Music: Un-Soviet

Try as they might, Soviet composers could not please the Kremlin.

At first, Composer Herman Zhukovsky thought he had made the grade. Most of Moscow’s critics welcomed his new opera about Ukrainian collective farms, From the Depths of the Heart, with whoops of joy. But the returns were not all in. Critic No. i had viewed a performance himself (TIME, April 23). Last week Pravda got around to stating the real, blown-in-the-bottle Stalinist position: the new opera was full of “serious mistakes,” and all concerned should hang their heads.

The worst blunder: funking the “great theme” of “the life of a contemporary collective farm village.” Instead of glorifying “creative labor and the growth of a new people,” there had been entirely too much attention given to “songs and dances at holiday celebrations.” Moreover, one of the sets had included a “miserable, sagging fence.”

In short, it was just not Soviet realism.