Talking of Wikipedia, I rather randomly discovered the extraordinary story of Gavriil Popov’s fourth symphony… composed in 1949 but not given its first public performance until this year cos it kind of vanished. I don’t actually know much about Popov and I don’t think I’ve got any of his music, but I find the tale of this symphony quite remarkable. He finished it in 1949, a couple of years after Zhdanovshchina became the USSR’s cultural law; one of the manifestations of that was a 1948 resolution against “formalism” in music, with the composers’ union going after a number of composers including Popov for not being socialist realist enough in their work. So Popov bent the knee somewhat, which produced this curious response noted in the symphony’s Wiki entry:
In her review for Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti of the symphony’s world premiere in 2023, Vera Stepanovskaya wondered why Popov would turn to what she considered were “hollow Soviet texts” for his work…
Vera. My sister in Christ. Gavriil Popov lived in one of the most authoritarian and repressive countries on Earth, and the time during which he composed this symphony saw those tendencies get even worse. Indeed, while he was writing the first version of this symphony, the poet whose texts he was using died under apparently suspicious circumstances, hence why Popov started rewriting it with someone else’s words. He’d been specifically targeted by Stalin’s government (after having been a Stalin Prize recipient in 1946 for his second symphony), which was encouraging composers to use socialist realist texts in their works if they didn’t want to be accused of formalism. Why would he NOT have turned to those hollow Soviet texts? Popov would’ve been trying to save not only his career but quite possibly his life, I don’t suppose he relished the prospect of the gulag or having an “accident”… Prokofiev did the exact same thing when he was also specifically targeted in the anti-formalism crusade, there weren’t a lot of options. Do I know more about the history of her own country than Vera does?
