000 01679cam a2200157 4500500
005 20251012015527.0
041 _afre
042 _adc
100 1 0 _aSklower, Jedediah
_eauthor
245 0 0 _aA Red Music Hall? The Communist Musical Apparatus and Show Business, From Zhdanov to Montand (1945-1958)
260 _c2025.
500 _a51
520 _a‪This article looks at the French Communist Party’s relationship with “le music-hall” between the end of the World War II and 1958, a period paradoxically marked both by the permanence of its policy of cultural openness begun in the 1930s and by the echoes of the Cold War in its musical apparatus. The Communist movement promoted choral singing, as well as great musical and theatrical frescoes composed and written by fellow travelers, embodying an aesthetic, themes and a musicking in line with its current doctrine and propaganda, and opposed to both the “formalism” and “uprooted cosmopolitanism” of “bourgeois music” and mainstream productions. It also perpetuated its support to sympathizing performers of French chanson and variety shows, the most representative and popular being Yves Montand. The failure of the party’s countercultural strategy, and the evolution of the singer’s ties with the Communist Party, from fellow traveler to harsh critic following the 1958 break-up, reveal the political and cultural crisis the movement was undergoing in the late 1950s – the prelude to its cultural aggiornamento.‪
786 0 _nVolume ! | 22 : 1 | 1 | 2025-05-30 | p. 119-136 | 1634-5495
856 4 1 _uhttps://shs.cairn.info/journal-volume-2025-1-page-119?lang=en&redirect-ssocas=7080
999 _c1532424
_d1532424