[Piccolo]

While the article below comes from a left-wing website, I believe the posters here might have an interesting take on it. The author argues that the modern capitalist elite is uninterested in high culture and he uses the decline of classical music as an example of the collapse of high culture under market logic.

http://jacobinmag.com/2013/11/the-end-o ... cal-music/

Interestingly, the author notes that both the fascists and Soviets lavishly supported classical music.

Thoughts?

[quetzalcoatl]

I really don't see that much of a difference. Prokofiev, arguably one of the handful of great composers of the 20th century, was dependent on friends for survival at the end of his life, and Shostakovitch lived in a constant state of dread. Classical musicians now are simply professionals marketing themselves as best they can.

[Potemkin]

I really don't see that much of a difference. Prokofiev, arguably one of the handful of great composers of the 20th century, was dependent on friends for survival at the end of his life

He couldn't earn a living in the West either, which is why he returned to Russia in 1933 (just in time for Stalin's purges - Prokofiev was always a rather hapless person). His problems in the Soviet Union were mainly political rather than financial.

and Shostakovitch lived in a constant state of dread.

As did almost every prominent person in Stalin's Soviet Union.

Classical musicians now are simply professionals marketing themselves as best they can.

This has been the case since at least the mid 19th century. The era of aristocratic patronage of high culture is long over. Artists are at the mercy of the market, and have been for quite some time now.

[quetzalcoatl]

I guess we kind of agree, Potemkin. I think the heyday of the classical music race (a little akin to the space race) has long passed. The brouhaha over the Shostakovtich's Leningrad Symphony in WWII and Lenny's invasion of Moscow with NY Philharmonic seem like another era.

[Potemkin]

I guess we kind of agree, Potemkin. I think the heyday of the classical music race (a little akin to the space race) has long passed. The brouhaha over the Shostakovtich's Leningrad Symphony in WWII and Lenny's invasion of Moscow with NY Philharmonic seem like another era.

Agreed. The Soviet state sponsored classical music and the other arts partly out of ideological conviction that the victorious proletariat were the inheritors of human culture, and partly for reasons of prestige. During the Cold War, the West felt the need to artistically compete with the Soviet Union, for obvious reasons, and was prepared to pay top dollar to achieve that. The end of the Cold War also ended a great many other things, not all of which were bad.

[Far-Right Sage]

And quite like a great many things, one need not say they (in this case the state patronage of high-caliber classical music and instrumental masterpieces) are "over", but merely on hold. No one here would be the first to say that the present era is lacking in a multitude of areas.