A doctrine with sources in 19th-century aesthetics but now chiefly associated with Marxism or communism. It has had, to say the least, a somewhat chequered ideological career. Its applications have ranged from the largely descriptive to the downright prescriptive and dogmatic, their common factors being a realist (mimetic) theory of representation and a belief that art can promote human emancipation by offering a truthful yet affirmative vision. Argument about these terms has been widespread since the 1930s, but was especially urgent in the Soviet Union and its satellite countries, where socialist realism was for long periods official policy.
The great paradox of that policy, as viewed by most Western Marxist commentators, was that it espoused revolutionary aims in the socio-political sphere while adopting a conservative canon of aesthetic values, even if there was the authority of Lukács for 19th-century realism as the means of portraying 20th-century injustice. In musical terms, that conservatism resulted in a favouring of such forms as the programme symphony, the dramatic cantata and other such genres (opera, ballet, epic film score) that could range from private suffering to reaffirmed social values – values that distinguished socialist realism from other (as Lukács would have it, ‘bourgeois-decadent’) realisms that emphasized human misery without any redeeming sense of collective destiny and purpose. Hence a connection with the Promethean works of Beethoven's middle period.
But Beethoven could be interpreted differently. For Adorno, the collapse of political revolution had brought about the decisive change in Beethoven's music to the late style, and socialist realism failed to recognize how hope had been revoked more than a century before. To some extent, these opposing views mirrored the postwar division of Europe, between a west defining itself against collectivism and an east anxious to present itself as the chief adversary of Nazism and heir to those values the Nazis had sought to destroy. However, the argument goes deeper. What most distinguishes socialist realism is its conception of the artist's prime responsibility as being to fellow participants in the effort to construct a genuine democratic culture.
Commentators have not been slow to remark on the quantity of bad music produced to the standard prescription, nor are we lacking for views of Shostakovich's most apparently committed socialist-realist works as shot through wth bitter irony. Wider problems have to do with what ‘realism’ means in the case of music and with defining how, in Marxist terms, economic base is related to cultural superstructure. If material forces are bound to prevail, it would be hard for art to be at once realist, in the sense of reflecting things as they are, and socialist, in the sense of providing an image of things as they might be.
One way out of this dilemma is through Engels's notion of ‘relative autonomy’, by which factors other than economic (political, philosophical, cultural etc.) may at times assume a decisive role in shaping change. At the opposite extreme lies Zhdanov's hard-line realism, which assumes an achieved socialist order and requires the artist to celebrate. This doctrine was enforced during the period of political and cultural retrenchment in the Soviet Union, which started in the late 1920s and ended the relative freedom enjoyed by artists as a by-product of Lenin's mixed-market New Economic Policy. Where hitherto there had been a rivalry between two groups of composers – the modernists and those advocating mass appeal – now the latter came to control all aspects of Soviet musical life. And where socialist realism, as outlined by Marx and Engels, had allowed scope for complex ‘mediations’ between base and superstructure, now it was the bluntest of instruments to impose conformism.
But abuse does not discredit the idea. Fine music has come from the spirit, if not the bureaucratic letter, of socialist realism, by composers within the Soviet Union (Shostakovich, notwithstanding revisionist commentaries, and Myaskovsky) and beyond (Eisler, Schulhoff, Weill, Bush, Stevens, Stevenson, Henze). There is no reason to suppose that gifted composers have not been genuinely moved by social inequity and not genuinely responded. Socialist realism, as an effort to liberate such response, is not a codified and now obsolete musical style but rather an expression of humane values that have been with us at least since the French Revolution.
G. Abraham: Eight Soviet Composers (London, 1943)
G. Lukács: Essays über Realismus (Berlin, 1948, 2/1955 as Probleme des Realismus; Eng. trans., 1980, ed. R. Livingstone)
A. Werth: Musical Uproar in Moscow (London, 1949/R)
G. Lukács: Wider den missverstandenen Realismus (Hamburg, 1958, Eng. trans., 1963, as The Meaning of Contemporary Realism)
E. Fischer: Von der Notwendigkeit der Kunst (Dresden, 1959, 2/1961; Eng. trans., 1963/R)
T.W. Adorno: Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie (Frankfurt, 1962, 2/1968; Eng. trans., 1976)
T.W. Adorno: ‘Spätstil Beethovens’, Moments musicaux: neu gedruckte Aufsätze 1928 bis 1962 (Frankfurt, 1964), 13–17
H.W. Henze: Musik und Politik: Schriften und Gespräche 1955–1975, ed. J. Brockmeier (Munich, 1976; Eng. trans., 1982)
G. Bisztray: Marxist Models of Literary Realism (New York, 1978)
C. Dahlhaus: Musikalischer Realismus: zur Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1982; Eng. trans., 1985, as Realism in Nineteenth-Century Music)
M.H. Brown, ed.: Russian and Soviet Music: Essays for Boris Schwarz (Ann Arbor, 1984)
M. Scriven and D. Tate, eds.: European Socialist Realism (London, 1988)
H. Gunther, ed.: The Culture of the Stalin Period (London, 1990)
L.R. Furst, ed.: Realism (London, 1992)
G. Levine, ed.: Aesthetics and Ideology (New Brunswick, NJ, 1994)
R. Taruskin: ‘Public Lies and Unspeakable Truth: Interpreting Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony’, Shostakovich Studies, ed. D. Fanning (Cambridge, 1995), 17–56
For further bibliography see Marxism.
CHRISTOPHER NORRIS