In Buchanan’s chapter “Transits” from Performing Democracy: Bulgarian Music and Musicians in Transition, she describes the attempts by the transitional BSP government to create an illusion of national and ethnic homogeneity by co-opting the 1878 Liberation of Bulgaria from the Ottoman Turks, specifically focusing on the revolutionary figure Vasil Levski. In particular, Buchanan speaks of a 1990 rally, meant to honor the 117th anniversary of the death of Levski, that opened with selections from Handel’s Messiah. This choice evidently fits well with the BSP’s goal to whitewash the omnipresent national question facing Bulgaria at the time, along with claiming a European, Western, and Christian identity. It also somewhat confirms the platform’s idea that “turning to the past… would bring the nation a new beginning,” as the religious themes of Messiah point towards Bulgaria’s early adoption of Christianity, and its return to these values in the coming years (30). Yet, it seems that some of the irony of turning to the past may have been lost on the party leaders, as this sentiment bears great similarity to that expressed by Soviet officials in the 1936 antiformalist line. As Fitzpatrick explains in The Lady Macbeth Affair,
“One aspect of the 1936 antiformalist line clearly had resonance among musicians, not to mention the concertgoing public: Stalin’s call for new Soviet classics after the Quiet Don performance. The term “Soviet classics” could mean various things. In the first place, it suggested works that grew out of the classical tradition in music. The basic models were the great Russian composers of the nineteenth century (Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Mussorgsky), plus Beethoven” (205).
Both strategies present a clear message of looking towards the past for innovation; however, while Soviet musicians, at least in 1936, dealt with a more recent past, the BSP opts to overlook the painful history of the USSR in favor of the same romanticized past–a past free of ethnic and religious tensions, along with Bulgaria’s messy involvement in assimilation measures. Additionally, the two platforms employ musical figures from the West (Germany, in this case), although to different aims. While the USSR’s claim to Beethoven represents an attempt to label him, a Western composer, as a musically superior Soviet/Russian figure, the BSP’s employment of Handel’s Messiah marks their attempt to self-identify as a Western, religious state. While these claims are inversions of one another, their end result is actually the same: establishing a singular national identity through erasure and assimilation.
