The Composer and the Dictator

[chas smith R.I.P.]

The Composer and the Dictator

April 4, 2004
By JEREMY EICHLER , New York Times

In a century when so much new music failed to speak to
listeners, Dmitri Shostakovich thundered. His music
expressed with lacerating wit and scorching emotional power
the tragic Soviet history he lived through. In his time,
premieres of his works could provoke ovations of tidal
force. Today his 15 symphonies provide a harrowing index of
a nation's collective memory; his 15 string quartets probe
the private depths of a ruthlessly public era. Taken as a
whole, his music grips contemporary audiences like that of
no other modern composer. But for all its fantastic ability
to communicate, what exactly does the music say?

That question leads straight into the fiercest controversy
in classical music today, a debate that has lasted almost a
quarter century and is about to flare up again with the
publication of two books. At its core has been an argument
over Shostakovich's true identity. Was he a faithful
servant of the Soviet regime, as his public behavior and
official pronouncements might suggest? Or was he a secret
dissident who expressed with musical signs and subtexts all
the protest he could not make in words? Or did he live and
work, like so many Soviet citizens, in a complicated gray
area between those extremes?

When he died in 1975, there seemed little question in the
West that Shostakovich had been, to quote his New York
Times obituary, "a committed Communist." That image was
starkly refuted in 1979 with the publication of
"Testimony," Shostakovich's memoirs "as related to and
edited by" Solomon Volkov, a Russian musical journalist.
The book revealed an embittered elderly composer, deeply
critical of the regime he had been forced to serve. What's
more, it suggested that he had been pouring his opposition
and protest into his music for much of his creative life.

In the West, music lovers embraced this new Shostakovich as
a sympathetic and like-minded artist who had been martyred
by a repressive regime. Musical code-breakers began
analyzing his works, finding embedded quotations, symbols
of protest and references to Stalin, which, they claimed,
transformed the music's meaning. Shostakovich's music has
since ballooned in popularity, becoming a mainstay of the
orchestral and chamber repertories. His life has inspired
countless symposiums, a multimedia theater project and a
biopic starring Ben Kingsley.

But "Testimony" - just out in a new paperback, a
"25th-anniversary edition" (Limelight Editions) - has not
convinced everyone. In the Soviet Union, it was dismissed
as "a pitiful fake." Less predictably, in 1980, Laurel Fay,
a young American musicologist, published an article,
"Shostakovich Versus Volkov: Whose `Testimony?,' "
challenging the book's basic authenticity. The debate over
"Testimony" has continued ever since, growing increasingly
vitriolic. Among the most passionate antagonists, charges
of lying and stupidity have been hurled, Internet screeds
abound, a K.G.B. angle has been suggested, and each side
has accused the other of using Stalinist tactics.

The most sustained and vehement defense has come from Allan
B. Ho and Dmitry Feofanov, who published "Shostakovich
Reconsidered" in 1998, raising troublesome objections to
Ms. Fay's case. But on Friday, the anti-"Testimony" camp
fired back with "A Shostakovich Casebook," edited by
Malcolm Hamrick Brown (Indiana University Press).

At its heart is a new article by Ms. Fay, addressing
criticisms and providing a trenchant critical analysis of a
Russian typescript of "Testimony." The book also includes
other valuable essays and interviews, which move beyond the
scholarly controversy to sketch a nuanced picture of
Shostakovich's life under a totalitarian regime.

Mr. Volkov, meanwhile, has also written a new book,
"Shostakovich and Stalin: The Extraordinary Relationship
Between the Famous Composer and the Brutal Dictator,"
published last Monday (Alfred A. Knopf). Those looking for
Mr. Volkov's personal perspective on the "Testimony" saga
will not find it here. Although he refers to the memoir in
his preface and occasionally cites it in the book,
"Testimony" figures mostly as a guiding inspiration for a
way of thinking about Shostakovich.

As its subtitle suggests, the book offers a close reading
of the dangerous game of political brinksmanship between
Stalin and Shostakovich. By the 1930's, the young composer
was already the star of his country's musical life, and his
fortunes soared higher with the wild success of his opera
"Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District." The plot centers on
a housewife-turned-adulterous-murderer and features sex
scenes with music so explicit that one American critic
called it "pornophony." Most Russian critics were dazzled
by the work, but Stalin apparently was not. He saw the
opera in 1936, and only days later, a now notorious Pravda
editorial appeared with the headline "Muddle Instead of
Music." It attacked Shostakovich for spurning the interests
of the masses in favor of the "formalist" aesthetic of the
West. Most chilling, it warned that this affair might "end
very badly."

It was a devastating blow, and the threat was reinforced by
the horrific purges that soon ripped through the Russian
intelligentsia. Friends were taken away, Shostakovich's
sister was exiled. He stoically collected the daily attacks
in the press and defiantly told a friend, "Even if they cut
off both my hands and I have to hold the pen in my teeth, I
shall still go on writing."

Go on he did, eventually writing his tremendously popular
Fifth Symphony (1937), which was celebrated as proof of his
return to the tenets of Socialist Realism. But is that what
listeners heard at the work's premiere? Why did they weep
during its dignified slow movement and cheer at its
conclusion for more than a half hour? Both new books
suggest that many found a subtext in this music, and that
the ovations may have been a kind of covert political
demonstration, an outpouring of support for a persecuted
composer.

This was the first of many times that Shostakovich would
hide inside his music, saying little in public and allowing
listeners to hear in the abstract art whatever meanings and
political ideology they wished. Noting that two
diametrically opposed messages could be heard in a single
work, the music historian Richard Taruskin, in a "Casebook"
essay, speaks of Shostakovich's "doubleness." The
phenomenon, he writes, turned the reception of
Shostakovich's music into "the secret diary of a nation."

More symphonies would follow, and more double meanings. The
Seventh (1941), which was considered a heroic gesture of
solidarity with compatriots under brutal attack by Hitler's
armies, had the most dramatic context. Nazi troop positions
were struck in advance of the Leningrad premiere to
guarantee quiet. But was the manically repeated "invasion"
theme of the first movement a savage critique of Nazism or
an attack on Stalinism? Could it have been both?

Another brutal denunciation came in 1948, after
Shostakovich failed to deliver a symphonic paean to Soviet
victory in war. He and other "formalists" were publicly
shamed. He was removed from his teaching posts, and much of
his music was banned. It was a time of immense hardship,
and he apparently considered suicide. But again, he
continued composing music. The Passacaglia of his First
Violin Concerto (1948) offers some of the most dolefully
majestic music ever written.

As both new books attest, Shostakovich suffered
immeasurably from the inhuman conditions that Stalin's
Great Terror wreaked on the intelligentsia and the country
as a whole. Like untold numbers of friends and
contemporaries, he lived a double life of public obeisance
and private loathing. The image in the West of Shostakovich
as an unconflicted musical and ideological servant of the
Communist state was a gross distortion.

Still, once revisionism had begun, with "Testimony," it was
hard to know where to stop. Some instances of musical
protest were obvious, as in the bitterly satirical
"Antiformalist Rayok," but others remained open to
contention. As Ms. Fay has noted, against the backdrop of
the cold war the idea of a dissident Shostakovich had an
appeal all its own. It also touched on a deeper collective
yearning to see artistic genius as connected to moral
greatness. It is natural to want heroes in art to be heroes
in life as well.

But the facts of Shostakovich's life impede efforts to
canonize him as a dissident saint. Survival under Stalin
forced him to hone strategies of public compromise and
private disassociation, but he carried those strategies
into a post-Stalin era that required them less. He joined
the Communist Party in 1960, when it was not necessary to
do so for survival. And in 1973, his name was printed on a
letter denouncing the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov.
The "Casebook" contributors compellingly warn of replacing
one mask with another, one black-and-white myth with its
simple inversion. Truth may well lie somewhere in the
middle.

In the end, of course, this would all be academic if the
music did not have a power to shake audiences, even
listeners who know nothing of its circumstances. So we
might legitimately ask just how much the artist's politics
and intentions, and the historical context itself, actually
matter. The answer is, both a little and a lot. On one
level, the signs and references encoded in the music can
provide valuable clues for interpretation, but seldom more
than that. Even if we understood all the veiled references,
to reduce these works to simple transcriptions of
Shostakovich's life experiences, or those of his country,
is to deplete needlessly both the music and its medium.

At the same time, it is impossible to imagine this music as
having been born of a completely different time or place.
Shostakovich stared into a century's abyss, and his
knowledge of that abyss gave his work its ultimate depth
and meaning. His genius lay in the way he preserved the
expressive syntax of music's past but forced it to address
both the public and the private dimensions of a
totalitarian reality that was fearfully, gruesomely modern.


As we gain more distance from tragedies of the era in which
Shostakovich lived, the music's origins must not be
forgotten. But these works must also be freed of the burden
of so much signifying. They are indeed sonic documents of
their times, but they are much more than that. One's
ability to see clearly through the fog of the Shostakovich
wars will benefit from keeping in mind two fundamental
paradoxes that his art embodies: an ability to contain
poignantly but also transcend magnificently the historical
moment; and an ability to speak to us so profoundly yet so
obliquely.

Shostakovich died of lung cancer at 68, having composed
until the end. He was buried in a Moscow cemetery, and his
grave was marked by a tombstone inscribed with the four
notes of his cherished musical monogram: D, E flat, C, B
(D, Es, C, H in German nomenclature), suggesting that in
death as in life Shostakovich will be searched for in his
music.

The notes provide perhaps the best epitaph for
Shostakovich, but there is yet another musical staff at a
nearby grave that also hauntingly captures the broader
paradox of Shostakovich's art. The grave belongs to his
fellow composer Alfred Schnittke, but its inscription is a
perfect postscript to Shostakovich's life, too. Above the
staff is a fermata, denoting that the music should be
stretched beyond the normal flow of time. Below the staff
is "fff," fortississimo, denoting an expression of
thundering volume. On the staff itself is a whole-note
rest, denoting silence. 

[Tom Olson]

If Russia was a person, that person would be completely and utterly insane.

[Bob Hoffnar]

Shostakovich's 4th string quartet really turned me on to him.
I love his chamber works. The piano trio opus 67 is one of my all time favorites.
I've read a couple of his biographies. He took some hard lumps.

Bob

[Earnest Bovine]

Shostakovich's music is the most powerfully moving music of the 20th century for me. I have always been kinda bored and disgusted with all the talk about his politics. Just listen to the music!

[David L. Donald]

Chas, again you have posted a truely thought provoking musical vignette.

It is impossible to imagine that a genious such as Shostakovich could not see completely through the insanity surrounding him.

And yet still feel a profound need to continue his work under what ever strictures were present.

Under most systems Stalin would have been certifiable or at least in jail for life without parole. But he was the boss in this one, with carte blanche, and those around him had to just deal with it. Or face the consequences.

In Shostakovich's world, how could someone who's friends are "disappeared", sister exiled and himself periodically shackeled into a form other than his own, not be agains't that rampaging authority, so blantantly manipulating his very essense.

Possiblly later in life as an old man in a post Stalin Soviet world he saw a "kinder gentiler" government, relatively,
that he felt he might influenence towards sanity through his works, and help his fellow Russians from within.

Remember he was Russian with a communist overlay imposed. Not the other way round.
This might explain his joining the communist party in 1960.

He may have though as an old man that Shakarov was going too far for the moment. Or that there were other preasures, we have yet to discover, at work.

Subvering the system from within is often easier than without. And putting small musical references with a philosophical basis into classical music is a long standing tradition.

If anyone could speak without words in his world it would have been Shostakovich. And yet be obscurantist enough that the authorities never saw it, yet those that could see, did.

We're not talking "Ode to a Tractor" here.

Still no question he was a genious of the highest water, and a deeply thinking man, stuck in a world of small minds, scrabbling for the slightest advantage in irrational circumstances.

[Chippy Wood]

Ernest,
My sentiments exactly,some folks get too bound up trying to critically analyse music and composers without enjoying music for what it is.
I am not ignorant of the fact that some pieces were written during momentous periods of a composers life e.g Mozart (my favourite)
but I would not delve so deep that it spoilt my listening pleasure because of political issues which may or may not have had an infuence on the works or the translation of music from a critics own personal viewpoint.

------------------
Ron (Chippy) Wood
Carter S10/Pad
Emmons D10

<FONT SIZE=1 COLOR="#8e236b"><p align=CENTER>[This message was edited by Chippy Wood on 05 April 2004 at 12:36 AM.]</p></FONT>

[Bob Hoffnar]

When Shostakovich was asked about what he thought about critics and the stuff being written about him he said something to the effect of " I don't think about it at all. If I was a cook and you were hungry I would cook you some eggs and you would eat them. What difference would somebody writting about it make ?"

Bob

[Kevin Macneil Brown]

It seems to me that Shostakovitch chose, despite great pressure, not to choose silence; that his music contained enough complexity and passion that we are still able to debate its meanings is testimony to its power and integrity.

[David Doggett]

Earnest is right. While it is interesting to know this context to Shostakivich's compositions, as it is interesting to know that Wagner was antisemitic, etc., ultimately music is abstract. It is about the universals of good and evil, sorrow and joy. The specific goods and evils, as the composer saw them, are irrelevant, even if they are knowable. Great art is about the universals of the human condition, not the petty specifics of any one person's life.

[Mike Perlowin RIP]

Shostakovish thought Americans were crude, boorish and childish. This impression created when he visited visited America in 1960, and as he disembarked from the plane, some reporter yelled out. "Hey Shosty, What do you prefer? Blonds or redheads?"

I recorded one of his lighter, humorous pieces on my Firebird Suite CD.