Silvestre Revueltas: Sounds of a Political Passion
by Roberto Kolb-Neuhaus
Published 2023
Hardcover, 736 pages
ISBN 978-0199751488
Oxford University Press
In the Los Angeles neighborhood of Highland Park, where I was born and raised, every Christmas parade in my childhood opened with a pounding of drums that announced the representatives of MEChA (an organization whose acronym represents an orotund Spanish name meaning “Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán”), who then flounced about the asphalt in pseudo-Aztec caparison at the head of the procession. More than the incongruity of pre-Columbian pagan imagery within the context of Christian celebration, however commercialized, I was more mystified by the dancers themselves, who in spite of their apparent nostalgia for a phantasmally idyllic heimat unblemished by the shadow of Hernán Cortés, often bore features fairer than those endowed to me by my Chilean immigrant parents and their Italo-Basque ancestors. It was an early personal experience with the schizoid tension between the authentic and the ersatz at the heart of modern Mexico and its culture; an outcome described by Roberto Kolb-Neuhaus in his Silvestre Revueltas: Sounds of a Political Passion as the “whitening aestheticization of peasant culture”, whose reverberations continue to be felt in the gasconading chauvinism of the self-styled nación azteca that, paradoxically, is also riddled from within by a persistent inferiority complex borne from bunk-bed proximity to its occasionally violent, often bullying, and always over-achieving big brother to the north.
A residue of the latter quality is palpable in the separation letter that Revueltas drafted, but never sent to his American first wife in 1927:
The things on which we apparently agree are of the same nature outwardly, at the bottom, profoundly they differ completely. Your ideology is based on the social, ethical conceptions of the bourgeoisie that is fighting its lost battle the world over. My idea of the social, ethical problem has another sense and different sources: they come from the people, the workers, the oppressed, and the exploited, makers of the future […]
With characteristic alacrity, Revueltas deliberated another two years before he returned to Mexico to advocate for the people. During the interim he toured the American Midwest and South, playing in various silent film orchestras. By his side was the woman he left his wife for, Aurora González, the widow of Gen. Francisco Murguía, the anti-Villista “Hero of León”—a politically discordant, if inadvertently telling choice of lover.
Perhaps to a greater degree than most of his artistic compatriots, Revueltas embodied the contradictory stresses of the new Mexico baptized in the blood of its ideologically diffuse ten-year revolution, wherein meaning was largely imposed upon it after the fact, and whose chief accomplishment was the replacement of one form of indolent authoritarianism for another. While the dust settled around them, Mexican artists and intellectuals of the 1920s were faced with a colossal task: making sense of the century of war, invasion, occupation, despotism, and revolution that their nation had been subjected to; as well as create a unifying ethos/mythos from these around which their fellow countrymen could transcend the humiliations inflicted upon them, and become active participants on the global stage, rather than passive objects in the destinies of other peoples.
Together with his friend and fellow composer Carlos Chávez, Revueltas obligingly grappled not only with those demands, but also those of the macédoine of eristic leftism that ruled artistic thought during the interwar period. For a moment early in their careers, these two exact contemporaries were in political accord, even if the means to achieve their aims—which diverged ever wider with each passing year—were not. Chávez briefly embraced what would later be known as “socialist realism”, best exemplified in his “proletarian symphony” Llamadas (“calls”) from 1934: a Latin American counterpart to the sort of score that for the likes of Lev Knipper and Dmitri Kabalevsky would gain approval from governmental tastemakers in the Soviet Union. Perplexingly, the same work was pilloried as crypto-fascist in the first issue of Frente a frente (“face-to-face”), the house magazine of LEAR (League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists). Revueltas, a member and later president of that organization, was unclear about his own estimation of Chávez’s Llamadas. What was unequivocal and unavoidable, however, was the fissure this affair signaled, which eventually culminated in the rupture between these two giants; an outcome instigated by a cultural climate where artists not only had to express their political convictions, but were also under intense peer (and sometimes official) pressure to perform these to the satisfaction of onlookers. Whether Revueltas’s career would have reached the heights commensurate with his genius had this rift with a valuable and increasingly well-connected ally been averted is a matter of speculation, but it is symbolic of the futile intra-factional squabbling of his times, which was destined to become the dust upon the dust on the decaying corpses of history.
In life, though, this politicking was believed to matter urgently. Revueltas’s siblings—particularly Rosaura and the writer José—were all lifelong evangelists for leftist causes. The composer’s political awakening in the 1920s and later commitment, therefore, were foreordained. As Kolb-Neuhaus explains, Revueltas’s battle on behalf of the “makers of the future” was central to his perception of himself. Most commentators have ignored this. How curious, then, that Revueltas sought to express political convictions through musical forms whose inherent ambiguity could potentially defy his intent, to say nothing of this book’s pursuit to recontextualize him as homo politicus. That his ideological brain and artistic heart were often not in alignment only further confuses the matter.
Rejecting the acquiescent socialist realism sought by Chávez in his Llamadas, Reveultas’s music instead erupted in a bold and confrontational modernism influenced by, among others, Igor Stravinsky, Arthur Honegger, Alexander Mosolov, and Dmitri Shostakovich. (Not coincidentally, Revueltas conducted the Mexican premieres of Mosolov’s The Iron Foundry and Shostakovich’s Third Symphony.) That did not stop the composer from inveighing sarcastically against the critics of his friend José Pomar, a composer of cheerless mass songs:
[Y]ou, who are prostrated before the altars of artistic meditation, who believe that the Palacio de Bellas Artes is a tabernacle: [Pomar’s] work, I insist, has outstanding political, revolutionary, and educational transcendence. Ah, but you are too busy listening to the great works of the world’s music, which lull even the musicians to sleep!
Yet the highly idiosyncratic setting of an ideologically sound anti-fascist text in Revueltas’s own mass song, Porras (a Mexican colloquialism meaning “supportive cheers”) for chorus and small instrumental ensemble from 1936, would have been difficult for “the people, the workers” of his time to grasp, let alone perform. Does this contradiction occlude its creator’s tacit wish to be inducted among those somnolent greats of the canon? (Suggestive enough is the fact that Revueltas largely ignored the mass song genre, a topic that Kolb-Neuhaus examines inconclusively.)
Elsewhere, as in Troka, a piece for small orchestra composed for a children’s agitprop spectacle based on a series of short stories about an anti-imperialist robot, Kolb-Neuhaus observes:
Except for a brief hint of a popular children’s song and a straightforward tonal march that is indeed quite suitable for a children’s pantomime, hardly a trace of easily digestible didacticism […] is to be found here. The expected tonal narrative, including familiar and repeated, singable children’s songs is here avoided in favor of post-tonal syntax, associated with a complex montage of constantly changing episodes characterized by the juxtaposition of unexpected strident sonorities that nobody would associate with music for children.
A couple of pages later the book sighs, “musicalizations of machine soundscapes, evidently, are not by themselves able to confer an unambiguous associated semantic meaning”. Not for nothing did Soviet authorities in the late Stalinist years strongly encourage the composition of vocal music, all the better to vet political content.
Artistic instincts ultimately subverted political objectives, regardless of the latter’s importance to Revueltas. The strain he experienced from these frequently irreconcilable principles—reflected in a fuliginous musical output that resists claims of exclusive ownership by ideologues, aesthetic and political—was surely terrible.
Kolb-Neuhaus, inadvertently, depicts Revueltas as fettered by the incessant doctrinal argufying of his times; an unhappy impression reinforced by the author’s insistence that his protagonist can only be truly understood within the parameters of his socio-historical context. Even if one accepts this proposition, the intrinsic obliquity of the orchestral and instrumental music that Revueltas focused on can be plausibly heard as either supportive or spoofing the political beliefs that the author esteems. Further undermining this thesis are plausible non-political interpretations of Revueltas’s music, including some obvious ones that the author confoundingly ignores.
Revueltas’s String Quartet No. 2 from 1931, subtitled “Magueyes” (a Spanish term of Caribbean origin for agaves), according to Kolb-Neuhaus, is a “caricature of both export-exoticism and nationalist auto-exoticism” that questions “how to represent the voice of the people from within the framework of art music”. He bases his argument on the quartet’s use of the folk song “Los magueyes”, about a drunkard who hates agaves because of the traditional alcoholic drink made from its fermented sap known as pulque. “Our composer pokes fun, not so much at the mariachi, poor and unadorned,” Kolb-Neuhaus states, “but at his appropriation through theme or leitmotif composing, such as that practiced by pre-Revolutionary colonial-minded nationalism”. Our author, presumably, has never heard “Los magueyes” in situ. Had he done so, he would have recognized it as a standard that usually materializes amid the din of an inebriated night out entre compadres, at least one of whom will be ailing from a recent heartbreak. (Which is how I last heard the song during a fantastically bibulous night with friends in 2004.) The song’s protagonist loathes agaves not because he is an aspiring teetotaler, but because his anguish for the woman he loved and lost, safely suppressed under normal circumstances, surges anew whenever pulque crosses his lips. Rather than the “political and commercial misuse by patriotic Mexicanists” of national symbols and tropes such as agaves, Revueltas appears to be satirizing amatory regret, possibly his own. Inexplicably unmentioned by Kolb-Neuhaus is to whom the composer, by then newly remarried, dedicated the quartet to: his one-time inamorata, Aurora González.
One could mistakenly infer from Kolb-Neuhaus’ monomaniacal thesis that Revueltas was a political activist who also happened to compose music. At the very least, the book urges its reader to determine his music’s value based on its hypothetical political meaning. Discussion of its worth as music is only ever approached as a secondary matter. A typical example occurs when Kolb-Neuhaus admonishes Chávez, whose enmity towards his erstwhile friend was abiding, for remarks that deplored the perceived repetitiveness of Revueltas’s music:
What is striking in [Chávez’s] critique is the complete absence of a reference to a political intent in Revueltas’s music, which would have explained the repeated “explosive contrasts” and “piangendo melodies” that Chávez denounces. It makes one wonder about the nature of their ideological exchange, considering that they shared [a] leftist vision at the outset of their collaboration. [Emphasis mine.]
Chávez’s concern with music as fundamentally an aural experience is unsurprisingly evaded. What is troubling is the author’s disinterest in the possibility that Chávez criticized Revueltas precisely because and in spite of familiarity with his political agenda. Even if Chávez was wrong about Revueltas—one of the most compellingly original composers of the twentieth century—his larger unstated question is still valid: why should “good” intentions excuse mediocre art?
If the book’s central thesis is, at best, debatable, its subordinate point that Revueltas’s legacy is distorted is certainly true. With apostolic zeal Kolb-Neuhaus dismantles the most enduring of these posthumous encrustations: the “symphonic suite” from the film score to La noche de los mayas “edited” by the Mexican conductor José Yves Limantour. In reality the work is a potpourri by Limantour, based on cues by Revueltas. Unlike the score for Redes, Revueltas had no especial interest in composing the score for La noche de los mayas, let alone in developing it into an autonomous musical creation. Twenty years later, Limantour glommed the score as fodder for his own career, hawking it to European audiences as a “Mayadämmerung”.
Music lovers around in the 1990s, during the eyeblink moment that Revueltas appeared on the cusp of a mainstream breakthrough, may fondly recall the albums from BMG Catalyst and Sony Classical where La noche de los mayas was a central selling point; the former daubed down to the very disc in the exotifying imagery that Limantour evoked and which Kolb-Neuhaus condemns. Similar to what Rimsky-Korsakov did for Mussorgsky and Ferdinand Löwe for Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, Limantour’s risible Les Baxterization helped get genuine Revueltas masterpieces like Planos, Alcancías, and Ventanas their feet through a door that would have otherwise remained shut to them. Rather than to be flung down the Scalae Gemoniae of today’s politico-aesthetic conceits, the “symphonic suite” of La noche de los mayas—contrivance of anachronistic hokum whose time has passed though it is—deserves guarded appreciation. Its explicit purpose to elevate Limantour’s reputation failed, but it clinched for Revueltas (or his name, at least) a toehold in the orchestral repertoire.
Years ago, I attended a performance by the Los Angeles Philharmonic of Sensemayá. As its ecstatic final chords resounded within Disney Hall, an elderly subscriber seated next to me exhaled deeply and let out a hushed “wow”. Considering Revueltas’s frustratingly marginal recognition, this listener was in all probability unaware of the political implications of this score. (Even fewer in the audience would have caught the resonances around Nicolás Guillén, who was mentioned fleetingly in the scanty program notes.) In the end, the music spoke for itself.
The breaking of the ideological chains that once constrained Revueltas’s creativity should be celebrated, not mourned, much as its attendant exegetical liberty would conceivably vex their composer (and Kolb-Neuhaus). In the twenty-first century, when “globalization” for Hispanophones has merely resulted in the encroachment unto extinctive threat of their cultural space by what José Enrique Rodó referred to as nordomanía (or “the doomed destiny of an American planet” that Vicente Verdú cautioned against), Revueltas’s music may be more important than ever.
Shortly before his spectacular death on November 25, 1970, Mishima Yukio offered some advice to his close friend, the composer Mayuzumi Toshirō, who at the time was becoming increasingly known in Japan as a political personality. “I listen to you talk on TV and your thinking resembles mine”, the novelist told him, “but be careful never to allow the right-wing to take advantage of you.” It occurred to me while reading Silvestre Revueltas: Sounds of a Political Passion that its subject could have benefitted from similar counsel against the squandering of his genius on causes that contributed to the terminal decline of his health. In a polarized environment that enabled his immoderate and self-destructive political idealism, fate consigned Revueltas to become another tragic figure of classical music and Latin American culture; a reckless martyr to crusades that took little notice of his premature death and for whom his sacrifice was of no consequence.
Néstor Castiglione
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