Pearls jammed up the noses of swine
Sonia Kovitz
Shostakovich's 5th is ready to begin. First a rustling
of program notes.
Shostakovich was born in 1906, entered the conservatory at
age 13, and wrote his 1st symphony at age 19 as a graduation
exercise. (I bet Eddie Veddars still hasn't finished his.)
S's stuff was really popular in the 20s, a wild and wide-open
time in the Soviet Union--rough, dangerous, disordered--
and the arts were going full guns--bold, crazy stuff.
I always think of Mayakovsky (girls, he was a HUNK) standing
on tables with a wooden spoon in his lapel reciting his
poetry..."I know the power of words, I know the pounding
of words, not the words they clap for in theatre-boxes but
words that coffins break loose from and walk off on their
wooden legs, sometimes they throw you out, unprinted,
unpublished, but the word gallops on, tightens the
saddle, sounding for centuries, and trains creep up to
lick the calloused hands of poetry."
Mayakovsky shot himself in 1930 at age 37. The ceiling
was coming down, the walls were closing in, the Party
was taking over, and the fun stuff was done.
In the 20s Shostakovich wrote music inspired by and
filled with the energy of Soviet life and everybody dug it.
In the 30s art was no longer on the loose. It was on a
leash and was the servant of the State... or else. (Mayakovsky:
"I stepped on the throat of my own song.")
Shostakovich, a devout Communist (so were large numbers of
the people exiled or killed in the great Stalinist purges
of the 30s), was denounced as decadent. He withdrew his
4th symphony (then in rehearsal) and a year later came out
with the 5th, which he called "A Soviet Artist's Practical
Creative Reply to Just Criticism."
You think he's eating crow? Well, that's what's so interesting.
He's not. He took a set of rigid expectations and restrictions
and managed to satisfy them while opening up inner space and
freedom under the very eyes of the jailers staring in at him.
At this point I should type in the section of the _real_
program notes that talks about all this but it's 1 a.m.
and I'm fading fast. I'll do that in the next installment.
I want to end up now with my usual psycho-bonkers response
to the music itself.
When the symphony starts out you think you're in the
Russian forest... freshness in the gloom, violet light
falling through the birches ...
(a line from a poem by Pasternak helps set the scene:
"in the woods cathedral darkness swirled")
Shostakovich combines earthy, radiant impressionism
--lightness of touch, free-flowing currents--with an uncannily
firm use of assemblage, structure, planes, forms, angles.
Monet + Kandinsky. Renoir + Cezanne.
The opening of the symphony felt intimate, like lying
right down on the Russian earth, and then you could hear
the raucous chaos of the revolution, of bone-wrenching turmoil
move in--on a personal scale and dark brooding urban scale at once.
You could actually hear creation/destruction/creation/destruction
going on, the madness of it and also the joy and pride of being
part of it and of "casting your fate to the winds."
I connect the Russian earth, the forest, the panoramic sense
of land and possibility that Shostakovich opens with, to Russia's
ancient name Rus'. Rus' is old Mother Russia with her broad
behind (I forget which poem that image comes from, maybe one by
Alexander Blok). Rus' is the Russian people; Rossiya is a later
name (maybe from the time of Peter the Great, who opened the "window
to the west")... Rossiya is the bureaucracy, the state, the machinery--
arbitrary power looming from above. Rus' is the earth, the passive
yet enduring power looming below--in people's hearts.
I know this is reductive but I can hear these two names wrestling
in the symphony, and Shostakovich manages amazingly to give
life and beauty even to the harshness and the frightening side of
Russian life (the revolution, alas, turned into a counter-revolution
more oppressive than the Czars ever managed on their own). He
invests the entire drama of struggle with such ... truth...
that he moved the petty despots as well as the people the despots
were trespassing and traipsing upon. I can't imagine any art but
music accomplishing this feat.
I'm over-simplifying to a horrendous degree the stages and passages
and moods and developments in the symphony (I wanted to write
this review the same night I heard the music but didn't make it).
I haven't even talked about the grand-tympani-bombs-bursting-in-air
-was-the-Potemkin-still-there-finale.
I'm pooped.
Sonia