A situação revolucionária

Revolutionaries themselves are the last people to realize when, through force of time and circumstance, they have gradually become conservatives. It is scarcely to be wondered at if the public is very nearly as slow in the uptake. To the public a red flag remains a red rag even when so battered by wind and weather that it could almost be used as a pink coat. Nothing is so common as to see a political upheaval pass practically unnoticed merely because the names of the leaders and their parties remain the same. Similarly in the world of music, the fact that some of the key-names in modern music, such as Stravinsky and Schönberg, are the same as before the war has blinded us to the real nature of the present-day musical revolution. We go on using the words 'revolutionary composer' just as we go on using the words 'Liberal' and 'Bolshevik'; but between the modern music of pre-war days and that of today lies as much difference as that between the jolly old Gilbertian 'Liberal or Conservative' situation and the present mingled state of the parties, or that between the clear anarchical issues of the October revolution and the present situation in Russian politics with Stalin at the head of a frustrated Five Year Plan and Trotsky fuming in exile.

To the seeker after the new, or the sensational, to those who expect a sinister frisson from modern music, it is my melancholy duty to point out that all the bomb throwing and guillotining has already taken place. If by the word 'advanced' we mean art that departs as far as possible from the classical and conventional norm, then we must admit that pre-war music was considerably more advanced (if that is any recommendation) than the music of our own days. Schönberg's Erwartung for example, still the most sensational essay in modern music from the point of view of pure strangeness of sound, was actually finished in 1909. If your ear can assimilate and tolerate the music written in 1913 and earlier, then there is nothing in post-war music that can conceivably give you an aural shock, though the illogicality of some of the present-day pastiches may give you 'a rare turn' comparable to the sudden stopping of a lift in transit.

We are most of us sensationalists at heart, and there is something rather sad about the modern composer's relapse into good behaviour. There is a wistful look about the more elderly 'emancipated' critics when they listen to a concert of contemporary music; they seem to remember the barricades of the old Russian Ballet and sniff plaintively for blood. The years that succeed a revolution have an inevitable air of anticlimax, and it is noticeable that popular interest in the Russian Soviet films has considerably waned since the directors turned from the joys of destruction to the more sober delights of construction. With the best will in the world we cannot get as excited about The General Line as we did about Potemkin, and it is doubtful if any of the works written since the war will become a popular date in musical history, like those old revolutionary war-horses Le Sacre du Printemps and Pierrot Lunaire.

Constant Lambert in "MUSIC HO! - A STUDY OF MUSIC IN DECLINE" (1934).