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Oh, for you youngsters or
those with fading memories ... I should add something. Musicians and orchestras
from Socialist Bloc countries toured the West regularly, and in warmer moments
of detente, Western musicians toured the Socialist Bloc countries. The
Easterners knew all about the dog-eat-dog corruption of capitalism, and the
Westerners knew all about the Artists' and Workers' Paradise awaiting them in
the socialist societies.
So which touring musicians had to be
accompanied by government security guards to make sure they came home again?
Which touring musicians couldn't bring their family members with them? Which
musicians slipped their leashes, and in which direction did they
jump?
This isn't my paean to capitalism. It
really is a brutal system, and its more brutal and competitive aspects need to
be promptly muzzled and declawed.
And whatever socialism truly means,
those Soviet Bloc societies were a crude facsimile of it. They all ended up as
just totalitarian police states, with some lip service paid to an economic
philosophy.
But throughout the Cold War, musicians
and artists were constantly risking their lives to choose between the two
competing albeit flawed systems. And always in the same direction. I only know
one major artist who went in the other direction, Bertholt Brecht, immediately
after he got a vicious anti-intellectual reaming from the USA's psychotic House
Un-American Activities Committee; he hopped a plane and established a great
state theater in East Germany. America's loss, and a nasty blot on our
historical reputation as a welcome shore for the world's refugee artists and
thinkers.
E
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