The Genius of Shostakovich

During his life, Dmitry Shostakovich, by now recognized as one of the major composers of the twentieth century, was too often judged for what he said in words, rather than through his music. Today, over a quarter century after his death, we can look more objectively at his life, work, and legacy.

Dmitry Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was born in St. Petersburg, on September 25, 1906. Despite his Jewish-sounding name, he was of Russian and Polish ancestry. Historically, Poles were the rebels within the Russian empire and had to be repeatedly subjugated. No doubt influenced by his heritage, Shostakovich, from childhood, was politically aware. It should come as no surprise that his first compositions were titled “Hymn to Freedom,” “Revolutionary Symphony,” and “Funeral March to the Victims of the Revolution.”

Shostakovich was a miraculously gifted musician. Not since Mozart had the world known someone who could perform so many musical tricks so often. A conductor friend (Nicholas Malko) remarked to him, “They tell me you are a genius. If you really are, you will write down and orchestrate this dance piece from memory.” So he did, in forty-five minutes. Fast-forward some forty years, and another conductor--Gennady Rozhdestvensky—recalled with astonishment how Shostakovich, after hearing a loud tutti passage, pointed out a mistake: the harps should have been playing harmonics, and did not. (Harps are decidedly inaudible if an entire orchestra is playing.) Such unbelievable ability was matched by only one other musician in the twentieth century—Glenn Gould, who, to the astonishment of his sound engineers, could tell the difference in the playback between two digital recorders (which, theoretically, should not have any difference in the quality of their playback, having identical technical characteristics).

Shostakovich studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, both as a composer and a pianist. His graduation thesis was his First Symphony, which achieved world-wide acclaim. He was eighteen. Inevitably, after some youthful sturm und drang, he came into conflict with the authorities. He was too intelligent, too irreverent, and too sarcastic to have a pleasant life in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. And when Stalin took notice of your work and expressed his displeasure, it was not like getting a star and a half in your review; things could end very badly.

Shostakovich was chastised twice, in 1936 and again in 1948. He feared for his life, and kept his toothbrush and towel packed in a bag, expecting arrest. He himself credited his survival to his movie scores, written in a powerful, accessible idiom. They were useful to the propaganda aims of the Soviet state. Others note that Stalin restrained himself because he wanted a panegyric from this most famous of Soviet composers; Shostakovich resisted for a long time, producing the required “masterpiece” (Song of The Forests) only in 1949.

With the death of the dictator in 1953 came the “Thaw.” By that time, Shostakovich’s psyche was irreparably damaged; however, he was not broken, only bent. In the early sixties, he once again openly defied the Soviet regime over its anti-Semitism (in his Thirteenth Symphony). Nonetheless, as the proverb has it, “once burned, twice shy.” In parallel to this defiance, Shostakovich signed every denunciation letter the authorities asked him to and read every speech in support of the Soviet “peace offensive” which they asked him to read. In return, The Powers That Be allowed him to die in the “big zone” (an expression in use during the Soviet era by concentration camp prisoners, who contrasted the “big zone”—the entire Soviet Union, to the limited “zone” of the camps).    

Chronicler of the Soviet Era

Shostakovich wrote in every major genre. One of his operas (Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District) is considered a masterpiece. Other masterpieces include his first violin concerto, second piano sonata, and most quartets. (Decidedly non-masterpieces are his piano concertos and ballets.)

However, it is to the genre of the symphony that Shostakovich gave his most profound and provocative thoughts. In the century that was marked by declarations that the symphonic form was dead, or at least dying, he composed monumental canvasses that, within themselves, encompassed entire universes and are now viewed as kind of “secret chronicle” of the Soviet era.

After a few occasion pieces (his Second and Third Symphonies), he wrote a monumental and tragic Fourth. Coming on eve of the purges of 1937, it proved too much to swallow; he withdrew it from premiere, and it was not heard until 1961. Coming in the midst of the purges of 1937 was his Fifth Symphony, another monumental and tragic work, the meaning of which was not lost on its first Leningrad listeners—after the requiem-like slow movement, many in the hall wept.

Another milestone was the Seventh (the “Leningrad Symphony”). Ostensibly depicting, in crude and external ways, the Nazi invasion, it achieved a poster-like status during WWII. Its score was flown to the United States on a bomber, and leading conductors vied for the honor of the American premiere (Toscanini won). In fact, as Shostakovich confessed later, the Seventh Symphony was about the Leningrad that Stalin destroyed, and which Hitler merely finished. The Seventh was followed by the Eighth, another monumental and tragic (is there a pattern here?) work. It was denounced by the authorities, who had, by now, begun to wise up to Shostakovich’s subversive ways.

The war ended, and the Soviet Beethoven was supposed to offer up a Ninth Symphony—something with cannons, chorus and a balalaika orchestra—like Prokofiev’s Cantata to the 20^th Anniversary of the October Revolution. Needless to say, the chorus was to sing about the Great Leader, who single-handedly won the war. Instead, Shostakovich gave the Leader none of the above—no cannons, no chorus, no balalaika orchestra, just a little paranoid hype.

After Stalin’s death, Shostakovich composed one of his most personal utterances—the Tenth Symphony. The riddle-like quality of this symphony has recently been deciphered—its motives represent, in musical terms, Stalin, Shostakovich, and Shostakovich’s love interest. In the climactic moment of the finale, the motives of Stalin and Shostakovich clash, and Shostakovich wins.

In the twilight of his life, Shostakovich summed up the main themes of his music. In his Thirteenth Symphony, he turned again to the theme of confrontation between the individual and authority. His Fourteenth was about death, and as bleak a piece as they come. His Fifteenth Symphony, his last, is filled with enigmatic quotations ranging from Rossini to Wagner; Shostakovich looks back at his life and anticipates the moment of its end.

The Testimony Controversy

Shostakovich, who Stalin considered a master of movie music, did not separate styles into “high” and “low.” He used the same musical language to express his ideas in movie scores as he did in symphonies. Perhaps this explains his accessibility to listeners and the disdain in which he was held by critics.

For decades, Shostakovich was considered a third-rate “Hollywood” composer. His symphonies were too much like his movie music; his movie music was too much like his symphonies. Both were long-winded, banal, crude, and appeared to be concerned mostly with external effects.

It is ironic that these views changed because of an external, extra-musical source. Shortly before his death, Shostakovich dictated his memoirs to a musicologist, to be published in the West posthumously. They were. In his memoirs, Testimony, Shostakovich talked longingly about the teachers and friends of his youth. He also made some comments about his music (calling his symphonies “tombstones”) and spoke candidly about his relations with the Soviet regime.

Testimony was a revelation. It revealed a private persona of Shostakovich drastically at odds with his official image. It also offered tantalizing hints regarding the true meaning of some of his works. It was an eye-opener to every intelligent musician and listener; as a result, the stature of Shostakovich shot up and, instead of being seen as a Hollywood-like hack, he is now considered Solzhenitsyn’s musical equivalent.

Inevitably, there was controversy. The Soviets, deeply offended by the “betrayal” of this “loyal son of the Communist Party,” immediately declared Testimony a CIA-produced forgery, and called Shostakovich’s collaborator, the musicologist who put the book together, a “bedbug.” Many American academics, deeply offended that someone dared to challenge their conception of Shostakovich (even though the challenger was the composer himself), joined the fray. The editor of Testimony, and the person responsible for smuggling the manuscript to the West, Solomon Volkov, was branded a forger and a liar, and saw his career destroyed. The fact that Volkov, a person with a gift for getting people to “open up,” had a track record of collaboration with other important musical and literary figures (Nathan Milstein, George Balanchine, and Joseph Brodsky), resulting in similar memoirs, mattered little.

A curious situation developed. While the image of Shostakovich, as depicted in Testimony, had been accepted as true by every intelligent musician, it was also universally accepted that Testimony was a forgery. The matter might have rested at that, but for the conviction of a University of Kentucky piano professor, who thought that, for the CIA forgery, Testimony spent too many pages describing the teaching and drinking habits of Shostakovich’s composition teacher, Alexander Glazunov.

I was that professor. In the early 1980s, my colleague Allan Ho and I were assembling an English-language dictionary of Russian/Soviet composers. The articles on important figures were farmed out to experts in the field. Having read Testimony, I thought it rang true, and I persuaded my colleague that we should ask Volkov to write the article on Shostakovich. (He did.)

Twenty years later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Solomon Volkov approached us with a suggestion to put together a collection of recent writings about Shostakovich. As part of this collection, we wanted to address the Testimony controversy, and asked Volkov to relate his side of the story. He declined, having long before adopted the posture of “never explain, never apologize.” However, he made a counter-offer—to open his archives to us, to use as we saw fit.

What was meant to be a thirty-page preface grew into a 300-page section, nearly half of Shostakovich Reconsidered, a book we edited. Going through Testimony with a fine-tooth comb, we were astonished to discover that, not only did it not contain any contradictions or inconsistencies, as was claimed by its detractors, but, in fact, it referenced facts that had to have come from Shostakovich himself.

Chief among them was the existence of “Rayok,” a hilarious response to his chastisement in 1948, which Shostakovich wisely concealed from the world, and which was premiered only in 1989, in Washington, D.C. It contains vicious parodies of the speeches made by Soviet officials in 1948, beginning with profound and circular utterances by “Number One,” set to the tune of Stalin’s favorite Georgian folksong. This was a shooting offense. And Testimony (published in 1979) was the first public reference to its existence.

Coincidences continued. Vladimir Ashkenazy, who eventually wrote the preface for Shostakovich Reconsidered, sent me a copy of the reminiscences of Shostakovich’s confidante, Flora Litvinova. I was not planning on reading the original Russian version, since an English version was available to us. Yet, on a train to Chicago, I leafed through it, and came across a passage where Litvinova relates how Shostakovich told her of his meetings with a “young Leningrad musicologist,” for purposes of dictating his memoirs (needless to say, the then twenty-something Volkov was from Leningrad). “How could we have missed such a smoking-gun confession?”—I asked my colleague Allan Ho, who must have been red-faced despite his Chinese complexion. As it turned out, the fault was not ours: the crucial passage was censored out of the English translation of Litvinova’s memoirs. The editor of that book explained her decision to omit the crucial paragraph because of a lack of space in her 500-plus page book; she was also unwilling to get involved in the Testimony controversy. Another “scholar” subsequently explained Litvinova away by claiming she was confused (without checking with her, as we did).

Does all this matter? Apparently so. Music is an abstract art, and it helps in its understanding to know the circumstances of its creation. It is also apparent now that musicology, a discipline that purports to “explain” what music is all about, is woefully inadequate for the task. The Shostakovich paradigm is a case in point: for decades musicologists were telling us that his symphonies seek to glorify the Soviet regime. Now the same musicologists (well, most of them) are telling us that his symphonies seek to condemn the Soviet regime. Even the fence-sitters are conceding that there is no glorification in his sincere works, and whatever glorification works he wrote were written because his physical survival was in question.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that Shostakovich’s case was unique in the history of music. Never before did the compositional legacy of a composer undertake a 180-degree reversal because of a book. Testimony took the proverbial veil off the listeners’ ears. All this—because of fate and efforts of one man. Without it, Shostakovich, who so bravely spoke against tyranny in his music, would have been still regarded as a communist lackey and Soviet Russia’s most loyal musical son.

Perhaps the real legacy of Shostakovich consists of two things: first, a corpus of works that, collectively, make up the Gulag Archipelago of twentieth century music; second, a realization that the voice of an artist pitted against the most powerful tyranny in history was finally heard, despite the tyranny’s efforts to crush it, due to fate and the efforts of another man. One wonders how many voices we have not heard because fate was not willing, and no man brought them to us. RL

*****

Dmitry Feofanov is a pianist, lawyer and one of the editors of Shostakovich Reconsidered (Toccata Press, 1998), of Biographical Dictionary of Russian/Soviet Composers (1989) and Rare Masterpieces of Russian Piano Music (1984). He makes his living suing car dealers in Naperville, Illinois. Steven R. Manley and Allan B. Ho also collaborated on this article.

Caption for the Picture: Dmitry Feofanov, Solomon Volkov, Allan Ho, Martin Anderson (publisher, Toccata Press), and Vladimir Ashkenazy.

SIDEBAR

Additional Reading

Testimony -- The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, As related to and edited by Solomon Volkov is now in its 5th edition, published by Proscenium (1999).

Shostakovich Reconsidered, by Allan Benedict Ho, Dmitry Feofanov (Editor), Vladimir Ashkenazy (Translator), (Toccato Press, 1998). Widely praised for bringing an end to the controversy over Testimony, this book took two decades to compile and is a must-read on the greatest musical debate of the 20th century. For more information, visit the author’s website at:

http://www.siue.edu/~aho/musov/shosrecon.html

Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, by Elizabeth Wilson (Princeton University Press, $18.36). Wilson undertook to interview dozens of the composer’s family, friends and enemies, and compiled the interviews here with official documents, letters and diaries to present an amazing first-hand portrait of the composer.

Shostakovich: A Life, by Laurel E. Fay (Oxford University Press, 2000). For the latest salvo in the anti-Testimony view, read Fay’s new book.

Additional Listening

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5 and Symphony No. 9, performed by the Russian National Orchestra, Vladimir Spivakov, conductor. (available on the Russian Arts Foundation website: www.russianarts.org)

Websites

For Allan Ho’s Shostokovichiana, visit:

http://www.siue.edu/~aho/musov/dmitri.html

The site includes everything from reviews of CDs to a full history of the Testimony debate to biographies and diaries about the composer.