2008 MUSIC TOUR – SAINT PETERSBERG

PEKBNeM or Requiem. Last minute practice for the Verdi Requiem, the original centrepiece of our trip, has been challenging. Windows Media Player has inserted tracks from Rosie’s band, The Bakery, in between the Dies Irae, Kyrie Eleison, Sanctus, etc. Now at St Petersburg airport, we crawl for 90 minutes through a concrete bunker, packed with disgruntled passengers, towards a door marked PASSPORTS. We have missed the shuttle and have no Roubles. But then, to our delight, we see a huge Russian bear holding up a World Festival Choir placard. In a booming voice straight out of Boris Goudenov he says “I wait 2 hours for 7 people and you are first. We wait 1 day, 1 week or we go?” We go. Boris winds down the window of his truck-like contraption and a blast from the Arctic snap freezes my beard. We drag our trolley-bags across mounds of broken concrete, reminding me of Mumbai, to the hotel. But in Mumbai the rubble is probably still there whereas, in St Petersburg, four parallel road rollers seal the road overnight. We heard all four! We sang in Verona with Marlene Norst, below left, and now again in St Petersburg, where she helped rescue me from the muggers.

LOOKING BACK NOW from the peaceful serenity of Cockleshurds Cottage and its entertaining three little girls (they all met us at the airport), St Petersburg has its minuses and plusses. The minuses were the icy winds and 9 degrees max, the three big muggers who tried to push me through a door, and St Isaac’s and St Nicolas Marin. Of these two grim, forbidding Russian  Orthodox cathedrals, one was officially dedicated as a monument to Russian military glory, the other dedicated to intimidating a proletariat that eventually will say “Enough is enough” and join a revolution. The plusses were, of course, the enthusiastic audience trying to coax an encore at the end of the spine-tingling Requiem, the immense Hermitage museum on foot, the self-indulgent Peterhof by hydrofoil, the Peter and Paul Fortress and Cathedral where the Tzars are buried, the Russian museum, the Church of the Spilled Blood, and the Alexander Nevsky monastery. I have to admit here a preference for crazy Etruscan tunnels, alleys and arches, for the simple soaring beauty of French abbeys, and for sleepy little Saxon churches, over all of these massive monuments of aristocratic and imperial triumphalism.

RUSSIA. But these are all part of the contradictions that Russians accept. They seem proud of everything: the princes that squandered thousands of lives in the building of palaces, the revolution that toppled the princes, proud of their siege museum dedicated to that half of the population of St Petersburg, sometimes called Petrograd or Leningrad, that starved or froze to death during “the 900 days” face-off with Germany, and now proud of their new empire re-builder, Vladimir Putin.

The St Petersburg Times provided us with some outspoken background. In reply to the threat of the American missile shield, Moscow is recruiting Venezuela, Libya, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Cuba in an anti-west axis. To this end, two Russian long-range bombers recently visited Venezuela, and might visit Cuba, while a Russian battleship will soon conduct naval exercises in the Caribbean. “The West is definitely out to get us” after all, we “built a progressive, democratic and affluent communist society that the western bourgeoisie envied with a passion”  Interviewed at an exhibition of war trophies from Georgia, a man said “I wanted to show my son this. He has to see how strong and powerful the Russian army is. It was not the aggressor but it still won.” We never learn, do we? As we belted out at the tops of our voices “DIES IRAE, DIES CALAMITATIS,ET MISERIAE” it does seem that  Russian history is a series of days of wrath, calamity and misery.

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

Hatred of the oppressive Tsarist regime was recorded as far back as 1591 when the people did “wish for some “forreine” invasion”. Later, Peter the Great, in a fit of pique over an unsuccessful palace revolt in Moscow, and with the income from immense landed estates behind him, ordered the construction of a new capital in a freezing Baltic swamp. In an insane attempt to rival Versailles and Venice, St Petersburg cost the lives of 150,000 serfs and bankrupted the economy. In 1861 the emancipation of the serfs made little difference to their fortunes since land ownership, and hence rights to collect whatever rents they wished, remained concentrated in the nobility. Adding to the palatial extravagances of Peter, and later Catherine, were attempts at Westernisation in which “young Russian nobles went to Paris little piglets and came back perfect swines.”

And so, for 200 years bewildered peasants had been rounded up across Russia to build palaces, then armies and then the new factories, adding one more group of discontented subjects each time. This last group, since it was concentrated in Moscow and St Petersburg, was more easily mobilised into the 1917 revolution than an uneducated peasantry stretched across the vastness of Russia. One of Lenin’s early ambitions, land distribution to the peasants, would have been far more successful than Stalin’s later collectivisation. This was demonstrated when the small private plots allowed to each peasant turned out to be 17 times more productive than the collective farms.

But both Lenin and Stalin seemed to have forgotten item one of Marx’s Communist Manifesto, “The collection of all [not just rural] land rent for public purposes”. This simple reform, generating the surplus necessary for industrial investment, would have made most subsequent communist programs unnecessary. Much later, after the eventual Soviet collapse, it would have prevented the aggressive rent seeking by erstwhile party officials in which much of the state’s infrastructure fell into private hands.

ON TRAGEDY – MACBETH

Macbeth, like the later Stalin, eliminated all who stood in his way. So I will use extracts from Macbeth as proxies for Russia’s grim and blood-stained history of legend, intrigue, murder and war. Macbeth, fascinated by witches and oracles, asks: “If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then to me”, to which the third witch replies “Thou shalt get kings though thou be none.”  But lady Macbeth already has plans to become queen and, together, they plot the assassination of Duncan, king of Scotland. Macbeth agrees “If it were done…t’were well it were done quickly” but has doubts. Lady Macbeth then challenges his manhood “screw your courage to the sticking place and we’ll not fail”. After the deed Macbeth has nightmares, and misses his “sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care”

After more murders and ghosts, lady Macbeth starts to crack: “Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.” And Macbeth, resigned to his fate, reflects on the futility of his life:

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more; it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

I will end on a more cheerful and musical note with a tribute to the Russian peasantry who , battered and bruised by cruel fate, could always sing and dance. I am thinking of the huge ethnic energy which erupts in the Polovtsian Dances, and the sheer joyousness of the Shrovetide Fair in Stravinsky’s Petrushka.