European composers of the early twentieth century, like everyone else, found their lives profoundly affected by the economic, political, and military upheavals of the time. Besides the sheer threat of annihilation in a time of war, other, less dramatic difficulties loomed. Many institutions that composers’ careers depended on — orchestras, opera companies, and the like — disappeared or fell into disarray. Some were victims of changing governments with new priorities. Others did not survive staggering inflation in parts of Europe in the 1920s, worldwide depression in the 1930s, or war in the 1940s.

Modernist composers in the avant-garde in particular faced threats that were not only physical and social but also ideological — that is, threats made not on their lives or livelihoods but on their ideas, including musical ideas. This was most evident in (though not restricted to) the two most powerful repressive totalitarian regimes of the era. In Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, radical modernism in most of its guises was rejected and banned.

In each country the rationale for repression was the same distorted outgrowth of nineteenth-century nationalism: Art ought to speak straightforwardly to the national “folk” and give voice to its aspirations and history. This was foreign to modernist art’s emphasis on originality and individualism, its formal intricacies, and its experimentation — its elitism, as the culture czars in Russia and Germany saw it. For Nazis and Stalinists alike, modernist art had no reason to exist.

Nazi Germany

Hitler’s regime promoted music of the great German masters; Beethoven and Wagner were special favorites. But it banned explicitly modernist music, supporting instead the latter-day Romanticism of the aging Richard Strauss, for example (see page 335). Meanwhile Jewish composers and other musicians faced extermination. Those who could fled to countries all over the world, many of them to the United States. Arnold Schoenberg is the best known of these refugees (see page 325), but there were many others, including Kurt Weill, composer of “Mack the Knife,” who established a second career on Broadway. Béla Bartók, who was not Jewish but also decided to emigrate when his native Hungary finally joined with Hitler, had a harder time (see page 340).

The Soviet Union

Perhaps the most famous victim of ideological muzzling was one of Russia’s greatest composers, Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975; Shos-ta-kó-vich). Growing up under Communism, he originally followed the dictates of the state without question. Shostakovich was certainly no radical modernist of the Schoenberg sort; but his music did show novel tendencies, including strongly dissonant harmonies. A darling of the regime in the early 1930s, he nevertheless walked a dangerous path.

With his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensky Region of 1934, when he was twenty-eight, he went over the edge. Subject matter and music were equally shocking. The worldwide clamorous success of this work brought Stalin himself to see it. Two days later the official Communist Party newspaper condemned the work and issued a scarcely veiled threat to the composer: “The power of good music to affect the masses has been sacrificed to a petty-bourgeois, formalist attempt to create originality through cheap clowning. It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly.”

In fact, Shostakovich was back in favor a year afterward. But his troubles were not over; he was condemned again ten years later — only to be rehabilitated once more when Stalin died. To what extent Shostakovich accommodated the regime, or criticized it by means of half-secret musical signals in his later compositions — signals recognized by his audiences — is a fascinating question still debated.