It’s 50 years this month since the Soviet Union abruptly ended the Prague Spring. On August 21, 1968 Alexander Dubček’s newly introduced liberal regime with a free press, no travel restrictions and a partially decentralised economy was brought crashing down. By coincidence, just hours after Russian tanks rolled into the then Czechoslovak capital, the USSR State Symphony Orchestra took to the stage at the Proms. Evgeny Svetlanov conducted a programme that included a Czech masterwork, Dvořák’s Cello Concerto, played by Mstislav Rostropovich.
During a public discussion at this year’s Proms, I was able to speak about that memorable evening with the Czech-born journalist Sir John Tusa. Tusa, a junior BBC employee at the time, listened to the live broadcast. As was still the tradition, it began with God Save the Queen. Then the orchestra immediately crashed into the bombastic, brassy Soviet anthem. ‘‘It felt like a clear statement,’’ Tusa remembers. ‘‘ ‘We are strong, we are powerful, we are stronger than you.’ The sound of that anthem brought the fact brutally home.’’
Svetlanov enjoyed close links with the Soviet high command; his musicians were kept in line by KGB officers prowling the backstage corridors of the Royal Albert Hall. But the soloist was less controllable. At the end of the concerto, Rostropovich lifted Dvorak’s score into the air, in what was immediately interpreted as a gesture of solidarity with the Czechoslovak people.
The Moscow-born musicologist Marina Frolova-Walker thinks that night was the moment Rostropovich was radicalised against the USSR; soon afterwards he angered the authorities by offering shelter to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In 1974 he left the Soviet Union for good, his citizenship withdrawn four years later.
Although there were angry protests before the 1968 concert, when Svetlanov raised his baton the audience listened to the music in respectful silence. Many Prommers would have watched the invasion earlier in the day. Czechoslovak state television broadcast live coverage; the Soviets failed to cut the link to Vienna, from where the images were broadcast around the world. As the Guardian’s television critic Stanley Reynolds wrote the next day: ‘‘Thus what had been television’s first revolution ended with what was television’s first invasion.”
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The musician Andrzej Panufnik was deemed a traitor by the Polish authorities when he fled Warsaw for London in 1954. His daughter Roxanna is now one of our most celebrated composers. As she told the Catholic Herald in 2010, though baptised a Catholic she only started exploring her faith seriously in her twenties.
She has since written extensively for the Church, including a Mass setting for Westminster Cathedral and a Missa brevis for the Benedictine Monks at Douai Abbey.
This year Roxanna Panufnik gets the opportunity to reach classical music’s largest audience, with a commission for the Last Night of the Proms. Songs of Darkness, Dreams of Light sets texts influenced by or taken directly from the Ashkenazi Jewish, Maronite Catholic and Sufi Muslim traditions. ‘‘There is a bit of an interfaith mission going on here,’’ she tells me. ‘‘We hear so much about our differences – yet the chant of the Abrahamic faiths all evolved out of the same area in the Middle East. It’s like a single tree that sprouted different-shaped branches and clusters of leaves.”.
Could this be a starting point for greater dialogue? ‘‘Just think of all the other cultural channels where we can combine and complement each other’s faiths,’’ says an optimistic Panufnik.
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Since the death of the master travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor in 2011 there has been an outpouring of accounts of his life and work. The latest is by the Irish biographer Michael O’Sullivan, published by Budapest’s Central European University Press.
O’Sullivan has worked as a foreign correspondent, historian and political journalist. When I first met him in Dublin he was covering the Irish Parliament as the bow-tie wearing host of Dáil Report on RTÉ Television.
His fascinating new book explores, in rich colour, the aristocratic families that the teenage Fermor stayed with as he walked through Hungary and Transylvania. What he called his ‘‘great trudge’’ took him from the Hook of Holland to today’s Istanbul. He reached Budapest in March 1934. Though he didn’t know it, he was just in time to meet the princes, counts and barons of the old order before war and communism destroyed their existence.
Remarkably, O’Sullivan managed to interview some of those whom Fermor met, including Anna Sándor de Kenós, who died last month at 97. She was 89 when she made the arduous pilgrimage to the Csíksomlyó Marian shrine in central Transylvania. All the more remarkable given that she was not Catholic but Calvinist. As she explained, ‘‘Anything that was banned under communism must be good for the soul.’’
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