Music and dictatorship

Today's history debate takes the form of a conversation with Esteban Buch, Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where he heads the Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage.

The occasion for this dialogue is provided by the publication of his latest book, Trauermarsch. L'Orchestre de Paris dans l'Argentine de la dictature. The book is published by Éditions du Seuil in the collection La librairie du vingtième siècle , edited by Maurice Olender. The starting point is the four concerts given in July 1980 by the Orchestre de Paris, conducted by Daniel Barenboim, in military-ruled Argentina. Since the coup d'état of March 24, 1976, they had installed a totalitarian, nationalist and " Catholic " regime, characterized (and stigmatized in Europe as early as 1977) for the brutality of its repression : arbitrary arrests, sequestration, torture, rape, kidnapping of babies, assassinations and death flights. For Esteban Buch, it's all about the role of music in a dictatorship. Is it necessarily instrumentalized by power and the oligarchy that supports it ? Or is it like an island where, for a time, the constraints and sufferings of the present  are forgotten? Or can it be a form of resistance to tyranny ?

But the question goes even deeper. In its last concert, the Orchestre de Paris played Mahler's Fifth Symphony, opened by the mournful march that gives the book its title, Trauermarsch. Did this music resonate with the political situation at the time ? How did the enthusiastic audience at the Teatro Colón receive the work ? Did some listeners associate it with their death-saturated present ? Esteban Buch sets out to answer these questions by reconstructing both the polemical context of the tour, marked by differences of opinion among the musicians and the fury of certain Argentine authorities at the refusal of some of them to take part in any official reception, and the course of the concert on July 16, two days after the diplomatic crisis triggered by this appeal. It is not easy to know how the audience on July 16, 1980 heard Mahler's symphony, its mournful march and the lament of the adagio. Documents are lacking, the memory of a time long past is uncertain and, in any case, it is difficult for all the witnesses interviewed to put into words the memories of their emotions.

With this new book, Esteban Buch continues his research and reflections on the relationship between music and politics. The investigation has favored several approaches. First, in 1999, with the book Beethoven's Ninth. A Political History, he focused on the multiple, contradictory and conflicting appropriations of the same score. Then, in a book published in 2011 by Editions de l'Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, L'Affaire Bomarzo. Opéra, perversion et dictature, he analyzed a spectacular case of censorship, that of an opera, Ginastera's Bomarzo , banned in Argentina by General Onganía's dictatorial regime in 1967. With the book now published, Esteban Buch raises the fundamental question of the political significance of music ? Does it lie in the potential of the score ? Is it produced by listening to audiences ? Or is it defined by the associations that each listener constructs by crossing his or her musical emotions with the experiences of his or her own existence ?

Does Mahler's Fifth Symphony contain " a political will unconscious of itself ", which anticipates future violence and gives voice to that of Mahler's present ? This is what Adorno thought, and what Bruno Walter rejects, for whom " is music and nothing else ". Did Argentinian listeners in July 1980 associate it with a form of recollection or protest ? There's no indication of this in the testimonies gathered. The political effect of the tour is certain, but without Malher's score having been invested with any political or ethical significance.

Esteban Buch applies the same questioning to other types of music. Was Argentine national rock the site of a secret protest, an allegorical denunciation of the military ? And when he composed his 1977 work Le Tribun. Dix marches pour rater la victoire, was Mauricio Kagel, himself an Argentinean and denouncer of human rights crimes, thinking of the Argentinean dictatorship ? The answers oscillate between the clues that link the music to the tragic political reality and, on the other hand, the associations that arise in the memory of listeners or the author, Esteban Buch, between this or that musical composition and the suffering inflicted by the crimes of Argentine tyrants.