The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes Page A

baffled. Gently, he tried to help her along with a suggestion;
    ‘Well, what did Lenin say?’
    But she was too panicked to catch the clue, and for all his inclinations of the head and rolling upwards of the eyes, she failed to locate the answer.
    In his view, she had done well, and when he occasionally noticed her in the corridors or stairways of the Conservatoire, he tried to give her an encouraging smile. Though given how she had failed to pick up the heaviest of hints, perhaps she thought his smiles, like his weird eye-rolling and head-jerking, were facial tics the distinguished composer was unable to control. Yet every time he passed her, the question reverberated in his head: ‘Tell me, whom does art belong to?’
    Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it. Art no more belongs to the People and the Party than it once belonged to the aristocracy and the patron. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art’s sake: it exists for people’s sake. But which people, and who defines them? He always thought of his own art as anti-aristocratic. Did he write, as his detractors maintained, for a bourgeois cosmopolitan elite? No. Did he write, as his detractors wanted him to, for the Donbass miner weary from his shift and in need of a soothing pick-me-up? No. He wrote music for everyone and no one. He wrote music for those who best appreciated the music he wrote, regardless of social origin. He wrote music for the ears that could hear. And he knew, therefore, that all true definitions of art are circular, and all untrue definitions of art ascribe to it a specific function.
    A crane operator on a building site had once written a song and sent it to him. He had replied: ‘Yours is such a wonderful profession. You are building houses which are needed so badly. My advice to you would be to keep going with your useful work.’ He did so not because he believed a crane operator incapable of writing a song, but because this particular would-be composer showed as much talent as he himself would if put in the cabin of a crane and instructed to operate the levers. And he hoped that if, in the old days, an aristocrat had sent him a composition of similar worth, he would have had the fortitude to reply: ‘Your Excellency, yours is such a distinguished and exacting position, being responsible on the one hand for maintaining the dignity of the aristocracy, and on the other for looking after the welfare of those who toil on your estates. My advice to you would be to keep going with your useful work.’
    Stalin loved Beethoven. That’s what Stalin said and what many musicians repeated. Stalin loved Beethoven because he was a true revolutionary, and because he was exalted, like the mountains. Stalin loved everything that was exalted, and that was why he loved Beethoven. It made his ears vomit when people told him this.
    But there was a logical consequence to Stalin’s love of Beethoven. The German had lived, of course, in bourgeois, capitalist times; so his solidarity with the proletariat, and his desire to see them throw off the yoke of servitude, inevitably sprang from a pre-Revolutionary political consciousness. He had been a forerunner. But now that the longed-for Revolution had taken place, now that the most politically advanced society on earth had been built, now that Utopia, the Garden of Eden and the Promised Land had all been rolled into one, it was obvious what must logically come forth: the Red Beethoven.
    Wherever this ludicrous idea had come from – perhaps, like much else, it had sprung fully-formed from the Great Leader and Helmsman’s own forehead – it was a concept which, once articulated, must find its own embodiment. Where was the Red Beethoven? And there took place a nationwide search unparalleled since Herod’s quest for the infant Jesus. Well, if Russia was the homeland of