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Great Music Isn't Necessarily Made by Great People
Bernard Holland A postscript on the Shostakovich month just past and a caution: You can like the music; you don't have to like the man. Listeners have a hard time believing this. How, people ask, could the composer who toadied and cringed before his Soviet bosses have written such bravely beautiful music? In all those quartets and symphonies, weren't those secret messages he was sending? Do we read between the conformist lines and find rebellion? They weren't. We don't. False syllogisms are at work. One goes like this: If we admire noble character and admire good music, then the two belong together. Also, if music makes us feel good in a noncriminal way, then mustn't that ethical good health originate with the person who created it? The impulse to join the admirable with the beautiful is nearly irresistible for most of us, but we might have to face the fact that Shostakovich was a mediocre human being possessed of staggering musical ability. After Stalin scared him almost to death in the mid-1930's, the composer did his duty: writing patriotic pieces, signing petitions on request (some of them damaging to his colleagues), rebuking what he was asked to rebuke, dispensing the government line as directed. He may not have liked some of it, but there is little evidence that he showed much hesitation when his own skin was in question. In other words, Shostakovich behaved just as most of us would have behaved in similar circumstances. Martyrs are few. Self-preservation is strong. Cowardice is a human concept. Animals run away without apology when they feel themselves threatened. This may make them smarter than a lot of us. Shostakovich seems to have been a fragile personality to begin with. It is a wonder he survived at all, but he did, and with a comfortable life style far above that of nobler Soviet citizens around him. There are other opinions. My colleague James R. Oestreich reported last season on a Boston musicological conference at which the great man's personality and history were vehemently debated. Loud support came from defenders of Solomon Volkov's "Testimony," purporting to detail the composer's unhappiness with his own words. "To call Shostakovich a Communist is the ultimate insult," said Dmitry Feofanov, a pianist and a lawyer. Richard Taruskin, a joyously contentious music historian, rose from the audience to defend his belief that the composer was "perhaps Soviet Russia's most loyal musical son." Words like fraud were bandied about, apologies asked for and derisive laughter heard but evidently no fists thrown. At a performance of the 11th Symphony by the San Francisco Symphony at Carnegie Hall not long ago, I was greeted with program notes offering a description within a description. On the face of it, the piece is pure patriotism and storytelling. The subtitle is "The Year 1905" and its movements take us through the events and the emotions of a galvanizing event in pre-Soviet history. Here peaceful protesters were slaughtered in the streets of St. Petersburg by Cossack troops. The massacre was a stepping stone to revolution. Could we not simply have taken this symphony for what it says and does? It is full of pictorial sounds, musical gunshots among them. It also mourns publicly injustices done the masses. Shostakovich did what a good Soviet with musical talent would be asked to do. If the piece is not profound in the way of his more abstract music, it is not supposed to be. I am not the first to point out that composing relatively superficial pieces was for Shostakovich not a chore at all. He was good at flag-waving and populist dumbing-down; he seemed to enjoy the process. But what about those hidden clues? Especially the date, 1957, a year after the Hungarian uprising, the one that featured brutal suppression by Soviet occupiers. Certainly Shostakovich, the brave dissident, was offering wry commentary on the morals of his masters by pretending to celebrate their predecessors. What delicious irony. Certainly this was not propaganda but guerrilla warfare, at the very least a message in a bottle floated out toward the free world. "Shostakovich may seem to be enslaved," it reads, "but in his covert way he is fighting back." Tortured speculation like this is a conclusion looking for arguments in its behalf. It begins with a need to find that a maker of beautiful things is also a moral person. Artists are not necessarily good people at all. Nor does their work necessarily have anything to with goodness. We all know what a dreadful human being Wagner was, and yet he opened to us a world of scarcely fathomable richness. Beethoven was a not a very nice man either, nor always a scrupulous one. When foreigners asked Haydn for transcriptions and arrangements, he farmed the work out to pupils and collected the money himself. How are we to reconcile the elegance of Herbert von Karajan's conducting with the slippery politics of his career? The executioner sighs happily at the sound of "Vissi d'arte." Murderers are capable of feeling the beauty of a Haydn quartet with the same intensity, penetration and purity as a Benedictine monk. Weak people write strong music. Bad people write noble music. For one who has moved through and around one particular artistic community for many years, the paradox of creative beauty emanating from the hands of less than well-behaved creators is powerful. I tend to think the situation is worse in music, but I tell outsiders about the jealousy, the scheming, the greed and the dishonesty of so many musicians, and their response is invariably: "Well, it couldn't be worse than (dance, writing, art -- you fill in the blank). That there are and were musicians as pure as their best work is of course true. Brahms and his coterie were nastiness incarnate toward Liszt, who in turn treated them with magnanimity. The wisest of the good musicians have a hold on their necessarily outsize egos and are splendid citizens. But it is important to notice that the two parts of a creative career -- the life lived and the art created during it -- are not automatically co-dependent. It is hard to call Shostakovich's life tragic, at least any more tragic than your own. Terrifying and stressful a lot of it was, but tragedy requires an imposing person brought down by fate and bad decisions. Shostakovich was more a victim; I don't think he rises to the needed stature. It is easy to pity his discomfort. Indeed, the wrenching anguish in so many of his pieces (and this may be more tortured speculation) is perhaps a composer wondering how much he really likes himself. Be satisfied with Shostakovich, the great musician. He doesn't have to be a great man.
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