On the 8th of May, 1906,
a young music fan treated himself to a night at the Viennese opera.
He was in luck.
Wielding the conductor's baton was one of Europe's greatest musicians,
Gustav Mahler.
Famously flamboyant,
Mahler commanded the orchestra with an extravagant passion
that perfectly matched the soaring music.
That evening stayed with the young fan for life.
His name was Adolf Hitler.
Years later, Hitler would take to a podium of his own, where he brought
to his speeches an intense physicality
and almost operatic, maniacal energy.
And when you look at them side by side,
it's not difficult to see how Mahler,
the great maestro with his arms soaring
and his fists pumping the air,
might well have inspired the Fuhrer's own
volcanic, fatally compelling style.
But when Hitler came to power,
Mahler's music was banned because he was Jewish.
This time, I'm exploring the power of music in the dark 1930s, when
the soundtracks to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia
were exploited to forge
national identity and prop up violent ideologies.
You don't decide what the music of the Soviet Union is.
WE decide.
I'll show how music was an instrument
of repression and resistance.
Our life was so cut.
It gave us hope for a short time.
How, for composers, every piece became a battle ground.
You can hear Shostakovich slapping Stalin in the face.
Bam, bam, Bam!
And I'll also be asking whether
music itself has a moral case to answer.
What fascinates me is music's uncanny ability to stir us up,
to calm us down, to express every possible human emotion.
It bypasses language and reason and aims instead directly for our souls,
and that's what makes music so incredibly powerful
and also potentially incredibly dangerous.
In the medieval city of Nuremberg,
the cultural heartland of Germany,
the Nazi party, newly in power in 1933,
gathered together for a rally of victory.
Here, the nation's rich past would
be symbolically linked to the glorious
Nazi future, and music would be crucial.
A performance of Wagner's opera The Mastersingers Of Nuremberg
was to kick off the celebrations there,
and the new Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler,
issued party officials with 1,000 free tickets.
When he arrived in the theatre,
Adolf Hitler was appalled to find that it was nearly empty.
Faced with four-and-a-half hours of heavy-duty opera,
most of the Nazi party rank-and-file
had skived off to one of the numerous beer houses nearby.
The Fuhrer was furious,
and he sent out a patrol to haul them all back to face the music.
For him, this wasn't just an evening of entertainment.
Germany's musical heritage, its great composers like Bach,
Beethoven and Brahms, were what made the country unique,
made it superior.
In Hitler's Third Reich,
music would be instrumental again in making Germany great.
Richard Wagner was Hitler's favourite composer,
and the Fuhrer even liked to claim
it was Wagner's music that had inspired
him to enter politics.
MUSIC: Ride Of The Valkyries by Wagner
Hitler loved Wagner because the music
had a kind of grandeur and mysticism
and he could lose himself in the kind of passion and intensity of
the work.
Wagner allows the audience to be kind of seduced into not thinking
and just being overwhelmed.
It wasn't just the emotive seduction of the music that the Fuhrer adored
but also the stories of Wagner's operas,
epic German fantasies about nationhood,
destiny and sacrifice with immortals like the Valkyries riding across
the sky, inciting men to make war.
The music of Wagner is creating
a different world and speaks of gods and speaks of power
and speaks of very grand feelings, very heroic feelings,
something that, of course, attracted Hitler very much,
creating myths and creating a society, creating an idea...
..inhuman, in a way.
Wagner had also been a fervent nationalist and anti-Semite.
Hitler venerated his whole worldview.
Wagner had been the great champion of the Gesamtkunstwerk,
a total work of art where music, drama, costume,
stunning visuals, all came together to create an epic and intoxicating
spectacle, and that was exactly what Hitler wanted to achieve,
to turn the Third Reich into a grand opera.
For the Nazis, politics itself would
become a new kind of performance art.
BAND PLAYS
It was music that underpinned Nazi pomp and pageantry,
creating a powerful display of national unity.
This was the stage set for those immersive Nazi spectaculars,
party rallies immaculately choreographed to music,
bands playing, tens of thousands of people marching perfectly in unison,
and Hitler up there on the podium,
waving his arms about like the supreme conductor.
HE SPEAKS IN GERMAN
When he addressed the crowds here in 1933,
Hitler intentionally used the phrase that closes
Wagner's opera The Mastersingers Of Nuremberg.
"Wach auf," he said - "Awake!"
He'd taken the Gesamtkunstwerk out of the opera house
and created an emotional, spiritual, almost religious experience
to rouse the entire German nation.
The rebirth of German culture was to include bringing the musical
tradition to the masses, and the Nazis invested heavily.
It was an idea of a long-term education of the people.
They spent a lot of money giving concert tickets very cheaply,
giving a lot of money to the concerts.
For example, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra,
would not, could not have survived otherwise.
And if one speaks to elderly people today, they say, yes,
Hitler was not in principle very good,
but he did some good things,
this was he brought work for the people,
he built the autobahn and he had wonderful music.
It's like, what have the Nazis ever done for us?
I mean, forget the fact that they rewrote cultural history and human
history, but we have still got the Berlin Philharmonic!
Classical music gave the Nazis a veneer of respectability.
These weren't thugs, they were civilised people,
they loved Bach and Beethoven and Wagner.
The problem with that, for me,
is that I also love Bach and Beethoven and Wagner.
And it makes me realise, I think, at a very subconscious level,
that I think I've always assumed
that classical music was a good thing.
That it's somehow noble or civilised to love it.
And yet, when you think about the relationship between music and
National Socialism, that is patently nonsense.
Merely listening to or loving classical music
does not make you a good person.
The Nazi enthusiasm for classical music didn't mean
they loved all of it.
You'd have thought something as simply beautiful as that could not
be considered politically dangerous.
But in Nazi Germany, this music was prohibited because Mendelssohn,
its composer, had Jewish heritage.
Never mind that he was long dead and had been baptised as a Christian.
When the Nazis came to power,
they set about creating institutions that would censor and control the
kind of music that would be played and the people who would play it.
Anything they considered undesirable was labelled "Entartete Musik" -
degenerate music.
No surprise that, to the racist Nazis,
music with a Jewish connection was considered degenerate,
a threat to German cultural purity.
The Nazis said music was
an instrument to educate the racial soul.
They thought that Jewish blood would influence the character of the music
and something bad would come.
Because it's not racially pure?
I mean, it's nuts, it's like craziness.
It is crazy. Mendelssohn sounded very Germanic
but it was not. They said it looks like Germanic,
it sounds like Germanic but it is not.
The real Germanic is only Bach,
Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner and so on.
And if we only play good German music,
then the Germanic people will be a better people.
As increasing Nazi persecution
targeted Jews in every aspect of daily life,
music by Jewish composers ceased to be played
and Jewish musicians were prevented from working.
To avoid musical contamination spreading unchecked,
there were even handy reference books with thousands of entries.
So, this is the utterly compelling Music And Race,
something to send you to sleep at night, if you need that.
This is a very catchy title, this one.
"Judentum und Musik" - Jews and Music ABC.
This is the Nazis' attempt at a comprehensive blacklist
of everybody they thought was musically verboten.
So, you get everybody in here, from the piano teacher up the road,
to the kind of biggest international figures anywhere on the music scene.
If I just take a look at some Kleins, none of them any relation,
but let's see, we've got Bernard Klein from Berlin, composer.
Charles Klein, who is a librettist from London, Saul Klein,
pop music composer from New York.
I mean, there is literally anybody you could possibly think of here.
Gustav Mahler gets quite a lengthy entry
and, of course, Felix Mendelssohn is in there.
It's just, to me,
a kind of stunning testament to how powerful the Nazis must have felt
Jewish influence in music was - it NEEDED to be silenced.
The Third Reich's cultural establishment was soon "Judenfrei" -
free of Jews.
But whatever propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels claimed,
the Nazis were depriving music-loving Germans
of some of their favourite tunes.
MUSIC: Wedding March by Mendelssohn
I'm sure you recognise this piece.
Maybe you walked down the aisle to it.
It's Mendelssohn's famous Wedding March
from A Midsummer Night's Dream.
It was, of course, banned.
But so much missed that the Nazis tried to fill the void by paying
approved composers to write alternatives.
More than 40 new scores for A Midsummer Night's Dream were
tried, but none of them won over the public.
It seems you can't just magic up musical genius.
MUSIC: The Mooche by Duke Ellington
To the Nazis, it wasn't just Jewish blood that was degenerate,
they also tried to silence music
that was avant-garde, somehow left wing,
or, like this Duke Ellington track,
what the Nazis called "Negermusik".
In 1938, all that was judged a corrupting influence
on German music,
was even gathered together in a truly weird exhibition.
The catalogue cover sums it up,
a caricature of a black man with the Jewish Star of David and a gypsy
earring playing jazz.
Showcasing the inferiority of the supposed degenerates,
the Nazis thoughtfully provided
audio booths where you could hear banned music.
Ironically, long queues formed of Germans eager for a taste
of forbidden musical fruit.
The only other way to hear it was if you were Jewish.
Berlin's Rykestrase Synagogue became one of the venues for
the Kulturbund, a new cultural society.
Set up in 1933,
here Jewish musicians and actors who had been thrown out of work,
were allowed to perform, though only to fellow Jews.
The Nazis strictly controlled their repertoire.
Kulturbund concerts were shut tight behind closed doors.
Non-Jews were not allowed to attend,
Jewish performers could play, say, Mendelssohn, but Aryan composers,
Beethoven, Bruckner, Wagner, were banned.
This was musical apartheid, a kind of sonic ghetto.
Soon, over a third of Germany's half a million Jews had joined
the Kulturbund.
Music became a kind of a refuge from the persecutions
of their daily lives.
95-year-old Margot Friedlander
performed with the Berlin Kulturbund in the 1930s.
Was there one particular production or a show that you did
that you really loved doing?
Yes, Grafin Mariza.
Emmerich Kalman's... Emmerich Kalman's Grafin Mariza.
So that's a great, fun operetta.
It was great fun, and every evening was a fun evening.
When we played, we had to wear these short pants
and I had wonderful legs.
But it was wonderful.
It was something that is very hard for me
to describe
what it meant for us.
It gave us a hope
for a short time.
You came from this very cultured world...
Yes. ..which almost overnight kind of disappeared.
Yes, you were not allowed to be in the street any more after eight.
You're not allowed to buy newspapers.
You're not allowed to have animals, cats or dogs.
You cannot go shopping except from four to five in the afternoon.
Our life was so cut into nothing.
What was there for us?
The Kulturbund could
give us Jews
a home.
Could give us something that we loved and naturally missed.
And it gave us the feeling we are alive.
Margot was eventually sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
She was the only member of her family to survive.
Even a musician considered Aryan to the core
could find working under the Nazis politically perilous.
The choice, to collaborate or risk the consequences.
Garmisch-Partenkirchen was the home of Germany's
greatest living composer, Richard Strauss.
He would find himself on a moral precipice as the Nazis sought to
capitalise on his international reputation.
Never a modest man, Strauss was always convinced of his own genius,
the last in a line, as he saw it, of great German composers like Bach,
Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms.
"I am the final mountain of a large mountain range," he once said,
with typical self-deprecation.
"After me, come the flatlands."
Strauss was asked in 1933 to become the official face of German music,
president of the Reich Music Chamber, the RMK.
By accepting, he seemed to give credibility
to the Nazi's repressive music policies.
Why did Richard Strauss take the job?
He was already famous, he didn't need the money,
and he certainly wasn't a card-carrying Nazi,
he wasn't remotely interested in politics.
I think this was about vanity.
For Strauss, what mattered most was German culture and his place in it.
He had been banging on for years about issues that were close to
his heart, things like copyright, royalties,
German music youth education,
and nobody had really paid him much attention.
Maybe now things would be different.
When Hitler came to power, Strauss's response was, "Thank God,
"at last a Reich Chancellor who is interested in art."
In his role as head honcho of the Reich Music Chamber,
Strauss socialised with Nazi leaders,
appeared at state occasions,
and sometimes stepped in to replace Jewish conductors
who had been ousted.
This is his family home,
and it's still owned by his grandson, Christian.
What kind of a grandfather was he?
What kind of a man do you remember him being?
For many years, there was a taint that hung over him
because of the 1930s, the 1940s.
Thinking back to the decisions he had to make,
how hard was that for him?
This was a dangerous game,
playing along with the Nazi regime
while also trying to keep his distance.
Strauss wanted prestige, but to protect his family too.
His daughter-in-law, glimpsed in this home movie, was Jewish.
If your grandfather hadn't taken that job with the RMK,
what would've happened to him?
Strauss's troubles would come to a head in 1935 over his new opera,
Die Schweigsame Frau - The Silent Woman.
He had chosen to work with a famous Austrian writer, Stefan Zweig,
who was Jewish.
Stefan Zweig wrote to Strauss,
complaining about the terrible treatment
of his fellow Jews in Germany.
Strauss writes a response which goes like this.
"Do you believe that Mozart was consciously Aryan when he composed?
"Do you believe that I am guided by the notion of being Germanic?
"For me, there are only two types of people,
"those with talent and those with none.
"It has nothing to do with politics".
Unfortunately, for Strauss, it had everything to do with politics.
This letter was intercepted by the Gestapo
and then, just a few days later,
there was a huge row about the opera that Zweig and Strauss
had been working on together, Die Schweigsame Frau,
because the Nazis wanted to take Zweig's name off any of the posters,
any of the programmes, to deny that he had any part in it.
Strauss went ballistic, insisted that Zweig's name was put back.
And here it is on the programme.
But a line had been crossed for the Nazis.
Richard Strauss had critiqued them in public,
he had insisted that a Jewish colleague's name appear in print.
And he lost his job and his opera was banned.
With his ego wounded and fearful for his family,
Strauss still tried to maintain his relationship with the Nazis.
He wrote a grovelling letter of apology to Hitler
and continued to conduct at high-profile events
like the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
But he never fully found his way back into favour.
The conductor Toscanini once said,
"To Richard Strauss the composer, I take off my hat,
"to Richard Strauss the man, I put it back on again."
Now, I'm not sure we can judge
Strauss in black-and-white like that. It's not that simple.
After all, if you were living under the regime, what would you do?
I know I would do everything that I could to protect my family,
to protect my livelihood.
I would work within that system.
It's not very brave, it's not very moral,
but it is what real people do when they're living in a nightmare.
We tend to put these composers on a pedestal.
We expect them to behave better than other people.
I think that's wrong, actually.
Why should a composer necessarily be more or less selfish than
any ordinary other person?
I do think we're allowed to judge the composer,
I do think we're allowed to do that.
And I think as soon as you express yourself in a way that's political
or that has influence in society,
you have the responsibility to make the right choices.
Strauss's difficult choices haunted him.
In Metamorphosen, written in the closing months of the war,
he seems to reflect upon his shattered hopes
and the painful complexities of his experiences.
It's music of anguish and sorrow,
foreshadowing Strauss's own imminent death and lamenting the destruction
of the Germany he knew and the culture he loved.
If being a composer in Nazi Germany was difficult,
in the Soviet Union, it could be terrifying.
Nearly two decades after the revolution,
its idealistic promise of a brave new world had given way to the firm
grip of totalitarian control.
In January 1936, Dmitri Shostakovich,
the young superstar of Soviet music,
arrived at the theatre in a state of nervous excitement.
His opera Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk
was already a huge hit with the public,
but, tonight, there would be a special guest in the audience.
Imagine the scene,
Shostakovich scanning the audience and in particular the box where he
could see several influential members of the politburo
laughing and chatting before the curtain went up.
They seemed to be enjoying themselves.
But Shostakovich was acutely aware that also up in that box,
concealed behind a curtain,
was a small, moustachioed man whose reaction could make or break
his career. Josef Stalin.
The supreme leader's opinion was all-important.
Stalin, like Hitler, took a keen interest in culture,
believing it played a crucial role in society.
Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk is a pretty grisly tale.
An adulterous Russian housewife murders her husband,
kills her father-in-law with rat poison,
gets sent to a Siberian labour camp and ends up dead.
It is a brilliant, hard-hitting piece.
Shostakovich was on the edge of his seat, nervous, excited,
to see what the general secretary made of his opera.
His stomach dropped when he looked up to the box and saw that Stalin
had walked out before the show was over.
Shostakovich left the theatre feeling, as he said to a friend,
"sick at heart".
And he was right to be worried.
Two days later, Pravda, the official Communist Party newspaper,
printed an anonymous article condemning Lady Macbeth.
And anyone who was anyone read Pravda.
This is one of the most important musical documents of the whole of
the 20th century.
I've known about this,
I've read about this for the best part of a quarter of a century,
so to have an original from 1936 in my hands is genuinely very exciting.
And it's also really chilling,
because this marks a turning point
in the relationship between the state and its creative artists.
The headline here is "Muddle, instead of music."
And right from the start, it is the most blistering attack.
"Here is music deliberately turned inside out.
"It quacks, grunts and growls.
"It tickles the perverted taste of the bourgeoisie.
"The composer has ignored the demands of Soviet culture
"that all coarseness and savagery be abolished
"from every corner of Soviet life."
This wasn't just a bad review, this was a crushing blow,
and it came from the very top.
They were rumours that Stalin himself wrote this.
At the very least, it had his full support.
For Shostakovich, one phrase was particularly frightening -
"this is a clever game of ingenuity that may end very badly."
Shostakovich knew a bad end in Stalin's brutal Soviet Union could
be terminal.
Stalin was paranoid, obsessed with destroying all potential opponents.
He had begun a mass purge in which millions were arrested on trumped up
charges, and then sent to the slave labour camps of the Gulag,
or executed.
Everyone lived in fear.
This was the Great Terror,
violent political repression on an unprecedented scale.
The public attack on Shostakovich signalled that the arts were under
fierce scrutiny too.
Writing the wrong notes could make a composer an enemy of the state.
Stalin demanded that all creative artists should be instruments of his
vision of the new Soviet society.
Their duty was to create a culture
imbued with positive Soviet values that the masses
could easily understand.
In the visual arts, that meant bright and cheerful paintings
of well-fed, happy Russians.
And statues like these, of heroic soldiers and contented peasants.
This approved style was called Socialist realism.
Now the same was to apply to music.
The problem for Shostakovich and his fellow composers was that while
everybody knew what socialist realist art should look like,
nobody had the foggiest what socialist realist music
should sound like.
There was a long list of no-nos, of course,
you couldn't write anything to modern, too formalist,
too reactionary, too gloomy, too romantic, too Western.
No, what Stalin was after was something that the regular Russian
music lover, a man like himself, perhaps, could really enjoy.
And if you got that wrong, everybody knew the consequences.
Shostakovich lived with his suitcase packed, in constant fear of arrest.
But he never stopped composing.
"Even if they chop my hands off," he said to a friend,
"I will continue to compose music,
"even if I have to hold the pen in my teeth."
Nearly two years after the Pravda attack,
knowing it was make or break,
Shostakovich offered up his Fifth Symphony.
MUSIC: Allegro Non Troppo from Fifth Symphony by Shostakovich
Had Shostakovich succeeded in creating the happy,
optimistic socialist realism Stalin wanted?
It certainly seemed a dramatic change in style
from his Lady Macbeth.
But was Shostakovich's change of tune for or against Stalin?
I hear the victory. I hear the fanfares.
I hear the Russian exhibition of power.
You can hear the symphony as a big triumph for Stalin himself,
or as Russia being the strongest and the best nation in the world.
At the same time,
you can also imagine somebody hearing that music as someone
slapping Stalin in the face, bam, bam, bam, saying,
"Listen, what you are doing is totally wrong."
To me, this music feels like being mauled by a dog
that won't let you go.
It's intense and ferocious.
In the relentless finale,
Shostakovich layers on contradictory harmonies,
neither major nor minor.
Ambiguous to the last.
We can't be sure what Shostakovich intended,
or how each member of the audience interpreted the music.
Triumph or terror?
What we do know is that the premiere ended with wild applause.
This time, the press response wasn't a damning attack from Stalin,
but a serving of humble pie from the composer himself.
Shortly after that first performance,
Shostakovich wrote a newspaper article
stating that his Fifth Symphony was a public apology
for the errors that he'd made in his opera Lady Macbeth.
Only, this being Shostakovich, it wasn't quite as clear cut as that.
He wrote, "If I have succeeded in embodying in music
"all that I have thought and felt
"since that critical article in Pravda,
"if the demanding listener can identify in my music
"a greater clarity and simplicity, then I am satisfied."
And that's a lot of ifs for somebody who's really trying to say sorry.
Shostakovich was learning the subtleties and nuances
of playing the political game.
For now, at least, he'd hit the right notes with the authorities,
and evaded the Gulag.
There is one way in which Shostakovich
undoubtedly left a message in his music, and it's this...
It's a really odd, haunting little sequence of four notes,
and it turns up all over the place.
It's in several of his pieces.
Now, composers for hundreds of years have loved the idea of making music
a kind of code, where the notes are ciphers,
that correspond to letters of the alphabet.
Bach did it, so did Brahms, so did Schumann,
and Shostakovich's cryptogram is absolutely essential for him.
Let's hear it again...
D, E flat, C, B natural.
Now, in the German system, those notes
correspond to the letters D, S, C, H.
D - Dmitri, S C H - Shostakovich.
And this is his way of saying,
I am putting myself right into the fabric of this music,
and whatever you take it to mean, you cannot obliterate me.
I love those musical cryptograms,
the clues composers leave behind to tantalise us. Crack the code,
we think, and we might just understand
their innermost thoughts and feelings.
Only music isn't that simple.
There are no literal answers,
it allows us to make of it what we will.
And Shostakovich fully exploits that ambiguity in his work.
His music is just a masterpiece of grey areas and doublespeak.
It's a chimera, a shape shifter.
And even someone as all-powerful as Stalin couldn't control that.
Control was exactly what the Soviet authorities demanded.
Music was the perfect tool to inspire enthusiasm and loyalty.
And in organisations like the Young Pioneers,
a kind of communist Scouts,
music helped to instruct the next generation
into the collective way of life.
Julia Maximovar was a Young Pioneer in the 1950s.
It's very...
It is the kind of music to make you want to stand up and march in line.
How much did it instil a sense of belonging in the Young Pioneers,
that music?
Looking back at it now, do you
feel that they really believed in the power of music to get to young
people's minds, and their emotions?
In May 1936, an audience of Young Pioneers was treated to a new piece
written specially for children.
Peter And The Wolf by Sergei Prokofiev
ticked all the right Soviet boxes.
It's a jolly, tuneful, accessible story
about a Young Pioneer who sets out beyond the safety of
his grandfather's gate, on a big adventure.
Gutsy young Peter's Pioneer skills are put to the test as he tries to
escape a wolf in the forest.
The classic musical fairy tale is also a political lesson.
The subtext of Peter And The Wolf
is just absolutely standard Stalinist propaganda,
as delivered in schools all over the country and in Pioneer camps.
Who is the Wolf?
The Wolf is the capitalist saboteur.
Who are the three hunters?
That was the standard depiction of the defence forces.
And the grumpy grandfather who says,
what do you think about going out there, you shouldn't be doing that,
and Peter says I can look after myself -
it's the older generation,
who won't allow the younger generation to take full
responsibilities as a Soviet citizen.
And Peter makes the correct decision,
he disobeys the grandfather.
You've got to give your first loyalty to your school,
to the Pioneers and to Stalin, which is exactly what Peter does.
Peter And The Wolf's composer, Sergei Prokofiev,
would regularly turn his genius for writing
crowd-pleasing melodies to suit the Soviet regime.
Prokofiev was internationally famous,
and had spent the 1920s living abroad.
But he was deeply homesick for Russia, and in 1936,
lured by the promise of prestige and lucrative commissions,
he'd chosen to return.
I think my grandfather really wanted to be back at home.
In his teens and 20s, he'd been a young star,
and had been really successful in Russia.
And he'd never quite recovered that level of success.
I think, like any artist, you want...
you need to be where you are most appreciated.
You need to go where the work is,
and the work was definitely in Russia.
Back in the USSR, Prokofiev was given a swanky apartment,
in one of the most desirable blocks in central Moscow.
He had a maid, a chauffeur, a holiday home.
He was well known for driving around town in a blue car,
when everyone else's was regulation black,
and for sporting flamboyant Parisian clothes.
He must have cut quite a dash in the drab grey atmosphere
of 1930s Moscow.
Prokofiev knew privilege came at a price,
and that to survive under Stalin,
he'd have to prove his commitment to the regime.
He composed overt propaganda pieces, like this, Toast To Stalin,
celebrating the beloved leader's birthday.
That was the best solution, he could just knock something out and then
carry on doing what he wanted to do.
Maybe he might have to do some works that would appease the state,
would fit into requirements.
But, being such a prolific composer, that wasn't difficult for him.
I think he'd always believed somehow that he was invincible and that
people appreciated his talent enough to never come down hard on him.
Prokofiev's phenomenal ability to compose quickly to order,
made him perfect for another Soviet propaganda mission,
reaching the masses in their millions by writing music for film.
There was a huge culture of cinemas, even in the smallest towns.
Cinema really dominated both actual musical culture in the Soviet Union
and the authorities' determination to control it.
Working for the cinema was
the principal occupation of Soviet composers.
In the early 1940s,
Prokofiev worked with pioneering director Sergei Eisenstein,
who had been commissioned by the state to make a film about
the 16th century tyrant, Ivan the Terrible.
Stalin idolised Ivan the Terrible
and he felt there were powerful lessons
to be learned from his reign,
so Eisenstein and Prokofiev knew their film
had to have a positive spin.
Prokofiev created a Wagnerian theme for Ivan. Muscular and heroic,
the music conveys regal power.
Ivan had unified Russia,
but through a notoriously bloody reign of terror.
For Stalin, that ruthlessness was something to be admired.
The victims of his own cruel regime now numbered millions.
Stalin was delighted with the film and awarded it a prestigious and
highly lucrative Stalin prize
to be shared between the director and composer.
Thrilled by their success,
Eisenstein and Prokofiev got to work on a follow-up,
Ivan The Terrible Part Two.
This time, they took a more psychological approach,
Ivan comes across as tyrannical and a bit mad.
But that wasn't the message Stalin wanted.
"This is not a film, it's some kind of nightmare,"
said Stalin when he saw the movie.
"Ivan the Terrible was very cruel," he went on.
"You can show he was cruel,
"but you must show why it was essential to be cruel."
Predictably, Stalin banned the film and Prokofiev never composed for
the cinema again.
However hard he tried to please,
he found it impossible to strike the right notes every time.
Targeted after the war in a new round of attacks,
Prokofiev spent his final years humiliated.
In a savage twist of fate, he died the very same day as Josef Stalin.
The florists sold out as vast crowds mourned their beloved leader,
leaving no fresh flowers for Prokofiev's grave.
Making music for the great dictators had proved to be a minefield.
Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Richard Strauss, they all suffered.
But what of the music itself?
Has it been stained by the violence and tyranny
of the place and time that produced it?
There's one piece written in the 1930s that I think more than
any other captures the toxic spirit of the age.
THEY SING IN LATIN
Carmina Burana by Carl Orff stirs us up to feel tense excitement
with its violent power.
It's hypnotic rhythms chimed brilliantly
with the frenetic atmosphere of Nazi Germany,
where it swept the crowds off their feet.
The Nazi party newspaper called it, "The kind of clear,
"stormy and yet disciplined music our time requires."
The Nazis were very against intellectual music,
and, of course, Carl Orff's music isn't intellectual,
it appeals to the senses,
it's primitive.
When somebody hits a bass drum, you feel the vibrations in your body.
You cannot escape that music.
You feel the tension and you enjoy the tension,
and, at the right moment, there's this big releasing of this tension.
Carmina Burana has become one of the most performed pieces
of classical music.
A staple of popular culture, used by film, TV and advertising.
A cliche of macho, apocalyptic glory.
The music has long outlived the politics of the time.
But is there something inherently fascist about the bombastic,
unreflective emotion written into its very notes?
We might like to think that the music we still love today
has nothing to do with the dark and distant politics of a terrible time.
But I'm not sure it's quite that simple.
I suppose if listening to music can't make you
a better, more moral person,
nor can it by the same token make you an immoral person.
That said, Carmina Burana, for me,
is the ultimate piece of empty music.
A load of sound and fury signifying nothing.
It pushes our buttons and it tries to provoke our basest emotions.
I cannot help but hear the hate-filled ideology it grew out of
when I hear those notes.
And our willingness today to still submit to its power
carries with it, I think, a real health warning.
That when we embrace music like this, we also have to recognise that
it came out of a profoundly evil regime.
Next time, as Europe is engulfed by war,
how will music play its part in the battle...
..and the moral and spiritual collapse that is yet to come?