Show notes
For this centenary year of the birth of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), StAR has chosen to devote another issue to the great writer and “freedom fighter.” The last issue of StAR to focus on Solzhenitsyn was the July/August 2007 issue, a year before Solzhenitsyn’s death at 89. At that time I contributed a piece on Solzhenitsyn’s good friend (and fellow freedom fighter) Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007), the esteemed cellist and conductor.[1] In this issue I intend to examine another great Russian musician of the twentieth century, the prodigiously gifted but enigmatic composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975).[2] Historical and personal events were intertwined in such a complex manner that even today Shostakovich’s political allegiances and opinions are not crystal clear. Interestingly, there is a Catholic connection, although somewhat tenuous. Two generations earlier the family had been Polish and Roman Catholic, but when the composer’s grandfather, Bolesław Szostakowicz, was exiled to Siberia, he settled there after his sentence was over. His son, the composer’s father, became Dmitri Boleslavovich Shostakovich and eventually moved west to Saint Petersburg.
Shostakovich was the oldest of these three Russian geniuses; he was barely eleven years old when the Russian Revolution occurred and propelled the country into seventy years of Communism. Dmitri’s family were liberal in their politics, so they welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution and the boy was enthusiastic about political changes following the “October Revolution.” Dmitri was the first Russian composer of note to be entirely educated musically within the Soviet system, and this education began in 1919 when he began studies at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. He immersed himself in his studies of piano and music composition and apparently was not very interested in politics, as in 1926 he did not pass—on his first attempt—the final examination in Marxist methodology. Dmitri’s musical idols at this time were Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev, which did not please his composition professor, Maximilian Steinberg. During his conservatory years, too, Shostakovich saw the premiere of his Symphony No. 1, his “senior thesis.” This symphony caught the attention of Bruno Walter in 1927; Walter gave the Symphony No. 1 its Berlin premiere later that same year. Leopold Stowkowski was another world-renowned conductor who saw the merits of Shostakovich’s First Symphony, and not only did he conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra in its United States premiere (1928), he also made the very first recording of it. The young composer’s next two symphonies were more experimental in style, so they did not receive the popular acclaim of the First. The Symphony No. 2 was also a paean to Communism; it was subtitled To October.
Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, Shostakovich worked on his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which premiered in 1934. Initially, the opera was a great success, both with the people and the government, but two years later a famous—or rather, infamous—event occurred. On 26 January 1936 Joseph Stalin attended a performance of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Shostakovich, who was present at the performance, was horrified to see how Stalin and his cronies were reacting negatively to various aspects of the opera. Several days later Pravda published an unsigned article, “Muddle Instead of Music,” which described the opera as a “deliberately dissonant, muddled stream of sounds … [that] quacks, hoots, pants, and gasps.” Now pressure to recant was put on all those critics who had earlier praised the opera. Even so, some brave souls continued to support Shostakovich. Another attack from Pravda appeared soon after, on February 6th, this time denouncing the composer’s humorous ballet, The Limpid Stream. Shostakovich was pressured into admitting that he was in error for not composing the ballet in a more accessible musical style. This campaign of slander resulted in a large loss of income for Shostakovich, and the December 11th premiere of his Symphony No. 4 was cancelled by government officials.[3] 1936 also marked the beginning of Stalin’s Reign of Terror.
Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony did receive its premiere in 1937, and this work is traditionally considered to be the composer’s riposte to Stalin’s condemnation of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and the 4th Symphony. The music of the 5th Symphony was more accessible, and a newspaper statement purporting to be by Shostakovich described the work as “a Soviet artist’s creative response to just criticism.” This seeming capitulation of the composer to the party, and his public statements praising the Soviet government, led to his being discounted as a serious, bona fide composer. For instance, Harold Schonberg, music critic of the New York Times, would write: “Shostakovich rehabilitated himself in 1937 with his Fifth Symphony. But to all intents and purposes, he was ruined as a composer … He was to write nothing but safe music, repeating old formulas, imitating some of Prokofiev’s mannerisms.” Shostakovich composed many patriotic works, including film scores, and he wrote reams of patriotic essays in official Soviet jargon. So it seemed that Shostakovich was a mere mouthpiece of the Communist party; or was he?
In 1979, a sea change occurred with the publication of Solomon Volkov’s Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich. Volkov claimed to have published interviews and personal conversations he had had with the composer. This was a new, hitherto unknown Shostakovich. Instead of being a willing collaborator with the Soviets, the composer revealed his hatred of Stalin and indicated that his compositions were full of coded references to Stalinist Russia. Terry Teachout remarks: “Testimony had the same effect on Western musicians that the first volume of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago had on Western intellectuals: some embraced it, some deplored it, but everybody read it.”[4] In fact, one Western intellectual, the American musicologist Laurel Fay, wrote an article criticizing Stasov’s Testimony.[5]She showed that Testimony contained significant plagiarism, with eight sections having been taken from previously published articles by Shostakovich. However, even though scholars like Fay argued over its authenticity, Volkov’s Testimony was positively received by musicians and the concert-going public, “who thereafter ‘read’ Shostakovich’s works as a Solzhenitsyn-like chronicle of life under totalitarianism.”[6] Many friends of the composer maintained that although Volkov’s book had its weaknesses, still it was true in many of its essentials.
In 1994, however, a book was published that corroborated to a great extent Volkov’s portrait of Shostakovich as dissimulating in his official words, but revealing his real thoughts in his music. Elizabeth Wilson, a cellist who had lived in Russia from 1964-71, published Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, which contained many reminiscences of the composer by friends and associates who, now, in the post-Soviet era, were able to speak honestly. The Soviet regime was so horrific that Shostakovich evidently followed every order merely to survive. He commented about Solzhenitsyn’s novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: “[I]t’s reality varnished over, it’s reality varnished over. The truth was ten times worse than that.”[7] Wilson’s Shostakovich: A Life Remembered reveals that Shostakovich despised himself for his public dissimulation, including when he signed an official letter denouncing Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. Knowledge of Shostakovich’s double life caused many to re-evaluate his music and to listen to it with new ears. Another British writer, Ian MacDonald, opined that knowledge of the historical context is essential for understanding Shostakovich’s music when he wrote that “listening to Shostakovich’s music without knowing The Gulag Archipelago is equivalent to listening to spoken Russian without a translation.”[8]
Shostakovich and Solzhenitsyn, then, both hated Communism, but each man responded to the tyranny in his own way. Solzhenitsyn, through his novels, openly and explicitly represented his own sufferings and the sufferings of others. Shostakovich, on the other hand, allowed himself to present a public face of acceptance of Communism while silently suffering. His music, in its non-verbal, symbolic way, represents that same suffering. Whether or not one accepts Shostakovich’s response to life under the Soviet regime, his best music has a depth (and even humor) which identify him as one of the great twentieth-century composers.
Recommended Recordings
Shostakovich, Symphonies 1-15, various symphony orchestras conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich. Warner Classics 2564 64177-2
Shostakovich, Cello Concertos 1 & 2: The Russian Years, Mstislav Rostropovich, cello; Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Gennady Rozhdestvensky; USSR State Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Evgeny Svetlanov. Warner Classics 0190295892227. This is a vintage mono recording remastered for CD.
Shostakovich, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Vishnevskaya, Gedda, Petkov, London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich. Warner Classics CD1: 77.50, CD2: 77.03
[1] “Mstislav Rostropovich: Friend of Solzhenitsyn, Friend of Freedom,” StAR (July/August 2007), 26-28.
[2] Rostropovich studied with Shostakovich at the Moscow Conservatory and Shostakovich composed his two cello concerti for Rostropovich.
[3] It finally received its premiere on 30 December 1961.
[4] Terry Teachout, “The Problem of Shostakovich,” Commentary (February 1, 1995), accessed online.
[5] Laurel Fay, “Shostakovich versus Volkov: Whose Testimony?” Russian Review 39, no. 4 (1980): 484–93. Laurel Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2000).
[6] Teachout
[7] Teachout
[8] Ian MacDonald, The New Shostakovich (London, 1990)
Permalink
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
Stay Connected
