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The
Composer Was Courageous, But Not As Much As In Myth Laurel
E. Fay Nineteen forty-eight was the worst year of Dmitri Shostakovich's life. The crisis surfaced on Feb. 10, with the infamous resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party indicting Shostakovich and other leading Soviet composers as "formalists", enemies of the people. Official displeasure over a new opera by the sycophantic hack Vano Muradeli quickly escalated into wholesale intervention by the party into all aspects of musical life, directed by Stalin's cultural henchman Andrei Zhdanov. Forced to swallow torrents of abuse and recrimination, Shostakovich publicly recanted his sins. The orgy of degradation climaxed in April, during the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Composers, but Shostakovich's tribulations did not end there. He would be fired from his professorships at both the Leningrad and Moscow Conservatories, lose his livelihood, see his works banned and be a target of continuing vilification and hate mail. What was his creative response to all of this? Within weeks of the conclusion of the Composers' Congress, Shostakovich was asking for help in pronouncing Yiddish words. That August he set eight texts from "Jewish Folk Poetry" - a collection of Yiddish folk poems published the year before in Russian translation - for soprano, alto, tenor, and piano. In October he set three more poems from the same collection, rounding out the cycle that became known as "From Jewish Folk Poetry". Not until 1955, two years after Stalin's death, would the work receive its public premiere. Shostakovich's orchestration of the cycle will be given its New York Philharmonic premiere on Thursday evening, conducted by Valery Gergiyev at Avery Fisher Hall. Hindsight is prescient. Memory is fickle. In retrospect, events often acquire resonances that could not have been imagined at the time. "From Jewish Folk Poetry" has come to occupy a hallowed place. It was written, after all, by a composer in mortal disgrace, not just at the height of the cultural purges but also in the early stages of an official anti-Semitic crusade of Stalin's late years. The opening salvo is routinely traced to the murder of the acclaimed actor and head of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee Solomon Mikhoels, in Minsk in January 1948. In light of the surfeit of madness and atrocity that anti-Semitic cause encompassed by the time of its ultimate travesty - the exposure in January 1953 of a trumped-up conspiracy to murder Stalin by a group of predominantly Jewish doctors - it's hard not to be awed by Shostakovich's audacity and selfless courage. His setting of Jewish folk texts at a time when his own survival stood in manifest jeopardy seems to display his principled solidarity with the persecuted Soviet Jews. It is generally accepted that Shostakovich's innate survival instinct dictated that the protest remained private: thus the myth that he composed his cycle of Jewish songs "for the drawer." But in fact Shostakovich made no apparent attempt to conceal the existence of "From Jewish Folk Poetry". After completing the first eight songs, he played them to the soprano Nina Dorliak and her husband, the pianist Sviatoslav Richter. At the composer's suggestion, Ms. Dorliak recruited two more singers, and they performed the songs for an appreciative gathering of relatives and friends at Shostakovich's birthday party on Sept. 25, 1948. The song cycle was tried out several more times in succeeding months. Something does not add up here. Shostakovich was petrified with fear. His bag was packed in anticipation of imminent arrest. He had ample inducement to contemplate suicide, but surely courting martyrdom by means of his music would have been an unnecessarily gruesome way to go about it. In reality, he perceived no special risk either while he composed "From Jewish Folk Poetry" or when he shared it openly with those whose opinions he valued. Nor, it seems, did singers in 1948 balk at the very idea of performing this music, as more than one musician would do under much less parlous circumstances in 1962, when Shostakovich produced his 13th Symphony, with its setting of Yevgeny Yevtushenko's controversial poem "Babi Yar." Since "From Jewish Folk Poetry" kind already been performed repeatedly, it is clear that when Shostakovich wrote a former student in January 1949 that he was expecting to "demonstrate" his Jewish songs in 10 days, he intended to submit them to the peer-review process at the Composers Union, a necessary precondition to public performance. If Stalin's minions were already implementing their scheme for the eventual containment or eradication of Soviet Jewry, Shostakovich and the vast majority of his compatriots were obviously not privy to the plan. By the autumn of 1948, they could have had received few hints. Mikhoels was reported to have died in a car accident, and his passing was mourned with glowing tributes. The true circumstances of his murder, let alone its pivotal significance, eluded even suspicious family members for some time. Anti-Semitism played no conspicuous role in Zhdanov's scenario for the purge of the musicians. Indeed, of the composers indicted as ringleaders of the formalist, "anti-people" gang in the Central Committee resolution - Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Aram Khachaturian, Vissarion Shebalin, Gavriil Popov and Nikolai Miaskovsky - not one was Jewish. Yet they were all stigmatized as "cosmopolitan", signifying that they had succumbed to Western influence. While Shostakovich was practicing his Yiddish in May 1948, Stalin was publicly upstaging Truman by making the Soviet Union the first country to grant de jure, not merely de facto, recognition to the nascent State of Israel. A front-page editorial in Pravda touted equality and mutual respect for the ethnic cultures of all of the Soviet Union's constituent nationalities, great and small, as the country's special and unique strength. Early in September, Golda Meir arrived in Moscow to become Israel's first ambassador to the U.S.S.R. An estimated 50,000 Soviet Jews turned out to greet her and the other members of the Israeli mission at the Moscow Synagogue on Rosh ha Shanah, just as Shostakovich was finishing the final three songs of his cycle. Shostakovich had more specific encouragement in his decision to tackle settings of Jewish folk poetry in the example of a young friend and protégé, the composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg (Moisei Vainberg). Before the shrill exhortations of the Composers' Congress had faded, Weinberg submitted his new Sinfonietta, audibly saturated with Jewish themes, to the scrutiny of his peers at the Composers' Union. The reception was gratifying. Those in attendance, Shostakovich included, praised the work's tuneful, optimistic, "realistic" style. The most indignant reaction came from a composer who thought Weinberg's musical language a primitive distortion of genuine Jewish music. His objections were quashed by fervent supporters. When another major conclave of Soviet composers was summoned at the end of the year to assess the headway made since the Composers' Congress, Weinberg's Sinfonietta received pride of place in the opening concert. It was vaunted by the general secretary of the Composers' Union, Tikhon Khrennikov, as shining proof of the benefits to be reaped by shunning the ruinous influences of modernism, turning to folk sources and following the path of realism. Kowtowing to the Composers' Congress back in April, Shostakovich had enumerated the steps he planned to take to rehabilitate himself. He pledged above all to place melody at the heart of his work, melody steeped in the bountiful heritage of national cultures. He conceded the utility of programs, stories and literary images to engage the listener actively in the musical experience. He promised to produce the songs and romances he had previously avoided. He promised to produce the music demanded by the party. When Shostakovich chose to compose songs on Jewish folk texts for his first major work in the aftermath of Zhdanov's purge, he was making a good faith effort to redeem his well-publicized pledges. As Joachim Braun, the leading authority on the "Jewish" facet in Shostakovich's music, has pointed out, "From Jewish Folk Poetry" is an example of stylized urban folk art. It uses genuine folk texts. Its melodic and harmonic style is simple and highly accessible. Everything is in complete accord with the esthetic [sic] precepts handed down by the Central Committee and ratified at the Composers' Congress. Shostakovich's interest in Jewish music was neither casual nor academic.
It had already found expression in works like his Second Piano Trio,
of 1944, and his First Violin Concerto, of 1948. If he was now required
to prostrate himself before the indigenous wellsprings of Soviet art,
it was only natural that he should turn to ethnic sources that genuinely
stimulated his creative imagination. No one ever ordered him to write
bad music. And if there was ever a genius at turning repressive strictures
to consummate artistic advantage, it was Shostakovich. Any illusions Shostakovich still harbored about how his Jewish songs might be greeted must have been dispelled by the virulent propaganda campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans" that erupted in late January 1949. He thought better of submitting his songs to peer review and quietly shelved them. Soon he embarked on a more sure-fire, if more cynical, route to political and creative rehabilitation, the composition of a rousing paean to Stalin's "great plan" for the country's afforestation, the "Song of the Forests" of 1949. The myriad subversive subtexts and chilling ironies that engraved themselves in the score of "From Jewish Folk Poetry" during the years it languished unperformed are no less actual for being authored more by Stalin than by Shostakovich. What started as a diligent attempt to respond to the imperatives of Socialist Realism was transformed by the ravages of history into a heart-rending musical monument to the end of the Stalinist era.
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