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Lingering
Questions About a Musical Giant Barbara
Amiel Barbara Amiel criticises Shostakovich Reconsidered. Writer Ian MacDonald writes in to defend the book.
All sorts of controversies swirl about us. Some years ago, historians were preoccupied with a dispute as to whether or not Hitler was influenced in his genocidal policies by Stalin's stirring example in the 1930s of do-it-yourself, man-made famines. These days, musicologists are once more fighting about Dmitry Shostakovich. Shostakovich (1906-1975) was a highly talented Russian composer. Alternately banned and praised by Stalin, he died a natural death with a large number of official Soviet medals pinned to his chest. Four years after his death, his smuggled memoirs, as related to and compiled by Solomon Volkov, a Soviet Jew, defector and editor of a Soviet music magazine, were published in the United States under the title Testimony. According to the memoirs, Shostakovich detested communism, filled his music with coded insults to Stalin and risked his life to help friends. The KGB claimed the book was a fraud and some Western critics agreed. The notion that Shostakovich was a dissident, coded or not, was questioned. He had virtually been the official face of Soviet communism long after Stalin died and had never denounced him. He had disavowed dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, and when it became relatively safe to speak out, Shostakovich became even more conservative. Now, a new book, Shostakovich Reconsidered, by musicologist Allan Ho and Dmitry Feofanov, a lawyer and pianist, analyzes the evidence of both sides and comes down firmly on the side of Shostakovich as hero. The academics supporting Shostakovich as a closet dissident, for example, cite his daring, in a climate of anti-Semitism, in composing >From Jewish Folk Poetry, a song cycle based on Jewish melodies. Those debunking this say that the piece was completed in August, 1948, one month before Stalin's anti-Semitic policies were proclaimed. This was when Pravda was praising the "policy of equality and mutual respect among the ethnic cultures of the country's constituent minorities." Soviet multiculturalism needed the depiction of happy folk in national costume, and Shostakovich, according to his critics, filled his quota by writing this piece. "It was his rotten luck [not an act of heroism]," declares one of his fiercest critics, writer Fay Laurel, in a 1996 essay, "that of all the available nationalities, great and small, he just happened to pick the wrong 'folk' as his inspiration." The battle over this point has been ferocious among academics, but both sides are probably right. There is nothing mutually exclusive about the same person at the same time being (1) an inner dissident, (2) wanting to satisfy the Politburo, (3) knowing Jews were persecuted by the Communists, and (4) writing a piece of music about Jews to please the Communists. And further, (5), having had the "rotten luck" to pick the wrong group, turning that accidental act into a deliberate act of heroism in his own mind. Only those with no feel for the Kafkaesque nightmare of Stalinism could possibly believe that only one of these explanations is true. It is normal for people even less gifted than Shostakovich to have contradictory impulses. In dealing with tyranny, one has to make a number of mental adjustments to cope with terror. They may include the need to believe that everything is all right or that one is secretly fighting bad things. In addition, Shostakovich probably shared with most of his generation the notion that communism was a noble idea that had been distorted in practice. When you live in a tyranny, you can survive if you don't make waves. But if you turn out to be a great airplane designer-or composer-you will have to become a vocal supporter of the regime. It is expected of you. Refuse, and at best you'll never hear your music performed. At worst, you and your family will be put into the gulag, or killed. To be one of the leading musicians in the Soviet Union and not take an active role in political life would be a contradiction in terms. Shostakovich, as revealed in Testimony, shows his fear on virtually every page. His rivetting anecdotes demonstrate how unpredictable - except in his cruelty - Stalin could be. Myself, I don't believe Shostakovich was a closet dissident. The great cellist Mstislav (Slava) Rostropovich believes he was, and explains how Shostakovich made sarcastic allusions to Stalin in his First Cello Concerto. "These allusions," says Rostropovich in Elizabeth Wilson's book Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, "are camouflaged so craftily that even I did not notice them to begin with. I doubt if I would have detected [them] if Dmitry hadn't pointed it out to me." If Slava couldn't hear the tune, I'd say it wasn't there! Alexander Solzhenitsyn was disdainful of Shostakovich. In The Gulag Archipelago, he writes that if Shostakovich had wanted to parody Stalin's favorite tunes in the Cello Concerto, he should have come to the camps to hear the zeks whistle them. I would never deny Solzhenitsyn the right to be disdainful of the ambiguity and the yielding to fear and ambition that makes Shostakovich at best a carefully coded resister to Stalin. Solzhenitsyn is entitled to vent his disdain - he has earned that right - but I have not. Nor, I think, have Western academics or writers. Think what we have done in order to get a little advantage - a Canada Council grant, a place on an arts committee, jury or government body, to be invited to this or that dinner, or get an Order of Canada. We have compromised principles, kept quiet or changed the tone of our voice to please. Who are we to criticize a Kurt Waldheim or a Dmitry Shostakovich for not standing up to Hitler or Stalin when we have gone to pieces for such little carrots? That, I suppose, is why I have written this column.
Letter to the Editor Ian MacDonald, 14 July 1998 Sir/Madam,
In her capacity as a professional know-all, Barbara Amiel must naturally pretend to have a valid opinion on Shostakovich's political outlook. A pity, all the same, that she feels the need to inflict her specious views on the rest of us. In her column "Lingering questions about a musical giant" (June 22, 1998), she claims: "There is nothing mutually exclusive about the same person at the same time being (1) an inner dissident, (2) wanting to satisfy the Politburo, (3) knowing Jews were persecuted by the Communists, and (4) writing a piece of music about Jews to please the Communists. And further, (5), having had the 'rotten luck' to pick the wrong group, turning that accidental act into a deliberate act of heroism in his own mind." Nothing mutually exclusive about being a dissident and wanting to satisfy the Politburo? A fair, if limited, definition of Soviet dissidence would be wishing to blow the Politburo to kingdom come. Only a non-dissident would wish to "satisfy"(!) it. - Non sequitur (1). How could writing a sympathetic piece about Soviet Jews in 1948 possibly "please" the political body which had organised their persecution since 1942? - Non sequitur (2). Only if Shostakovich hadn't known that Soviet Jews were being persecuted could he have made such a blunder. Yet, as Amiel allows in the third of her supposedly compatible options, Shostakovich did know that Jews were persecuted by the Communists. - Non sequitur (3). All the evidence we have suggests Shostakovich was incensed by Soviet official anti-semitism. Why, then, would he try to "please" the Communists who were persecuting Jews? Why not simply avoid the issue by picking another group instead of annoying the anti-semitic Politburo he was allegedly trying to "satisfy"? - Non sequitur (4). The evidence - Amiel is as loose with this as she is with logic - conclusively shows that Fay Laurel's [sic!] proposition that Shostakovich merely "had the rotten luck to pick the wrong group" is infantile nonsense. As Amiel herself concedes in her option (3), he knew exactly what he was doing. No luck, rotten or otherwise, came into it. What need, then, to "turn" it into anything else at all, let alone "an act of heroism in his own mind"? (And where's the evidence that he, a modest man, ever did so?) - Non sequitur (5). The evidence is overwhelming that Shostakovich's composition of From Jewish Folk Poetry, far from "accidental", was knowing and purposive, and hence, in its context of Soviet anti-semitism, dissident. Is Amiel (1) against Shostakovich being anti-Soviet, (2) against him despising anti-semitism, (3) confused, (4) ill-informed, (5) all of the above? (And who the hell is "Fay Laurel"?) Further proof that Amiel can't connect two thoughts in logical sequence is provided by her remarks concerning "sarcastic allusions to Stalin" in Shostakovich's First Cello Concerto. "These allusions," says Rostropovich, "are camouflaged so craftily that even I did not notice them to begin with. I doubt if I would have detected [them] if Dmitry hadn't pointed it out to me." Amiel triumphantly concludes: "If Slava couldn't hear the tune, I'd say it wasn't there!" Does she mean (1) Shostakovich said it was there but was mistaken, (2) Shostakovich said it was there but was lying, (3) Rostropovich said Shostakovich said it was there but was lying, (4) she can't hear it, (5) she can't see it (on pp. 478-9 of the very book by Elizabeth Wilson in which Rostropovich says this)? "I don't believe Shostakovich was a closet dissident," Amiel tells us, sweetly. But if Shostakovich wasn't a dissident, why did he write such savagely dissident works as Rayok (1948/57) and the Thirteenth Symphony (1963)? Why do half of the witnesses in Elizabeth Wilson's book speak of him as a dissident? Why do none of the others call him a conformist? Has Amiel read Wilson's book with her brain engaged? Has she read Ho and Feofanov's book at all? Why is she so intent on making a fool of herself? So far as I can tell from her final paragraph, Amiel wrote this chaotic tosh because she feels queasy about having been among those who "compromised principles, kept quiet or changed the tone of our voice to please... in order to get a little advantage - a Canada Council grant, a place on an arts committee, jury or government body, to be invited to this or that dinner, or get an Order of Canada". Amiel's trivial ethical problems may be important to her, but must Shostakovich yet again be mendaciously and irrationally traduced merely to appease a privileged Western woman's burbling conscience? - Ian MacDonald
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