At a 2007 performance of Alan Bush's cantata The Winter Journey, a long-standing friend of the composer, John Amis, spoke beforehand about Bush and his music, anticipating that the audience might find this a difficult work to understand. He addressed the central issue which has perplexed critics, admirers, and opponents since the 1930s: Bush's lifelong commitment to the Communist Party and to its views on music. Amis told the audience how he had once spoken to Bush's wife, Nancy, about this, asking her how Bush was able to reconcile himself with Stalinism. ‘Oh, Alan is such a nice chap’, she had replied, ‘he couldn't even hurt a wasp if it was bothering him.’ The audience laughed politely at this, and seemed reassured. What they made of the subsequent performance will forever remain unknown. The Winter Journey is ‘a materialist retelling of the Christmas story’ (118), stripped of its religious elements, set partly in the bombed-out ruins of a modern city and partly in a desert landscape more reminiscent of the Middle East. It uses the story of the birth of a new child as a vehicle for a socialist message calling for collective action to overcome social inequalities and to work for a more hopeful world in the future.

First performed in Alnwick Parish Church in December 1946, and broadcast live on the BBC, The Winter Journey stands chronologically and thematically at the centre of Joanna Bullivant's book. It was written at a moment in history when Bush hoped that after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Britain and the United States might still work with the Soviet Union to build international peace. In Britain itself, under a newly elected Labour government, the formation of bodies such as the Arts Council offered the hope of more state intervention to support culture and the arts, and to bring these to the working class. The libretto of The Winter Journey referred back to the shared British civilian and military experience of the war, and musically Bush sought with a more accessible language and the use of a didactic choral form to use his retelling of the Nativity story to urge listeners towards collective action rather than ‘sentimental resignation’ (120). Within only two years, Bush was taking part in the two International Congresses of Composers and Musicologists (held in Prague), which followed the infamous Zhdanov decree on music in the Soviet Union, events which heralded the onset of the Cold War ossification of radically divergent views about musical composition, and about the roles of composers and their music in society. Bush, notoriously, was one of very few composers in the West publicly to support the Zhdanovist view. In succeeding decades, as more and more Communist supporters in the West deserted the cause after international crises in 1956 and 1968, Bush maintained his steadfast support. He never abandoned this position.

As a result, reception of Bush has been typically cast in a series of binary oppositions: his earlier music has been seen as ‘modernistic’, ‘Central European’, ‘chromatic’, and ‘intellectual’, contrasting with a ‘more simple and direct’ national style after 1948 (141). Bush's composition after 1948 has been seen by some critics as formulaic, even slavish, and this shift has been bitterly criticized as ‘a rejection of artistic integrity, the very loss of musical self’ (141). Bullivant sets out in this book to offer ‘a comprehensive reassessment’ of the composer and his music, casting him as a quintessentially modern figure, and using the central idea of his ‘developing Communist selfhood’ (142–3) to explore the relationship between his political views and his musical composition. She stresses the unique personal freedom which Bush enjoyed, both as a composer with a comfortable private income in Britain and, after 1947, as a welcomed guest in Communist Eastern Europe, and she highlights the opportunities this gave him to develop his ideas about music in very different contexts, and to get his works performed and broadcast. With a close reading of Bush's extensive published and unpublished writing, and with detailed musicological analysis of his works, she stresses continuities and consistencies in his theoretical and practical work over several decades.

Inevitably, Bush's reaction to the Zhdanov decree still stands at the centre of this narrative, but Bullivant convincingly argues that in critical ways, Bush had anticipated some of its central demands, notably its call for composers to work in ‘national forms’, and to use folk music as the source of inspiration for music which would avoid ‘formalist’ sterility. She analyses how Bush used a synthesis of the ideas of Hindemith and the poet Christopher Caudwell to develop a specifically ‘British Marxist music theory’ which ‘had deep roots in his period of purported “modernism”’ (161). Following Caudwell, Bush envisaged art as an activity which ‘drew on man's emotional life and presented it back in an idealised form that could inspire change’. He saw himself as ‘the historical subject who in his daily activity helps to bring about socialism’ (159). Having developed alongside this a sense of folk music as ‘the basis of all vigorous and stimulating art’ (147), Bush was – as in The Winter Journey – seeking to locate his own composition within a specifically national framework, and to use it as a spur to political action before the publication of the Zhdanov decree.

Bush's sense of the composer as historical agent with a particular responsibility came to fruition after 1948 not in the Home Counties or the broadcasts of the BBC, but in the German Democratic Republic. Here four of his operas were performed between 1953 and 1973, and Bush was held up to the music profession and the public as a shining example of a ‘progressive’ and ‘humanist’ composer who was swimming with the tide of history. At the formation in 1951 of the new state's Association of Composers – an organization which critics would see as designed to enforce rigid conformity – a telegram of congratulation from Bush was read out, and in succeeding years his attendance at state-sponsored festivals was publicized. Again we should see continuities here, rather than a radical break with Bush's past. Bush had studied in Berlin in the late years of the Weimar Republic, and had got to know then the musicians who later dominated the musical culture of the GDR, notably Hanns Eisler and Ernst Hermann Meyer. Between 1933 and 1948 Bush had, with characteristic generosity, offered friendship and support to these men in exile. He had worked closely with Meyer and other Communist émigrés such as Georg Knepler in London during the war and Bush's developing Marxist understanding of music was taken by them to the GDR after they returned to Germany in 1948. Clearly Bush found himself at home in the earnest and dedicated culture of the GDR, one in which musicians were highly esteemed and seen as important agents in the building of socialism. It must have been a refreshing change for him to work in this context, and he must have contrasted this with his experience of working in Communist circles in Britain, where music was all too often perceived as merely ‘a pleasant change from politics’.Footnote ¹ His opera Wat Tyler (1948–51), based on a narrative of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, was performed in the GDR before it was broadcast in Britain by the BBC in 1956, and although it has been roundly criticized as a one-dimensional concession to socialist realism, Bullivant argues that it should be situated ‘within Bush's immediate post-war project and comparable projects in English culture of the period’ (185). She provides a fascinating comparison of Wat Tyler with Britten's Peter Grimes, arguing that both ‘opened up trenchant issues in post-war British culture’ (180). She also notes Bush's engagement with the Communist Party Historians’ Group in England, and with their sustained efforts at this time to provide ‘national-popular’ narratives of English history identifying ‘true Englishness exclusively with the working classes, and subtly presenting Marxism as a home grown tradition’ (187). While many of these historians, notably Edward Thompson, subsequently renounced their loyalty to Stalinism and the Soviet Union, Bush did not. Wat Tyler was performed in Leipzig shortly after the failed demonstrations of June 1953 – blamed by Bush's musical colleagues in the GDR on the influence of Western popular music – and broadcast in Britain shortly after the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956.

Bush appears to have been unaware of, or indifferent to, the censorial, conformist, and militantly aggressive side of the GDR's culture which was so unappealing to many contemporaries, and to later observers. Indeed it is difficult for anyone familiar with the tone and content of the GDR's writing about music in the 1950s to reconcile this with the gentle image of Alan Bush with which this review commenced. If we ask why Bush was willing to add his support to this musical culture, we need also to bear in mind the embattled atmosphere of the ‘young republic’ in the 1950s, when it perceived itself to be imminently threatened with nuclear war by a hostile capitalist world and revanchist elements in an unreformed Federal Germany. Bullivant does not present a whitewash, or draw a veil over this critical issue. She is forthright in her characterization of this side of Bush. He was, she asserts, ‘fundamentally misguided about the true nature of the attacks on composers’ implied by the Zhdanov decree (153); uncritical in his perceptions of musical culture in Eastern Europe, and naïve in his call (in 1945) for ‘mass popular support for socialism led by the Soviet Union’ (137). Her attention to another aspect of Communist dogma, and Bush's adherence to this, opens up discussion of a larger issue: the dissociation between Communism and youth culture in the 1950s and 1960s. Bush, while characteristically milder in his pronouncements about Westernized popular culture and, in the 1960s, about ‘Beatlemania’ than the Socialist Unity Party in the GDR, broadly shared the Socialist Unity Party's hostility to these cultural forms and towards the sexual attitudes imagined to accompany them.

Bullivant sets the third of Bush's operas commissioned in the GDR, The Sugar Reapers or Guyana Johnny (1962–65) in the context of this tension. Bush sought here to portray the ‘real-life struggle for independence’ (223) of workers in the South American colony of British Guiana, drawing upon authentic elements of Guyanese folk music, and he travelled to the colony under covert surveillance by MI5 to research this. The resulting work was ‘suffused with exoticism’, and in its efforts to capture the spirit of South American dance, conveyed a sense of ‘light-heartedness’ and ‘physicality’ (225). Bullivant notes how exoticism, eroticism, and primitivism ‘sat uncomfortably within socialist realism’, and she records that Bush himself was disappointed when he found one group of Guyanese workers singing American songs they had heard on the radio. Although the opera was praised by East German critics, Bullivant concludes that for Bush and the East German authorities this effort to introduce ‘elements of the bodily or the exotic into state-sanctioned opera’ and to reconcile this with Marxist–Leninist dogma was ‘a circle that could not be squared’ (232). There can be no doubt that the enormous popularity and influence of successive waves of Western popular music in Eastern Europe from the late 1940s to 1989 contributed significantly to disenchantment with the cultural vision propagated by the Communist state authorities. Capitalist states in Western Europe and North America also had fears about popular music, and reacted with censorial intent, but eventually proved far more successful in incorporating these musical forms harmlessly within their larger culture. Alan Bush belongs to a moment in world history when what the Germans then called ‘serious music’ was envisaged as a real force for social change, and not merely a pleasing diversion for the wealthy and cultivated.

Bullivant concludes with remarks on the collapse of ‘unified national cultures’ in both England and East Germany in the 1960s. After this, Bush's music could not aspire to the mass appeal and mass influence he had hoped to exercise in the 1940s and 1950s. His final opera, Joe Hill: The Man Who Never Died (1966–68) was, she argues, ‘an anxious reassertion of Bush's ideas about musical language’. Joe Hill was a Swedish-American trade unionist who was executed in 1915, and had then become a martyr, mythologized by the American labour movement. Bush's treatment of Joe Hill, based on Barry Stavis's 1950 play The Man Who Never Died, focused on Hill's immortalization through song, portraying him as a Christ-like figure in both overt and more cryptic ways. It represents in some senses a return to the Brecht–Eisler model of the Lehrstűck. Bullivant argues convincingly that Bush used this complex work as a vehicle also for reflection on his own aesthetic project, in ‘a profound instance of artistic lateness’. I can only wonder whether Bush was aware of Joan Baez's performance of the song ‘I Dreamed I saw Joe Hill Last Night’ at the Woodstock Festival in 1969, which was featured on the live recording of the festival, and probably reached much larger audiences than his own work.

Alan Bush's reputation as a serious composer remains and, as the Cold War fades into memory, those dichotomous views of Bush which have so long prevailed are also becoming more blurred. This book makes a substantial contribution to this process, and offers new perspectives on a phenomenon which still fascinates us today: the commitment of so many British intellectuals and artists to international Communism in the middle of the twentieth century.