For a composer who saw his popularity fluctuate more wildly than the Dow Jones averages while he was alive, Dmitri Shostakovich would have been astounded to find himself in the middle of a major resurgence. That resurgence has been steadily gaining force since the great Soviet composer’s death in 1975. It comes full flower this week as the music world celebrates the centenary of Shostakovich, who was born 100 years ago Monday in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Everywhere you turn, it seems, there are new recordings of his symphonies and string quartets, as well as his lesser-known vocal, film and theater works. Fine arts radio station WFMT-FM 98.7 is devoting much of its programming the rest of the month to Shostakovich’s music, including a two-hour documentary Monday night featuring rare interviews and reminiscences. In the Chicago area, fall performances of his works are disappointingly few, although the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is playing two of his most popular symphonies, Nos. 5 and 10, Tuesday and Oct. 5-7, respectively.
If the attention Shostakovich is receiving is modest by comparison to the voluminous hoopla that surrounded the 250th anniversary of the year’s other big birthday, Mozart’s, it’s hard to think of another important composer of the last century more fascinating and enduring, and whose music matters as much to so many listeners.
Shostakovich, along with Benjamin Britten, was perhaps the last great composer whose music is heard and understood throughout the world — as familiar to moviegoers (part of the soundtrack to “Eyes Wide Shut”) as fans of PBS’ “Reilly, Ace of Spies.” His is 20th Century classical music for people who don’t like classical music — engaging and approachable without ever pandering, often sarcastic in tone yet full of deadly serious content.
From his student days as a dedicated son of the Bolshevik revolution (he was 11 when Lenin seized power) until his death, Shostakovich created a soundtrack of the 20th Century’s history of revolution and repression. He was an eyewitness to tremendous political and artistic upheaval, and was nearly crushed under the hideous goosestep of history. All this is deeply embedded in his music, particularly the symphonies that are the beating heart of his oeuvre.
Shostakovich’s acidic harmonic language and penchant for extremes — darkly brooding, sometimes morbid melancholy giving way to frisky jocularity, often within the same work — place his music squarely in the 20th Century, particularly the midcentury Soviet Union.
But if Shostakovich had been merely the musical equivalent of a newsreel photographer, his reputation would be no greater than that of Popov or Shebalin or any of the other Russian composers who also were caught up in the heady modernist ferment of 1920s Russia but quickly faded into obscurity.
Visceral response
If his music reflects, directly or indirectly, his difficult and tragic life in Stalin’s Russia, its artistic depth and emotional resonance carry it beyond time and place, into the realm of timeless, universal art. You don’t have to know the biographical back story to appreciate its overwhelming, even cathartic, power.
“His music unfailingly grabs the audience,” David Finckel, cellist of the Emerson String Quartet, told me earlier this summer when the ensemble played Shostakovich’s final three quartets at Ravinia. “The music is theatrical, with its dramatic silences and incredible ability to use instruments.”
I know what he means. My life as a professional listener changed profoundly after I heard a recording of Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet during my university years. Without then knowing the breadth of his output, or realizing that the work abounds in self-quotation and cannily deploys the composer’s musical monogram (the notes D-E-Flat-C-B translated into German letters), I was knocked out by the score’s gutsy intensity and headlong sweep. I had never heard anything like it. For weeks I couldn’t get the music out of my head. I still can’t.
I felt a similarly visceral response last summer at Ravinia during James Conlon’s gripping CSO performances of the final three Shostakovich symphonies. One hardly thinks of a big, populist, outdoor festival as a venue conducive for performing or listening to these dark, demanding and enigmatic masterpieces. Also, many festival-goers were hearing the works for the first time. Yet, without knowing precisely what the music “meant” at any given moment, people around me reacted from the gut. At the end, they didn’t know whether to weep or cheer. Many did both.
A double life
If Shostakovich’s reputation is more secure today than it was at his death, much else about him is shrouded in uncertainty and speculation.
The caustic ironies that well to the surface of so many of his scores seem in retrospect to be symbolic of the double life he was forced to live in Communist Russia. For him, as for most Russian artists working under the Soviet system, survival meant expressing himself in a way that chimed with Stalinist propaganda.
And so he made his pact with the devil, cranking out the patriotic film scores and tub-thumping oratorios that would earn him points with the Communist party bosses while writing more profound and personal music that would satisfy his artistic conscience.
During the Cold War, the prevailing Western image of Shostakovich was that of the official voice of the Soviet state. According to that view, he was a Good Commie who wrote bombastic, reactionary music that toed the party line. His refusal to jump aboard the bandwagon of atonality and dodecaphony (music written according to Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone system) stood his music beyond the pale in the eyes of such influential critics as Virgil Thomson.
What a difference a half-century can make. At a time of more conservative listener tastes in contemporary music, Shostakovich’s refusal to adhere to the modernist hard line and the emotional nakedness of his language are, I’m convinced, important reasons why so many audience members take so readily to his works.
The thorny relationship between Shostakovich and Stalin continues to be debated by scholars, not least it speaks to the ambiguities of his virtually lifelong dance of death with the Soviet regime.
Stalin was so incensed by the sex and violence in Shostakovich’s 1934 opera “Lady Macbeth the Mtsensk District” that he denounced it as a “muddle instead of music” in a Pravda editorial. The most infamous bad review in music history placed the composer’s career and life in dire jeopardy.
Shostakovich immediately withdrew his Fourth Symphony from rehearsal and kept it under wraps until 1961, during the Khrushchev thaw. Mark Elder’s performance last spring with the CSO revealed a masterpiece full of unrelenting terror and desperation, ending in numbed despair. Had the work not been suppressed, one can only imagine the directions Shostakovich’s career might have taken.
His “rehabilitation” came with the more accessible Symphony No. 5, which will be conducted by Myung-Whun Chung at Tuesday’s CSO concert. Western critics took its inscription — “A Soviet artist’s creative reply to just criticism” — as a craven bow to Stalin’s apparatchiks. It later came out that the inscription was written not by Shostakovich but by a journalist.
At the height of World War II, Shostakovich was the most famous living composer. His Seventh Symphony (the “Leningrad,” as it became known) was broadcast from his native city during the siege that followed the Nazi invasion of the USSR. The score was smuggled out of the Soviet Union on microfilm and performed by every major Western orchestra. The symphony became the symbol of heroic Russian resistance to Hitler’s aggression. The composer’s iconic stature was sealed by his appearance on the cover of Time magazine, wearing the brass helmet of a volunteer fireman.
After the war, Shostakovich’s fortunes again dipped. The Seventh and the harrowing, masterful Eighth Symphony were dismissed as bombast by Western critics. A 1948 official decree accused the composer of “formalism” (a condemnation that meant anything the cultural commissars decided it meant) and stripped him of his teaching post.
Then, only a year later, the same hands that struck down Shostakovich exalted him. Stalin personally phoned the composer asking him to attend a conference for world peace in New York. Shostakovich reluctantly agreed to go. “Considering the situation,” he dryly noted in his memoirs, “it would have been irrational for me to refuse.”
Disputed `Testimony’
Shostakovich’s stock took a conspicuous leap in 1979 with the publication in the U.S. of “Testimony,” purporting to be the composer’s memoirs as told to, and smuggled to the West by, Solomon Volkov, a Russian music journalist who had emigrated to the West. The best-selling book portrays Shostakovich as a closet dissident, writing in musical code, denouncing his Soviet tormentors in general, Stalin in particular.
But did Shostakovich — a shy, laconic, nervous man who hid behind thick glasses that made him look like an aged Harry Potter — really say all the things that were attributed to him? Was everything he composed encoded protest?
These and other open questions touched off a prolonged debate as to the book’s authenticity.
Having taken his secrets to the grave four years before the publication of “Testimony,” the composer couldn’t be consulted as to how much of his “memoirs” is unalloyed fact, how much romantic mythmaking. The truth, I suspect, lies somewhere in between.
Volkov theorizes Shostakovich was a yurodivy, a traditional figure in Russian history, a pure fool who was allowed to tell the truth in code to the czar. Shostakovich (in his view and that of close friends such as cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich) survived mainly because the non-verbal nature of his symphonies allowed him to speak the truth right under Stalin’s nose.
But in a persuasive essay in the New York Times that appeared in 2000, the American author and Russian music authority Richard Taruskin criticized the book’s “findings” as spurious and totally lacking in scholarly validity.
“It is important to quash the fancy image of Shostakovich as a dissident, no matter how much it feeds his popularity,” Taruskin wrote, “because it dishonors actual dissidents like [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn or Andrei Sakharov, who took risks and suffered reprisals. Shostakovich did not take risks.”
The latter point is debatable. Was it not a severe “risk” in 1962 to call attention to Soviet anti-Semitism, in the opening movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 (“Babi Yar”), based on poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko?
The composer knew the authorities would ban the work from publication and further performance, but went ahead with it anyway.
Still, Taruskin makes a defensible argument that Shostakovich was no reckless hero, openly defying his Communist nemeses but a more practical artist who did what was necessary to survive while being true to his private muse.
The real value of “Testimony” was its putting Shostakovich back on the musical map after decades of having been debunked and dismissed by the apostles of high modernism. Of course, Volkov got help in that regard from the collapse of the musical avant-garde, the sundering of the serialist stranglehold on classical music and the return of tonality to serious musical composition.
The result was that Shostakovich became the poster child for the New Accessibility — the desire of a more eclectic generation of composers to seek solidarity with audiences. And it is on that virtue that much of his present reputation in the popular imagination rests today.
As the music world this season celebrates Shostakovich, perhaps exposure to the broad range of his output and the renewed scrutiny of performers will help us to unravel some of the many mysteries that lie beyond the mask Shostakovich presented to the world.
But even if we could miraculously tie up all the loose ends, it would not make Shostakovich’s music less important. What I’ve written before bears repeating. We need to do what too few people allowed themselves to do while the composer was alive: Set aside the extra-musical factors and simply listen. If the music abounds in ambiguity, so be it. In Shostakovich, the ambiguity is the message.
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jvonrhein@tribune.com
