The
Music Was Not To Blame
Gilbert
Klapper
“The
listener from the very first minute is stunned by the opera’s intentionally
unharmonious muddled flow of sounds. Snatches of melody, embryos of musical
phrases drown, escape, and once again vanish in rumbling, creaking, and
squealing. To follow this ‘music’ is difficult, to remember it impossible. . .
The music grunts, moans, pants, and gasps, the better to depict the love scenes
as naturally as possible. And ‘love’ is smeared throughout the entire opera in
the most vulgar form.” The quotation is from an unsigned editorial titled
“Muddle (or Chaos) instead of Music” in Pravda,
the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party. It was published on
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had been premiered two years earlier, had been performed
in three productions totaling two hundred times in Leningrad and Moscow prior
to the Pravda editorial, and had been
a critical and popular success.4 “But two days before the Pravda editorial, Stalin attended a
performance of the opera at the Bolshoi Theater, hated it, and walked out with
his entourage well before the end of the opera. As the editorial was unsigned,
the exact authorship is not absolutely certain but Stalin himself was either
the author or at least bore complete responsibility for its publication.5
The Pravda editorial represented a turning point in Shostakovich’s career and life. Until then his music had not been subjected to significant criticism from the higher echelons of the Communist Party. From the time of his internationally successful First Symphony at age 19 in 1926, he had enjoyed a period of general acceptance of his music, even though much of it in the late 20s was experimental and avant-garde. Criticism had mainly been leveled at his first opera, The Nose based on Gogol’s short story, but it was nothing compared with the official denunciation of Lady Macbeth. Furthermore, the timing of the Pravda attack coincided more or less with the beginning of the “Great Terror”: engineered by Stalin. During the period from 1936-1941, millions of Soviet citizens were either executed, many without even the formality or pretense of a “trial,” or were sent to the gulags. Prominent, close friends of Shostakovich, the Red Army Commander, Marshal Mikhail Tuckhachevsky and the theatre director V. E. Meyerhold, were among those executed.6 Shostakovich sat up with a suitcase packed, expecting to be taken away any night by the NKVD.7
Sometime before the execution of Tuckhachevsky in 1937, who was also an amateur violinist and violin maker, Shostakovich was called in for questioning by the NKVD [later known as the KGB] on a Friday and asked if he knew anything about Tuckhachevsky’s plot to assasinate Stalin [which was a fabricated allegation]. He said that they had only discussed music, not political questions. The interrogator Zanchevsky was not satisfied and ordered Shostakovich to reappear on Monday morning. He arrived at the NKVD promptly at the appointed hour, but the guard at the entrance could not find Shostakovich’s name on the list. The guard asked who he was expected to see, and when he learned the interrogator’s name, he told Shostakovich to go home as Zanchevsky had been arrested and imprisoned over the weekend.8
At
the time of the Pravda attack,
Shostakovich had completed the first two movements of his Fourth Symphony and
he finished the final, third movement after the editorial. The symphony went
into rehearsal but was withdrawn from performance at the last minute, as
Shostakovich was apparently so ordered because it was obviously another example
of “formalism.” The Fourth was not premiered until 1961 during the time of
Khrushchev’s leadership of the
The
Fifth Symphony marked Shostakovich’s return to the good graces of the Party. It
is in more traditional symphonic form with four movements, instead of the three
of the Fourth Symphony, but like the Fourth shows the influence of Gustav
Mahler, albeit transformed into Shostakovich’s own unique and distinctive
style. The Leningrad Philharmonic gave the premiere on
According
to the Revisionist view, however, the apparatchiks
wholly misinterpreted the meaning of the finale of the Fifth Symphony,
regarding it as a triumphal, joyful march. The official party line was that the
“finale resolves the tense and tragic moments of the preceding movements in a
joyous, optimistic fashion”.13 Partly this may have been caused by one
edition’s misprint of the tempo markings of the coda of the finale, at more
than twice the speed Shostakovich intended. There is evidence that he wanted
the coda to be played at the much slower tempo according to the conductor
Benjamin Zander: “when the final March is played at the tempo indicated in the
[original] score, the joyful celebration heard at the faster tempo turns into a
scream of pain, crying out against a relentless and inhuman force.”14
In the disputed memoirs of Shostakovich entitled Testimony [as told to Solomon Volkov] regarding the finale’s “triumphal, joyful” march, the composer is supposed to have said: “The rejoicing is forced, created under threat . . . It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing’, and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, ‘Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.’ “15 Whether or not Testimony published by Solomon Volkov in 1979, four years after Shostakovich’s death, is authentic, “our business is rejoicing” was a characteristic phrase used by the composer.16
Kurt
Sanderling, who emigrated from
Yet until the publication of Testimony in 1979, the Fifth Symphony was considered by many Western observers to represent a capitulation to the Communist Party and that Shostakovich was a loyal follower of the Party.17a A striking statement against this interpretation was given by the famous soprano Galina Vishnevskaya in her autobiography published in 1984: “In that ‘joyous, optimistic’ finale – beneath the triumphant blare of the trumpets, beneath the endlessly repeated A in the violins, like nails being pounded into one’s brain – we hear a desecrated Russia, violated by her own sons, wailing and writhing in agony, nailed to the Cross, bemoaning the fact that she will survive her defilement.”18 Purple prose no doubt, but which is the correct reading of the Fifth Symphony?
If
there are hidden subtexts in purely instrumental music such as the Fifth, their
meaning will almost always be ambiguous and debatable - especially if the
composer does not offer an explicit explanation, as Shostakovich could not possibly
have done during Stalin’s time. However, the first four notes of the finale
quote “Rebirth” from the cycle of songs based on Pushkin, composed just before
the Fifth Symphony, but not performed until later. These notes correspond to the
accompaniment to the words “A barbarian artist” in Pushkin’s poem: "A
barbarian artist, with sleepy brush/Blackens over a picture of genius/And his
lawless drawing/Scribbles meaninglessly upon it./But with the years the alien
paints/Flake off like old scales;/The creation of genius appears before us/In
its former beauty./Thus do delusions fall away/From my worn-out soul,/And there
spring up within it/Visions of original, pure days." The thesis of the
musicologist Gerard McBurney “is that Shostakovich used Pushkin's poem, itself
an Aesopian text written under conditions of Tsarist censorship, as a way of
encoding the true meaning of the symphony's otherwise inevitably debatable finale.
Stalin (or perhaps his culturalapparat) is the ‘barbarian artist’ who
blackened over Lady Macbeth in the Pravda editorial of
Shostakovich
completed the Seventh (“
At the conclusion of World War II, Shostakovich was expected to write a triumphal symphony (ala Beethoven’s Ninth) in praise of the Soviet victory that was reputedly masterminded by Stalin. But instead the composer penned the lightweight, comical and satirical Ninth Symphony.20 In an informal discussion prior to leading the work at the Aspen Music Festival in 2004, the American conductor James Conlon described the Ninth Symphony as Shostakovich thumbing his nose at Stalin. Again, the problem of the existence and meaning of subtexts is at issue.
The
“historic” decree of 1948 was an attempt by the Party to combat “formalism” in
music. Shostakovich (listed first), Prokofiev, Shebalin, and Khatchaturian were
the main targets.21 Much of their music was banned from performance
until after the death of Stalin in 1953. The decree accused these composers,
among others, of “ ‘formalist and decadent’ tendencies, ‘unhealthy
individualism’ and ‘pessimism.’ Shostakovich was forced to confess his artistic
‘sins’ publicly. He was dismissed from his” posts at the
During this time period (1948-1953), he wrote a number of significant works, including the First Violin Concerto, the Fourth String Quartet, and From Jewish Poetry, which were not performed publicly until after Stalin’s death. The last is a collection of eleven songs for three singers, accompanied by piano; it was performed privately several times during this period.23 A number of Shostakovich’s compositions contain melodies influenced by Jewish music, including the last movement of his Second Piano Trio, written in 1943-1944 and one of his masterpieces. The combined qualities of sadness and laughter in Jewish music appealed to Shostakovich, although he was not Jewish.24 Furthermore, he was strongly against the official Soviet policy of anti-Semitism.25
During this period when much of his music was banned from public performance, the composer subsisted by writing acceptable film scores. When the 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo piano, opus 87, were auditioned by Shostakovich in 1951 for the Union of Composers, the work was greeted either with severe criticism or without enthusiasm. The sole exception was the defense of the composer by the outstanding pianist Mariya Yudina, who had studied piano with the same teacher as Shostakovich at the Leningrad Conservatory in the early 1920s. Yudina “said something along these lines: ‘Comrades, what has got into you, are you out of your minds? Surely you understand what we are dealing with? This music will soon be performed as frequently as Bach’s Preludes and Fugues are today. We should bow down to the very ground in front of Dmitri Dmitriyevich!’ As Yudina was considered to be not completely normal, nobody paid any attention to her words, which were the only normal words pronounced on that occasion.”26
In
1960, tremendous pressure was put on Shostakovich to join the Communist Party,
an action he had resisted until that time. Eventually, in September of that
year, he was forced to join.27 Before that in July, 1960, he visited
The Eighth Quartet stands out among the many outstanding quartets of the fifteen he composed, and is the one most often played and recorded. The DSCH initials permeate the composition. The quartet, with this monogram and the quotation of his previous works, is undoubtedly autobiographical.29 Although the meaning of subtexts in many of his other instrumental compositions has been debated, even as to the question of whether there are subtexts, here there can be no doubt that the subtext is the life of Shostakovich. Thus, the disparity was clearly evident between the official dedication of the Eighth Quartet to the “ ‘victims of war and Fascism,’ allegedly prompted by the viewing of atrocity footage in Dresden – and the music, which consists almost wholly of the DSCH motif in thematic conjunction with allusions to Shostakovich’s earlier works, the martyred Lady Macbeth especially prominent among them. . . . . Shostakovich was clearly identifying himself as victim.”30 That the official dedication was a cover is shown by Rostislav Dubinsky, the first violinist of the Borodin Quartet: “When, at the first performance at the Composers’ House in October 1960, the chairman announced the quartet and started talking about the war and the heroism of the Soviet people and the Communist Party, Shostakovich jumped up and shouted, ‘No, no . . . I . . am protesting against any sort of Fascism . . .’ “31
According
to Lev Lebedinsky: “The composer dedicated the Quartet to the victims of
fascism to disguise his intentions, although, as he considered himself a victim
of a fascist regime, the dedication was apt. In fact he intended it as a
summation of everything he had written before. It was his farewell to life. He
associated joining the Party with a moral, as well as physical death. On the
day of his return from a trip to
Shortly after the Beethoven Quartet gave the first performance of the Eighth Quartet, the Borodin Quartet played it for Shostakovich at his apartment. Rostislav Dubinsky relates the following account: “As he listened, Shostakovich picked up the score and a pencil, and then put both aside, his head bent. What he must have felt at this moment, we could only guess. Having openly said at the beginning of the quartet, ‘This is myself,’ he sat before us, tormented, listening to his story about himself, his musical confession, the sorrowful cry of a soul, where each note weeps with pain. . . We finished the quartet and looked at Shostakovich. His head was hanging low, his face hidden in his hands. We waited. He didn’t stir. We got up, quietly put our instruments away, and stole out of the room.”33
Shostakovich is the main protagonist of William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central, a novel (or a collection of short stories as Vollmann has said) depicting the Eastern Front of World War II. In this 750-page book published in 2005 there is a chapter of over 100 pages devoted to the events leading up to and surrounding the composition of the Eighth Quartet.34 The epigraph of Europe Central is “The majority of my symphonies are tombstones.”35 In a review of W. G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction, Vollmann describes the Eighth Quartet as one of the saddest and angriest pieces of music ever written.36
In the period known as the “Thaw” during which Nikita Khrushchev revealed many though not all of Stalin’s crimes in his speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in 1956,37 Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem Babi Yar in 1961 and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962 were allowed to be published.38 The poem begins: “No monument stands over Babi Yar,” and is an attack on Soviet antisemitism, as well as on the Nazi slaughter. In two days in late September, 1941, Nazi Sonderkommando police and Waffen-SS men, as well as Ukrainian policemen, had rounded up over 33,000 Jews and machine-gunned them at the Babi Yar ravine on the outskirts of Kiev.39
Shostakovich
set
The Fourteenth Symphony also has poems set to orchestral music. The eleven poems are by García Lorca, Apollinaire, and Rilke, all in Russian translation, and a poem of Wilhelm Kϋchelbeker, a contemporary of Pushkin. All are on the subject of death. Shostakovich composed the work during a month-long hospital stay in 1969. “Just before entering hospital, I listened to Mussorgsky’s ‘Songs and Dances of Death’ and the idea of tackling death came to fruition. . . Everything that I have written until now over these long years has merely served as a preparation for this work.”44
But
he continued to compose, despite severe health problems. Included are the
Fifteenth Symphony with its quotations from Rossini’s William Tell Overture and Wagner’s Walkϋre and Tristan
and Isolde (1971), the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Quartets
(1970, 1973, 1974), and several song cycles (six poems of Marina Tsvetayeva,
1973, and the suite based on verses of Michelangelo, 1974). His last composition,
the viola sonata, opus 147, dedicated to Fyodor Druzhinin, the violist in the
Beethoven Quartet, was completed in the hospital a month before Shostakovich’s
death on
The
argument over the authenticity of Testimony,
whether these are actually Shostakovich’s memoirs as told to Solomon Volkov as
he claims, has spawned a great amount of writing on this subject since 1979.
The Revisionists, who support Volkov [the late Ian MacDonald, Allan Ho, and Dmitry
Feofanov], and the Anti-Revisionists [Laurel Fay, Richard Taruskin, Malcolm H.
Brown], who take the view that Testimony
“falsely purported to be Shostakovich’s transcribed oral memoirs,”46
are mostly musicologists. It is perhaps noteworthy that most of the musicians
who knew Shostakovich and emigrated from the Soviet Union [for example, Kirill Kondrashin,
Kurt Sanderling, Rudolf Barshai, and Vladimir Ashkenazy] have stated that many
of the remarks in Testimony coincided
with what they knew of Shostakovich’s views.46a
But this controversy over Testimony has given surprisingly little attention to the music itself. One might conclude: A lot of polemical writing but little illumination. As was said of one of the most influential and revolutionary jazz musicians, Charlie Parker: “What he did was enormous. You hear his music everywhere now . . .But people talk too much about the man – people who don’t know – when the important thing is his music.”47 So with Shostakovich, it is the music that matters. I recommend you delve into the music and ignore the Testimony controversy.
“The music was not to blame”48.
ENDNOTES
1Volkov, Solomon, 2004, Shostakovich and Stalin: The
extraordinary relationship between the Great Composer and the Brutal Dictator;
translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis: Alfred A. Knopf,
2Volkov, 2004, p. 92.
3Feuchtner, B., 2004, Notes to recording of Shostakovich:
Rayok, Chamber Symphony, etc., conducted by Vladimir Spivakov, Capriccio 67115,
p. 8.
4Osborne, R., 2002, Notes to recording of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich, EMI Classics, CMS 67779, p. 13.
5Volkov, 2004, p. 105-107.
6Wilson, E., 1994, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered:
7Maxim Shostakovich quoted in http://www.siue.edu/~aho/musov/reccom/reccom.html].
8Wilson, 1994, p. 124-125; also Fay, L.E., 2000, Shostakovich: A Life: Oxford University Press, p. 99.
9Vishnevskaya, G., 1984, Galina: A Russian Story; translated from the Russian by Guy Daniels: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich p. 211-212.
10Isaak Glikman in
11Wilson, 1994, p. 129.
12Wilson, 1994, p. 126.
13Taruskin, R., 2005, The Oxford History of Western Music: Oxford University Press, v. 4, p. 792; see also Taruskin, R., 1995, Public Lies and Unspeakable Truth: Interpreting Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, in David Fanning, (ed.), Shostakovich Studies: Cambridge University Press, p. 46.
14Zander, B., 1998, Notes to recording of Shostakovich Symphony no. 5, Cello Concerto no. 1, conducted by Benjamin Zander, Carlton Classics 30366 01012, p. 2-3.
15Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, 1979, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov, translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis: Harper & Row, p. 183; also Ho, A. B. and Feofanov, D., 1998, Shostakovich Reconsidered: Toccata Press, p. 165.
16Wilson, 1994, p. 177; Ho and Feofanov, 1998, p. 259, 427, 492-493.
17Sanderling, K., and Bitterlich, H., 1992, Notes to recording of Shostakovich Symphony no. 5, conducted by Kurt Sanderling, Berlin Classics 2063, p. 10; see also Ho and Feofanov, 1998, p. 170].
17aElizabeth
18Vishnevskaya, 1984, p. 213.
19 “Another aspect of the Finale was revealed by musicologist Gerard McBurney in an interval talk for [BBC] Radio 3 in 1994:” http://www.siue.edu/~aho/musov/reccom/reccom.html. See also Wilson, 1994, p. 127; Taruskin, 1995, p. 43, 45.
20Fanning, D., 2000, Shostakovich in Harmony: Untranslatable
Messages, in Rosamund Bartlett, (ed.), Shostakovich in Context:
21Wilson, 1994, p. 208.
22Epstein, P., 2000, The String Quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich, Notes to the Emerson String Quartet’s recording of the complete string quartets, Deutsche Grammophone 463 284, p. 19.
23Wilson, 1994, p. 236-237. There is a performance of From Jewish Poetry on Russian Disc 15015, with Shostakovich at the piano recorded in 1956.
24That the musicologist Laurel Fay misunderstood Shostakovich’s motives in composing From Jewish Poetry has been discussed by Ian MacDonald, 1998, Naive Anti-Revisionism, in Ho and Feofanov, p. 687; see also Fay, 2000, p. 169-170.
25Jackson, T. L., 1998, Dmitry Shostakovich: The Composer as
Jew, in Ho and Feofanov, p. 598-599; Kirill Kondrashin in
26Wilson, 1994, p. 211; Fay, 2000, p. 179.
27Lev Lebedinsky and Isaak Glikman in
28Glikman, I., 2001, Story of a friendship : The letters of
Dmitry Shostakovich to Isaak Glikman, 1941-1975, with a commentary by Isaak
Glikman, translated from the Russian by Anthony Phillips: Cornell University
Press, p. 90-91, 275; also quoted in a slightly different translation by
29Taruskin, R., 2000, Shostakovich and Us, in Rosamund
Bartlett, (ed.), Shostakovich in Context:
30Ibid.
31Dubinsky, R., 1989, Stormy Applause: Making Music in a Worker’s State: Hill and Wang, p. 282.
32Lev Lebedinsky in
33Dubinsky, 1989, p. 283-284.
34Vollmann, W. T., 2005,
35Taken from Testimony, 1979, p. 156.
36http://www.believermag.com/issues/200305/?read=article_vollmann.
37Khrushchev’s speech was given on
38Wilson, 1994, p. 354.
39http://www.zchor.org/BABIYAR.HTM.
40Details of the problems with the premiere and the finding of
a bass soloist who would perform the solo part are given by Kondrashin in
41Wilson, 1994, p. 360-361; Fay, 2000, p. 234.
42 Fay, 2000, p. 235-236; only Jews were killed initially on September 29-30 in 1941; later Gypsies and Russian prisoners of war were also slaughtered by the SS, see http://www.zchor.org/BABIYAR.HTM.
43For example, the New York Philharmonic recording of 1993 under Kurt Masur, Sony 4509-90848, in which Yevtushenko also recites the original version of the poem. When the score of the Thirteenth was published in 1970, the original text was restored according to Barry Brenesal in Fanfare, 2006, v. 29, no. 3, p. 220.
44Shostakovich: two letters to Isaak Glikman in
45Druzhinin in
46Taruskin, 2000, p. 5; Fay, 2000, p. 4; Fay, 2005, Volkov’s Testimony Reconsidered (2002), in Malcolm H. Brown, A Shostakovich Casebook: Indiana University Press, p. 22-66.
46a http://www.siue.edu/~aho/musov/kondrashin/kondra.html; http://www.siue.edu/~aho/musov/sanderling/sandint.html; http://www.dschjournal.com/journal17/barshai.htm; Vladimir Ashkenazy, August 5, 2000, quoted in http://www.geocities.com/kuala_bear/Contents.html.
47Dizzy Gillespie with
Gene Lees, Down Beat, May 25, 1961, quoted in Brian Priestley, 2006, Chasin’ the
Bird: The Life and Legacy of Charlie Parker:
48Yevgeny Yevtushenko in