Censorship is not readily practised on music, because music does not as a rule convey a precise statement such as persons in authority might wish to tone down or ban. Censorship has in the main affected forms that ally music to words, in particular music theatre (opera, ballad opera, musical comedy) and music with openly political associations (marches set to revolutionary or nationalistic texts, or cabaret songs). Such forms appeal directly to a large public gathering – a possible fount of subversion or violence. In dealing with them, censorship has by and large concentrated on the words; the music of some well-known marches, however, has been so bound up with the sentiments expressed by the words as to be unplayable, even on its own, after a political reversal, e.g. the Marseillaise after the Bourbon restoration.
JOHN ROSSELLI
In its dealings with instrumental music censorship must be distinguished from other forms of control, some of which may hinder or stop the performance of particular works. In societies where virtually the only fount of patronage is a monarch or a powerful institution, the likes and dislikes of persons in authority may decide whether works of a certain kind, or by a particular composer, are to be played; if those works require large forces and corresponding expenditure they may not be performable at all without authority's leave. This, however, is merely to say that for much of history the arts have depended on patrons, and individual works have been specifically produced for them.
An example is the insistence of Frederick the Great on having operas composed for his royal theatre exclusively by C.H. Graun: no other composer need try to write operas for Berlin. On a wider scale, church music down to the late 18th century was composed solely for liturgical performance: if religious orders were dissolved or cut down, as in England at the Reformation and in Austria under Joseph II, or if church choirs were suppressed, as in revolutionary France, certain kinds of music might vanish. Again, if the instructions of the Council of Trent had been fully carried out in the Catholic Church, the more elaborate kinds of polyphonic church music would have disappeared sooner than they did. These, however, cannot reasonably be called instances of censorship, which requires an intention to suppress or modify a work on grounds of its ideological or moral tendency, or of some characteristic of its author thought to be undesirable on such grounds (e.g. race or political commitment).
In our own day, radio authorities have at times been accused by a composer of ‘censoring’ his work by failing to broadcast it. When an art has a small audience, as is true of much modern music, a public broadcasting system may play a role not unlike that of an 18th-century monarch: it may in effect decide which work or composer is heard. But because the taste of its officials inclines towards one rather than another it does not follow that they are practising censorship.
In exceptional circumstances, public opinion, or pressure groups claiming to speak for it, may exert censorship of a kind. An example is the unofficial ban in Israel on the music of Wagner and Richard Strauss – on Wagner's because of his virulent anti-semitism and the exploitation of his work by the Nazis, on Strauss's because of his collaboration with the Nazi regime. Zubin Mehta as conductor of the Israel PO drew back in 1982 from an attempt to reintroduce Wagner through one of his least ideological works (the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde). This is a borderline case: the motives for the ban are akin to those of censorship, but what enforces it is not the power of constituted authority. A determined group, say a small orchestra playing the Siegfried Idyll, would be free to test it at the risk of facing a riot. Censorship of music theatre is considered in §3.
Censorship in fact requires the work of art, understood as that of an autonomous individual, to be offered on a market, however limited. So long as it is made for a patron and for a specific occasion, censorship (as against a list of the patron's requirements) has little scope. In Western instrumental music this transition came late, with Beethoven. Even then the indeterminacy of music kept off censorship until, in the 20th century, several trends came together: the attempt by totalitarian regimes to control all aspects of national life; the cult of music as emotional fulfilment, often doing duty for religious faith; and the split between popular and avant-garde art. Though some composers have suffered prison or exile because of their political commitment – and have therefore been unable to have their works performed – only in two regimes has censorship been directed systematically at music. These are Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin.
In dealing with the arts, these two regimes often used similar methods and slogans, although in their general ideological stance they seemed opposed. Some of these methods and slogans were first devised by Italian fascists; in Italy, however, they were applied far less thoroughly. Old-fashioned reactionary governments had worked a negative censorship by suppression, but these regimes brought in positive, all-encompassing official action, organization and propaganda, enforced by fear of loss of earnings, of physical or verbal violence and of the concentration camp. Their censorship worked as much by inducing composers to write certain kinds of music as by warning them off other kinds.
In both countries, official censorship was preceded by a period of factional struggle for control of artistic life – in the Soviet Union (1928–32) between the temporarily successful ‘proletarian’ musicians and the ‘modernists’, in the dying years of the Weimar Republic (1930–33) between Nazis and Communists. In Germany the installation of the Nazi regime (January 1933) at once led to violent assaults and other intimidation by party members against Jewish, Communist and other ‘non-national’ musicians. A law of 7 April 1933 dismissed musicians in these categories from official posts; other laws of 22 September and 1 November 1933 put all the arts, the press and broadcasting under the control of a Reichskulturkammer (headed by the Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels) and music under a Reichsmusikkammer, membership of which became compulsory for professional musicians. In the Soviet Union a resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (23 April 1932) denounced the ‘proletarian’ faction and set up single, inclusive unions for each of the arts. Though directed in the first place at literature, this decisive step towards regimentation led in 1934 to guidelines from the Composers’ Union enforcing the ‘socialist realism’ which Andrei Zhdanov, a leading member of the Politburo, had proclaimed that year as the standard for Soviet writing.
The establishment of conformity in music was swifter in Germany: performances in late 1935 of Mendelssohn (under Furtwängler) and Berg (under Erich Kleiber) were the last public signs of dissent. In the Soviet Union there was at first much discussion, within broad obeisance to socialist realism, until in January 1936 a violent denunciation in the party newspaper Pravda of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District – inspired by Stalin, and coinciding with the onset of the ‘purges’ in Soviet society – brought a first bout of censorship; a far worse episode began in September 1946 with Zhdanov's denunciation of various writers, leading on 10 February 1948 to a Central Committee decree on music and a campaign of organized vilification of leading composers, amounting to large-scale censorship.
In their ideological slogans the two censorships had much in common. The most notable difference was that in the Soviet Union anti-semitism was invoked only covertly (in the 1948–53 campaign against ‘cosmopolites’) and to spotty effect, whereas the Nazi regime dismissed Jewish composers or drove them into exile and forbade performances of ‘Jewish’ music, new or old (except, until 1941, in segregated concerts before Jewish audiences). For the rest, both regimes upheld the vital importance of folksong and of collective vocal performance, called for a return to the values of traditional German or Russian music, abused and banned both jazz and the ‘decadent’ or ‘degenerate’ works of the contemporary avant garde (seen as typical of a corrupt bourgeois society) and instilled adulation of the supreme leader, who intervened from time to time in person.
In both countries, censorship was exercised by fear and conformism as much as by decree: ‘this silent exclusion of all our music’, Berg wrote to Webern (8 May 1934). In both, many musicians gave the regime a wide measure of consent. This came of a shared sense that music was not for the isolated individual to work out in dialogue with a few peers, but should flow from the collective feeling of the people and in turn communicate with a broad popular audience; the break between avant-garde music and the mass of potential listeners was a genuine problem, to which some of the avant garde themselves were sensitive and which many conservatives were content to see resolved by censorship. In both countries much was explained by personal envy and greed: the upheaval forced by the regime allowed ambitious or disappointed musicians, and their works, to take the place of those driven out.
In Germany the ban on ‘Jewish’ music affected Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Mahler, Schreker and Schoenberg, as well as a wide swathe of operetta composers; Handel's Judas Maccabaeus, about a Jewish hero, was renamed The General and given a new text. Music banned as ‘degenerate’ included that of Berg, Webern, Hindemith, Krenek and Stravinsky. Pedantic exceptions were made: Webern's Passacaglia op.1, written before he had become a ‘servant’ of Schoenberg, could be played; conversely, Jenůfa, approved as a ‘folkish’ opera, could be called in question because of ill feeling towards Czechoslovakia.
In the Soviet Union, the 1936 attack on Shostakovich and Zhdanov's ferocious 1948 onslaught on him and on Prokofiev, Khachaturian and Myaskovsky as ‘the formalist and anti-people school’ led each time to a short-lived, unofficial ban on performance of their works. The 1948 attack inaugurated a five-year period during which these four composers and others had to make more or less grovelling apologies for their ‘shortcomings’ and to try to meet the demand for ‘positive’ works in a simple musical language while sometimes, like Shostakovich, continuing to write (and withhold) more complex works. Even total adherence to ‘socialist realism’ did not save a weak opera, From the Whole Heart (1950), from being savaged in Pravda and in effect banned, or its composer, Zhukovsky, from having his Stalin Prize cancelled. (The trouble was sheer feebleness as well as an insufficiently heroic depiction of a collective farm.) After Stalin's death in 1953 came a period of liberalization with occasional tightening up; by 1972 it was possible to include in a concert programme one string quartet by a member of the Second Viennese School but not two.
In all kinds of music theatre, sung words move more slowly than spoken ones, and are harder to grasp. The book of an opera or even of a musical comedy is shorter than a play; it cannot readily impart complex information. Hence a piece of music theatre has at times been officially permitted when the play it was based on was forbidden. A well-known example is Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro. Lorenzo de Ponte's preface to his libretto validly stated that one reason for his having made an ‘extract’ from the (topical and banned) play was the requirements of the opera form. No opera of that date could have carried the freight of information in Figaro's long soliloquy in the play (the object of the censor's objection), in which he acts as spokesman for the discontented commoners who were to make the French Revolution. In Britain, the mid-Victorian censor banned the play La dame aux camélias by Dumas fils but allowed the opera drawn from it, La traviata, on the grounds that in a musical version ‘the story is … subsidiary to the music and singing’; Strauss's Salome was allowed in 1910 (with some fudging of the text), while the Oscar Wilde play it was based on remained banned until 1931.
‘Low’ music theatre genres have at times been treated more indulgently than ‘high’ by censors who have regarded them as a safety valve. Under the French Second Empire, Offenbach got away with much naughtiness and satire, while Madame Bovary was prosecuted for obscenity; Bernard Shaw complained in 1895 that the censor allowed ‘lewd farce’ (a king in operetta listening at the keyhole of his daughter's bridal chamber) but forbade a serious discussion of sexual morals like Ibsen's Ghosts.
In all kinds of music theatre, censorship got to work once the genre had broken away from total dependence on patronage. It was to begin with only one among many aspects of control over theatres and theatre people, which was vested in a royal official or board (in England, in the Lord Chamberlain). Such control generally carried with it the licensing of theatres and, sometimes, exclusive legal jurisdiction and disciplinary powers over theatre people. In England, exceptionally, the latter powers fell away in the late 17th century, but the censorship and licensing powers were reasserted in a 1737 act of parliament, after the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, had been repeatedly attacked in ballad operas and plays. Censorship in France survived the 1789 revolution; in Germany and Italy the old arrangements were kept on, little changed, until the granting of liberal constitutions in 1848. Such constitutions, restored or established about 1860–75 after a further period of reaction, did not abolish censorship, but a new climate of opinion greatly limited its scope.
Within the official establishment, censorship until about then (in Britain until 1969) was the job of subordinate officials, often minor literary men who might impose their own views about propriety of language. The normal course was for librettists and managers to avoid subjects likely to raise difficulties, and to meet without much fuss the censor's requests for detailed changes.
Comic opera, when it developed in the early 18th century, was the first genre to run into trouble, chiefly over lampoons on clergy; the censors' reaction accounts for much that now seems anodyne and stereotyped in late 18th-century comic librettos. During the French Revolution, however, the censors at times insisted (as over Méhul's Mélidore et Phrosine, 1794) that the libretto should praise liberty and humanity; under the subsequent Restoration, such terms were, in contrast, banned, especially in the Italian states.
The onset of Romanticism brought uncommon trouble, coinciding as it did with Europe-wide reaction after Waterloo and with deepening concern for respectable manners and morals. Religion was a main stumbling-block. Romantic art was often drawn to it in its picturesque and historical aspects. British censors, however, would not allow biblical characters on stage. Continental states – reversing 17th-century practice, which had approved dramas about saints and, in Hamburg, had enjoined biblical opera – were equally nervous about clerical characters (hence changes in Verdi's Attila and Stiffelio and Musorgsky's Boris Godunov), devils (Weber's Der Freischütz) and saints (Donizetti's Poliuto, banned in Naples).
Romantic art also took a deep interest in violent moments of history. Where even the British writer Mary Russell Mitford could not in the 1820s get her play about Charles I past the censor, it is not surprising that continental despotism should have objected to letting stage monarchs be conspired against, deposed or assassinated; the problem was at its worst in the decade of reaction after the 1848 revolutions (notably affecting Verdi's Rigoletto and Un ballo in maschera). A rare example of a work that was meant to be subversive was Rimsky-Korsakov's satire on tsarist autocracy, The Golden Cockerel (composed 1906–7), held up for two years by the censor.
Political censorship, however, mattered less than the steady drizzle of demands for avoidance of the personal, the indecorous and the specific. In Italy, neo-classical ideals of elevated diction came together with fear of scandal and with 19th-century prudery to mangle Rigoletto with its deliberate justification of the ‘low’ and the grotesque; in some cities down to 1860 the work was denied a hunchback, a buffoon, a curse, an assignation or a sack. Suicide, multiple murder and public execution, all staples of Romantic drama, had to be cut or soft-pedalled. German and Russian 19th-century music theatre, often ‘folkish’, nostalgic and socially conservative, suffered far less. Political expediency at times moved French and British censors; in 1907 The Mikado was temporarily banned in Britain during a visit by the Japanese crown prince. In this century, with the considerable exceptions of the Nazi and Soviet tyrannies, censorship has been a vanishing problem.
See also Entartete Musik; Marxism; Nazism; and Socialist realism.
GroveO (J. Rosselli [with further bibliography])
V. Hallays-Dalbot: Histoire de la censure théâtrale en France (Paris, 1862)
G.B. Shaw: Our Theatres in the Nineties (London, 1932), i, 48–55
W.H. Rubsamen: ‘Political and Ideological Censorship of Opera’, PAMS 1946, 30–42
A. Werth: Musical Uproar in Moscow (London, 1949)
J. Elagin: Taming the Arts (New York, 1951)
A. Olkhovsky: Music under the Soviets (London, 1955)
H.F. Redlich: Alban Berg (London, 1957), 241
J. Wulf: Musik im dritten Reich: eine Dokumentation (Gütersloh, 1963)
C. Di Stefano: La censura teatrale in Italia (1600–1962) (Bologna, 1964)
F. Nicolodi: Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista (Fiesole, 1964)
R. Findlater: Banned! A Review of Theatrical Censorship in Britain (London, 1967)
B. Schwarz: Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia (Bloomington, IN,1972, 2/1983)
H. and R. Moldenhauer: Anton von Webern (London, 1978), 537–8
M. Lavagetto: Un caso di censura: il ‘Rigoletto’ (Milan, 1979)
B. Brévan: Les changements de la vie musicale parisienne de 1774 à 1799 (Paris, 1980), 117
F.K. Prieberg: Musik im NS-Staat (Frankfurt, 1982)
J. Black: The Italian Romantic Libretto: a Study of Salvadore Cammarano (Edinburgh, 1984)
J. Rosselli: The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi (Cambridge, 1984)
R.M. Isherwood: Farce and Fantasy: Popular Entertainment in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New York, 1986)
R.J. Goldstein: Political Censorship of the Arts and the Press in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London, 1989)
R. Taruskin: ‘The Opera and the Dictator: the Peculiar Martyrdom of Dmitri Shostakovich’, New Republic (20 March 1989), 34–40
M. Meyer: The Politics of Music in the Third Reich (New York, 1991)