When musical America sided with Hitler and Stalin

LIFE Magazine, Nov. 22, 1943, reporting on the fee for first performance rights paid by Columbia Broadcasting Corporation for Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony

The first performance rights fee of $10,000 [1] paid in 1943 for Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony may not seem impressive in relation to a single concert fee of $3,000-4,000 commanded in the 1940s by top performers like Vladimir Horowitz and Jascha Heifetz [2].  However, when compared to the typical first performance fee of $100 paid at that time for the music of American composers [3], the Shostakovich fee seems downright astronomical.

I have never encountered an explanation of this shocking disparity, but I am sure it cannot be explained by supposing that the princely sum paid for Shostakovich's symphony was a deliberately over-generous show of support for the music's role as a symbol of  struggle against Nazism.  Such an explanation would be doubtful for at least two reasons.

Fiddlers under the same roof

In the last three decades or so music critics have frequently complained (or at least noted) that the arrival of the jet age and the fall of the Iron Curtain have pretty much erased the distinctly national characteristics of music making.  Musicians and ensembles around the world, we are told, tend to make music in much the same "international" way regardless of whether  they hail from Moscow, Prague, Paris, or New York.

To me the empirical basis of such claims remains elusive.  Recordings of orchestral music from an earlier era suggest that styles of music making depend almost entirely on conductors.  Conductors who were trained within the same geographical borders (e.g., Klemperer, Walter, Furtwangler, Strauss, Karajan) and worked with the same orchestras (e.g., the Vienna or the Berlin Philharmonic) interpreted the same compositions in ways which differed from one another so much as to make the idea of a 'national style of music making' vacuous at best.   And when some of these conductors moved to other countries (e.g., Klemperer to London, Walter to New York) their ways of music making crossed the borders along with them.  The only empirically meaningful difference between performances of, say, a Mozart symphony conducted by Bruno Walter in New York, Vienna, and Paris in the 1950s is that the standards of execution maintained by the French orchestra were abominably low, those of the Vienna orchestra barely adequate, and those of the New York orchestra were at the highest level.

Those memorable photo ops...

Furtwangler's reputation will never live down this photo op with his patron Adolf Hitler:

Karajan's reputation will be forever tarnished by his Nazi Party ID card:

I hope the eager musical serfs of today's tyrants will pay a similar price: 

How history becomes "music history" ...

First, a bit of history in pictures:

A typical workday in a Soviet concentration camp ca. 1932

A typical workday in a Nazi concentration camp (Auschwitz) ca. 1942

Officers of Hitler's Wermacht and Stalin's Red Army enjoying a friendly smoke

in celebration of their joint invasion of Poland (1939)

Soviet Composer Dmitri Shostakovich 
 

9 years before the Pravda editorial attack:

Symphony No.2 "October" (1927)
(celebrating 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution)

6 years before the Pravda editorial attack: 
Symphony No.3 "First of May" (1930)
(glorifying the "proletarian holiday"
 and, again, the Bolshevik revolution)

7 years after Stalin's death:

joins the Communist Party (1960)

8 years after Stalin's death:

Symphony No.12 "The Year 1917" (1961)
(glorifying  the first Bolshevik mass-murderer Lenin 
and, once again, the Bolshevik revolution)

________________________________

And now lets take a brief look at how history is transformed into "music history":

... in the end [Shostakovich's] art, as it now becomes increasingly clear, remained for many years the only artistic phenomenon ... which actively resisted the totalitarian regime.  We can say without exaggeration that dissent was an integral part of this great composer's creative output.
Mark Aranovsky, Muzikalnaya Akademiya 4, 1997, p.3  (translation and italics mine) 

At a deeper level,  Shostakovich's works had spoken the truth about the tragedy of his times and the evils of the system of which he was himself a victim.

Alexandra George, Escape from "Ward Six", University Press of America, 1998, p.388 (italics mine). 
*     *     *
Since verbose motherfuckers like these two are never in short supply, I am sure that soon we will be told that atheism was an integral part of Bach's creative output (with his Passions vividly condemning the mixture of lunacy and cruelty in religion); that Wagner fought antisemitism by exposing its irrationality in his deliberately outlandish antisemitic pamphlets; and that Stalin's  vicious 1948 attack on "formalism" in Soviet music was secretly engineered by the CIA...