INDEX ON CENSORSHIP 1/83
Germany
Paul Hamburger
Marxist musicians
Hanns Eisler and Hans Werner Henze
With its non-verbal vocabulary and gram-
mar, music doesn't give much of a handle to
the political censor. At most, it can be found
'guilty by association'; that is, culpable of
consorting with unwelcome. texts, or of
sheltering behind a wall of advanced tech-
niques impenetrable, but suspect to the
censorious ear.
It is not these techniques in themselves
that annoy the censor, but the air of exclu-
siveness they exude, the purported removal
of music's message from the people. In other
words, the masses are deemed ineducable in
areas that do not seem vital to the interest of
the state — in those deemed vital, they'd
better be educable!
This kind of censorship, taking immediate
appeal as its sole yardstick, operates both
in the East and West; here through the con-
voluted but deadly channels of commercial-
ism, there through the acuter dictates of
state control. To be sure, nowadays a pro-
gressive Soviet composer like Alfred
Schnittke can get by; his works are published,
and the interest they arouse in the West may
be construed as a not unwelcome acknowl-
edgement of Soviet culture. And in Poland
and Hungary, no obstacles are put in the
way of avant-garde composers like Penderecki
and Kurtag, performed on either side of the
Iron Curtain.
State censorship in the late forties and
early fifties, when Andrei Zhdanov laid
down the law as spokesman of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party, was
certainly t o u g h e r . Prokofiev and
Shostakovich, accused of 'formalism' (ie
decent composing in up-to-date techniques)
recanted, or pretended to recant. But how
much did their later, would-be-conformist
works actually lose through state censor-
ship? The decrees just taught them to culti-
vate a populist veneer beneath which, by
way of a newly discovered compositional
technique, their individuality survived, and
sometimes even flourished. One could
argue, with somewhat cynical disregard
for personal suffering, that the late works
of these composers gained in substance
under the mask of dissimulation they were
forced to wear. Shostakovich, in particular,
was a man of brooding melancholy, shot
through with irony. In his late-period works,
the greatness of his soul and the perfection
Paul Hamburger is a professional pianist and
music critic
of his craftsmanship lie skin-deep under a proved stultifying, resulting in an obstinate
layer of 'social realism'. emptiness. But in other works, Eisler's
Of course, had Shostakovich and narrowness of purpose, allied to his vast
Prokofiev been radical innovators, they gifts as a composer, liberated latent powers
would have wilted away under censorship and helped him to achieve a rude, crude
(imagine a Schoenberg in Moscow). But as greatness not given to those who are 'social
it was, their style thrived (though it is heart- realists' in the first place, and composers in
less to say so) under state oppression, just as the second.
Mozart's style thrived under the pressure of Naturally, all this was swept away by the
the market place, forcing him to use the Nazis. Their censorship of music, based on
lingua franca of his age as the long-distance racial as well as on socio-aesthetic criteria
carrier upon which to load the well-wrapped (if this isn't too grand a word) was the most
tokens of his genius. For an artist to prosper senseless suppression of all times, rivalled
under oppression, certain conditions must only by the ban on Wagner in present-day
obtain: a) the oppressor, if a bureaucrat, Israel.
must be stupid enough; b) if a consumer, As an emigrant in New York and Holly-
must be snobbish enough to swallow certain wood during the Second World War, Eisler
unintelligible manifestations of greatness; experienced the 'democratic' form of cen-
c) the creator must be a genius of a special sorship: neglect of both his advanced and
kind adept at dissimulation and not ashamed . populist music, except for some commissions
of compromises which, though they may by leftist film-makers, and eventually depor-
look pragmatic, are in reality artistic con- tation from the USA after being investigated
quests. by the House Committee on Un-American
Although, to his own good, the complete Activities. Yet during his days in exile,
self-knowledge of a Mozart was denied to Eisler wrote what is perhaps his greatest
him, Hanns Eisler was in fact such an music, the Hollywood Elegies and other
artistic personality. Throughout his life cycles to words by Brecht, and his settings
he was torn between the intellectually satis- of Holderlin and Anacreon. Homelessness
fying twelve-note technique he had learned concentrated Eisler's mind wonderfully,
as one of the most self-willed, though none serving as a shield against both exploitation
the less favoured students of Schoenberg, and contempt.
and a sense of obligation towards the musical Choosing, in 1950, to live in East
weal of the proletariat laid upon him by his Germany, Eisler continued to pour out
generous heart. music which, as he said in a lecture, 'address-
In his excellent (and well translated) book es itself above all to the workers'. With more
on the composer, Albrecht Betz quotes from optimism than realism, he continues: 'For
an article Eisler wrote in 1927 for the Berlin the workers are not naive, and they learn
paper Rote Fahne, at a time when he was quickly ... they are eager for innovation;
much preoccupied with Marxist theory: they have learnt how necessary are change,
'The most significant thing about modern transformation, multiplicity of methods and
music is this: in the years following the war, mobility'. However, with the consolidation
in nearly all the arts, a number of revolution- of East Germany as part of the communist
ary artists have appeared who in their work block, Zhdanov's decrees caught up with
have drawn genuinely revolutionary conclu- Eisler. His own libretto for a planned Faust
sions from the social situation. In music opera was condemned by the Academy of
this has not happened and is not happening... Arts as 'negative and formalist', and the
Among musicians the only thing to have opera banned before any music had been
spread has been a slushily petty-bourgeois written. Eisler's last years were spent in
attitude or else worldly-wise nihilism ... An Vienna, and then again in Berlin, after a par-
art which loses its sense of community there- tial reconciliation with the authorities.
by loses itself.'
Eisler's response as a composer brought Hanns Eisler — Political Musician by
forth a series of workers'songs and choruses, Albrecht Betz, transl. Bill Hopkins.
and incidental music to plays by Brecht. In Cambridge University Press, pp 362. £25
some of this music, the self-denial or 'self- Music and Politics — Collected Writings
censorship' this former purveyor of hyper- 1953-81 by Hans Werner Henze, transl.
sensitive 'bourgeois' art imposed on himself Peter Labanyi. Faber andFaber, pp 286. £15
27
INDEX ON CENSORSHIP 1/83

Germany Marxist musicians

Hans Werner Henze liberal school-fellows found ways of circum- Hanns Eisler
venting the Nazi censorship of whole tracts
Eisler's polemical mind, as revealed in his of the fine arts, and in secret filled in the gaps arbiter of what's right in contemporary
writings and in the versatility of his musical left in their education. In an autobiographical music (ie Webern, almost exclusively).
methods, needed politics both as an inspira- sketch, Henze says: 'You could still get hold Henze is very amusing on the censorship
tion and as an impediment, producing the of Hindemith's works under the counter; exercised by the 'guardian angels' of the
friction that makes the sparks fly. The you could order them from Schott's, for musical world:
various kinds of censorship under which he they published Hindemith right tip to the 'Everyone needs them. They need us. It is
'suffered' were a necessary cog in his creative outbreak of war, until postal services to the all a question of personal connections. You
mechanism. United States were stopped.' Or, during his must be noticed, you must please, be sym-
The ways of the Muse are mysterious. military service: 'Occasionally, if I was on pathetic, amenable, and must justify hopes.
Francis Poulenc, an exact contemporary duty as a wireless operator, I could listen to Being "nice" is everything; you may be
(Poulenc:/1899-1963, Eisler: 1898-1962) was music by Stravinsky, Berg and Schoenberg,. scheming, but not impertinent. A good
a non-dialectic, a-political bourgeois com- even though this was forbidden by military listener, one who gratefully takes up hints
poser of about the same stature. What he law.' And again: 'In 1940 a classmate in (woe betide those who don't!); modesty is in
needed was some youthful anti-romanticism, Bielefeld, son of the town's chief librarian, order; the angels (later also playing the roles
a dash of cabaret, a middle-aged I'art-pour- regularly used to smuggle out of the public of functionaries, managers, impresarios, de-
I'art refinement, and an old-age French- library banned books which had been re- partmental directors and presidents) are
traditional ' Catholicism. With neither of moved from the shelves. So we read paternalistic friends, who know what you
these diametrically opposed composers does Wedekind, Hofmannsthal, Werfel, Trakl, ought to do. Generously they distribute
biography, of life or mind, furnish a yard- Mann, Heym, and Brecht too . . . and were their gifts in the form of contracts . . . Occa-
stick of artistic achievement. fascinated by these works, which were about sionally it becomes difficult to find your way
Hans Werner Henze, born in 1926, is a human beings and not monsters . . . A time around: does what you do still belong to
fairly close example of a socially committed of learning and contraband culture.' you, or is it already what the entrepreneurs
composer of the generation after Eisler. Like After the war, Henze studied feverishly to want?'
Eisler, he is also a fluent writer and polemi- become a composer, and all Germany did Rebelling against institutional thinking,
cist, and his essays, in some cases based on likewise to make up for lost ground. At against the banishment of the composer into
programme-notes to performances of his first, there reigned a spirit of relief, open- an ivory tower, but also against the re-
music, have now been collected in one mindedness, helpfulness; but soon a new militarisation of West Germany, Henze in,
volume, in a very readable translation from 'orthodoxy' established itself, as exemplified 1955 moved to Italy, where he has lived
the original German. by the modern-music sections of German since, in Ischia, Naples and Rome, and
Growing up in Brunswick during the radio stations, broadcasting esoteric music lately as director of the Montepulciano
war — he was actually taken prisoner by the late at night, and by the Darmstadt Summer Festival, a unique mixture of professional
British in 1945 — Henze and his like-minded School which soon turned itself into a rigid and amateur music-making.

28

Bugbears
and enemies
In Retreats, Routs and Retrenchments —
one of a dozen chapters that make up Mr
Lebrecht's book Discord — we observe
the testy inventor of the 12-tone system of
musical composition, Arnold Schoenberg,
protesting against Thomas Mann's
acknowledgement of him:
He calls me 'a (a!) contemporary
composer and theoretician'. Of course,
in two or three decades one will know
which of the two was the other's
contemporary.
To which the dignified author of Doctor
Faustus, the great hovel whose fictional
12-tone composer Leverkuhn was the
original cause of the row, replied at the
time:
You are attacking a bugbear of your
imagination and I am not it, so there
is no desire for revenge. If you want to
be my enemy completely — you will
not succeed in making me your enemy.
At the very beginning of the book Mr
Lebrecht complains that 'the role of social
discord in the development of music has
been minimised by the majority of
musical historians . . . they have tended to
shy away from the more human aspects
of a composer's activities . . . To overlook
them is to distort any understanding of
both the music and the man; to
fictionalise them (as for instance in films
like Lisztomania or plays like Peter
Shaffer's Amadeus) is to risk
sensationalism'. Mr Lebrecht sets out to
redress the balance and 'by using original
documents and first-hand accounts . . .
avoid the latter trap'. His aim is to
'broaden the appreciation of the vibrant
humanity that has expressed itself in
music'. Fair enough, although doubts
linger: some of us prefer the music to the
man behind it. Moreover, by taking
But flight brought no lasting relief. To
quote from an article on 'Art and Revolu-
tion': 'In Italy I built up a world of my own,
around myself and my work . . . I did not
notice that I was obviously isolating myself,
that my music was becoming more and more
private, that its motivations were private
ones, that it contained private communica-
tions, that it addressed itself to individuals,
to private beings . . . Eventually I became ill.
That was something! could not get round...
and that was perhaps the beginning of the
development of a new consciousness, or for
the need of one. In autumn 1967 I went to
Berlin to meet Rudi Dutschke, the leading
spokesman of the new German left.'
So with the help of the student leader, and
Marxist musicians Germany
human discord as his point of departure,
Mr Lebrecht has risked ignoring some
great musical figures untouched by
controversy. 'Controversies are the very
life's blood of classical music,' he writes,
'without them, it would soon be as dead
as the daguerreotype, the music hall and
the iambic pentameter.' One is tempted to
say that books about classical music might
be, but the music itself seems to have a
lot of life left in it.
After the serious opening the amusing
part soon gets under way, but there is no
doubting Mr Lebrecht's serious intent, as
for instance when we reach the first hint
of the odiousness so well known to us in
the twentieth century, transcending the
relatively benign personal quarrels and
intrigues that form the bulk of the book.
This is the notorious Judaism in Music
article by Wagner, first published under a
pseudonym in 1850. Mr Lebrecht
poignantly asks 'why Wagner elected at
this crisis in his life (his political exile
following the collapse of the 1848
uprising) to attack, not his numerous
opponents, but the Jews, who numbered
several of his few adherents', and adds, 'it
was also an opportunity to slander on
ethnic grounds individual adversaries with
whom no specifically musical fault could
be found'.
Nearly a century later the same blind
prejudice backed by almost unlimited
power signalled the excesses that were to
befall, among others, the composer of
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: when on a cold
January day in 1936 Shostakovich, on
returning from an official visit abroad to
promote Soviet music, wandered down to
the newsagent at the railway station at
Archangelsk he found Pravda attacking
his opera:
Officious music critics have praised the
opera (Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk) to
the skies . . . but audiences were
bewildered by a stream of deliberately
the support of Marxist composers such as
Paul Dessau and Luigi Nono, Henze
'learned to see contexts and to see myself
within these contexts'. In consequence of
this new-found 'solidarity with the oppress-
ed' Henze was able to 'dismantle a whole
series of mechanisms to which I had hitherto
been helplessly exposed. I no longer know
the feeling of jealousy; I am no longer per-
sonally ambitious. I no longer write music to
please myself and a few friends, but to help
socialism'.
Yet the artistic dynamism of Henze's
conversion lies precisely in the need to open
up new realms of musical thought and feel-
ing. This prodigiously gifted, prolific, many-
sided composer had outgrown his German,
INDEX ON CENSORSHIP 1/83
discordant sounds ... It is a leftist
bedlam instead of human music. The
inspiring quality of good music is
sacrificed in favour of petty-bourgeois
formalist cerebration, with pretence at
originality by cheap clowning. This
game may end badly.
And for thousands it did. The Pravda
article, entitled Chaos Instead of Music,
became the cornerstone of the bizarre v
excesses of zhdanovshchina, the
reverberations of which are felt to this
day, exemplified by defections of
distinguished artists from Russia as those
of Shostakovich's conductor son Maxim
and pianist grandson Dmitri.
Mr Lebrecht has a fine sense of the
paradoxical, as when he describes side by
side Toscanini's implacable opposition to
contemporary tyrants and his own
tyrannical ways as a conductor: Toscanini
'was, in campaigns against suspected
collaborators with an evil regime, as
unremitting as in his pursuit of orchestral
perfection. He valued moral integrity as
highly as tonal purity ... Enemy of
dictators, he was a tyrant to his
orchestras; sworn opponent of
persecution, he hounded his enemies
mercilessly'.
The book testifies to Mr Lebrecht's
amazingly wide and detailed reading. One
can at times take issue with his verdicts
on some minor, often esoteric, points,
such as whether the 'Divine Bohemian'
Myslivecek had VD or not — opinions
differ while Myslivecek himself, possibly
with good reason, maintained he had
broken his nose in an accident; either way
he lost his nose to a quack surgeon.
Coupled with an extensive bibliography
and an index, Mr Lebrecht's book is not
only a 'good read', but also a mine of
information — a reference book with a
most pleasing difference. Karel Janovicky
(Discord by Norman Lebrecht is published
by Andre Deutsch. 252 pages £12.95)
then his Italian style — or rather, array of
styles — and his creative egotism suggested
the abandonment of privacy, jealousy,,
ambition at just the right moment. In con-
sequence, the new Henze of the_works writ-
ten for Cuba and East Germany is just as
good as any of the several old ones. Ration-
alisations are the protective shield of the
artist, and mental rituals the leading-reins
of his Pegasus — whether it be the woman-
ising of a Liszt, the teutonising of a Wagner,
or the prayer-cataloguing of a Bruckner.
Admittedly, Henze's Marxism is a nobler
and more realistic ritual than many another.
His music may actually, though marginally,
have eased the lot of the proletariat of Cuba,
West and East Berlin. But as with Eisler, it is
29
INDEX ON CENSORSHIP 1/83
also the middle-class listener, both of the
hidebound and the enlightened type, whose
horizons are widened by Henze's intellec-
tual and musical transmutations. For that,
you have to be good at writing scores, not
only tracts.
Censorship troubles there are none for
Henze, excepting the inscrutable attitude
of the Soviet Union. But then, Henze is not
of the orthodox faith. He is a Euro-
Communist, for whom East Germany may
stretch a point, and who remains a highly
interesting 'suspect' in the so-called free
world. His symphonies, concertos, operas
and chamber-works are performed in
London, Rome, New York, Chicago,
Munich, Frankfurt, as well as in Leipzig and
Havana. Perhaps there lies hope for us all in
the fact that with a composer of such truly
universal mind, censorship is reduced to
local, laughable gestures, such as the razz-
matazz at the 1968 Hamburg premiere
of the oratorio 'The Raft of the Medusa'.
Here is Henze, setting the record straight:
'At the start of the concert in the Hamburg
Radio there was a "go-in" with slogans
against consumer culture; the audience
was bombarded with thousands of leaflets.
All this was organised by three different
groups: the Berlin SDS (Sozialistischer
Deutscher Studentenbund) 'Culture and
Revolution' team, members of the Hamburg
College of Music, and of the Hamburg SDS.
Then there was a poster of Che Guevara
which had been attached to the podium, and
which the programme director of the Radio
tore up out of hand. Thus the real protag-
onist was this enraged radio station boss who,
although he knew that the work had been
written in honour of Che, was unable to
tolerate his picture hanging there. Students
had put the poster up. I had done nothing at
all, and hadn't planned anything of the sort;
all I wanted to do was to conduct. But that's
how it turned out. Then other comrades put
up a red flag instead of the Che poster. I was
now called upon by the Radio's legal adviser
to have the flag removed, or else be respon-
sible for the consequences. Thereupon I said
I couldn't care less about the consequences,
because I was not prepared to submit to
such blackmail. The rest was as reported in
the press — part of the choir refused to sing
in the presence of a red flag (!) and walked
off. While negotiations were still going on,
heavily armed riot police came in and began
to beat up and arrest students . . . '
. Compared with the machinations of
power politics, this incident is, by and large,
a refreshingly wholesome 'exchange of
views'. But the villain of the piece is that
dolt of a radio boss who commissioned a
leftist parable before knowing his own
mind. Censorship/o/Zow/flg upon encourage-
ment: does it prefigure the end of civilisa-
tion? •
30
Czechoslovakia
Vratislav Brabenec, Ivan Jirous
Banned in Bohemia
The story of The Plastic People, a rock band which is seen as a threat
by the Czech authorities
'Why should music be censorable?' asks
Yehudi Menuhin on another page. Elsewhere
in this issue the reader will see that in some
parts of the world even certain musical
instruments can be declared taboo by this or
that military dictatorship. In Czechoslovakia
since the early seventies it has been chiefly
rock music that arouses the ire of the
authorities - and those who insist on playing it
find themselves not just banned but
imprisoned.
Ah, but of course, one might say: if you set
out to be a protest singer in a society ruled by a
one-party dictatorship, what do you expect?
The trouble with that line of argument is that
The Plastic People of the Universe and the
other rock groups with similarly strange
names were not protest singers at all. 'We
never liked singing protest songs,' says their
former saxophonist, Vratislav Brabenec, in
the interview thatfollows. All they wanted was
to 'do their own thing', to have 'absolute
musicalfreedom'. And that is the problem. In
a country whose regime insists on strict Party
orthodoxy in every aspect of everyday life,
any deviation from the norm is seen as a
potential threat and must be dealt with in the
only way a police state knows.
It is the unyielding nonconformismofThe
Plastic People and others that has led to their
constant harassment, persecution and, in
many cases, imprisonment. Unable to give
public performances, they played in private
and, as often as not, were raided by the police.
When even the Czech security forces found it
difficult to 'pin' a charge on a musician — as
in the latest instance of Ivan Jirous, The
Plastics' artistic director and one of the few
leading musicians of his generation still in
Czechoslovakia — they simplyframed him for
'possessing marijuana'.
First arrested in 1973, Jirous was sentenced
to 10 months in jail. An art history graduate of
the Charles University in Prague, he then had
to take a job as a bricklayer in an agricultural
co-operative, but in 1976 was detained once
more, this time with the majority of The
Plastic People band, and sent to prisonfor one
and a half years. At his trial, Jirous was
referred to by the prosecution as the chief
organiser of all unofficial cultural activities in
the country.. These were soon to develop into
what is now known as the Cultural
Underground Movement, whose leader and
foremost theoretician Ivan Jirous became.
He was re-arrested within a few weeks of
his release in 1977 and again jailed for 18
months, this time on account of a speech he
gave at the opening of an unofficial art
exhibition in which he spoke of the
unbridgeable differences between the
unofficial, and official culture.
In November 1981 he was once again
picked up by the police and accused of helping
to edit an unofficial cultural magazine,
Vokno C"Window'). On 9 July 1982 he was
sentenced to three and a half years'
imprisonment, to be followed by two years of
'protective surveillance' when he will have to
report daily to the police. While acknowledging
authorship of some of the articles in Vokno,
he denied that he had played any part in its
editing, and told the court he had not given
permission for his articles to be published in
the magazine. Although the police planted two
packets of cannabis in his home, it seems that
the court did not pronounce on the drugs
possession charge (Article 187 of the
Czechoslovak Penal Code), simply sentencing
Jirous under Article 202 (Disturbing the
Peace) for editing Vokno. Nevertheless, in the
mass media Jirous has repeatedly been
described as a 'drug addict' for propaganda
purposes.
Below, we publish an interview with the
recently exiled saxophonist, Vratislav
Brabenec, who last year spoke in Vienna to
Paul Wilson, a former member of The Plastic
People now back in his native Canada. The
interview is followed by an edited version of an
article written by Ivan Jirous in 1975, in which
he describes the beginnings, aims and
activities of the rock band whose persecution
was to have suchfar-reaching consequences: it
was the arrest and imprisonment of The
Plastics in 1976 which provided the main
impetus for the birth of the Charter 77 human
rights movement the following year.
Vratislav Brabenec
Heroes or madmen?
PAUL WILSON: How was the Plastics'
situation when you left Czechoslovakia?
VRATiSLAy BRABENEC: I hope you
understand if my answers" are somewhat
cautious. I only left Czechoslovakia a month
ago, and I have to bear in mind that
whatever I say can be used against my
friends at home. I will not be able to go into
as much detail as either you or I would like.
First I must stress that my emigration
does not necessarily mean the end of the