Russian Music and a Centennial: Some Historical Background Before a Concert

Storming the Winter Palace, 1917

 This past Tuesday marked the 100th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution, an event that is not likely to be “celebrated” in that sense of the word despite its having been, like it or not, one of the pivotal events of the 20th Century. And this weekend's program with Market Square Concerts commemorates the anniversary with a kind of “before-and-after” musical tribute to an event that not only changed Russian history, but is still having an impact on the world today.

The Amernet Quartet returns to Harrisburg with a program of three generations of Russian composers: two works from before the Revolution – to put them in chronological order, the 2nd String Quartet by Tchaikovsky, one of the most popular Russian composers of the 19th Century, the five Novelettes by Alexander Glazunov, a leading composer from the “next generation” of Russian composers – and then the 11th String Quartet by Dmitri Shostakovich, one of Glazunov's students and one of two composers of the Soviet era most familiar to Western audiences.

It had not been my intent to write a book on this program, but you can read the other posts in this series here:
about Tchaikovsky and Tsar Alexander II
about Glazunov and Tsars Alexander III & Nicholas II
about Dmitri Shostkovich, the Soviet Union's first "home-grown" composer
and about the lives of both Glazunov and Shostakovich during the years immediately before and after the 1917 Revolutions.

The performance is Saturday at 8pm at Market Square Church and Dr. Truman Bullard, who specializes in Russian music, will be giving the pre-concert talk beginning at 7:15.

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The second chapter of Boris Schwarz's history of Soviet Music begins,

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A salvo from the cruiser Aurora, anchored in the river Neva, signaled the beginning of the 'Third Revolution' proclaimed by Lenin. The roar of the guns could be heard at the Narodny Dom ('The People's House'), across the river from the Winter Palace, where an opera performance of Verdi's Don Carlo was in progress [ironically, there is a scene where the crowd storms the prison steps only to be quelled by the appearance of the Grand Inquisitor]. Chaliapin, on stage in the role of [King] Philip II, calmed the frightened audience, and the performance was finished. On his way home, the artist had to dodge some stray bullets. It was Wednesday evening, 25 October (7 November).

The following day, the citizens of Petrograd [as St. Petersburg had been renamed during the course of World War I] awoke to realize that, during the night, the Provisional Government [which had been formed following the overthrow of the Imperial government in February] had capitulated and that the Bolsheviks [the Communist Party] had seized power. John Reed, [an American journalist and] the famous eye-witness, described the scene,

'Superficially, all was quiet... In Petrograd, the street cars were running, the stores and restaurants open, theatres going, an exhibition of paintings advertised... All the complex routine of common life – humdrum even in war-time – proceeded as usual. Nothing is so astounding as the vitality of the social organism – how it persists, feeding itself, clothing itself, amusing itself, in face of the worst calamities.'

On the evening of 26 October (8 November), the Petrograd State Symphony gave a regularly scheduled concert. At the Maryinsky Opera (the former tsarist court theater), says conductor [Nikolai] Malko, 'I cannot remember even one performance being canceled on any of the nights.' Nothing seems so reassuring to an unnerved population as the continuance of theatrical and musical events.”
(– Boris Schwarz,Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 1917-1970, The Norton Library, 1972, p.11.)
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If you want to watch an old silent film, Sergei Eisenstein's 1927 evocation of the October Revolution is worth watching whether you regard it as Soviet propaganda, art, or a historical documentary. Keep in mind, even ten years after the events it depicts, much of the “scenery” is still accurate, little-changed. A silent film, the music added for this video is taken primarily from Shostakovich's own symphonic documentary of the events, his 12th Symphony (“The Year 1917”), which had been performed earlier this year by the Harrisburg Symphony, and written in the year 1961. Though 21 at the time of the film, Shostakovich had just written his 2nd Symphony, subtitled “October,” in 1927 as his own tribute to the Revolution's anniversary.

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Lenin addresses the Crowd

It's sometimes called the “October Revolution” because by the calendar then in use in Russia, the date was October 25th; in the rest of the world, using the Gregorian Calendar, it was November 7th. And while the Russian or Bolshevik Revolution (a.k.a. the Communist Revolution) officially began that night, it was far from a spontaneous historical happening.

There was also the “February Revolution” earlier the same year which toppled the Imperial government of Tsar Nicholas II and replaced it with a democratically led Provisional Government (at least, that was the intent) which in turn was toppled by the Bolsheviks eight months later.

Children with the toppled statue of Tsar Alexander III outside the Winter Palace, February 1917

And while the October Revolution is sometimes known as “Ten Days that Shook the World,” the impact of the revolution itself did not, as we in the West often assume, lead to a peaceful establishment of the new government, in fact a whole new society, in short order: it led directly into a protracted and violent Civil War that lasted another five years.

There are many history books – and fat books, at that – written about the Revolution and its aftermath. This isn't the place to go into that kind of historical detail but if you think that, well, the Revolution was a hundred years ago and the Soviet Union was tossed onto the ash-heap of history 26 years ago, you're missing a lot of the waves that rippled out from that very large rock dropping into the world pond.

In fact, you could argue much of the tension in our news today still stems from the divisions between the Old Soviet Union and what is generically called “The West” (or specifically, The United States and its allies) even though theoretically “The Cold War” is thought to be over. It will be interesting to see how the concerns over the Communist government in North Korea play out with modern Russia and the still-Communist government of China: will they band together with the United States against Kim Jong-Un or will they, as governments have usually done in the past, gravitate towards their traditional political alliances? History generally tends to repeat itself whether we understand it or not.

It is also important to realize that – just as we examine issues dividing our own nation today – the Communist Revolution did not spring spontaneously from the disaffection of the workers, the Proletariat, in the autumn of 1917. There was another, less-well-known revolution in Russian history in 1905, but the events and issues that led to that can also be shown to have existed earlier. Even if you only read Russian novels written in the last half of the 19th Century rather than books on Russian history, you can't help but notice the widening gulf between the wealthy class and the poor, or the aristocrats and the intelligentsia, or the impact of the poorly handled Emancipation of the Serfs by Tsar Alexander II in 1861 (even earlier than Lincoln freed the slaves during our own Civil War with its badly handled post-war Reconstruction – Lincoln, assassinated in 1865; Alexander II, in 1881) or the animosity festering among those being repressed by an authoritarian government going back even centuries before the Decembrist Uprising protesting Nicholas I's rule in 1825.

What about the frequent, general discontent that always seems to plague Russian history? It hardly matters whether the “Autocrat of All the Russias” is named Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Stalin or Putin – tsar, Communist party dictator or elected president...

It is true, no matter what period of history you look at, the story of Russia is a sad one.

But yet, there is Art: literature, theater, painting, and above all, music. And in that sense, the contributions of Russian Culture hopefully outweigh much of what many Westerners (and Russians) think of when considering Russian History.

In subsequent posts, I'll discuss the music on the program: Tchaikovsky's 2nd String Quartet was completed in 1874 during the reign of Tsar Alexander II; Alexander Glazunov's "Novelettes" were written in 1886 during the reign of Tsar Alexander III; and Glazunov himself taught Dmitri Shostakovich who was a student at the Conservatory during the Revolution, coming to terms with the string quartet fairly late in his career, writing his 11th Quartet in 1966 at the height of the Cold War, two years after Nikita Khrushchev was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev.

- Dick Strawser