Shostakovich and the Politics of Survival

...All we do is reduce him to the level of our imperfect comprehension and our biases...

...Shostakovich surely deserves some credit for not being anti-Semitic, as were most non-Jewish Russian composers other than Rimsky-Korsakov...

...A "good" man or woman will, perhaps especially in a work of fiction, promulgate moral values, making the hero or heroine stand for the virtuous life...

...It can appear to be happy while it is tragic...

...Volkov, an émigré journalist, claimed on the basis of alleged interviews that Shostakovich was an out-and-out dissident, and that irony, satire, concealed but decipherable screeds are the true meaning of many of his later works...

...Other arguments against Volkov include the fact that Shostakovich initialed only the first pages of each chapter—there is no evidence thathe saw the rest—and that those first pages always consisted of verbatim transcriptions of previously published Shostakovichstatements, shamelessly transcribed from other sources...

...There was also other questionable stuff attributed to the composer in these "memoirs," whose Russian text has suspiciously never been made available to anyone, but their allegations promptly became fiercely debated...

...One chose the reading that suited one's needs, and in the Soviet Union there was an enormous need for that choice...

...The main thing I very much want now is to justify—if only to a small degree—the attention you have shown me...

...Though we generally possess less knowledge about a painter or sculptor than about a writer, we infer the artist's "goodness" from whether he depicts a character we are familiar with from myth or history as good or bad...

...And he quotes approvingly from Testimony remarks allegedly made by the composer: "Jewish folk music has made a most powerful impression on me...

...From 1934 until his death [his] service as a civil servant was constant and uninterrupted...

...Note how extremely seldom the villain emerges triumphant and the hero an unmitigated failure...

...Most likely he had very little use for the hardliners in his heart of hearts, but that does not mean he could not have been a true believer in an idealized notion of Communism...

...He was responding to a Central Committee decree promoted by Secretary Andrei Zhdanov that attacked him and others by trying to curry favor...

...Not so Shostakovich, in several of whose compositions Jewish idiom is patently discernible, most obviously in the song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry...

...by camp following, she indirectly causes the deaths of the other two...

...I myself, then friendly with Mstislav Rostropovich's daughter Olga, remember running into Shostakovich's grandson in her company...

...Though one may view these and other musical passages as double-bottomed, there is no authoritative proof that the composer so intended it...

...Settings of texts, especially opera, are a different matter...

...The reality, though, is that Shostakovich, as Fay, Maes and Taruskin have shown, wrote the song cycle a year before Stalin's anti-Semitic hysteria surfaced in 1949...

...In no way could he have been what Volkov claims: a full-fledged dissenter...

...Whatever hurt he felt or grudge he bore, however, he did not vent in public...

...Thus Michelangelo's naked, bound and contorted male slaves may be viewed as expressions of his known homosexuality and possible sadomasochism—or, to quote the Phaidon Encyclopedia of Art and Artists, as "the struggle against a hostile fate...

...Some of this can be explained as the opportunism required from anyone not wishing to be a hero and martyr...

...So it is that passages supposedly depicting the Nazi invasion of Russia in World War II and the Tsarist troops massacring peaceful protesters in 1905 have been interpreted, respectively, as a satire on Stalin's tyrannical persona and a protest against the brutal quelling of the Hungarian rebellion in 1956...

...That he was not the uncompromising antagonist Volkov portrays on the basis of fake quotations, specious arguments and numerous imaginary interviews is evident, too, from his widow's statement that Dmitri gave no more than maybe three or four interviews to Volkov...

...A writer deals in words, and even if they take as many liberties with everyday reality as a poem can, words may be construed as exemplars: models for perception or behavior, influencing readers' thoughts and actions...

...As Taruskin puts it in his Casebook essay, such "music was at once an irresistible expressive conveyance and a tabula rasa on which all and sundry could inscribe their various messages with a minimum of resistance...

...Although it didnot originate there, the issue came to a head with the publication in English of Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov, translated by Antonina W. Bouis (1979...

...not for him was voluntary emigration an option, as it was for some genuine dissidents...

...is a gross misstep...

...In the booklet notes to the Chandos recording of that song cycle (Chandos 8800), the conductor and cellist Yuli Turovsky observes that it was composed "at a time when the mere word 'Jew' sounded like a curse...

...Something similar applies to painting and sculpture...

...No musical issue of modem times has been more hotly argued than the question of whether Shostakovich was in fact a good Communist and that his post-1936 works should be taken at face value as conforming to Soviet musical and political standards...

...Best to heed Taruskin's warning: "By turning Shostakovich into a saint, a hero, or a martyr to gratify our hatred of the evil that surrounded him, we grant him no posthumous victory...

...Take his two most famous protagonists, Mack the Knife and Mother Courage...

...Concomitantly, the villain in the story will reap some just punishment...

...By the same token, Taruskin notes, a critic of Joe McCarthy could be called an enemy of America or friend of Russia...

...Perhaps the best examples of moral doubletalk come from Bertolt Brecht, whose Communism was a mere peccadillo compared to his basic rottenness...

...When music with a Jewish coloring was used at all, it was usually treated as part of the orientalist mode...

...its content is realistic, portraying as it does ordinary people...

...But, beyond that, if we don't want to make Shostakovich into an utter hypocrite, we must concede a certain amount of genuine fealty...

...In addition, I have consulted two very important collections published earlier: Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, by Elizabeth Wilson (1994), comprising memories of the composer by a good many people, and Story of a Friendship: The Letters of Dmitri Shostakovich to Isaak Glikman with a Commentary by Isaak Glikman (2001), an intimate correspondence...

...Mack is an out-and-out scoundrel: Head of a gang of thieves, bigamist and whoremonger, he lands in jail, but escapes hanging as a highwayman by a lastminute, deus ex machina reprieve...

...And she should know...

...The work was doubtless intended as a subtle protest against anti-Semitic trends engendered by Stalin's paranoia...

...He inspired its loyalists, not all of whom were stupid and insensitive, without an evident undermining subtext of irony, parody and satire...

...Besides providing yet another similar letter from 1949, Maximenkov reminds us that Shostakovich "all along...

...As he saw it, From Jewish Folk Poetry satisfies, to quote Maes, "all official demands: It is intelligible...

...The morality of the writer, therefore, becomes a matter of importance...

...They are Shostakovich and His World (Princeton, 405 pp., $55.00 cloth, $22.95 paper) edited by Laurel E. Fay, author of the best Shostakovich critical biography...

...And a very potent anti-Volkovian argument is based on Shostakovich coming to prefer Katerina Izmailova, the bowdlerized version of his Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District opera, to the vastly superior original, whose suppression he advocated...

...and A Shostakovich Casebook (Indiana, 392 pp., $39.95) edited by the Russian music scholar Malcolm HamrickBrown...

...And much more in the same vein...

...text and music are based on folklore...

...In another letter, of February 1,1947, he thanks Stalin for a new Moscow apartment: "With all my heart I thank you for your concern about me...

...In theory, it should not matter which interpretation is true, but we hopefully lean toward the latter...

...Their books, too, have been suitably demolished by just about every specialist, notably Fay and Richard Taruskin...

...To jump from the work called Antiformalist Peepshow and certain comments in the letters to Glikman, Taruskin continues, to an assumption that they represent "blunt anti-Communism (or proWesternism...

...As for Mother Courage, the amoral canteen woman of the Thirty Years' War, she trundles after the troops and exploits them...

...This is more or less understandable—which is not to say justifiable—in the case of writers and painters, but absurd in the case of composers...

...About the second movement of the 11th Symphony ("January Ninth") he observes, "Guns go bang whether wielded by Tsarists or Soviets, and all that Shostakovich had put into his score . was the bang...

...Thus it became "the secret diary of a nation...

...The composer, moreover, was no hero...

...This then becomes an earnest of the author's basic decency...

...Two new books about Shostakovich are of undeniable interest...

...This and similar Volkov stratagems have been scrupulously documented...

...True, the modern hero may have more and greater flaws than his earlier counterparts, but rascal, opportunist or libertine, prostitute, adulteress or scheming royal mistress, he or she benefits from an authorial sympathy that affords some kind of whitewash...

...Dissidence did not exist under Stalin: All his opponents were either dead or in the gulag...

...All this by way of preamble to the case of Dmitri Shostakovich, one of the past century's finest composers, whose life does not readily conform to most people's moral expectations...

...As Francis Maes puts it in A History of Russian Music (2001), "The idea that Shostakovich was a lifelong dissident is anachronistic...

...He then quotes from the same passage in Testimony cited above...

...The composition even ushered in a new trend: the so-called New Folklore Wave...

...In English, chief among the former are Ian MacDonald (The New Shostakovich, 1990), and Allan B. Ho and Dmitri Feofanov (Shostakovich Reconsidered, with an "Overture" by Vladimir Ashkenazy, 1998...

...On the Berlin Classics recording of the cycle (BC 90162), the annotator Hanns-Werner Heister affirms that "Shostakovich wrote [the work] in 1948, the year of the infamous Communist Party resolution condemning contemporary music trends...

...Yet the amoral author makes him charming (as Brecht himself could be) in various ways, not least by portraying the arm of justice, Police Chief Brown, as more of a hypocritical rascal than Mack...

...Significant, too, for The Threepenny Opera is the "Barbara Song," sung by the heroine, the calculating Polly Peachum, to justify her engagement to Mack...

...and "Volkov's Testimony Reconsidered" by Fay, and "When Serious Music Mattered: On Shostakovich and Three Recent Books" by Taruskin...

...It's almost always laughter through tears . . . close to my ideas of what music should be...

...As for Botstein, he compellingly argues in his admittedly overlong and somewhat opaque essay that "too much of the claim now being made on behalf of Shostakovich's command of humanist semantics and existential irony (including his embrace of Jewish musical materials and idioms) conveniently overlooks that Shostakovich successfully and intentionally served the Soviet regime...

...There should always be two layers in music...

...The entire Casebook consists of essays focusing directly or indirectly on Testimony, and almost all destroy Volkov's credibility with compelling authority...

...If many chose to hear those elements in his music, "many others of equal intelligence, education and musicality heard at the same time a direct and convincing affirmation of Stalin's tastes and Soviet ideology...

...I wish you happiness, health and many years of life for the good of our beloved Motherland, our great people...

...As Maes points out, "Glinka, Balakirev, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and Stravinsky had all made offensive remarks...

...This is, typically, a double-bottomed work...

...Much here depends on the extent of our familiarity with the artist, because visual art is more ambiguous than anything written...

...oppression whose shackles these men strain to break with all their might...

...If the artist is known for his moral shortcomings, this is frequently ignored or glossed over, because the public prefers to think that, like his creations, he is fundamentally moral...

...For the fanciful declarations inside the chapters, there is no confirmation by parallels in anything Shostakovich ever said or wrote, or anything that family, friends or other witnesses remembered...

...here the same ethical values may be invoked...

...But books defending him, by authors who should know better, exist...

...In what follows, I will concentrate on two essays in World—"Stalin and Shostakovich: Letters to a 'Friend'" by Leonid Maximenkov, and "Listening to Shostakovich" by Leon Botstein—plus three in Casebook—"Shostakovich versus Volkov: Whose Testimony...

...in those years of her husband's poor health and relative helplessness, she never really left his side...

...or whether he so hated Stalin and the Soviet regime that he withdrew into a so-called interior emigration and produced works of a double nature...

...We would be happier if the beauty of a painted Salome or debauched Renaissance princeling did not, through the sitter's looks and the artist's skill, make the subject's character appear more palatable...

...He was not obliged to do that, or to join the Communist Party...

...Afterward, she told me that no one in her family and circle lent any credence to Volkov...

...Barbara rejects decent, well-off, virile suitors who know how to behave with a lady, and whose collars are clean even on weekdays...

...What emerges clearly from these works is that Shostakovich, who suffered many indignities at the hands of Stalin and his minions, also received considerable privileges from them...

...But again, the Volkovians make too much of this...

...But when a fellow comes along who is boorish, penniless, ignorant of manners with a lady, and whose collar is not clean even on Sundays (characteristics of the man Brecht), the girl promptly lies down for him, à la so many women for the playwright...

...My point is that art, while paying lip service to conventional morality, often advocates its opposite under the surface...

...If we are aware of what is considered a serious blemish involving, say, Caravaggio or Dante Gabriel Rossetti, it may not diminish our appreciation of his work, but consciously or not we will be inclined to view it with a certain ironic detachment or actual displeasure...

...That is, conforming on the surface to the prescribed Socialist realism, but having a deeper hidden agenda, in contempt and mockery of Stalin and Stalinism...

...Yet even in nonvocal music, it can be argued that a military march composed for a totalitarian state, or a hymn for a repressive religion, or any musical tribute to a tyrant, is morally deficient...

...For the sake of brevity, I will refer to them as World and Casebook...

...Furthermore, if any of these alleged opinions had reached official ears— and how could they not?—the composer's freedom, indeed his very life, would have been forfeit...

...Worse yet, many writers who do not buy Volkov wholesale are nevertheless affected by his thesis...

...Learning nothing from this, she persists in her questionable trade...

...The real Shostakovich thanked Stalin for a dacha and monetary award for furnishings in a letter of May 27,1946 that concluded, "I ask you to accept my most heartfelt gratitude for the attention and concern...

...served on innumerable official boards, committees, commissions, juries, and so forth...

...Music, to be sure, is very different from writing or figurative art, being essentially abstract, and so not lending itself to ready moral judgment...

...Two of the main exhibits of what I shall call the Volkovians are the 10th and 11th Symphonies...

...Through greed, she causes the death of one of her children...

...Now, we know there have been experiments where music having a specific program was played unidentified to audiences, and no one correctly associated it with what the composer was trying to evoke...

...Nevertheless, most of the audience, biographically ignorant, perceives incorrectly an implicit condemnation in the heroine's fate...

...Probably they would have passed muster with an ailing Shostakovich, oblivious of when and to whom he said them...

...I will apply all my strength toward that...

...Her opportunistic ability to survive is clearly admired by Brecht, who shared it...