THE WORDS OF THE BELL: SOVIET LATVIAN CHORAL CENSORSHIP IN THE 1970s AND THE CURIOUS CASE OF PĒTERIS PLAKIDIS(1947–2017)
Keywords:
Song Festivals, choral music, social memoryAbstract
In the 1960s–1970s, the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic experienced various forms of censorship. In the case of the Latvian composer Pēteris Plakidis (1947–2017), his choral song Zvana vārdi (The Words of the Bell) was banned due to his choice of text by the famous Latvian female poet Vizma Belševica (1931–2005), who had been persecuted by the Soviet regime since the early 1960s and was banned from publishing her works from the summer of 1971 to May 1975. This incident remained unreported and undocumented to a wider audience until 2018, after the deaths of both artists. This paper analyses the case study of Plakidis and Belševica within the framework of artistic censorship by association amplified by the experience of the Latvian nation within
the totalitarian regime of the Soviet Union. The author contextualises this case as a representation of a widespread type of censorship experienced in Latvia due to the importance of choral music within its national tradition.
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