mauveOkra

Extremely based agitprop cantata/opera. In the anglo establishment it is caricatured as evil and aggressively misinterpreted, possibly because HUAC translated it to smear Brecht and Eisler. (This production does not use the HUAC translation.)

While the Birmingham opera pushes the misinterpretation that it is about sacrificing yoursef for your values, in actuality it is a parable about a young passionate revalutionary whose idealism fatally clouds their judgement. I suspect that the translation makes this less clear, but I do not know the untranslated text.

Bonus points, I can't tell if the production is ironic or not. The cringe framing device feels ironic but the interviewer mentions solidarity with rail strikers at the end, so I can't tell. Either way, some of the audience and choristers interviewed seemed receptive.

I'm taking a 20th century music history course right now, and the professor is a strongly anticommunist progressive. Before he even started he claimed Stalin was unequivocally the worst person of the 20th century, if not all time. One of the most suspicious parts was when he told us about Prokofiev's statement against the capitalist world made upon his return to the USSR in 1936. He claimed that this was clearly forced out of him, despite having just told us how he had squandered 20 years trying and failing to find work abroad (one of the only things he did was a commission by a fruit company for a fruit-opera?). Additionally my teacher conceded that there is no record of Prokofiev's personal views from this time.

Then the is the whole Soviet Realism/Formalism thing. My teacher said these terms were intentionally ill-defined so that musicians/artists could be censored, imprisoned, or killed at the whim of Stalin. Again, I feel skeptical about how cartoonishly evil this description is.

So what is the history of music and art in the Soviet Union minus the Western propaganda? Is there a book or other resource I could use to learn about this?