The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Time of Stalin review – hymn to the exiled and executed

The Guardian

26-01-2025

Through all the blood and ice of Russian history, the national music has been a balm. Composers and performers have given a voice to the soul of their people, in all its suffering and bloody-mindedness, as well as to the enigma of their illimitable homeland. In the depths of the German siege of Leningrad of 1941-44, in which an estimated 1.5 million people died, Stalin airlifted musicians into the starving city in an effort to raise morale. Music has also soundtracked turning points in the cold war and the career of Vladimir Putin. When the KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky was smuggled out of Moscow in the boot of a car by British spymasters in 1985, the signal that he was finally safe was Sibelius's Finlandia playing on the car stereo. After Russia launched a military intervention in Syria in 2015 on behalf of the now departed Bashar al-Assad, Putin flew the cellist Sergei Roldugin to Palmyra to perform among its ancient ruins, in an echo of Leningrad.
Michel Krielaars, a Dutch journalist and classical music enthusiast, was posted to Moscow by his newspaper in 2007. A neighbour told him that, as a boy, he had attended recitals given by Sviatoslav Richter, 'the greatest pianist of the Soviet Union for nearly half a century', according to Krielaars. He wonders what became of this 'timid' maestro, who would tiptoe from the wings of a concert hall 'as though unsure of what business he has there'. Despite his renown, he fell under suspicion during the second world war because his father was German. Richter Sr was executed by the secret police in Odesa. The pianist refused to play in that city again. It's now a Ukrainian stronghold resisting Putin's forces.
Richter had begun his career thanks to a mentor who put him up in his own home, where the tyro slept 'under the piano'. Whether or not this was a literal description of the bedroom arrangements, it sounds like a mordant Russian expression for the lot of Richter and his fellow Soviet-era musicians, who are recalled in The Sound of Utopia. Sleeping under the piano is something you'd do if you couldn't be sure of keeping hold of it or if you had nowhere else to go. Rediscovered in these pages are not only vanished soloists and composers but airbrushed music hall turns and song thrushes including Klavdiya Shulzhenko, 'the Russian Vera Lynn'. They were adored by the public but lived in fear of their tin-eared critics in the Kremlin. They were encouraged to produce uplifting patriotic works in the folk tradition, while Stalin's goons quivered like tuning forks for anything that smacked of western decadence. Forbidden passages were classified as 'formalism', whatever that meant – the rare virtuoso who was bold enough to ask received a dusty answer, or worse. At the height of Stalin's 'Terror', in 1936-38, when more than 1.5 million people were arrested and 700,000 killed, musicians were among those 'persecuted, shipped off to labour camps or executed; their compositions and recordings were destroyed or banned; their performances cancelled', says Krielaars. A few years ago, The Lost Pianos of Siberia was a nonfiction hit for Sophy Roberts; this book is a companion piece, about the lost pianists. The musicians exiled to the boondocks were the lucky ones – even there, the music-loving Soviets ran academies – but these were barren, inhospitable places, an asteroid belt orbiting Moscow and St Petersburg and their glittering conservatories.
There are stories here to freeze the veins, but also to stir the heart, and even a little gallows humour. During a sleepless night in the headquarters of the secret police, where the composer Vsevolod Zaderatsky and his fellow prisoners were due to be shot in the morning, Zaderatsky sat down at a piano and played what amounted to a finale for himself. The head of the death squad, who heard him playing, set him free the next day. The other condemned men were killed. The composer Sergei Prokofiev affected snazzy yellow socks like a playboy and tore around Moscow in his 'fireball', an imported Opel Kadett. When it was his turn to be accused of formalism – by the USSR's propagandist-in-chief, no less – the master snorted: 'What right do you have to talk to me like that!' He was left alone after that, at least for a while. Following Stalin's death, a pianist enlisted to play sombre airs for the great crowds who filed past his coffin found that the pedals of the instrument weren't working, so he stuffed a score behind them. Krielaars says, 'This alarmed the mourners, who thought the man kneeling next to the piano was planting a bomb under Stalin.'
The name Shostakovich is like a leitmotif running through these studies: here is the extraordinary composer putting in a good word with the apparatchiks to save a fellow musician; there he is under a cloud as the party newspaper damns his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. But astonishingly, Dmitri Shostakovich doesn't apparently merit a chapter of his own – the man who reportedly stood in the stairwell of his apartment building at night, fully clothed and holding his suitcase, waiting to be disappeared. It's a strange omission from a book about omissions, which is a moving threnody to musicians who truly suffered for their art, many of them effaced from the record like notes struck on a dummy keyboard.
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The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Time of Stalin by Michel Krielaars (translated by Jonathan Reeder) is published by Pushkin Press (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply