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How
Dissident? Norman
Lebrecht:
The point I made was that Mr. Irving, while admitting that the Nazis killed Jews, refuses to accept that this was Hitler's wish until he sees a signed Fuhrer order. Ms. Fay refuses to accept Shostskovich's dissidence until she is presented with proof in his own hand. The oral testimony of the vast majority of his close colleagues and friends that he was heroically anti-Communist amounts, in her words, to "a treacherous resource for the historian." In this respect, her methodology is no different from Irving's. The historian Andrew Roberts wrote recently that Mr. Irving had made it untenable for anyone to call themselves a revisionist historian. The wilful distortions of Ms. Fay, and her defender, Mr. Taruskin, discredit revisionist musicology in much the same way. Norman Lebrecht Other related letters: Top SHOSTAKOVICH; 'Babi Yar' TroublesMarch 19, 2000, Sunday, Late Edition To the Editor: Richard Taruskin flatly describes Dmitri Shostakovich as a man who "did not take risks" "Casting a Great Composer as a Fictional Hero," March 5 . In this context, he notes that the Yevgeny Yevtushenko poems incorporated into Shostakovich's 13th Symphony, including "Babi Yar," had already been published in the Soviet Union. But he omits a much more important fact about the constantly changing political winds at the height of Nikita Khruschev's de-Stalinization campaign. By the time Shostakovich was preparing for the premiere of his symphony, "Babi Yar" had been attacked in the Soviet press for focusing on Jewish victims of the Nazi occupiers, and on Russian anti-Semitism. This made the production of the symphony a much riskier enterprise than Mr. Taruskin acknowledges. Anything to do with Jews was a highly charged subject under the Soviet regime. In her 1984 autobiography, the former Bolshoi opera star Galina Vishnevskaya recounts from first-hand knowledge the pressure brought to bear on singers to withdraw from the scheduled premiere. Shostakovich refused to alter a line of the text, even though he had been warned that the Party Central Committee might well ban the performance. The Central Committee did not give the go-ahead for the premiere until mid-day on the scheduled date of Dec. 18. Yevtushenko himself bowed to pressure on an occasion when Shostakovich did not. Only a few days after the premiere of the 13th Symphony, a second version of "Babi Yar," expurgated to conform more closely to the official line on Jews, appeared in a conservative literary publication. None of this, of course, qualifies Shostakovich as a "dissident" in the sense that the term is commonly understood in the West. But it hardly fits Mr. Taruskin's portrait of the composer as a man who took no risks. It is as vulgar and reductive to view Shostakovich's life and music through a smug lens of post-cold war triumphalism as it is to enshrine him as a dissident. SUSAN JACOBY
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