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Music during the Occupation: Musical Activity and Composition in Latvia, 1940–45

Scholars of World War II in the Baltic will embrace this 695-page survey of musical life in Latvia under Soviet (1940–1941) and Nazi (1941–1945) occupation. Far too little has been written. Historians tend to ignore music. Musicologists, to date, have only scratched the surface of this critical period. This book adds much-needed historical context to recently published biographies of twentieth-century Latvian composers and conductors (Graubi nš, Norvilis, Kokars, Mednis, etc.). Among primary sources surveyed are, for example, an exhaustive summary of government decrees, reports and reviews published in the mass media; rare archival documents such as meeting stenograms and minutes, often quoted at length; concert programs, photographs, letters and diaries; and the author’s personal interviews. The 64 pages of bibliographical notes in small type are a mandatory syllabus for future students, and the 45-page English summary gives ample information for researchers outside Latvia. Persons who have met Arnolds Kloti nš in person are stunned by his erudite, encyclopedic knowledge of everything musical, from folklore to symphonies, from composers’ unpublished correspondence to mass media broadcasts. For his work on this book, last year Kloti nš received Latvia’s National Music Prize, an honor usually bestowed on music performers and composers. Kloti nš is one of very few musicologists to be so recognized over the two decades since the Prize’s inception. Sections of this book are also authored by a team of well-established specialists: Ilma Grauzdi na, Ludvigs K arkli nš, Daiga Mazv ersīte, and Ilze Šarkovska-Liepi na. In writing about this pivotal period of Baltic history, it is tempting to tell a unified narrative of “good vs. evil” and present grand conclusions, for example, about heroes, villains, and victims. The authors, however, reject such simplistic interpretations and allow readers to find their own interpretive path through a forest of documents. What emerges from the book is a complex mixture of often contradictory and perhaps rationally irreconcilable cases of resistance, collaboration, and/or submission by composers, performers, critics and administrators. Submission (distinguished from active collaboration) can be traced to a variety of roots: during the first year of Soviet occupation, for example, some did not immediately comprehend the government’s intentions, while others understood too well the threats of brutal Bolshevik Journal of Baltic Studies Vol. 45, No. 1, March 2014, pp. 131–140