Music is the ultimate unifier – so let’s not ban Tchaikovsky
Removing Russian works from concerts is a terrible mistake. By Ivan Hewett and Ben Lawrence
I‘Whenever something terrible happened, the state response was to play Swan Lake’
t was inevitable. Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, that celebration of Russia’s successful defence against Napoleon’s invading army, has itself become a casualty of war. Last week, the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra removed it from a forthcoming concert, in response to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
At this febrile time, the roar of cannon fire to be heard in it is undoubtedly in bad taste, and you can see why the orchestra (whose number includes a musician whose family are directly caught up in the Ukraine situation) has made the decision, fully aware of its incendiary impact.
“We are aware that, whatever decision we made, it would not go down well, so we are stuck between a rock and a hard place,” said Martin May, the director of the orchestra, in a statement last week.
Another potential flashpoint in the concert was the inclusion of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2, the so-called “Little Russian”. This was the name given to Ukraine by Russians during the Tsarist era, and it was claimed Ukrainians might find this offensive.
So the symphony too had to be dropped, and in the end the orchestra reprogrammed the entire concert from scratch.
This shows how quickly common sense can be set aside, when passions are inflamed by conflict. Anyone with any knowledge of Russian culture will know that the diminutive form in Russian language is a sign of affection. Far from being contemptuous, the name “Little Russian” is a sign of the reverence and love held by Russians for Ukraine.
Must we banish Tchaikovsky’s symphony – which actually quotes Ukrainian folk melodies – just because one man has twisted this historical fact into a reason for an armed invasion?
The question might seem trivial, when set beside the vast human suffering now being unleashed in Ukraine. But this cancellation is only one sign of a wider cultural boycott now being mooted. All around the world, musical or operatic events that involve Russia or Russians are being called into question, or revised to eliminate all Russian participation.
To give just one example, the Honens Piano Competition in Canada has banned all the Russian participants from attending.
There is something desperately sad about this decision. Music, more than any other art form, has the potential to leap over political divisions and find our common humanity. It is also a powerful release in terrible times – look at how Ukrainian violinist Illia Bondarenko filmed himself playing an old folk tune in a basement shelter in between explosions last week.
Throughout history, we have found that music is the great unifier. During the First World War, when antiGerman sentiment was at an all-time high (to the extent that British street names, such as ‘Frankfurt Road’, were routinely changed), Sir Henry Wood, founder of the Proms, rose above it all with gusto. He programmed Beethoven, Bach and Wagner.
“The greatest examples of music and art are world possessions and unassailable even by the prejudices and passions of the hour,” he said.
It is entertaining to think that Lili Marlene, the German popular song, was the favourite of both British and German soldiers during the Second World War.
The power of music to offer solace at time of conflict should never be forgotten. The pianist Myra Hess would play a famous series of concerts at the National Gallery during the Blitz: the pictures had been evacuated to safety in a Welsh mine but we still needed art.
Most heartbreaking were the performances of talented Jewish musicians in Nazi death camps, at Auschwitz and Birkenau, where skeletal figures would play in freezing conditions for the SS guards and camp commanders.
Here, music’s ability to unify was fleeting, limited merely to the moment. One can only imagine the effect on the performers who knew they might not survive the week.
Hitherto, in modern times, the idea that music has no boundaries has prevailed. It’s not for nothing that Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, set up to bond musicians from a fractured Middle East, has been designated a United Nations Global Advocate for Cultural Understanding. Achieving peace might be an unreachable ambition (indeed, Barenboim has said as much), yet the orchestra’s mission to create a dialogue between warring sides is an essential first step.
It is dictators that ban music. Hitler banned all Jewish culture, and that included the work of composers as contrasting as Schoenberg and Offenbach. And, yes, the “great” dictators of Russian communism were also averse to the disruptive tunes of the musical avant garde, with Stalin taking such a dislike to Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk that the composer’s stage work was banned throughout the Soviet Union.
There’s another aspect to the question of banning specifically Russian music that we must keep in mind. Banning a nation’s music has grievously damaging effects which go beyond the simple loss of this or that symphony or opera. A great musical tradition, as the Russian one undoubtedly is, embodies an entire way of thinking and feeling.
In the late 19th century, when composers such as Debussy, Ravel and Respighi were seeking a way to escape the suffocating dominance of the Austro-German tradition, it was to Russian music that many of them turned. In the operas of Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov they found something enticingly different – a music as vivid and brilliantly coloured as an icon.
Instead of the endless melodies of Wagner, the tunes in these operas circle around a few pithy phrases, repeated and re-arranged in a way that is naively folk-like and sophisticated at once. This musical earthiness goes hand in hand with the earthy realism that courses through Mussorgsky’s operas.
With Tchaikovsky, there is something else; an open-heartedness and a humanity that remains unrivalled in the history of classical music.
The Russians knew this – in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the risk of insurgency was rife and so, whenever something terrible happened, the state response was to play Swan Lake on TV and radio on a loop.
As the comedian Olga Koch points out, this created a Pavlovian response among Russians – but it also suggests the emotional power of arguably the nation’s greatest composer.
Perhaps we should all be listening to Swan Lake right now.