It is well known that Britten visited the Soviet Union on five occasions between 1960 and 1971 and established warm friendships with members of the Soviet musical elite: Dmitri Shostakovich, Sviatoslav Richter, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Galina Vishnevskaya. Using a range of declassified archival material, this article places this engagement in the wider historical context of Anglo-Soviet political, commercial, and cultural relations, from the wartime alliance with Stalin to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It considers the operation of the Anglo-Soviet Cultural Agreement, alongside the importance of individuals such as the impresario Victor Hochhauser and a sequence of supportive British ambassadors and cultural attachés. It also examines the role of the British Council on the ground and some of the constraints placed upon this cultural engagement through resourcing and the rules of the political game. Finally, it assesses engagement beyond Britten’s lifetime, in the light of the visits of pop artists such as Sir Cliff Richard and the Bootleg Beatles to the Soviet Union and the first performances of works hitherto taboo, such as Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius.

Mahler’s influence among composers intensified steadily over the course of the twentieth century. Within the Austro-German orbit, his impact is evident in the music of figures as varied as Kurt Weill, Hans Werner Henze, and Dieter Schnebel. Further afield, by the mid-1920s a distinguished array of composers including Aaron Copland and Dimitri Shostakovich had begun to engage seriously with Mahler’s music. This trend would continue in the second half of the twentieth century, with the renewed attention paid to Mahler outside Central Europe giving rise to an even more diverse group of followers, including those eager to find emancipation from some of the more influential strands of postwar modernism: George Crumb, George Rochberg, Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, Pierre Boulez, Peter Maxwell Davies, Michael Finnissy, and Jonathan Harvey. These are surveyed here with particular attention to the diverse ways in which Mahler’s influence expressed itself.

This chapter offers a brief overview of the history of operetta in Russia, starting with performances and reception of German and French operettas from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and exploring home-grown, Soviet operetta. It will show that operetta was big business in tsarist Russia, and later in the Soviet Union, and demonstrate that it was a valuable resource, a laughter therapy, for the Soviet authorities with which to anaesthetize the masses to the realities of life. The works by German and French composers dominated Russian operetta stages, with the most popular composers being Suppé, Offenbach, Planquette, Hervé and Lecocq, until Soviet composers began to create operettas according to the new, official socialist realism style. This chapter will briefly introduce significant operetta composers – Dunayevsky, Strelnikov, Aleksandrov and Milyutin – and discuss contributions to the genre from such well-known composers as Shostakovich and Kabalevsky. It also gives a brief account of how operetta was instrumental to boosting the morale of the population ravaged by World War II, especially in blockaded Leningrad, and shows that operetta (both European and Soviet) is still popular in today’s Russia.

The October Revolution in 1917 profoundly shocked the cultural ecosystem. The new authorities recast notions of freedom, of the arts, and of the public. Links between and among audiences at different levels that had thrived in the prerevolutionary cultural market were dismantled. Over time the government imposed strictures on culture requiring alignment with political directives. By 1934, the official policy of Socialist Realism was mandatory and compliance enforced by rewards and terror. The early years of revolutionary ferment yielded aesthetic innovation of the highest order, yet the mounting pressures took their toll on creativity. Writers, artists, and performers responded variously. Some took cover in works employing irony and in the (somewhat) safer terrain of children’s literature. By seeding children’s literature with values counter to those practiced by Soviet officialdom, selected writers and artists spread counter-values to a new generation. They worked with the guile of the fox, the flight of the firebird, and, perhaps, the recklessness of the Fool. By keeping alive Russian stories of wise Fools, sentient animals, and magical powers, their creators carried forward folkloric traditions barred from the reigning Socialist Realism. In doing so, they protected limited public space for artistic innovation.

Irony refers to a use of language in which the actual import of words is different from their literal meaning, or in which a work carries multiple messages. The culture of reading and viewing on the eve of the Revolution and in the 1920s incorporated reading for multiple meanings due to the traditional practice of reading aloud in groups. Listeners who commented, questioned, and discussed among themselves automatically gave works layers of meaning. When the Bolsheviks shocked this universe with an onslaught of ideological works, readers sought and found irony. For example, from the outset, it was clear that the Bolsheviks espoused with great seriousness the “science” of “scientific socialism” and the routinely heroic “Soviet man.” Each of these received masterful ironic treatment by Ilf and Petrov, Zoshchenko, Bulgakov, and others. Works for children, too, took on layers of ironic interpretation. Not even music escaped. Shostakovich wrote his “film opera” of Marshak’s poem Silly Little Mouse in part as an ironic retort to Pravda’s earlier criticism of his work. Skill with irony gave creators and audiences channels of communication and outlets in parallel to those officially sanctioned; in short, a supply of fresh air to counter creative suffocation.