I was playing Beethoven's "Pathetique" on KPFA's concert grand one
day 45 years ago as I waited to go on with my show. Alan Rich, the music
director, who has gone on to be chief music critic for major dailies and
weeklies, heard me and asked me to do a broadcast concert. I declined
because practice to reach the level at which I would be satisfied with
my performance would eat into my time for research to combat the Cold
War via my program.
Today I go to concerts to relax. Usually I do. Today I didn't,
because the Cold War, that same old Cold War, intervened. The concert
was at U.C. Berkeley, in the International House auditorium. Two
talented young musicians, Monica Chew, pianist, and Shaw Pong Liu,
violinist, performed, very well indeed. One of the pieces was
Prokofiev's Sonata in F minor for violin and piano, for which Ms. Liu
wrote the program notes. Ms. Chew, speaking before the performance,
echoed those notes, knocking on the piano to illustrate the words: "the
repeated three-note motif suggests police knocking at the door."
Ms. Liu's notes end with a line from the poet Anna Akhmatova,
reading: "Where I can freely weep/ Over the silence of common graves."
The oral comments by both performers emphasized that the sonata was
written in a period of great turmoil in the Soviet Union. Quite true. As
Ms. Liu notes, it was completed a year after the end of World War II, in
1946, but the written notes and spoken words leave the unmistakable
impression that both Prokopiev and Akhmatova were referring to Stalin's
mass murders.
There is nothing of which Russians were more proud in 1946 then
their victory over Hitler the previous year, at the cost of 20,000,000
Soviet dead soldiers and civilians, fifty for every American lost. There
is nothing else of which they are unanimously proud to this day.
Akhmatova's "common graves" referred specifically to the 900,000 bodies
of those who died of starvation in the German and Finnish siege of
Leningrad in that war, and which lie in endless mounds in that city's
Piskarev Cemetery. I was for twenty years the cover-to-cover translator
of a quarterly, Soviet Studies in Literature, and know Akhmatova.
To me who, when Prokofiev wrote that sonata, had just been United
Press Expert on Russia from immediately after the Battle of Stalingrad
to the end of the war, that three-note motif represented German
goose-steps on the invasion of Russia, just as Shostakovich used a
similar device to render the same thing. Ms. Liu writes: "The second
movement opens with a militaristic, savage dialogue in which violin and
piano constantly interrupt each other." That is precisely where the
three-note motif appears.
It happens that Prokopiev had left Russia in 1918, just after the
Communists took power, and lived in America and Western Europe until
1935, when he and his wife chose to return to the Soviet Union, with
Stalin in power. That is where they lived out their lives, he dying in
1953. His first work after returning to the USSR was an opera, "Semyon
Kotko," set in the German-occupied Ukraine in 1918, and glorifies the
Red Army as it marches south.
I am absolutely certain that Chew and Liu do not regard themselves
as political propagandists in any sense. It is simply that they have
been educated, as have all Americans, to think of the Soviet Union as
the country of mass murders, and so when they think about a composer's
motivation in writing particular themes, they reflect that education,
speculate accordingly, and transmit that image to their audiences.
Inasmuch as the US and Russia remain the only countries capable of
destroying the world with their ICBMs should they come into conflict,
that is not a helpful mind-set to reinforce in an America that needs to
learn that it cannot rule the world.
William Mandel
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The title of my autobiography, SAYING NO TO POWER (Introduction by
Howard Zinn), is based on the fact that my testimony before Sen. Joe
McCarthy in 1953 had such impact that an excerpt was performed 35 years
later in a long-running play, and my 1960 HUAC testimony has been shown
in six documentary films. The book is a history of how the American
people fought to defend and expand its rights since the 1920s (I'm 86)
employing the form of the life of a 30s AND 60s activist, one who was
involved in most serious movements: student, labor, 45 years of efforts
to prevent war with the USSR and Cuba, civil rights South and North,
women's liberation [my late wife appears on 50 pages], 37 years on
Pacifica Radio [where I reinvented talk radio, of whose previous
existence I had been unaware], civil liberties, and opposition to
anti-Semitism and to Zionism. You may hear/see my testimonies before
McCarthy and, later, HUAC on my website, http://www.billmandel.net I am
the author of five books in my academic field, have taught at UC
Berkeley, and earlier held a postdoctoral fellowship, by invitation, at
Stanford's Hoover Institution.
The book may be ordered through all normal sources. For an autographed
copy, send me $24 at 4466 View Pl.,#106, Oakland, CA. 94611
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