Patrick Zuk (University of Durham)
Nikolai Myaskovsky and the "hysterical" Resolution of 1948
On the face of it, the condemnation of Nikolai Myaskovsky during the 1948 campaign against formalism in music seems deeply curious. By this stage in his career, Myaskovsky was held in the highest regard as a composer and teacher, and was generally considered to have made a contribution of exceptional importance to Soviet musical life. He had, moreover, tried his utmost to conform to the dictates of the officially imposed aesthetic of Socialist Realism, having eschewed from the mid 1930s onwards the modernist experimentation of his earlier work and sought to evolve a more accessible compositional idiom. This paper explores the underlying causes of Myaskovsky’s fall from official favour in 1948. Three factors appear to have played a decisive role. The first was the hostile reception accorded his cantata Kreml’ noch’yu (1947), which was considered to portray Stalin in an insufficiently ‘realistic’ manner. The second concerned his preference for writing abstract instrumental music and his apparent disinclination to cultivate the ‘democratic’ genres of opera and choral music. Finally, by making an example of Myaskovsky, the authorities hoped to intimidate teachers of composition into exercising greater vigilance over the styles in which their students composed, emphasising the extent to which they would be held personally responsible for extirpating undesirable modernist tendencies in the work of their charges. The paper concludes with an assessment of the ways in which the events of 1948 and their aftermath subsequently influenced perceptions of the composer and his work in the Soviet Union, causing him to be depicted as a creative artist who was reformed under the wise guidance of the Communist Party and whose later work was a triumphant vindication of the aesthetic premises of Socialist Realism.
