“Your business is rejoicing”: Music in Stalin’s Russia

The case of music in Russia during the Stalinist period has been much examined as a lesson in the extremes of totalitarian intervention in the arts. There is no doubt that the conditions of work for artists under the system was fraught and that careers, such as those of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, not to mention countless others, were indelibly shaped by the experience. While Stalinism, and all forms of totalitarianism, largely (if not universally) stand condemned, irksome questions linger about the nature and significance of their artistic products. In this presentation, the School of Music’s Simon Perry draws on his knowledge of mid-twentieth-century Russian-Soviet music to illuminate just a few of these questions through a selection of works by Soviet composers.