Hmmmmmmmmmmm
Glazunov's political profile:
-Wrote coronation cantata for the would-be last Czar of Russia.
-Had an uncle who was Mayor of St. Petersburg (politics and charity organizations ran in the family)
-Supported minority rights of Jews (did this for decades)
-Supported democratic process and students/faculty rights over Aristocratic control of academic institutions (as demonstrated by the events of 1905-06)
-Supported the "intelligentsia" class by being a part of it
-Wrote an Anthem for the first Russian Duma (congress of representatives). fun fact, Putin resurrected it a few years ago. :lol:
-Supported the proletariat/working class by giving scholarships both formalized and unformalized
-Denied his own salary so that it could be used for here said scholarship (personal charity over government subsidy)
-Worked closely with
Lunacharsky during early Soviet era to maintain the Conservatory's independence (anyone who knows that name knows him for ill, but he was a huge fan of Glazunov. Wouldn't make
him go to the slums! Even though basically everyone else did)
-Petitioned Lunacharsky hundreds of
personal favors for students depending on their talent and situation, be it better rations, more clothes, travel money, etc (again, personal charity over government subsidy)
-Angered by the elimination of property rights and filed lawsuit against it (which he lost and consequently had to start paying rent for living in his own home even though his family owned it for generations
)
-Opposed political "decries" of older composers during early Soviet era, who were condemned for being bourgeois and nearly
banned (ex. Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, basically anyone who was well-off as a musician)
-Left Soviet Union for several reasons, one of them notably that Lunacharsky was demoted and the new person in power enforced quotas on the Conservatory rather than quality standards, which was against everything Glazunov stood for. Rather than only the best be allowed to join, standards would be dropped so that a certain number was always enrolled. He considered this the end of the institution and gave up. (Fortunately things got better later)
Very complex, eh? That's why I've not been able to guess myself. He was the
Music Party, I guess. Pro-music, pro-musicians, no matter who they were or where they came from. Whatever he stood for was for the promotion of higher education and quality in music. I guess that's a kind of Labor Party? But being from the bourgeois class, he was representing people who were very different from him. A free-thinking, egalitarian Liberal in the old fashioned sense, and yet extremely conservative regarding the use of money, authority, and independence of choice.