(Russian music and Russian lies)
Russian Troika [i]
One of the few Christmas pop
songs which actually bears listening to is Greg Lake’s I
believe in Father Christmas.
The lyrics, suggest that Lake (or at least Peter Sinfield who actually
wrote them) had a rather jaundiced view of the festive season – especially in its
religious aspects – and of the deceptions that underlie it. And the song and,
especially, the
video lament the fact that Christmas is typically a time of war, rather
than peace, on earth. But the music is jolly enough and is, of course, partially
based on Sergei Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kijé Suite.
Despite what is often supposed, Prokofiev's
piece has no connection with Christmas, though it does have a Troika
movement named after the traditional Russian three-horse sled. This section
does have a Christmassy vibe and, in the early 1970s, was used by BBC
television as the theme music for its Christmas output announcements. I suspect
this reinforced the
popular association between Prokofiev's music and Christmas, and probably played
a role in Lake’s choice of this theme for his song.
There are, however, connections
between what Sergei Prokofiev's Kijé Suite is about and the war that
will play out on our television screens this Christmas:
The Suite was composed
in 1933 for a film of Kijé which was one of the earliest Soviet movies with
sound. The film in turn was based on a novella by Yury Tynyanov
(who also wrote the screenplay for the film). That novella was based on a short
piece entitled Stories of the time of Paul I by the Ukrainian born Vladimir Dal (or sometimes “Dahl”)
and Dal cited anecdotes told by his father as the original source.
The story grew in the telling
but the basic idea throughout the various versions is that a clerical (or
mishearing) error results in the promotion of a non-existent soldier to the
rank of lieutenant. Because nobody dares admit the mistake to Tzar Paul I, a
series of ever more elaborate deceptions unfold. These culminate in the holding
of a grand funeral for Kijé when, having been summoned to meet Paul in person,
he dies suddenly – and fortuitously.
The parallels with current
events in modern day Russian hardly need to be spelt out. There are daily news
stories about Vladimir Putin
being kept in the dark as to the true state of Russia’s armed forces and
their equipment, and the true progress of his war against Ukraine. Deaths-of-convenience
– albethey, sadly, of real people – are also a regular occurrence.
We can only hope that on the
coming Christmas morning, or one day soon thereafter, the Russian people will
awake “with a
yawn at the first light of dawn” and see their leader for what he really
is.
