Excerpt from The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Next, and linked to this, was what he thought of as government-box criticism, an articulation of those smirks and yawns and sycophantic turnings towards the hidden Stalin. So he read how his music "quacks and grunts and growls"; how its "nervous, convulsive and spasmodic" nature derived from jazz; how it replaced singing with "shrieking." The opera had clearly been scribbled down in order to please the "effete," who had lost all "wholesome taste" for music, preferring "a confused stream of sound." As for the libretto, it deliberately concentrated on the most sordid parts of Leskov's tale: the result was "coarse, primitive and vulgar."

But his sins were political as well. So the anonymous analysis by someone who knew as much about music as a pig knows about oranges was decorated with those familiar, vinegar-soaked labels. Petit-bourgeois, formalist, Meyerholdist, Leftist. The composer had written not an opera but an anti-opera, with music deliberately turned inside out. He had drunk from the same poisoned source which produced "Leftist distortion in painting, poetry, teaching and science." In case it needed spelling out—and it always did—Leftism was contrasted with "real art, real science and real literature."

"Those that have ears will hear," he always liked to say. But even the stone deaf couldn't fail to hear what "Muddle Instead of Music" was saying, and guess its likely consequences. There were three phrases which aimed not just at his theoretical misguidedness but at his very person. "The composer apparently never considered the problem of what the Soviet audience looks for and expects in music." That was enough to take away his membership in the Union of Composers. "The dan­ger of this trend to Soviet music is clear." That was enough to take away his ability to compose and perform. And finally: "It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly." That was enough to take away his life.

Excerpted from The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes. Copyright © 2016 by Julian Barnes. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.