The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

a twist that would seem too heavy-handed in a novel, Prokofiev died on March 5, 1953, about fifty minutes before Stalin breathed his last.

Seen from one angle, then, Lady Macbeth is nearly an opera in the service of genocide.

The Russian musicologist Alexander Benditsky has discovered that the symphony is in fact riddled with references to Carmen, and they are probably connected to Shostakovich’s lingering love for the translator Elena Konstantinovskaya, who, after her time in prison, had gone to Spain and married the Soviet photographer and filmmaker Roman Karmen.

Copland probably never lost sleep over the uses and misuses to which his music was put, although he might have relished the irony of a gay leftist of Russian-Jewish extraction supplying the soundtrack for the Republican Party platform. Pragmatic rather than radical at the core, he wanted to speak for the entire country, even at the expense of diluting his message. In this sense, he was the perfect musical counterpart of the thirty-second president of the United States.

The aftermath of Hitler’s corrosive love of music is unavoidable. Much of subsequent twentieth-century musical history is a struggle to come to terms with it. Although there is no point in trying to restore Schopenhauer’s separation of art and state, it is equally false to claim the opposite, that art can somehow be swallowed up in history or irreparably damaged by it.

Like so many German music lovers, Hitler claimed that the classical tradition was an “absolute art” hovering above history, as in Schopenhauer’s formulation.

The automatic equation of radical style with liberal politics and of conservative style with reactionary politics is a historical myth that does little justice to an agonizingly ambiguous historical reality.