September 01, 2006

Dmitry Shostakovich

a life challenged by the Powers That Be

“For some reason, it seems like everyone is looking at me. It seems as if they are whispering among themselves, following me with their gaze. And the main thing is that it seems they are waiting for me to fall, or at least to stumble. And so I feel that at any minute I will stumble. When the lights go out before a performance, I am almost happy… But, as soon as the lights are back on, I am once again unhappy.”

This is what, in the final years of his life, Dmitry Dmitriyevich Shostakovich told biographer Solomon Volkov. Such was his tragically painful perception of his “grey and miserable” life.

Now, one hundred years after Dmitry Shostakovich’s birth (September 25, 1906 – or September 12, old style), it is clear that this innovator has become a classic. Every important orchestra and pianist performs his work. Recordings of his music fill music stores. The opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, is firmly established as part of the international repertoire. In this centennial year, there has been great interest in the personality of the maestro and in his amazing fate, which has been elaborately and tragically intertwined with the fate of Russia.

Shostakovich’s youth might seem the auspicious beginning of a charmed life. At the age of 13, he was admitted to the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where he quickly demonstrated his talent as both a composer and musician. Even his early works brought him renown far beyond Russia’s borders. Shostakovich followed a rich Russian operatic and symphonic tradition, but at the same time sought his own means of artistic expression.

It was the 1920s, a time of unrestrained experimentation in all spheres of art. The Civil War – which had ruined, waylaid, or sent into exile legions of writers, artists, philosophers, and musicians – was now over. Furthermore, for many young people, the revolution seemed to a certain extent a reflection of their own artistic quests. There was a reason that a large number of artists, poets, and film directors made a sincere choice to serve the Bolshevik cause. They believed that victory for the political Left would lead to victory for the artistic Left, that the collapse of the Old World would create an opportunity for artistic innovation. For Shostakovich, the 1920s was a time of collaboration with Mayakovsky and Meyerhold, and a time of constant experimentation.

But, with time, the situation in the country changed. With the dawn of the 1930s, the young avant-garde was increasingly supplanted by adherents of officially-approved Realism, and its impetuous revolutionary views came to be less and less compatible with the ossified ideology of the new communist empire. It was during these years that Shostakovich, who had already achieved wide fame, demonstrated his affinity for the tragic grotesque. He wrote The Nose, an opera based on one of Gogol’s most bizarre and macabre tales, followed by a work that turned his life upside down – Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.

Nikolai Leskov’s novel is about Katerina Izmailova, a merchant’s wife who kills her father-in-law, husband, and child for the sake of her young lover, with whom she is sent into forced labor. She ultimately dies as she drowns a rival for her lover’s attentions. This story was so out of step with the era of the first Five Year Plans, that one can only wonder at how taken the young Shostakovich must have been with it to dare to develop it into an opera. The novel, perceptually-difficult, erotic and bizarre music instantly transformed Shostakovich from being just a famous composer into an internationally renowned genius.

The opera was staged in the major opera houses of countless countries; its author was relentlessly acclaimed both in the Soviet Union and abroad. This made the change that took place over the course of one day seem all the more sinister. On January 28, 1936, an article that has since achieved historical notoriety – “Muddle Instead of Music” (Sumbur vmesto muzyki) – appeared in Pravda. It remains a mystery whether the article was written by Stalin, who was put off by the unconventionality of the music and the “indecency” of the subject matter, or by one of his henchmen. In any event, the blow delivered by the Pravda article was tantamount to a death sentence.

Shostakovich, who at the time was in Arkhangelsk, went out one frosty morning to buy a newspaper and had the ground swept out from under him. Others standing in the queue made lighthearted fun of the fellow in front of them who was drunk so early in the day. Little did they know that before them was a great composer who had just seen his world come crashing down around him. Fortunately, Shostakovich was not arrested. We will probably never know whether Stalin had merely intended to scare the composer or if Shostakovich was helped by the intercession of members of the Soviet cultural establishment who dared to speak on his behalf.

Several years passed and Shostakovich again achieved official recognition. His subsequent life was marked by a series of strange turns. He was exalted and named to numerous official positions. Shostakovich’s evolution from being a creator of avant-garde music to composing more melodic and traditional works was perceived as a correct “reaction to criticism.”

His Seventh Symphony, written in Leningrad during the blockade, was praised by the authorities and seen as a memorial to heroes of the Great Patriotic War. This did not prevent his music from being officially denounced as “formalist” a few years later, in 1948.

The following year, when Stalin forced Shostakovich to speak at a peace conference in America, the composer was certain that this was part of a game of cat-and-mouse and that he was being held up to the free and democratic world only to be later destroyed.

It was around this time that he decided to compose something “for the drawer” – a strange satirical composition, Little Antiformalist Paradise (Antiformalist Rayok), which depicted sinister buffoons leading a struggle to make music more “simple” and to bring it down to the level of the people. The work was not performed until 1989.

With Stalin’s death in 1953 came a final period of relative calm. The great composer spent the remaining years of his life, which ended in 1975, in relative peace and well-being, officially recognized by the regime and free of conflict with it. In 1960, when there did not appear to be any pressing need to do so, Shostakovich joined the Communist Party. He obediently said what he was supposed to say, attended the meetings he was supposed to attend, and signed what he was supposed to sign. Meanwhile, he was constantly creating his amazing and tragic music. Over the course of his lifetime, Shostakovich wrote fifteen symphonies and numerous quartets, preludes, oratorios, film scores, and songs. He was constantly composing. The authorities attempted to tame him, and indeed many perceived him as a loyal servant of the regime.

When Russian biographer Solomon Volkov left the Soviet Union for America and published a book of his conversations with Shostakovich, it unleashed a storm (see Russian Life, Sep/Oct 2001). Many people, including the composer’s widow, repudiated and continue to repudiate the harsh denunciations of Stalin Volkov attributes to Shostakovich, along with Volkov’s versions of the composer’s explication of his own music, according to which the Tenth Symphony paints a horrifying musical portrait of Stalin and the Eleventh and Fourteenth reflect the composer’s anguish over the executions of innocent victims of the regime.

Two irreconcilable images of Shostakovich emerge – one of an official bard of the Communist authorities, whether acting of his own free will or under compulsion, and the other of a genius following the rules of the game on the surface, but expressing his true feelings through his majestic, somber, and, at times, grotesque music.

But now, on the centennial of Shostakovich’s birth, this question is secondary. Shostakovich composed music during a tragic time, and his music is a perfect reflection of the horrors of the 20th century.

When, during his 1949 visit to America, Shostakovich delivered a speech that had been prepared for him about the superiority of Soviet over “bourgeois” art, he was asked what he thought about the castigation of great composers like Stravinsky in the Soviet press. The Russian expatriate who asked the question could probably imagine the humiliation the great musician felt, not knowing whether awards or arrest awaited him on his return to the motherland. Shostakovich said that he fully shared the opinions expressed by his country’s press. Many years later, recalling this incident with irritation, he said:

I am judged by what I said or didn’t say to Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones. Isn’t that absurd? Newspaper articles should serve as a basis for judging their authors. Let them be used to judge Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones. What I have is my music. And quite a bit of music. Let them judge me by my music. I have no intention of commenting on it.

September 01, 2006

Dmitry Shostakovich

See Also

Testimony: Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich

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