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Carnegie Hall Sound Insights - The Music of Shostakovich
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By Paul Griffiths
During the three decades since Shostakovich’s death, the image has grown of him as a tragic figure, his creative personality blighted by the enforced artistic doctrine of the Soviet state. Twice he was called to account for overstepping the official line; regularly he had to abide by dogmas at once confused and restrictive. Throughout his 50-year career as a composer he lived under threat, and his works speak loudly of anguish and resentment. Their voice is that of an individual who, in the face of an overwhelming state machine, sings out his protest, hopelessness, and bleak humor.
This is a good story, but, like all good stories, it leaves a lot out of account. Shostakovich was indeed unlucky in having to survive half his adult life under the rule of Joseph Stalin, and his anxieties cannot be doubted—especially in the 1930s, when fellow artists were among the multitudes Stalin found expendable, and again in the late 1940s, when the tightening of artistic policy left little room for maneuver. Yet the Soviet state provided opportunities such as no Western composer of Shostakovich’s generation enjoyed. His symphonies were performed repeatedly by great orchestras under outstanding conductors, and he was able to write for such soloists as Sviatoslav Richter, David Oistrakh, and Mstislav Rostropovich. As a young man he had the chance to work with leading stage directors and film makers; later he had two fine string quartets at his disposal: the Beethoven and the Borodin. Moreover, his works were rapidly published and recorded, and energetically promoted abroad.
The story of Shostakovich as victim also underplays how much he willingly subscribed to Soviet cultural policies. The evidence of his symphonies, concertos, sonatas, and string quartets suggests he was fully committed to maintaining his roots in the great tradition from Beethoven to Mahler; it is impossible to hear his music as that of a caged-in radical. Also, artists in all times and places have been constrained by economic and political forces, whether exerted by Soviet apparatchiks, Renaissance popes, or the free market. To be sure, Shostakovich’s music is often dark, bitter, and doom-laden (even if it can also be joyous and playful), but these pessimistic propensities it shares with much in Russian culture before and after Soviet times, and with much in 20th-century art worldwide. Indeed, the fact that it touches so many so deeply is proof that it addresses griefs, uncertainties, and aspirations that are universal in modern societies.
Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich was born in St. Petersburg on September 25, 1906, into a professional family: his father was an estate manager, his mother a trained pianist, who gave her three children—Dmitri and his older and younger sisters—a solid musical beginning. There were Bolsheviks among more distant relations, and it is possible that Shostakovich was taken as a boy to witness some of the earth-shaking events of 1917. Two years later, aged just 13, he entered the conservatory in his home city, by now renamed Petrograd. Around the same time he produced his Op. 1, a scherzo for orchestra in F-sharp minor.
At the conservatory he studied piano and composition, the latter with Maximilian Shteynberg, who was the pupil and son-in-law of Rimsky-Korsakov. Times were hard as the new Soviet Union struggled to impose a socialist economy, and the death of the young composer’s father, in 1922, made them harder for the bereaved family. Shostakovich at 17 began working as a cinema pianist to earn money, while continuing his studies. In 1925 he graduated, his graduation piece being his First Symphony, a work of brilliant liveliness and equally brilliant grotesquerie (as his teacher was dismayed to find). Still only 18, he had made a startlingly individual beginning, and the work’s first performance—in Leningrad (as the city was now called) on May 12, 1926—made his name, within Russia and abroad.
During the next few years he wrote two more symphonies, both with explicitly Revolutionary choral finales, but almost nothing else for the concert hall. Instead, in rapid succession, he composed two operas, two ballet scores, and several scores for theater productions and films. Like many composers of his generation, he wanted his music to be practically useful. Also, again like many others, he was eager to embrace the modernism of the previous generation—especially, in his case, that of Stravinsky and Prokofiev. The result, very often, was a blast of satire, for which the theater provided a suitable home.
He based his first opera, The Nose, on Nikolai Gogol’s story of a nose that detached itself from its owner’s face and took on an existence of its own. His second, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, was also drawn from a 19th-century Russian classic, by Nikolai Leskov, telling a story of animal savagery (in the sex and murder scenes involving the central character) and hilarious parody (in the depiction of the police force). The piece opened almost simultaneously in Leningrad and Moscow in January 1934, and was enormously successful. By January 1936 it had been seen in Western Europe and the Americas, and was playing in Moscow in three different productions. Then it was visited by Stalin. A vulgar denunciation in the party newspaper Pravda followed, the work was taken from the stage, and the composer’s Fourth Symphony was withdrawn after rehearsals.
His Fifth Symphony, written the next year, ostensibly answered criticisms of the wildness and brutality of Lady Macbeth by espousing a much more solid, settled style, in the tradition of Tchaikovsky and Borodin. However, this symphony also contains moments of irony that relate to Mahler and were to persist in Shostakovich’s music, often creating a tense atmosphere of self-doubt. The meaning may be hard to read. In the composer’s Sixth Symphony (1939), for instance, the weight of a long tragic adagio at the start is not displaced by the two fast movements that follow, jokey and brittle. However, the Piano Quintet (1940) marks the beginning of a franker kind of expression coming in chamber music.
Shostakovich’s next symphony, No. 7, brought him back to public concerns, for it was an immediate response to the 1941 German siege of Leningrad. Like other Soviet artists, he was evacuated from the war zone. While away he started another opera—The Gamblers, again after Gogol—but abandoned it. Then came two more symphonies, in which he failed to maintain the expectations aroused by the Seventh that he would accept the responsibilities of a state artist: the Eighth (1943) was too cheerless for a time of struggle, the Ninth (1945) too flippant to be a victory celebration. Ultimately, in 1948, he and his leading colleagues (including Prokofiev) came under attack from the culture minister, Andrey Zhdanov. He put his new violin concerto aside and devoted himself on the public front to approved subject matter—as in the cantata The Song of the Forests, celebrating Stalin’s afforestation of the steppes—while writing more personal music in string quartets, songs, and a volume of preludes and fugues for piano.
In 1953, after Stalin’s death, he was able to resume his compositional life as before, notably with the Tenth Symphony he composed that year, a work whose chilling victory of negativity has been construed as a portrait of the late dictator. Other works that had been held in reserve—the violin concerto and the song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry—could now be heard. But any feeling of liberation was short-lived, and there were also personal problems. In 1954 he lost his wife, Nina, to whom he had been married in 1932. Their marriage had been an open one, and he was on intimate terms with a pupil who had become a fellow composer, Galina Ustvolskaya. But Nina’s death was a blow, and he was left with two teenage children: Galina (b. 1936) and Maxim (b. 1938). In 1956 he remarried, but his creativity remained depressed. His next two symphonies, Nos. 11 and 12, were programme pieces—film scores without films—and once more he found a more immediate, more personal outlet in chamber music, especially in his Eighth Quartet (1960), in which he included quotations from other works as well as his musical monogram D-S-C-H (in German note names, i.e., D-E-flat-C-B).
The relaxation of artistic constraints during Khrushchev’s later years in power allowed Shostakovich to restore Lady Macbeth to the stage, albeit under the new title of Katerina Izmaylova, and to address the hot theme of anti-Semitism hotly in his Symphony No. 13 (1961), setting poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. But again this was a brief flare in a creative life that had largely gone underground, into chamber music and film scores (notably for the Hamlet directed by his old friend and colleague Grigory Kozintsev). That life emerged prominently again in his Fourteenth Symphony, a symphonic song cycle on poems of death, and his Fifteenth, with its puzzling quotations from Rossini’s William Tell Overture and Wagner’s Ring. Other works of this late period were similarly concerned with mortality and disintegration—not least his Fifteenth Quartet, a sequence of six slow movements.
The posthumous publication of Testimony (1979), in which Solomon Volkov purported to present the composer’s views, was widely greeted in the west as revealing the “real” Shostakovich. But the authenticity of Volkov’s account has been questioned, and, in any event, there will never be an easy explanation of music that, coming from desperate times, conveys desperation on a knife edge between terror and hilarity, protest and gloom.
Copyright © 2006 Paul Griffiths
Paul Griffiths is the author of numerous books on music, including
The New Penguin Dictionary of Music and, most recently,
A Concise History of Western Music (Cambridge University Press).
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