Socialist Realism in Music

A worthy successor to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff as a melodist, Aram Khachaturian (1903-1978) was born to Armenian parents in Tbilisi, and trained in Moscow in the 1930s. He set his first ballet, Gayaneh (1942), in an Armenian cotton cooperative, nominal inspiration for lushly-orchestrated orientalist themes that included the Sabre Dance for which he is perhaps best known: 

   

You can get a better sense for how his melodies have seeped into popular culture by listening to the adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia from his second ballet, Spartacus (1954): 

   

The obvious political appeal of the story of a slave uprising against the Romans, in combination with Khachaturian's enchanting musical themes, lent the work great success (and resulted in a Lenin Prize for Khachaturian in 1959). He is the only Soviet composer to emerge from the non-Russian national musical projects and achieve world fame. Frolova-Walker points to the irony in this outcome, since Khachaturian's work in no way challenged the Russian orientalist style. He was even treated as somehow representative of the entire Soviet Orient, capable of generalizing all these diverse traditions. Having read Taruskin's essay, how do you think we should gauge the historical (as opposed to creative) significance of Khachaturian's work?