ABSTRACT
The break in 1917 from certain musical attitudes that prevailed in Tsarist Russia was linked directly to the radical political and social changes that were ushered in by the Bolshevik Revolution. One of the major factors in determining the course of the new Soviet music was the rigorous effort by the revolutionary government under Lenin to establish an official social program in which the arts would play a significant role in the education of the culturally oppressed masses. This interest in identifying music with the people was not a new one to Russia, the “Mighty Five” having already turned in the late nineteenth century toward folk music as a fundamental source for their own artistic creativity and as a manifestation of the essence of the Russian people. However, the unfavorable political conditions that prevented free artistic expression under Tsar Nicholas II were protested in an open letter signed in 1905 by well-known Moscow musicians, including Rachmaninov, Chaliapin, Taneyev, Gretchaninov, and Glière, after the “Blood Sunday” massacre outside the Tsar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg: “Only free art is vital, only free creativity is joyful … We are not free artists but, like all Russian citizens, the disfranchised victims of today’s abnormal social conditions. In our opinion, there is only one solution: Russia must at last embark on a road of basic reforms.” 1
