TLS: David Shiff: The Shostakovich wars
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5.5.4
A SHOSTAKOVICH CASEBOOK
Malcolm Hamrick Brown, editor
408pp. | Indiana University Press. $39.95; distributed in the UK by
Combined Academic Publishers. £29.95. | 0 253 34364 X
SHOSTAKOVICH AND STALIN
The extraordinary relationship between the great composer and the
brutal dictator
Solomon Volkov
370pp. | Knopf. £18.50 (US $30). | 0 375 41082 1
SHOSTAKOVICH AND HIS WORLD
Laurel E. Fay, editor
405pp. | Princeton University Press. $55 (paperback, $22.95);
distributed in the UK by Wiley. £35.95 (paperback, £14.95). | 0 691
12068 4
Dmitri Shostakovich has been a case and a cause, as well as a composer
since his debut in 1926, with the extraordinarily assured First
Symphony. He was nineteen years old. The brash works he wrote while
still in his twenties, particularly the opera The Nose and the ballet
The Age of Gold, made him the musical emblem of the new Soviet
society; judgement of the music thereafter has proved inseparable from
its evolving political context. Understanding of the music has also
been limited by the paucity of Western critics with a command of the
Russian language and knowledge of Russian culture, and further
hindered by the Cold War. Representing an antagonistic system shrouded
behind an Iron Curtain, the music became a field - a minefield -
reserved for experts and ideologues. Today Shostakovich's music is
more widely played and highly valued than ever before, but it remains
a nexus of musical and political dispute.
Shostakovich's career was a lifelong rollercoaster ride of musical
triumphs and political free falls. In 1934, his brutal, erotic opera,
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, played to sold-out houses in the
USSR and was performed around the world until an unsigned editorial
entitled "Muddle Instead of Music" appeared in Pravda in January 1936.
Shostakovich was taken to task for creating a "deliberately dissonant,
muddled stream of sounds" instead of the simple direct expression that
would engage a wide proletariat audience. The editorial warned: "This
is a game . . . that may end up very badly". At a time when the
slightest hint of political incorrectness spelt exile or death, such a
review was more than an aesthetic threat, but Shostakovich was not
arrested. In December 1936, the premiere of Shostakovich's vast,
craggy Fourth Symphony was cancelled at the last moment, amid a fog of
conflicting explanations. In 1937, however, Shostakovich composed his
Fifth Symphony, soon described in words attributed to the composer as
the "practical creative answer of a Soviet artist to just criticism".
An instant success, the Fifth quickly travelled around the world. In
the USSR it seemed, finally, to present a musical style which exalted
the values of Socialist Realism to Beethovenian heights. In the West,
composers acknowledged, often grudgingly, that Shostakovich had
created an idiom that could reach the masses.
In 1942, Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, written during the siege of
Leningrad, was smuggled out to the West, premiered on American radio
by Toscanini, and became an epic anthem of resistance to the Nazis.
The
composer-as-hero appeared on the cover of the July 20, 1942, issue of
Time, wearing a fire-fighter's helmet. Shostakovich's two other
wartime symphonies, the monumental Eighth and the jocular,
small-scaled Ninth, encountered critical resistance in the USSR, a
portent of post-war repression. In 1948, a new wave of anti-formalist
attacks, launched by Stalin's ideology minister Andrei Zhdanov,
maligned the work of virtually all the leading Soviet composers and
demanded their strict adherence to the party line. (As in the 1930s,
the aesthetic debate took place against the background of show trials,
disappearances and executions.) In March 1949, Shostakovich dourly
defended the official position at a Peace Conference in New York that
was also the last gasp of the old
American Left in the face of mounting anti-Communist hysteria. Baited
by the composer Nicholas Nabokov, Shostakovich condoned the official
attacks on the music of Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Hindemith, all
three of whom were American residents at the time. Not only did
Shostakovich appear to be a dupe of the system, his party-line message
was a mousetrap for American leftists; Aaron Copland, who briefly
spoke and, without defending Shostakovich, nevertheless questioned the
paranoid mentality of the Cold War, was soon called before a
Congressional committee.
During the first decade of the Cold War Shostakovich kept a lower
profile. He composed intimate works, like the Twenty-Four Preludes and
Fugues and a series of string quartets (inspired by hearing
performances of the Bartók quartets during his visit to New York), and
held off the premieres of any pieces that might invite controversy. In
America his only champion seemed to be Leonard Bernstein; the Seventh
Symphony vanished from orchestra programmes. No recordings were made
by other Western artists of the latest symphonies and concertos; the
new quartets were barely known. In the post-Webern era Shostakovich
felt like a vestige. The nadir of Shostakovich's Western reputation
came with Stravinsky's return to Russia in 1962. Robert Craft reported
the older composer's coup de grâce of condescension:
'[Shostakovich] blurts out that the Symphony of Psalms had overwhelmed
him when he first heard it, and that he had made his own piano score
of it which he would like to present to I. S. Seeking to return the
compliment, I. S. says that he shares some of Shostakovich's high
regard for Mahler, at which point Shostakovich starts to melt, but
quickly freezes up again as I. S. continues with: "But you should go
beyond Mahler. The Viennese troika also adored him, you know, and both
Schoenberg and Webern conducted his music."'
In the "Thaw" that followed Khrushchev's critique of Stalin's "cult of
personality", Shostakovich seemed to entrench himself even further in
the Soviet system. In 1960 he finally joined the Communist Party. The
Eleventh and Twelfth Symphonies celebrated the Russian Revolutions of
1905 and 1917 in a newsreel populist style, and the Eighth String
Quartet, composed in Dresden, was dedicated explicitly "to the memory
of the victims of Fascism and war", and implicitly to the "collateral"
victims of Allied bombing. None of the leading Western string quartets
recorded this work, which is now commonly seen as Shostakovich's
greatest in the genre. To win any new acceptance in the West,
Shostakovich had to demonstrate a connection between his music and the
mainstream of Modernism, and also some explicit critique of the Soviet
regime. The belated premiere of the Fourth Symphony, in 1961, and the
appearance of a revised Lady Macbeth (retitled Katerina Ismailova) in
1963, reacquainted Western listeners with Shostakovich's wild side and
re-established his Modernist credentials; in 1962 the Thirteenth
Symphony, Babi Yar, to poems of Yevtushenko, seemed like an overt act
of political resistance, as proven by the Soviet Government's demand
that lines that explicitly attacked anti-Semitism be altered.
Shostakovich's last decade, however, further muddled his "case". He
travelled abroad more often and formed a close friendship with
Benjamin Britten. The dark, death-haunted Fourteenth Symphony can be
heard as a homage to the War Requiem. Yet at the same time Western
attention was drawn to young composers such as Edison Denisov, who
rebelled against the official Soviet style by writing in a twelve-tone
idiom, and to the emerging critics of the Soviet system. In August
1973, Shostakovich's name appeared on a letter attacking the dissident
Andrei Sakharov - a final sign of his apparent blind loyalty to the
system. His late works, like the Fifteenth Symphony and the last three
quartets, struck Western listeners as gnomic and depressed, faint
echoes of the composer of the Fifth Symphony. Shostakovich died of
lung cancer in 1975.
Everything in the preceding paragraphs is uncontroversial. And yet we
might remind ourselves that well before Testimony: The memoirs of
Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov
(1979), reconfigured the whole story, the facts and the music could be
interpreted in different ways. To Stalinists, Shostakovich's oeuvre
was a glorious proof of Soviet "humanism". To anti-Communists, his
humiliating capitulations to the party were proof of Soviet villainy.
To left-liberals, he was a sympathetic victim of Stalin's perversion
of socialism. For many thinkers on the Left in the 1940s, the composer
who symbolized victimization was not Shostakovich but Stravinsky.
Stalin might be bad but the (then) almighty dollar was worse. How
tragic it appeared that the composer of Le sacre was now reduced to
accepting commissions from Billy Rose, Paul Whiteman, the Barnum and
Bailey Circus - and then, in yet another step of desperation, to
writing a Catholic mass. The Soviet Union supported its artists -
while look what America did to Bartók and Webern. Or Ives. Surprising
echoes of these antique opinions can still be heard today in the
"Shostakovich wars".
The current dispute stems from TestimonyThe memoirs of Dmitri
Shostakovich as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov, published in
1979. Testimony, which turned Shostakovich's image around 180 degrees.
The musical defender of the Soviet system now appeared as its most
persistent critic. Testimony was also published at an opportune
moment. In the East, the USSR was unravelling; in the West, musical
Modernism was on its deathbed. When the post-Webern millennium failed
to arrive, Western concert halls showed a new openness to solidly
crafted, intensely expressive music like Shostakovich's symphonies and
chamber music, but first the music had to be cleansed of its
politically suspect content. Musicology, too, was in a state of
transition; overthrowing the yoke of formal analysis and inspired by
the latest fashions in literary theory, musicologists turned their
scrutiny from structure to content, from form to meaning.
Shostakovich's music always seemed to tell a story, but Testimony's
new portrait of Shostakovich was a hermeneutic dream come true;
everything had to be reread. The writings of Christopher Norris and
the late Ian MacDonald hailed the arrival of a "new" Shostakovich
whose meaning was the reverse of what it had seemed just a few years
before. George Orwell and Lewis Carroll may have chuckled in their
graves.
At first, nearly everyone seemed happy with the "new" composer;
grumblings about Testimony from within the USSR were blamed on the
KGB. But soon Western scholars began expressing doubts about Volkov's
claim that Testimony was based on his interviews with Shostakovich and
that the composer had signed off every chapter. Laurel E. Fay
discovered that large passages from the book were literal but
unacknowledged quotations from previously published articles by the
composer; she suspected that he had signed only pages that contained
these older materials, and by 2002 she had documented evidence that
Volkov had repaginated the manuscript to make it appear that the
composer had approved pages that he might never have read. Other
musicologists, especially Richard Taruskin, the leading American
expert on Russian music, came to the conclusion that the wholesale
reinterpretation of Shostakovich's oeuvre that followed in the wake of
Testimony was fruit of the poison tree.
A Shostakovich Casebook, edited by Macolm Hamrick Brown, states the
case against Volkov and his defenders, MacDonald, Allan Ho and Dmitri
Feofanov; Volkov's Shostakovich and Stalin, however, barely
acknowledges the existence of any dispute, but restates and elaborates
Testimony's arguments, this time in Volkov's voice rather than
Shostakovich's.
Who is winning the Shostakovich wars? The answer depends on where you
locate the battleground. In Shostakovich and His World, edited by
Laurel E. Fay, and the Casebook, American, British and Russian
scholars take turns bayoneting Testimony and its defenders. But in
concert halls, at least American ones, Volkov seems triumphant.
Performances of any Shostakovich work are routinely preceded by actors
impersonating the composer and his nemesis, Stalin - or are they Luke
Skywalker and Darth Vader? We can thank Volkov to some extent for the
vast increase in the performances of Shostakovich's music - and also
blame him for supplying a black-and-white subtext which has encouraged
interpretations of the music that exaggerate its expressive gestures
to the point of self-parody . . . .
Peter T. Daniels
>
> David Shiff: The Shostakovich wars
> Who is winning the Shostakovich wars? The answer depends on where you
> locate the battleground. In Shostakovich and His World, edited by
> Laurel E. Fay, and the Casebook, American, British and Russian
> scholars take turns bayoneting Testimony and its defenders. But in
> concert halls, at least American ones, Volkov seems triumphant.
> Performances of any Shostakovich work are routinely preceded by actors
> impersonating the composer and his nemesis, Stalin - or are they Luke
> Skywalker and Darth Vader?
They are???? Can anyone document this happening once, let alone
"routinely"?
--
Peter T. Daniels gram...@att.net