Hail to Freedom

Paris was set this week to welcome 2,300 musicians from the U.S. and Free Europe for a month-long festival in celebration of human freedom. The idea behind the festival, billed as "Masterpieces of the 20th Century": to show some of the good things produced in the past 50 years "by independent creators, exercising the priceless gifts of freedom and self-expression." The U.S. will be represented by the Boston Symphony and the New York City Ballet, by the music of such native American composers as Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, Walter Piston and Virgil Thomson and of such adopted Americans as Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith.

From the beginning, the Paris public has been enthusiastic. When tickets went on sale in March, 700 music lovers queued up the first day. Some well-known intellectuals held conspicuously aloof. Existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir ("We are not that anti-Communist") turned down bids to speak. But plenty of other certified intellectuals accepted, e.g., Britain's Stephen Spender, France's Andre Malraux, Italy's Ignazio Silone.

Had the festival directors thought of performing any Russian music? Director Nicholas Nabokov, Russian-born citizen of the U.S., answered with a story that epitomized the whole point of the festival. Nabokov wanted to present part of Dimitri Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Minsk, the story of a murderous hussy of Czarist days who winds up in Siberia. But the Kremlin had banned Lady Macbeth in 1937, and for that reason Nabokov ran into trouble with his project. Even though the opera was performed at the Metropolitan in 1935, there was no score available in the U.S. Nabokov cabled Artur Rodzinski, who had conducted the performances at the Met. Rodzinski replied that he had surrendered his copy long ago, after repeated requests from the Soviet embassy. Finally, Nabokov found a copy in Vienna. Now Paris will get to hear a concert excerpt played by the Berlin RIAS (American zone radio) orchestra under the baton of Hungarian Exile Ferenc Fricsay.

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