Politics in Classical Music

How far does music reflect contemporary issues and how much is too much? Politics has had immense effect on classical music over the centuries, both in the making of it as well its performance and acceptance.

Beethoven started it all, as was his wont, when he first dedicated his 3^rd  (Eroica) symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte and then tore out the title page on hearing that the erstwhile Republican had declared himself Emperor of the French. So did that make Beethoven a full-fledged democrat in today’s terms? Not really, as he lived at a time when princes ruled and there was no such thing as universal suffrage; artists would dream of liberty and equality, as he did when he set Schiller’s Ode to Joy (actually the poet’s Ode to Freedom, renamed for fear of attracting princely disapproval). In practice, then (as now), one had to put up with the society one was born into and that was that!

That didn’t mean, mind you, that one was not allowed to subtly ridicule present-day mores or to accept them tongue-in-cheek, while in fact covertly saying something quite contrary. Hence, Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro” is just as important a politically charged classical masterpiece as the Eroica symphony: the way it sets and even adds to Beaumarchais’s play about the frivolity and profligacy of the nobility and contrasts it with the honesty and loyalty of the working classes, is actually extremely bold.

In a similarly covert way, Verdi, supporter of Garibaldi in French-occupied Italy, could write the famous Prisoner’s Chorus in his opera “Nabucco”, ostensibly set in Biblical Egypt, but in reality a representation of the Italian struggle for freedom. No wonder then, that VERDI VERDI VERDI came to be plastered as graffiti on walls through Italy, standing for the name of the great composer as well as being a convenient acronym of the Nationalists’ rallying call “Vittorio Emmannuelle Re D' Italia.”

Indeed, through the occupied countries of Europe, music became the channel for nations to assert their national identities and their defiance of foreign occupation, be it German-occupied Bohemia (Dvorak, Smetana), or Russia-occupied Finland (Sibelius). Even Russia itself, a mighty nation but still primitive compared to Western Europe had its Mighty Handful, a group of five composers led by Balakirev & Rimsky-Korsakov. It was not that all nationalist works were political but the composers willy-nilly came to be associated with their respective national identity movements.

Of course even with nationalism, there can be too much of a good thing: perhaps the most parochial and controversial of all composers was Wagner; his Ring and other operas may celebrate Teutonic myths and legends but he was also not above writing anti-Semitic rants in his essays on music, no wonder then that he became the Nazis’ favourite composer.

The Nazis were, undoubtedly, the most repressive force in the world of music leading up to the 2^nd World War: composers of Jewish origin, composers with Leftist leaning, composers who just didn’t get on with the Nazi elite, were ruthlessly exiled, their works proscribed as degenerate art. Even older masters were not spared: Mendelssohn’s name was wiped from the repertoire overnight, thanks to his Jewish ancestry.

The situation was not much better in Stalin’s Russia as composers like Shostakovich and Prokofiev found themselves composing with a gun to their backs, forced to churn out retrogressive crowd-pleasing numbers for the Common Man: a strange turn of events in the land of freedom, where the period immediately following the Revolution had in fact, seen dazzling innovations and experimentation in music. Just why it was important for composers in the 20^th century to try to write like Tchaikovsky was never explained, nor how it fitted with the Marxist dialectic. But the likes of Shostakovich found themselves having to bow and scrape to the comrades at home and to defend them abroad.

Yet again, though, secret messages and symbols came to be means of resistance: grand heroic passages written to sound hollow, popular tunes presented in a deliberately banal way, dangerously dissonant passages disguised as depictions of the “reactionary enemy” all these abound in the works of Shostakovich. Even today, a controversy rages: how much of what he wrote is disguised satire and how much genuine public-spiritedness!

The message is clear: politics and music are inextricably linked, and music is able to be political in a more abstract (and hence, more effective way) than say, literature or painting, but at the end of the day, artists need their freedom and will always find a way to rebel, no matter what the circumstance.