On Music
SIMON, JOHN
On Music The Sorrows of Shostakovich By John Simon Few things, if any, are harder to determine than the meaning of a piece of music. Absolute music, that is—not the setting of a text or,...
...Though Zhdanov died in 1949, his spirit lived on as bureaucrats continued to persecute the intelligentsia and any independent-spirited artist...
...It became the symphony's first movement...
...The second crashing blow came in 1948...
...Many of the composer's song cycles fall under the same heading...
...As Maes remarks, "Dissidence did not exist under Stalin: All his opponents were either dead or in the gulag...
...Glinka, Balakirev, Musorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and Stravinsky had all made offensive remarks...
...thus the stranger with the stick suggested the secret police, who usually made their arrests in the wee hours...
...For a composer and his music to survive in harsh times, a heroic obstinacy may well be the right recipe...
...Included as well is an earlier Pushkin cycle, Four Romances to Words by Pushkin, op...
...Yet Stalin seems to have been offended less by the music than by what he considered licentious eroticism, even though the libretto closely followed an 1864 story by Nikolai Leskov, a Russian classic...
...About the life, the big question is: Was he a true believer in Communism, or a nonbeliever coerced into fellow-traveling...
...I imagine now that I am a Jew./ Here I wander through ancient Egypt./ And here I hang on the cross and die./ And still I bear the marks of the nails...
...These are lyrical outpourings of love, the sort of thing not often set by Shostakovich, and amazingly melodious...
...In him one quality obliterates the other...
...The Soviets considered this too pro-Jewish, so the poet had to rewrite eight lines...
...is a plea to remember a forgotten friend in times of loneliness...
...In addition, the opera portrayed certain peoples of the northern Caucasus as enemies of the Russians during the civil war, whereas Stalin held the opposite view...
...Shostakovich got into trouble with his Thirteenth Symphony because one of the five Yevgeny Yevtushenko poems he set was "Babi Yar," about the Nazi wartime murder of Ukrainian Jews...
...Dmitry Shostakovich, though, repeatedly told us that the only answer to any personal question about him is to be found in his music...
...The setting of texts, of course, involved a double jeopardy: Words were just as liable to censorhip as notes...
...This was Shostakovich's last song cycle, and its premiere was the last he attendedrin 1975...
...Why does a man strike up a jolly song...
...It is against this background that Shostakovich's output must be viewed...
...This becomes: "I stand there as if at a wellspring./ That gives me faith in our brotherhood./ Here lie Russians and Ukrainians,/ With Jews they lie in the same earth...
...The composer seems to have been shuttling between works that, covertly or not, defied the Party's demands, and others that, out of prudence or coercion, conformed to them, at least enough to get by the commissars...
...Earlier it would have been condemned as "Western formalism...
...Berlin Classics 90162, Capriccio 10788, and Chandos 9600...
...the supposed relaxation of strictures under Nikfta S. Khrushchev has been exaggerated...
...He is exactly what you say he is, plus something else—he is hard, acid, extremely intelligent, strong perhaps, despotic and not altogether goodnatured (although cerebrally good-natured...
...Elizabeth Wilson's Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (Princeton, 1994), part an oral history based on Wilson's interviews, part a cogent survey of published texts...
...That strikes me as the key to the man and his music...
...the third, "A Letter to Distant Siberia," was introduced by the conférencier with the explanation that such banishment occurred under the Tsars, which provoked titters among the audience...
...Shostakovich declared that he picked them "to tell about the fate of the Jewish people...
...It is possible to postulate a mood or a feeling, butnotameaning...
...The composer Edison Denisov, a Shostakovich disciple, is quoted by Wilson about classes he took with Vissarion Shebalin, a close composer friend of Shostakovich: "He didn't point to Shostakovich's melodic language, as he felt that this was one of the weaker aspects of Mitya's [familiar for Dmitry's] composing, and indeed, he told us that writing melodies was agonizing for him...
...Rather, it is sober verging on somber...
...These songs were, in Fay's words, "illuminated by intimate purpose distant from the composer's public mask...
...I have turned out a very sinister composition," he said...
...Part buffoonish, part cynical, it encapsulates two important aspects of the composer's music...
...Described as a satirical summing up in musical form, it is dryly amusing...
...Similar bravery and feeling for the Jews were affirmed earlier in that year of musical persecution (1948) with the private performance of Shostakovich's wonderful From Jewish Folk Poetry...
...It is almost a catastrophe...
...Where the book steps outside music, as when it calls the movie director Trauberg "David," not Leonid, it may be somewhat shaky...
...inciting ethnic hatred by elevating the wartime suffering of the Jews above that of Russians.' Undeterred, Shostakovich actually set the poem before getting Yevtushenko's enthusiastic permission...
...When music with a Jewish coloring was used at all, it was usually treated as part of the Orientalist mode...
...the other four featured poems wryly critical of contemporary society but less controversial...
...It was first performed in 1955 with piano accompaniment, which the composer orchestrated in 1964...
...These poems were set in October 1952, when Shostakovich had to curry favor at the 19th Communist Party Congress...
...Absolute music, that is—not the setting of a text or, say, a tone poem with an explanatory title...
...You cannot help wondering, therefore, whether its bitterness reflects the political situation, some specific incident in his life, or his whimsical decision to put a sardonic movement between a comic and a melancholy one for effect...
...146, based on Dostoyevsky texts...
...The five chosen here are sung by the elegant bass-baritone Sergei Leiferkus, accompanied by Semyon Skigin's expert pianism...
...Elizabeth Wilson quotes Shostakovich: "The distinguishing feature of Jewish music is the ability to build a jolly melody on sad intonations...
...Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin's culture czar, launched a series of ugly attacks on certain magazines, writers, playwrights, filmmakers, and, in February, musicians...
...But most interesting is the first, "Fragment," taking place in a humble cottage inhabited by an extended family of impoverished Jews...
...even so, Shostakovich found it safer to relegate the work to the drawer...
...Maes comments: "Such positive treatment of Jewish culture was new in the history of Russian music...
...Béla Bartók, who found it crude and jingoistic, parodied it in his Concerto for Orchestra...
...In him there are great contradictions...
...Moreover, we know how mood-driven most Russians are: ecstatic in their happiness, distraught in their sorrow...
...The first eight songs were composed in August, and are mostly somber or bitterly humorous...
...Something like serving an endive salad after red meat and before a sweet dessert...
...Thus the Fourth Symphony was one of his most demanding and daring efforts, leading Shostakovich to shelve it until 1962, a quarter century later...
...The last, besides a concise yet not skimpy section on Shostakovich, provides a good account of Russian music from Mikhail Glinka on...
...It is conflict in the highest degree...
...If, for example, apiece of music is considered to sound bitter, there remains the critical question: Why...
...62, are settings of translations of poems by Sir Walter Raleigh, Robert Burns, Shakespeare (Sonnet 64), and a nursery rhyme, also topleasingmelodies...
...Even the exemplary, and for a long time to come definitive, Shostakovich by Laurel E. Fay (Oxford, 2000) cannot come up with clear-cut answers to the many tormenting questions concerning its subject's life and work...
...The great composers of the previous generation had all been anti-Semites, with the exception of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov...
...These are short texts from that satirical magazine, e.g., a pensioner's account of boxing the ears of an arrogant bus driver, a personal ad (most likely a joke) seeking a well-heeled and understanding female companion, and an ironic tribute to fresh bread that smells of the harvesters' gasoline-soaked hands...
...Not even Stalin's death in 1953 brought very much relief...
...There was official criticism of Shostakovich...
...Each is recommendable, with the choice depending on the coupling you prefer...
...That the plight of the Jews became for Shostakovich a somewhat safer, symbolic way of expressing persecution of himself and other artists does not take away from the temerity and humanity of the work...
...When a furious Stalin stormed out well before the end, the opera's fate was sealed...
...From the day it was unveiled, the objection to the poem was (in Fay's words) its "trying to drive a wedge between nationalities...
...It was the only place he could express what he wasn't allowed to put into words...
...In a letter to the writer Marietta Shaginyan, he said: "It seemed to you that he is 'frail, fragile, withdrawn, an infinitely direct, pure child.' That is so...
...He was also intensely private, elusive, quirky, complex, and frequently contradictory...
...ALTHOUOH the booklet lacks a transliterated Russian text, Romances and Monologues is a worthwhile release...
...Such seesawing appears to reflect the composer's political vacillations...
...The Fifth Symphony, unofficially subtitled "A Soviet composer's response to just criticism," was, on the surface at any rate, "Socialist realism" with a vengeance, and a big success...
...The fourth, "Leavetaking," is a call for resignation after a necessary parting from loved ones...
...Both the conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky, who had premiered many of Shostakovich's previous works, and the bass Boris Gmirya, who had sung in a couple, refused to participate, much to the composer's chagrin...
...In the case of Shostakovich, whose life was a dizzying alternation of ups and downs—depending often, but not always, on whether the authorities were heaping punitive restrictions or embarrassingly fulsome honors on him—one really wants to know the meaning hidden in his work...
...The dictator's ire resulted in severe censorship of all music, and in Shostakovich's abandonment of opera despite sundry previously entertained projects...
...The sole extensive review, by a local critic, acknowledged good intentions and powerful music, while observing that the ideology was flawed and that the composer did not understand the Party's requisites for art...
...And why not...
...These are perfect examples of Shostakovich's technique: making a nourishing meal out of minimal melody...
...But, as Maes notes, he did not realize Stalin was probably instrumental in the commissar's death during the 1937 purges...
...But the scheduled TV broadcast was canceled, there was almost no press coverage, and there were few subsequent performances...
...But shelving it was judged wiser...
...And if you want more of this music, try to find Song Cycles for Bass Voice, a Saison Russe CD (RUS 288089, distributed by Harmonia Mundi), where Piotr Gluboky sings three of the same, but also two other important Shostakovich cycles...
...Not for them the subtle cerebrality of the French, the serene love of nature of the British, or the easy songfulness of the Italians...
...At the dress rehearsal, Viktor Nechipailo, the scheduled soloist, failed to show up, and was replaced by his standby, Vitaly Gromadsky...
...But one should not make too much of this quasiSubversion...
...Extreme emotional and stylistic dislocation between successive works were not uncommon," Fay remarks...
...its hero was the Georgian commissar Ordzhonikidze...
...Muradeli was charged with "falsification of the historical facts...
...Next, Five Romances to Poems by Dolmatovsky, op...
...There followsfive Romances to Texts from "Krokodil" Magazine, op...
...And then it may be possible to understand his art to some degree...
...His specific target was the opera The Great Friendship by the Georgian composer Vano Muradeli...
...And Shostakovich, unlike the more cosmopolitan Igor Stravinsky or Alexander Tcherepnin, was as Russian as the vodka he loved...
...The second one, "Why Do You Bother About My Name...
...His is a deeper (not better) voice, and, accompanied by Natalia Rassudova, he does a fine job especially on the Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin, op...
...It attests to honor and courage that, when the symphony was next performed —in remote Minsk—the composer was present and saw to it that the original text was sung...
...Four very different poems are given simple but fulfilling musical sustenance with relatively few but sawi ly applied and varied notes...
...It was performed with overwhelming success in the USSR and abroad until Stalin and his entourage belatedly came to see it...
...the wartime Seventh, known as the Leningrad Symphony, came across to worldwide acclaim as nobly patriotic...
...This becomes: "I think about Russia's heroic feats/ In blocking fascism's path./ To the very tiniest dewdrop,/ Her whole essence and fate is dear to me...
...In addition to the publication of the Maes book, the subject of this column was prompted by an interesting new Shostakovich release, Romances and Monologues (Koch-Schwann 1095...
...I have it on four very different CDs: London 417581...
...Was it merely a patriotic piece Shostakovich had to write to clear himself from accusations of "Western formalism," or was it as some claim (following Solomon Volkov's largely discredited Testimony) a disguised mockery of the pompous tyrant Stalin...
...But if it were only so, then great art (as with him) would never be obtained...
...In private, he enjoyed setting poems with a thinly veiled applicability to Stalin's Russia...
...Much of what follows is indebted to these three books...
...Despite its coming right after Zhdanov's attack, in a growing atmosphere of Stalinendorsed anti-Semitism, since the piece was based on folk songs (albeit of the "wrong" folk) and had accessible music, it was thought it could sneak by...
...About the work, the conundrum is: To what extent should one take, for instance, the Fifth Symphony at face value...
...They were meant to placate the authorities...
...The three books that anyone seriously interested in Shostakovich must read are the aforementioned Fay biography...
...but since all the principal participants, including the conductor Kiril Kondrashin, stood their ground, the authorities, wised up to the counterproductiveness of interdicts, allowed the concert to go on to great audience delight...
...In October, Shostakovich added three songs of a more cheerful nature, though perhaps with underlying ironic intent...
...At times it feels as if Shostakovich's music were one immense, protracted ostinato...
...Because he feels sad at heart...
...The Sixth Symphony was once more boldly experimental...
...Along with him, all major composers were threateningly reprimanded—except for Dmitry Kabalevsky, who had connections high up...
...You can argue that what matters is simply the bitterness, that the reason for it is unimportant...
...The disc begins with the posthumously discovered miniature Preface to the Complete Collection of My Works and Brief Reflections Apropos This Preface, op...
...Luckily for Shostakovich, he could cover up his melodic weakness with strengths in all other aspects of music...
...Anyone acquainted with Shostakovich's compositions will note their contradictory, paradoxical, evershifting nature...
...Annoyingly, this fine CD lasts under 58 minutes and could easily have accommodated another set of songs...
...The Six Romances on Texts by English Poets, op...
...as music history, it is both readable and trustworthy...
...That is the combination in which he must be seen...
...The best sizing up of Shostakovich is by the novelist Mikhail Zoshchenko, who knew the composer well...
...The initial virulent attack on Shostakovich and the other progressive composers came in an unsignedPravda article of January 28, 1936, entitled "Chaos [or Muddle] Instead of Music...
...and A History of Russian Music: From "Kamarinskaya "to "Babi Yar," by Francis Maes (English translation from the Dutch, California, 427 pp., $45.00,2002...
...Ironically, what caused that first of Shostakovich's two downfalls was one of his masterpieces, his second opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District...
...The poor fellow had set out to write a work in full accordance with official requirements...
...Last, and perhaps best, is Four Monologues on Poems by Pushkin, op...
...Genuinely laughing music, but not performable during the composer's lifetime...
...The work consists of 11 poems gleaned from an anthology of Yiddish songs with no tunes given...
...The Eighth Symphony again refuses to conform to the Soviet prescriptions: tunefulness, accessibility, use of folk melodies...
...After describing their misery, Pushkin evokes a midnight knock on the door by a stranger holding a wanderer's staff (read big stick) in his hand...
...It is instructive to compare the original eight lines of "Babi Yar' and their replacements...
...Again, the original: "And I become a long, soundless scream/ Above the thousands and thousands buried here./1 am each old man shot here,/1 each child here shot...
Vol. 85 • May 2002 • No. 3
