Believe It Or Not, The Man's A Tenor!

Believe it or not, the most incisive and eloquent review of the half-dozen or so we've read of Alex Ross's first-rate book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, was written not by a professional book reviewer or by a musicologist, but by an operatic tenor(!), the most excellent Ian Bostridge.

The price paid for classical music’s proximity to power was heavy, and the central chapters of Ross’s book lay bare the moral somersaults composers turned, the degradation into which they sank. The cultural theory which the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century had inherited from the nineteenth gave artists a dangerous potency, the all too useful capacity to become, in Stalin’s words, "engineers of human souls". Stalin’s amateur interest in classical music — he reputedly owned ninety-three opera recordings, writing critical remarks on his record sleeves — did nothing to protect composers like Prokofiev and Shostakovich from the cultural policy of a regime which saw no role for anything that smacked of autonomous art. Shostakovich’s output veered between the cryptic privacy of his chamber music, the crassness of his patriotic cantatas and songs, and the still-contested "irony" of the major public works. Ross’s analysis of the possibility of irony in music is at one and the same time sceptical and appreciative. "To talk about musical irony", he writes, "we first have to agree what the music appears to be saying, and then we have to agree on what the music is really saying. This is invariably difficult to do." His concluding advice is that one should "stay alert to multiple levels of meaning", making Shostakovich’s symphonies, the Fifth or even the supposedly propagandistic Seventh, "rich experience[s]". The consequence of Ross’s superbly nuanced historical accounts of both Prokofiev’s and Shostakovich’s music is to send one back to the music with new ears.

RTWT here.