Shostakovich

Shostakovich: A Life Remembered

By Elizabeth Wilson

Faber and Faber, 1995. 550 pp., $29.95 (pb)

Reviewed by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/12708

Russia, it could be said, has over-fulfilled its quota of great classical composers — Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov for starters. Up there with the best of them is Dmitri Shostakovich, but, unlike his 19th century peers, Shostakovich faced hurdles of an altogether unique kind, having to compose through six decades of tragicomic cultural dictatorship from Stalin to Brezhnev. His political and cultural bosses liked to claim Shostakovich as a model Soviet citizen — a loyal party member from 1960 who wrote positive music of high seriousness and uplifting harmony reflecting the "optimistic, bright future of Soviet Man". They used the cultural lustre of Shostakovich to brush up the international and domestic standing of Stalinism. Many liberal dissidents were disappointed that Shostakovich kept his opposition to Stalinism private and lent his considerable public prestige to the bureaucracy. Shostakovich preferred to acquiesce in the political pressures placed on him so that he could get on with his music in peace. Elizabeth Wilson's book sheds some new light on the musical and political dilemmas faced by Shostakovich, through its collection of interviews with people who worked with the composer. Shostakovich was a child of Russia's turbulent revolutionary history. He was born only one year after the 1905 revolution. He had an aunt and an uncle who were members of the Bolshevik Party, and his parents were liberal opponents of the tsar. Shostakovich was not immune to the grandeur, and tragedy, of the 1917 Revolution, and he was part of the intense artistic life which flowered under the snowdrifts of his home town of Leningrad during the Civil War years of cold, hunger and invasion, and during the '20s before Stalin had secured decisive political control. Mikhail Tukhachevsky, violin player and brilliant Red Army commander under Trotsky, was a champion of Shostakovich's music. Shostakovich's Second Symphony was composed in 1927 for the 10th anniversary of the Revolution and was a gesture of commitment rather than the result of coercion. Some interviewees in the book claim otherwise, keen like many Russian anti-communists to forget the revolutionary values they shared in the decade after 1917 and whose testimony on Shostakovich's views is rendered less than trustworthy by their glib retailing of tired anti-Bolshevik slanders. Nevertheless, Stalin's growing power was becoming more evident as the '20s wore on. Shostakovich's first opera and one of his ballets were casualties of RAPM (the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians), which was under the control of Stalin's faction. RAPM was dissolved by Stalin in 1932 because it was associated with the "left" phase of Stalin's Third Period and contained some musicians who genuinely believed in proletarian values in music. RAPM's replacement, the Union of Soviet Composers, was more reliable and had more power to enforce rules for form and content in music. The Composers' Union snared Shostakovich in 1936 when his opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, a dark story about a crime of passion, which had run for over a hundred performances to popular acclaim, was suddenly declared by Stalin and his cultural lieutenant Zhdanov to be an avant-garde, dissonant, atonal, vulgar and "modernist" monstrosity. This cultural attack was brought on to accompany Stalin's switch to the politics of the Popular Front, seeking to curry diplomatic favour with the capitalist ruling classes of the West. Soviet music was now to celebrate such "bourgeois" values as the simplicity, melody and accessibility of the composers of the historical capitalist epoch. Shostakovich retreated to the safer ground of wordless music, but the traumatic episode made him acutely aware of the power of the bureaucrat to wreck the reputation and livelihood of the composer. Stalin's terror state, too, counselled caution. Shostakovich watched with dread as his friends disappeared during the late '30s into the labour camps and death — his Bolshevik uncle, Tukhachevsky, the internationally famous theatre director Meyerhold. Shostakovich's next symphony, the Fifth, was simple, melodic, with victorious fanfares, a concession to the great fear. After the musical respite afforded by World War II, during which Shostakovich's anti-Nazism and patriotism inspired the tragic heroism of his Seventh Symphony, he returned to his unpredictable ways and became insufficiently optimistic about Soviet society and its Great Leader. In 1948, Shostakovich (along with other Soviet composers such as Aram Khachaturian and Sergei Prokofiev) was once again a victim of Zhdanov for a "formalist" deviation from the simplistic principles of an official "socialist realism" which was neither socialist nor realist. In a period when Stalin managed to ban the saxophone (1949) and the labour camps were still full, Shostakovich learned the value of "safe" compositions. He was rehabilitated, winning prizes and state posts. The cost was having to publicly align himself with the party. He publicly supported the invasion of Hungary, for example, although for those who cared to listen, his Eleventh Symphony in 1957, dedicated to the 1905 Revolution, was as much about tanks in Budapest as the tsar's soldiers firing on people at the Winter Palace. Khrushchev tactically removed some of the more irrational fetters of Stalinism, and secured public affirmation from the likes of Shostakovich. In 1960, Shostakovich joined the CPSU. Albeit with disgust and cynicism, he spent the next 15 years until his death in 1975 signing unread statements and delivering ghosted speeches attacking dissidents, and attending all the required meetings, suffering "torture by boredom". In the end, Shostakovich's musical integrity did speak louder than his words. His symphonies have a dramatic content and theatrical impact born of a political and emotional landscape coloured by the hopes of revolution and the tragedy, distress and suffering that were the times he lived through. In spite of Shostakovich the obedient party-liner, Shostakovich the composer remains a revolutionary in the true sense of that word.