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Casting a Great Composer as a Fictional Hero Richard
Taruskin
In the "untroubled countries" of the West, where the arts have tended (in the sweetly sneering words of Adam Zagajewski, the exiled Polish poet) to become "food for a bored handful of experts," Shostakovich's social commitment was held against him. Virgil Thomson set the tone for two generations of snobbish raillery when he wrote that the Soviet master's willingness "to write down to a real or fictitious psychology of mass consumption" compromised him "in a way that may eventually disqualify him for consideration as a serious composer." In later years, many musicians revised their opinions about the degree of Shostakovich's willingness to cater to Soviet norms; but even if his easily accessible style and often garish content were regarded as more coerced than willing, they remained unpalatable to modernist opinion. Shostakovich was written off, in the language of the time, as a "middlebrow" or "midcult" composer. A taste for his music continued to mark one as a philistine. Times have changed. Their catastrophic loss of prestige since the 1960's has made it harder for composers of contemporary classical music to indulge the old canard that serious artists live only in history, not in society. There is a new impulse to seek solidarity with listeners, and Shostakovich is suddenly a role model. "The pact Shostakovich forged with a great audience," as Joseph Horowitz noted in Arts & Leisure on Feb. 6, is what now impresses musicians and wins him new admirers. "His music acutely resonated with the needs and aspirations of a public traumatized by autocracy and war," Mr. Horowitz wrote, and "performed a therapy." Composers left out in the cold by the collapse of the avant-garde now see that the support system can work both ways. What has happened in Mr. Zagajewski's Poland since the collapse of Communism makes a perfect counterpoint to what has happened in the "untroubled countries" since the collapse of dogmatic modernism. The rise of the Solidarity movement inspired Witold Lutoslawski to abandon the trappings of avant-gardism ("aleatory" textures, 12-tone melodies and harmonies) and revert, in a manner that distressed some of his Western admirers, to a style that spoke to his fellow Poles in a language familiar to them (and therefore redolent, to Western ears, of Socialist Realism). Even earlier, partly out of his religious -- and thus even more explicitly anti-Communist -- commitments, Krzysztof Penderecki abruptly turned from the experimental "sonorist" style (as it is called in Poland) that won him his Western following to a frankly neo-Romantic idiom similar to the retro trends that have caused so much consternation among critics in the West. In the 1990's, after the Communist regime had fallen, Mr. Penderecki changed his style again, to one now touted in Poland as a "dialectical synthesis" of his two earlier manners. The average between the avant-garde and the neo-Romantic turns out to be (drumroll, please) . . . neo-Shostakovich, as exemplified by Mr. Penderecki's Second Violin Concerto, which received such a condescending press in New York when Anne-Sophie Mutter, its dedicatee, played it last month. Critics could not fathom how, in post-Communist Poland, Penderecki could write a kind of music that would have been kosher under Communism. But is it really so hard to understand that a style of music that had to be resisted when it was enforced by censorship (and when, therefore, playing chicken with the censor was the chief engine driving stylistic evolution) could be embraced when it represented a voluntary reconciliation with public taste? What Mr. Zagajewski feared -- that "what arose in response to the dangerous challenge of totalitarianism" would "cease to exist on the same day as the challenge" -- has not come to pass, at least in music, and the example of Shostakovich has abetted that heartening outcome. Let us now give the devil his due and recognize the contribution of "Testimony," that notorious best seller of 1979, toward the posthumous reassessment of Shostakovich's musical and moral legacy. Its subtitle proclaimed the book to be "The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov," a Russian music journalist who had emigrated to the West. Many have disputed its authenticity. In the interests of full disclosure, I had better acknowledge that I am one such, and that I have received in consequence much abuse from those whose views I am about to critique. But no matter how one feels about Mr. Volkov's methods, one must feel a certain gratitude for the role his book has played in the elevation of Shostakovich's stock. It portrayed the composer as embittered by the mistreatment he had suffered and vengeful toward the Soviet state, and toward the memory of Stalin in particular. Both in Mr. Volkov's annotations and in the text itself there were hints that Shostakovich's works contained veiled (or not so veiled) ironies, even outright messages of protest. One of the most poignant revelations concerned the autobiographical Eighth Quartet, which has since become a repertory staple. This was inspiring stuff. It played not only into cold-war stereotypes but also into the prejudices of a post-Freudian age that trades heavily, in the words of the musicologist Douglas Johnson, "on the notion that the more profound truth is the one that is repressed or concealed." We take special pleasure, Mr. Johnson goes on perceptively to observe, "when the repressed truth can be shown to contradict the apparent truth of the surface." No wonder, then, that people began listening to Shostakovich with new ears and with a new sort of pleasure. More important, though, more people began listening to more of his works. The Fourth and Eighth Symphonies began appearing on as many concert programs, it seemed, as the Fifth and Seventh. The quartet cycles began. Recordings proliferated. Pretty much all of Shostakovich is now available. No critic would dare debunk him now the way Thomson, for one (and the critic B. H. Haggin, for another), used to do. Even the academy treats him with a respect befitting his huge achievement and historical importance. No matter how they came about, these were auspicious developments. But something still stands in the way. In a survey text called "Twentieth-Century Chamber Music," published as recently as 1996, the musicologist James McCalla held back from giving the Shostakovich 15 the full treatment. He ended his brief assessment of them, shorter than the space accorded Bartok's Third Quartet alone, on a note of skepticism: "Whether the current popularity of Shostakovich's quartets reflects our current situation, or whether they will achieve the seemingly timeless stature of their only modern equivalent, Bartok's six, remains to be seen." The "Testimony"-inspired enthusiasm, Mr. McCalla implies, may prove ephemeral as the cold war, and the passions it aroused, fade into the past. I share the concern, which has been magnified of late by the emergence of a clamorous cult around the person of the composer. For it is not only students of Soviet music or Soviet politics who ought to view a cult of personality with alarm. Like the one around Stalin, like any such cult, the one around Shostakovich is an instrument of thought control. It fosters orthodoxy, enforces conformism and breeds intolerance of critical thinking. In surrounding him, it hides the composer from view and flattens response to his music. Its biggest boost came in 1990, with "The New Shostakovich" by Ian MacDonald, a forceful British writer, who followed up on Mr. Volkov's suggestions by fashioning anti-Stalinist readings, of astounding blatancy and jejune specificity, for all of Shostakovich's works. The kind of explicit symbolism employed in a few pieces like the Seventh Symphony and the Eighth Quartet was asserted to operate in every one, reducing them all to a single, endlessly repeated and paraphrased content -- and turning them collectively into one colossal bore. Mr. MacDonald himself exposed the incompatibility of his method with an appreciation of music when he dismissed out of hand the two quartets that followed the Eighth, remarking blandly that "one can be forgiven for thinking that we have been over this ground once too often." Having ears only for the paraphrase, he was unable to distinguish one piece from another or to distinguish his own monotonous, hectoring voice from Shostakovich's. As music criticism, his book was altogether worthless. But it was not music criticism. It was romantic myth-making, which enabled Mr. MacDonald and the many other cultists who now write album notes and book reviews, and whose outpourings can be sampled at length (very great length) on many a lively Internet site, to cast Shostakovich as the Soviet dissident supreme: an omnipotent anti-Stalin, able at the height of the Stalinist terror to perform heroic acts of public resistance (absolutely transparent to all his fellow dissidents but absolutely opaque to those in power) such as even Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did not hazard until he was living abroad. This "new Shostakovich" has become for the cultists an alter ego through which they live a thrilling if childish fantasy life, reminiscent of a classic New Yorker cartoon by William Steig, captioned "Dreams of Glory." It appeared toward the end of World War II and showed a boy in chaps and a cowboy hat, cap pistol in hand, taking a surprised Hitler prisoner in his office. Put the frail, bespectacled composer in the cowboy suit and Stalin behind the desk, and there is the new Shostakovich in a nutshell. Such fantasies ludicrously travesty Soviet reality, but they have become an article of faith to many, even some American academics who should have known better than to join a cult. One is Allan B. Ho, the co-editor of "Shostakovich Reconsidered," a book that defends Mr. Volkov and Mr. MacDonald by mounting a heinous attack on the integrity of their critics, particularly Laurel E. Fay, whose recent biography of the composer, "Shostakovich: A Life," is an attempt to counter the torrent of fantasies with a quiet recital of the factual record. Another, Timothy L. Jackson, has tried to squelch debate by invoking the Holocaust, identifying the gentile Shostakovich -- and claiming that Shostakovich identified himself -- as an honorary Jew. To support their fantasies, the Shostakovich cultists draw on the writings of post-Soviet historical revisionists who have sought to counter the old monolithic model of Stalinism by showing that, yes, people grumbled all through Stalin's reign and even told jokes about the dictator, and that consequently, dissidence was an option even in Shostakovich's day. But private grumbling and joking are not "dissidence," as the term is normally used. Dissidence is public. The evidence for the grumbling and the joking in books like Sarah Davies's "Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia" or Sheila Fitzpatrick's "Everyday Stalinism" comes mainly from the newly opened archives of the K.G.B. It describes the overheard and reported kitchen conversations of callow folk who had no idea of the danger they were in (but who, many of them, found out). Among the callow was at least one great artist, the poet Osip Mandelstam, who by actually doing what Shostakovich is now fancied to have done managed only to commit state-assisted suicide. It is important to quash the fantasy image of Shostakovich as a dissident, no matter how much it feeds his popularity, because it dishonors actual dissidents like Mr. Solzhenitsyn or Andrei Sakharov, who took risks and suffered reprisals. Shostakovich did not take risks. Four of the five poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko that Shostakovich incorporated into his "dissident" 13th Symphony (including "Babi Yar," the famous protest against anti-Semitism) had already appeared in the official Soviet press by the time Shostakovich set them, and the fifth, "Fears," had also been published there by the time the symphony was first performed. In 1960, by which time his international fame offered him a shield, Shostakovich gave in to pressure and joined the Communist Party. The autobiographical Eighth Quartet, which places his musical monogram in conjunction with a famous prison song, was an act of atonement for this display of weakness. When, in 1973, Shostakovich was approached with the demand that he sign a circular letter denouncing Sakharov, he again gave in, with disastrous consequences for his reputation among his peers in the Soviet intelligentsia, including Mr. Solzhenitsyn, who despised him for it. Shostakovich's likely motive in dictating whatever portion of "Testimony" proves to be truly his was exculpation for these and similar failures of nerve. Yes, forgive the man, by all means. Who are we to judge his deeds? He faced pressures we cannot imagine, and nobody is required to be a hero. But do not list him among the heroes. Going along to be left alone is the response you or I might make to totalitarian pressure, not the response of a "moral beacon." That is the title Mr. Horowitz, in his recent article, conferred on Shostakovich. It is just another fantasy -- or more precisely, an opportunistic appropriation. Mr. Horowitz is nostalgic for a time when "the equation of great music with spiritual uplift was a prevailing article of faith." Having tried without much success to convince people that Wagner can serve again as our spiritual uplifter the way he did at the turn of the last century (if we could just forget that pesky Holocaust), Mr. Horowitz has pinned his hopes on the only figure in sight through whom a powerful symphonic rhetoric might yet be reattached to family values. Another opportunistic appropriation, and an altogether honorable one, was the audience reaction to Shostakovich's 11th Symphony at the time of its premiere, in 1957. Officially dedicated to the memory of the suppressed Russian Revolution of 1905, it was privately interpreted as a protest against the crushing by the Soviets of the recent Hungarian revolt. Whenever asked, Shostakovich denied it; but that made no difference. His audience never asked. For them it was enough to be given the opportunity to sit together in the concert hall and enjoy an otherwise forbidden solidarity in protest. Like self-styled opera queens, who blithely and charmingly reinvent familiar plots to maximize their pleasure in their favorite divas, Soviet audiences were sophisticated ironists. But the legend of the 10th Symphony's reception in 1953, by which Mr. Horowitz sets such store -- "a communal rite," he calls it, "an act of purgation, a national catharsis" -- is entirely a post-"Testimony" fable. It is based on the dubious revelation, which no one had previously suspected either in Russia or in the West, that the wild tornado of a second movement was intended as a portrait of the just-deceased Stalin. IT is only the believers in the recent cult of Shostakovich's personality who naively claim the authority of his intentions. It is only they who imagine they possess the means of infallible arbitration between straight speech and irony -- which, of course, eliminates the irony. As they like to repeat, for anyone "with ears to hear" (read "who needs to hear"), there are never any doubts. But the heat with which the cultists denounce doubters belies their faith. "Frantic orthodoxy," the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once wisely wrote, "is never rooted in faith but in doubt; it is when we are not sure that we are doubly sure." At some obscure level the cultists are aware of the untenability of their claims. Were the silly claims or rabid denunciations confined to cyberspace, there would be little need to cry them down, but they have had some alarming public repercussions in the wake of Ms. Fay's biography. Harlow Robinson, a contributor to "Shostakovich Reconsidered," writing in The New York Times Book Review, derided it for its failure to support the myths inspired by "Testimony," as did the reviewer for The Washington Post. The sentimental Mr. Horowitz faults the author for being "inordinately dry-eyed." The nadir -- it has to be the nadir -- was reached in a column by the English music journalist Norman Lebrecht, which compared Ms. Fay's honorable scholarly skepticism with David Irving's notorious attempts at Holocaust denial. The atmosphere of hostility and organized slander that Ms. Fay has had to endure is more than a little reminiscent of the atmosphere in which Soviet dissidents -- and even Shostakovich, at times -- had to carry on. Innocent bystanders like a recent reviewer of "Shostakovich Reconsidered," who "cannot see the reason for starting all the tumult in the first place" about the authenticity or veracity of what, after all, is just talk about music, might find an explanation for it in this painful replay of a horrible history by those who have not learned from it. Such, then, is our "current situation," to recall James McCalla's
qualms. If we want Shostakovich's presence in the concert hall and on
records to outlast it, let's begin by returning our attention from our
cold-war bedtime stories to his music and recognizing that our interpretations,
and the purposes they serve, are ours, not his. Something there is that
does not love a cult, regardless of how we feel about its object. Encasing
Shostakovich in a bubble of dramatic fiction is a fool's game. Bubbles
burst.
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