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Who Was Shostakovich? Richard
Taruskin
Glikman's reading was thus an attempt to take possession of the meaning of the text -- or perhaps, in his own view, to return possession to the rightful owner. It was an attempt to contain meaning and foreclose interpretation. And in that sense it was an old Soviet habit -- or, rather, it was an attempt to fight Soviet methods of appropriation with Soviet methods. What Glikman tried to do is to carry out a sort of pre-emptive strike against the old, opportunistic official view of Shostakovich, to which the reflexes of a lifetime had understandably rendered him permanently sensitive, but also against the equally opportunistic habits of secret nonconformist interpretation in which he knew his readers, in reaction to the very same coercive official construction, had been thoroughly trained. But the effort to resolve every contradiction and eliminate every ambiguity inevitably produces inconsistencies and contradictions of its own. And the price of certainty is always reduction -- reduction not only in meaning but interest and value. Glikman's presentation of Shostakovich's letters thus crystallizes in a microcosm, and with relatively unproblematic texts, the difficulties and the fascination that have always haunted the experience of Shostakovich's musical works, those vastly problematic texts, and our relationship to them. The fact is that no one owns the meaning of this music, which has always supported (nay, invited -- nay, compelled) multiple opportunistic and contradictory readings, and no one can ever own it. Under the Soviet dispensations, of course, the Party claimed exclusive interpretive rights. Attempts by Solomon Volkov (the author of *Testimony*, the 1979 volume that fraudulently purported to be the composer's memoirs), or Glikman, or anyone else, to return exclusive ownership to the composer are futile at best, dishonest at worst. (The "Shostakovich" to whom ownership is returned is an ex-post-facto construction -- as he would remain even if the authenticity of *Testimony* were confirmed -- through which latter-day interpreters, potentially including the composer, assert their authority. Imagine Edgar Bergen making himself very small and trying to sit on Charlie McCarthy's lap.) But that hopelessness of final arbitration is precisely what has given the music its enormous social value, its terrific emotional force, and its staying power. No other music -- indeed, no other body of texts -- so radically forces engagement with the most fundamental issues of interpretation. No other body of texts so compellingly demonstrates that meaning is never wholly immanent but arises out of a process of interaction between subject and object, so that interpretation is never subjective or objective to the total exclusion of the other. And no other body of texts so fully convinces us that the meaning of an art work, indeed of any communication, is never wholly stable but is the product of its history, a history that only begins with its creation. (Otherwise, one could maintain, our national anthem is not a patriotic song but only a drinking song.) Add to all of this the incredibly high stakes of the creative and interpretive genre as played within the frontiers of a brutal political tyranny. Whether viewed internally or externally, whether in terms of their content or of their context, Shostakovich's works are fraught with horrific subtexts that can never be ignored. That is why they have always been, and will always be, objects of furious and manifold contention. We can never merely receive the messages; we are always implicated in their making, and therefore we can never be indifferent to them. It is never just Shostakovich. It is always Shostakovich and us. Music in the post-Beethovenian symphonic tradition, of which Shostakovich was perhaps the last great master, was arguably the most potent medium of artistic expression ever devised. It was equipped with a sophisticated and highly ramified practice of melodic elaboration and directed harmony, which enabled it both to forecast and to delay points of melodic and harmonic arrival. Since by means of these techniques it was always portending its own future and recalling its own past, it could be said to possess a powerful internal sign system -- an introversive semiotic, Russian formalists would say -- that enabled it to represent enormous tensions and cathartic releases that elicited corresponding affective responses in the hearer: responses that were controlled and directed more precisely, hence more powerfully, than those brought about by any other art medium. At the same symphonic music was often laden with "extroversive" symbols and portents as well. By Beethoven's time there were already many conventions for representing the wider world and its contents, all the way from primitive onomatopoeia to subtle "intertextual" allusion. The repertoire of such devices grew rapidly over the next hundred years, with Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich's countryman and predecessor, and Mahler, his most obvious model, making signal contributions to its development. But -- and this may be the key to its uncanny efficacy -- such music resolutely eschewed the establishment within itself of any stable code by which its signs were to be read. Thus, while its unfolding can simulate the manner and produce the effects of a drama or a narrative, music eludes conclusive paraphrase. Its inescapable assault on the senses and its dynamism, governed by a compelling syntax but unmediated by any established semantic canon, seem to present and to evoke emotional intensity in a primal, inchoate fashion. "Music," Schopenhauer was prompted thus to write, "is the kernel that precedes all attempts to shape it; it is, that is to say, the heart of things." Wagner, under its (and Schopenhauer's) spell, called music that fits this description, "absolute music", and the name has stuck. But as originally conceived, the idea of absolute music did not imply abstraction, still less formalism. It meant something uncanny and sublime -- something that named no names, and was therefore unattached to objects, but that was supremely attached to subjects, to the point at which it could seem to take over its beholders' sentient lives for the duration, giving knowledge of a reality that went beyond the bounds of the sensory or phenomenal world, into the realm of gnosis or revelatory "intuition." What this amounts to, in interpretive terms, is an overwhelmingly fraught surface or manifest content, consisting of the dynamically unfolding sound shapes with all their clamor of introversive and extroversive signification, but a symbology whose referents must be sought in the realm of latent content. This difficulty has given rise to a persistent, heated, and fruitless debate that still rages, on and off, both in and out of the academy. On the one hand are those who would prefer to simplify matters, denying the very existence of a latent content and claiming for music the status of an inherently or ideally nonreferential medium, unattached to the wider world and beatifically exempt from its vicissitudes. Their outstanding nineteeth-century spokesman was Edward Hanslick, on whom Wagner modelled the figure of Beckmesser, the eternal pedant in *Die Meistersinger*. The outstanding twentieth-century representative of this position was an uprooted Russian nobleman and White émigré named Igor Stravinsky, and in so identifying him I have identified the motivation for his aesthetic stance. In retrospect it seems only predictable that the autonomist or formalist position should have achieved its completest ascendancy in the West during the Cold War. On the other hard are those who not only acknowledge the immanence of a latent musical content but seek, or presume, to define it, to fix it, to make it manifest, to have it name names and propound propositions, to subject it to paraphrase, which means subjecting it to limitation and ultimately to control. It is not difficult to see the political subtext that informs this debate, or why the so-called referentialist side of the argument should have reached ascendancy in the twentieth-century totalitarian states at the same time that the autonomist position triumphed in the liberal democracies. But both of these extreme positions are impoverishing. The position that would eliminate a whole level of meaning from music impoverishes it literally and obviously. Yet the other side is hardly better. When fixed and paraphrased, the latent becomes blatant. And when the latent becomes wholly manifest, the manifest becomes superfluous. Where latent musical meaning is neither negated nor successfully administered -- where, in other words, it is acknowledged but contested -- the value of its vessel is much enhanced. Nietzsche grasped this truth better than anyone when he wrote, "Music reaches its high-water mark only among men who have not the ability or the right to argue." The whole history of the arts in Russia (not just the Soviet Union), and the whole story of Shostakovich's life, are encapsulated in that sentence. In few countries have the arts ever mattered so much, and in few countries have they been subjected to more terrible stress, to a more terrible contest for ownership. As the pre-eminent modern master of the post-Beethovenian rhetoric (a rhetoric that declined in the West as the autonomist aesthetic triumphed), Shostakovich was willy-nilly the most important artist in the country where the arts were most important and the most watch-dogged, precisely because his was the medium with the most potential slippage between its manifest and its latent content. Because of this, Shostakovich was the one and only Soviet artist to be claimed equally by the official culture and the dissident culture. He managed this feat, of course, by leaving interpretation to others. Not explaining his music -- or any music -- except under public pressure, in the vaguest terms, became the Shostakovich defense, and a rule that he even carried over into his private life. That his letters to Glikman contained little about his music beyond what Glikman calls "statistics" -- number of movements, timings, keys -- might have been expected; Soviet letters, after all, were public documents whether or not they were published. But he was just as tight-lipped in conversation. A much-repeated anecdote (prized because it brings together two leading figures whose meetings were few) reproduces some summer shop talk between Prokofiev and Shostakovich, overheard by the musicologist Grigoriy Shneyerson at Ivanovo, the Composers' Union retreat, immediately after the war:
Shostakovich: So, is the weather here always like this?
Well, that's not quite all. There is more here than the doer's quarrel with the talker, more than the artist's familiar insistence on sensory immediacy and pleasure over secondary, rationalized response -- though in this overanalytical age of ours that's a hint we might do well to consider at times. There is simply too much in Shostakovich's instrumental music that is strongly marked -- too much that resonates, like Beethoven's or Tchaikovsky's music, with characteristic and functional genres, with the conventional iconicity of emotion, with intertextual allusion, with sheer violence -- for us to doubt that at bottom he shared his society's faith in the reality of the latent content. Yet unlike the socialist-realist critics who tried to catalogue and thus circumscribe his "imagery" and "intonations," and unlike the more recent biographical paraphrasts (including the one who scandalously appropriates his name), Shostakovich insisted on keeping the latent content latent -- and keeping it labile. The thickest aura and the loudest Babel -- a true international Babel, in many tongues -- has surrounded the Seventh (*Leningrad*) Symphony ever since the composer's autograph score was microfilmed and flown to New York via Tehran and Cairo in a great fever of war-hysterical publicity for performance under Arturo Toscanini. (That autograph has been recently issued in facsimile by a Japanese publisher with a provocative introductory note by Manashir Yakubov, the archivist of the Shostakovich family estate.) Toscanini's performance was broadcast on July 19, 1942, to an audience of millions, including Mr and Mrs Stravinsky of Hollywood, who, we learn from Mrs Stravinsky's posthumously published diary, stayed home in order to listen in. Aura attached in those days far more to the work and its circumstances than to the composer's person. As Toscanini put it in a letter to Leopold Stokowski, whom he had to fight for first-performance rights, "I admire Shostakovich's music, but I don't feel such a frenzied love for it like you" [sic]. Stravinsky's regard for Shostakovich likewise fell short of frenzied love, as he lost no opportunity to remind his legions of interpreters. Yet the very fact that a composer of Stravinsky's stature felt compelled to position himself insistently and repeatedly vis-à-vis a composer universally accorded a lesser stature during Stravinsky's lifetime already suggests something of Shostakovich's emblematic status. Nor was Bartok immune -- else why should he have been so enraged by the Seventh Symphony that he went to the trouble of parodying its notorious "invasion" theme? (There really can be no doubt he did so, despite the wan claim, made on Bartok's behalf by fellow Hungarians, that he was quoting "Da geh' ich zu Maxim" from Lehar's *Merry Widow*, the tune that may in fact have served as Shostakovich's model for caricaturing the Nazis. The passages in question, from Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, are in Shostakovich's key, not Lehar's, and follow Shostakovich's exact note sequence.) What has made both composer and symphony into icons, and the symphony from the very first (though there has been little agreement as to what it is an icon of), is the way their careers have forced critical confrontation with so many cherished assumptions about art music, its values, and its relationship to the world. Shostakovich, by turns abused and adulated by a totalitarian state to a degree that lies, at both extremes, beyond the power of his benignly neglected Western counterparts to imagine, was in the 1940s a vastly ambivalent emblem. Was he toady or victim? Secret voice of conscience or accomplice to deception? Nation's darling or Party-propped demagogue? Keeper of the Beethovenian flame or cynical manipulator of clichés? He aroused pity and annoyance, envy and condescension, admiration and scorn -- but never inhabited the limbo of public disregard that has by and large been the fate of the modernist generations in the West. He lacked the freedoms of his counterparts in laissez-faire states, including the freedom to be indifferent and the freedom to be marginal. He accepted the civic obligations that were thrust upon him and the rewards that followed. While now it is easy enough to see that he had little say in the matter, in the 1940s this was not so clear. Arnold Schoenberg (again: what compelled his avid notice?) reproached Shostakovich for having "allowed politics to influence his compositorial style," finally exonerating him on terms that today can only seem callous: "Heroes can be composers and vice versa, but you cannot require it." Yet having established which of them was the hero, Schoenberg could allow himself a certain noblesse-oblige generosity toward the Soviet composer which contrasted with Bartok's and Stravinsky's furious rejection. Linking Shostakovich with Sibelius, after the habit of contemporary reviewers like Olin Downes (who cried them up) and Virgil Thomson (who cried them down), Schoenberg made a pronouncement -- "I feel they have the breath [did he mean breadth?] of symphonists" -- that has been pounced upon ever since by writers eager to issue Shostakovich or Sibelius a passport to academic respectability. And yet Shostakovich's relationship to the public, both at home and abroad, was at once a seeming vindication of the ostensible ideals of socialist realism and a paradigmatic violation of one of Schoenberg's fundamental postulates: "If it is art, it is not for everybody, and if it is for everybody, it is not art." The Seventh brought it all to a head. This hulking programmatic symphony, this bombastic anachronism replete with onomatopoetic battle music and cyclic thematic dramaturgy, emerged like some sort of woolly mammoth out of the Stalinist deep freeze. Its rhetoric was shamelessly inflated: by a veritable stage band in its outer movements, by a theatrical travesty of Bach in its protracted Adagio (Passion chorales, massed violins soliloquizing a chaconne). Its path to grandiose affirmation opportunistically replayed Beethoven's Napoleonic scenario. The crass methods by which its message was mongered were an assault on fastidious taste just as brutish as the Nazi assault on Russia -- represented by a mind-numbingly repetitive march that, in its slow, inexorable crescendo, brazenly appropriated the surefire formula of Ravel's *Bolero* (even down to the snare-drum ostinato and surprise modulation at the end). Glikman's Shostakovich defiantly confirms the resemblance: "I don't know what will become of this piece," Glikman reports his friend saying after playing through the newly composed first movement in August of 1941. "Idle critics will surely rebuke me for imitating *Bolero*. Well, let them: that is how I hear the war." The war. This debasement of musical values was being carried out in the name of the same holy humanitarian cause that illuminated the daily headlines. Shostakovich's symphony was riding both cause's and headlines' coattails to world-wide acclaim. In fact, it was making headlines of its own. Its performances, both at home and abroad, were as much political events as musical ones. Was music serving politics or was politics serving music? Was music exploiting politics or was politics exploiting music? Or, worst of all, was the very distinction between the two being undermined? Toscanini's powerful advocacy of the music was at least partly due to its political implications. "I was deeply taken," he wrote to Stokowski, "by its beauty and its anti-Fascist meanings, and I have to confess to you, by the greatest desire to perform it. Don't you think, my dear Stokowski, it would be very interesting for everybody, and yourself, too, to hear the old Italian conductor (one of the first artists who strenuously fought against Fascism) to play this work of a young Russian anti-Nazi composer [sic]." Performing the work, then, would be another anti-fascist credential for a conductor who, in America, was trading heavily on his political commitment. That "extramusical" appeal was accounting for the symphony's success; and that "extramusical" freight was what conditioned not only "the special meaning of this Symphony," as Toscanini called it, and its special privilege, but also its very special blatancy. Critics took revenge. Virgil Thomson launched his review in the *New York Herald-Tribune* with a really memorable salvo: "Whether one is able to listen without mind-wandering to the Seventh Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich probably depends on the rapidity of one's musical perceptions. It seems to have been written for the slow-witted, the not very musical and the distracted." And he ended by accusing the composer of cynicism: "That he has so deliberately diluted his matter, by both excessive simplification and excessive repetition, to the comprehension of a child of eight, indicates that he is willing to write down to a real or fictitious psychology of mass consumption in a way that may eventually disqualify him for consideration as a serious composer." B. H. Haggin, less verbally astute but farther out on a limb because he was writing for *The Nation*, then a Stalinist publication, hauled out all his doughtiest pejoratives: derivative, eclectic, unresourceful, crude, pretentious, blatant, banal. What was particularly galling was the barbarization of musical values in the name of humanitarian ones, paradoxically embodied in "an hour-and-a-quarter-long symphony concerned with the struggle and final victory of humanity over barbarism". The Russians, Haggin warned, not very realistically, "can escape this difficulty only by recognizing the unimportance of those external conditions [that is, the unimportance of the war against fascism] in relation to the greatness we are aware of in some music, the importance instead of the composer's personal and musical resources [sic]." Aesthetics were thus pitted irreconcilably against ethics; transcendence against commitment; quality against currency; art for the sake of art against art for the sake of people. For so crystallizing the terms of the endless and fruitless debate, Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony surely deserves its status as icon. However "monologically" Shostakovich's works were read by the regime (to borrow a vocabulary of the Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin), however passively the silent composer appeared to acquiesce in the readings thus imposed, and however great the consequent propaganda yield, the regime could never fully ignore the power of music (and Shostakovich's music above all) to harbor a potentially anarchic folk hermeneutics. The issue was finally brought to a head in 1948, during the Zhdanovshchina, the show trials instigated by Andrey Zhdanov, Stalin's cultural watchdog. The Party stooges who were now recruited to vilify Shostakovich -- mainly Vladimir Zakharov, the leader of the Pyatnitsky folk choir, who inveighed against Shostakovich at the open hearings, and the composer Marian Koval', who published a series of calumnious articles in the journal *Sovetskaya muzyka*, the organ of the Union of Soviet Composers -- did so by attacking the monumental instrumental genres that Shostakovich now employed. The overt quasi-"Tolstoyan" charge was made against him that such genres, being inaccessible to the broad public and thus elitist, were divisive of society, hence uncommunitarian, hence anti-Soviet. The covert motive, transparent enough but now documented through the recent efforts of the archivist Leonid Maksimenkov, among others, was to discourage genres that in their wordlessness were less than ideally subject to ideological control. As Maksimenkov writes, "The ideologues from Agitprop demanded texted music, which could be submitted to censorship on a par with movies, literature and programmatic, socialist-realist painting." Early drafts of the Central Committee's Resolution on Music contained explicit formulations designed to render all musical genres safe for censorship -- formulations that, had they been published, would have acquired the force of law. One read, "Resolved: to liquidate the one-sided, abnormal deviation in Soviet music towards textless instrumental works." A revision substituted the somewhat less baleful verb *osudit'* ("censure" or "judge unfavorably") for "liquidate." One wonders what Shostakovich would have been left with had these passed. In the end, though, the modulation was vague and somewhat absurd; no specific genres were condemned, only the "formalist tendency in Soviet music," which was "anti-people and conducive in fact to the liquidation of music." Maksimenkov comments that "the laconicism of the final version of the directive portion of the resolution bears Stalin's indelible stamp." It should be added that there was good reason, from the administrative point of view, for imprecision. Specific directives can be complied with. Compliance can be a defense. There can be no defense against the laconic, inscrutable charge of formalism. So Shostakovich went on writing symphonies and, increasingly, quartets. And they continued to attract ventriloquists from all sides. More and more prevalently, Shostakovich's post-Zhdanovshchina output was read as so many notes in a bottle. To some extent the works obviously invited such a reading. Many of them contain signals that their latent content is private rather than public. The very shift, beginning in the 1950s, from symphony to quartet as the center of gravity for Shostakovich's output was such a hint. It was manifestly an anti-Soviet move of a sort, for, as both the Soviet government and its citizens knew long before it became a trendy slogan in the West, the personal is political. To concentrate on chamber music was not just an un-Soviet activity, it was un-Russian. There was never much of a tradition in Russia for chamber music. Under the Soviets it was always vaguely suspect as aristocratic or genteel. The official list of Soviet genres, drawn up for official promulgation in one of the resolution drafts, included symphonic, operatic, song, choral, and dance genres only; the final text specifically rejected all styles and genres that appealed only to "narrow circles of specialists and musical epicures." No Russian composer before Shostakovich had ever concentrated the way he eventually did on quartets, or written so many of them. (Nikolai Myaskovsky, another prolific composer who was frightened into abstraction, came closest to Shostakovich's fifteen, with thirteen; but since Myaskovsky wrote twenty-seven symphonies, the quartets do not bulk nearly as large in his output as they do in Shostakovich's. Besides, Myaskovsky's career was practically over by 1948, while most of Shostakovich's quartet writing lay ahead.) There are other hints of politically fraught preoccupation with the private and the personal in Shostakovich's quartets and in his late music in general. These include slow, ruminative, fading finales and the simulation of recitative (often in a demonstratively broken or halting mode, reminiscent of the end of the funeral march in Beethoven's *Eroica* Symphony) or, contrariwise, the simulation of voicelessness (the tapping of bows in the Thirteenth Quartet) or of screaming (the piercing unison crescendo at the end of the same quartet). The transfer of musical ideas, like the screams, or of whole passages of music, from one work to another, suggesting that different works are chapters in an overarching narrative, also puts us in mind of biography, the most overarching narrative of all. The obsessional quotations and self-quotations add the prefix "auto" to the biographical gesture. And, of course, there is the increasingly resolute denial of optimism, of "life affirmation," which is to say denial of the sine qua non of Soviet art. (Here is where the late Shostakovich's surprising recourse to a few superficial trappings of twelve-tone technique, officially denounced for its decadence and pessimism, seems to find its rationale.) As Shostakovich, a world-renowned and much-revered figure, reached the stricken and debilitated end of his road, and as the Soviet state stumbled toward its own debilitated end, the composer could afford to lessen his guard, if ever so slightly. Whereas in the Yevtushenko-inspired Thirteenth Symphony he was still manifestly wrestling with Soviet authority, in the Fourteenth Symphony, a fully texted and explicit death affirmation, Shostakovich spat in its face. In the Fifteenth Quartet -- a racking medley of Adagios -- he fashioned his personal pain and his pessimism into a tour de force. I speak of hints within the works, but they are hints that we read in hindsight, and with ever-increasing knowledge of the events of the composer's life. Ultimately it is difficult -- no, it is impossible -- to know whether he is forcing his autobiography on us or we are forcing it on him. We did not need complacent post-structuralists to tell us that autobiography is not just a writerly genre but a way of reading. The first work of Shostakovich's to end *morendo*, with the dying of the light, was the Fourth Symphony, on which the composer was at work at the time of his first denunciation, and which was withdrawn before its premiere (we now know) not at Shostakovich's request but at the bidding of the Composers' Union leadership. This combination of circumstances made it inevitable that when the symphony was finally performed, twenty-five years later, in 1961, it was received as the composer's first note in a bottle. Reading the symphony as autobiography reached a predictable height of impertinence (that is, of trivial specificity) with Ian MacDonald's recent attempt, in a volume called *The New Shostakovich*, to portray the composer, anachronistically, as a life-long anti-Soviet "dissident." And yet there is indeed something about the symphony that does seem naggingly to foreground the issue of individual integrity and social stress -- namely, the extremes within it of inwardness and extroversion, and the manifestly ironic way in which these extremes are juxtaposed and even thematically interchanged. Of course I cannot say exactly what it is that this disquieting exchange of roles signifies. Unlike MacDonald, I have no ready verbal paraphrase with which to replace it, nor have I a ready answer to a friend of mine, a composer, who asked, "Why can't he just have been experimenting?" (except maybe the answer attributed to Edgard Varèse: "My experiments end up in the wastebasket, not the score"). But my uncertainty may be one reason why the symphony haunts me the way it does. Maybe incertitude -- irreducible multivalence -- is essential to experiencing it as a work of art. There is more to an art work, one has to think, than there is to a note in a bottle. I'm pretty sure I do know exactly what the Eighth Quartet is about. Shostakovich has seen to that. This is the one composition of his that does ask expressly to be read as autobiography -- the one time Shostakovich did put an explicit note in a bottle. And although my saying so may win me few friends, I believe that this melancholy, much admired work of 1960 reveals something beyond its intended messages -- something I, for one, would rather not believe. What it shows is that the need to communicate urgently and with specificity in an atmosphere of threat did at times shrink Shostakovich's creative options. The wry relationship between the stated program -- a requiem for the "victims of war and fascism", allegedly prompted by the viewing of atrocity footage during a sojourn in Dresden -- and the music, which consists almost wholly of the composer's musical monogram ("DSCH", as the notes D, E-flat, C, and B are named in German) in thematic conjunction with allusions to his earlier works (the martyred opera *Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk*, banned by express orders from on high, especially prominent among them), was evident from the start. Shostakovich was clearly identifying himself as a victim. In the final movement, when the DSCH motif is played in exquisitely wrought dissonant counterpoint against the main continuity motif from the last scene of *Lady Macbeth*, which depicts a convoy of prisoners en route to Siberia, things become almost too clear for political comfort. And yet, by hooking this self-dramatizing music, by means of its manifest program, onto "his" side's most hallowed and heavily exploited official-propaganda motif of the Cold War -- namely, that it was the Soviet Union's heroic wartime sacrifices that had saved the world from fascism -- Shostakovich forced the work's official acceptance and even its official promotion. This was, in its way, an impressive political coup. The most searing page in Isaak Glikman's book is the one on which he describes the actual biographical sub-text to the Eighth Quartet. Shostakovich was being pressured to join the Communist Party as a trophy, and had not found within himself the fortitude to resist. It was in an agony of humiliation and self-reproach, as much as an agony of revulsion at fascist atrocities, that he conceived this work, and it was offered as an apologia, in the first instance to his own conscience. The central strategy, it now seems clear, was to contrive the pointed conjunction, which takes place near the end of the fourth movement, between the DSCH motif and the single extensive quotation that does not come from one of Shostakovich's own works -- namely, the famous song of revolutionary martyrdom that begins with the words "Zamuchen tyazholoy nevoley", which mean, literally, "tortured by grievous unfreedom." The citation was insulated from official suspicion by the fact, known to every Soviet child at school, that this was one of Lenin's favorite songs. Yet by appropriating it, Shostakovich was, as it were, giving his quartet not only subtext but literally a text, proclaiming his unfreedom and disclaiming responsibility for what he judged in himself to be an act of cowardice, or, rather, a craven failure to act. The Eighth Quartet is thus a wrenching human document: wrenching the way Glikman's commentary to it is wrenching, or the way... well, the way a note in a bottle can be wrenching. But its explicitness exacts a price. The quotations are lengthy and literal, amounting in the crucial fourth movement to a fairly inert medley; thematic transformations are very demonstratively, perhaps overdemonstratively, elaborated; startling juxtapositions are reiterated till they become familiar. The work provides its own running paraphrase, and the paraphrase moves inevitably into the foreground of consciousness as the note patterns become predictable. The compulsion to write in this virtually telegraphic or stenographic way was unquestionably an inner compulsion. Its sincerity compels a strong empathic response; and yet the work, I feel, is weakened by it nevertheless. I do not find myself returning to it with renewed anticipation of discovery, and when I do find myself listening to it, I seem to be listening to it the way that Ian MacDonald and other determined paraphrasts evidently listen to every Shostakovich piece. MacDonald himself reveals the danger of such listening when he comes to evaluate the Ninth and Tenth Quartets, works to which the musical imagination -- my musical imagination -- responds with less coercion and more imaginative energy. Finding in them little beyond the same anti-Stalinist program he finds in every Shostakovich piece, MacDonald writes dismissively, "One can he forgiven for thinking that we have been over this ground once too often." Having ears only for the paraphrase, he is unable to distinguish his own hectoring, monotonous voice from Shostakovich's. Ultimately what is wrong with MacDonald's monological approach, for all that one may sympathize with readings that respect the reality of the latent content, is the same thing that was wrong with many of the radically revisionist readings of Shostakovich that emanated out of the Soviet Union during the *glasnost* years, which now seem so long ago. In both cases Shostakovich has been assimilated to inappropriate ready-made models. In the failing Soviet Union he was cast as a "dissident" of a sort that simply did not exist during the better (or, rather, the worse) part of his lifetime. In the West he has been cast as an alienated modernist. Both moves reduce him to a stereotype. To read in MacDonald's book, for example, that the Leningrad Symphony was yet another exercise in sarcasm and anti-Stalinist opposition is painful. In contrast to White émigrés like Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff, who were raising funds and sending supplies for Russian war relief, and even in contrast to Anton Denikin, the White general who had led the campaign to attack Moscow during the Russian Civil War, and who had called upon his fellow émigrés not to support Germany in a possible conflict with the Soviet Union, Shostakovich comes across as obsessed with unassuageable feelings of political resentment and disaffection. It is here that Glikman's book, and others like it, can offer the most valuable corrective. The mature Shostakovich was not a dissident. Nor was he a modernist. The mature Shostakovich was an *intelligent* (pronounced, Russian-style, with hard "g"). He was heir to a noble tradition of artist and social thought -- one that abhorred injustice and political repression, but also one that valued social commitment, participation in one's community, and solidarity with people. Shostakovich's mature idea of art, in contrast to the egoistic traditions of Western modernism, was based not on alienation but on service. He found a way of maintaining public service and personal integrity under unimaginably hard conditions. In this way he remained, in the time-honored Russian, if not exactly the Soviet sense of the word, a "civic" artist. That was the ultimate irony, and the ultimate victory. Like the silenced Akhmatova and the martyred Mandelstam, Shostakovich, as the American Slavist Clare Cavanagh so movingly suggests, managed to bear witness "against the state on behalf of its citizenry". This was perhaps the most honorable civic use to which music has ever been put, a use in which the composer and his silenced audience could reclaim their individual subjectivities from an all-powerful authority. Music was the only art that could serve this purpose publicly. Never was its value more gloriously affirmed. And that is why Shostakovich's music, while easy for advanced musicians in the West to deride, has always tugged at their collective conscience, making it necessary for them to deride it. The extreme social value placed on this music -- by official ideology, to be sure, but also by disorderly, "carnivalistic" folk tradition (to borrow again from Bakhtin's vocabulary) -- has made the overweening technical preoccupations of the West look frivolous. The present rash of opportunistic efforts -- by Volkov, by MacDonald, even by Glikman -- authoritatively to define the meaning of Shostakovich's work can only diminish that value. Definitive reading, especially biographical reading, locks the music in the past. Better let it remain supple, adaptable, ready to serve the future's needs. The significance of Dmitry Dmitriyevich Shostakovich in and for the history of twentieth-century music is immense and possibly unparalleled, and, above all, continuing. Anyone interested in that history, or alive to the issues his work so dramatically embodies, will listen to it (*pace* Thomson) without mind-wandering, unless musical perceptions are wholly divorced from moral perceptions. The fact that his work still looms in our consciousness, while that of so many once better-regarded figures has receded unregretted into lethe [sic], suggests that the divorce is not yet final. The fate of the music, of its composer, and of the society from which they both emerged has made it, quite apart from its composer's designs or those of any critic, precisely into a bulwark against the divorce. Smug paraphrasts notwithstanding, it is unlikely that we who live in more favored times and places can ever fully come to grips with such a legacy. Given our scholarly and critical interests, this may seem lamentable. In the context of our lives as we live them, it is something to rejoice in.
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