SHOSTAKOVICH - A Musical Cold War Rages On
Who was the real Shostakovich? Twenty five years after
his death the battle for the truth still sees no end.
C H Loh
Vox -The Sunday Magazine Nov 2000
(The Sun, Kuala Lumpur)
"Our forebears crawled into cells
And often reminded themselves in an evil hour
'It's tough, friends, but probably
Our kids will be freer than us'
The kids grew up, and they too
crawled into cells in time of danger"
- from 'Satires' Dmitry Shostakovich 1966
25 years ago on August 9th Russia and 20th Century's greatest composer passed away. The Western world looked on in curiosity more than in loss, for he was probably just another Soviet dignitary, one who had wasted his immense musical talents on propaganda music. The official Pravda obituary read: "A loyal son of the communist Party, a prominent public figure and statesman, the artist-citizen D D Shostakovich devoted his entire life to the development of Soviet music . . . ."
This summation became the stock phrase most often repeated to describe the composer even up to the last decade. Key events of Shostakovich's life affirmed this statement: his disgrace for Lady Macbeth and his subsequent rehabilitation through the 5th Symphony, the TIME magazine cover picture of the composer in his fireman helmet posing as a Soviet citizen defending his motherland against Hitler and its musical equivalent, his 7th Symphony subtitled 'Leningrad' complete with graphic depiction of the approach of Hitler's invading forces.
Equally notorious are his pro-Communist works like The Sun Shines Over Our Motherland and the Symphonies 11 and 12, works that confirmed Western belief that Shostakovich was a talent wasted by ideological convictions. That the composer joined the Communist Party in 1960 and notoriously put his signature to a denunciation of Andrei Sakharov sealed his public image.
As Glenn Gould observed in 1964, "Shostakovich may yet write another great work, but I doubt it ..... When that first fresh, uncomplicated exposure of youth [ie. the 1st Symphony] had ended, he became paralysed by the unshakeable conceit of duty and responsibility."
Who could have predicted that after a dignified but otherwise quiet funeral of 1975 the fortunes of Shostakovich would explode into one of the most controversial episodes in musical history and scholarship? It all began with a music journalist Solomon Volkov, who had defected to the West and produced what was supposed to be the composer's memoirs as dictated to him.
In 1979 the book entitled 'Testimony' was published in the West to a huge international success. The Shostakovich that greeted the world was not the flag-waving ideology-spewing loyal communist that the world had known, but a bitter man with a dark view of his times and harsh critical views of the regime and the people who supported it. Testimony was translated into twenty languages and has a print run of half a million copies today.
"Looking back, I see nothing but ruins, mountains of corpses" says Shostakovich in the opening paragraphs of 'Testimony'. Perhaps it is these mountains of corpses that were prophesised in the 1st Symphony and eulogised in his music beginning with the anguished Largo of the 5th Symphony through to the haunting opening of the 14th Symphony.
Resistance to the memoirs appeared almost instantaneously. Six of Shostakovich's colleagues signed an article denouncing the book as a fraud. Amongst them was the composer's favourite pupil Boris Tischenko. In 1980 American musicologist Laurel Fay revealed that 7 of the chapters in the book were headed by material that were previously published in official Soviet sources. Her article in Russian Review amalgamated the anti-Testimony movement that to this day still refuses to accept any of the arguments supporting the memoirs.
Testimony itself sparked a revolution in the way the composer and his music was perceived, understood and performed. It catalysed a re-examination of his entire opus - one that encompassed 15 symphonies, 15 string quartets, two completed operas, and numerous orchestral, vocal, instrumental and chamber works - and is admitted even by critics as the reason for a renaissance of public interest in his works. The amount of Shostakovich now available in recordings and concerts has increased exponentially over the last decade, an enviable achievement for any 20th Century composer.
Shostakovich's archivist Manashir Yakubov aptly describes the composer's music: "[Shostakovich] would combine the lyric with the grotesque, and joy with irony, while the weak voice of hope was filtered through the deepest of despair. Grief was intertwined, somewhat paradoxically yet perfectly naturally, with light-hearted frivolity and mindless merriment. Shostakovich sees both sides of the coin at once with his extraordinary double vision . . . .the formal and the heroic can all suddenly turn shallow and comic, while in a single moment the ridiculous can descend into tragic nightmare."
While the memoirs itself lapsed into a period of disgrace, Russian emigres maintained that Testimony was a faithful portrait of the composer. In Europe there was less doubt about its authenticity, and several writers continued to support the rehabilitated view of Shostakovich. The seeds of change were sowed by English writer Ian MacDonald who published a significant re-examination of Shostakovich's music entitled 'The New Shostakovich' in 1990. Hence the war of words had begun.
The collapse of the Soviet Union stoked the fires of controversy, as biographies and personal accounts of Russians who knew and performed Shostakovich behind the Iron Curtain began come forth, speaking more freely about their beloved composer as they had never dared while the Communists were still in power. Shostakovich's son Maxim too began to reveal an increasing support for Volkov and the memoirs, despite his initial rejection of it during the years surrounding his defection from the USSR.
The bitter row over who Shostakovich really was and what his music meant has escalated in the last years of the 90s through to this millennium. Heated debates spilled into cyberspace, while journalists and scholars sparred in major Western newspapers. The few writers and academics who wrote in support of the "new" Shostakovich were severely criticised.
Richard Taruskin, the musicologist who initially endorsed Volkov's efforts, likened the movement which has developed in support of Testimony or the view of this "new" Shostakovich (together labelled as 'revisionists') to a cult of personality, drawing parallels with the blinded cult of personality that surrounded Stalin. In March he wrote in the New York Times, "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."
It is perhaps no accident that the North American media has been particularly vocal in deriding the so-called 'revisionists'. Taruskin is central to a small group of mostly American scholars who with their media allies have stepped up the offensive to challenge this "cult". They laugh off MacDonald's extensive research and critiques housed in his website 'Music Under Soviet Rule' and ridicule musicologist Allan Ho and lawyer-musician Dmitry Feofanov's huge summation of the issues surrounding the controversy in their recent 720-page 'Shostakovich Reconsidered'.
What is central to the debate is how it impacts on Shostakovich's music; it could significantly change the way we perceive even outwardly ideologically correct works like the 'Leningrad' Symphony and the 11th Symphony (subtitled '1905' in commemoration of the Bolshevik Revolution).
Laurel Fay maintains her doubts on the authenticity of Testimony and has promised fresh evidence to be published in Russian, and till then has chosen to remain silent to her critics. She was conspicuously absent at the Glasgow Shostakovich Symposium in October, an affair that may well be the high point of this commemorative year. Taruskin was present to renew his vitriol, as The Glasgow Herald reports, "defending scholarship from its enemies before an audience I must deem to contain enemies .... Their dishonesty is as potent as Mr Volkov's...I hold more strongly than ever that Testimony is a fraud."
The nadir - it has to be the nadir - of this musical Cold War is what Shostakovich's widow, his third wife Irina Shostakovich (who currently heads the Shostakovich Centre in Paris) had to say in the anniversary month of August. Mrs Shostakovich spoke out with unprecedented venom at unnamed persons who continue to 'defame' Shostakovich by supporting the fake memoirs. "The story of his life has been turned into a battlefield. Of course, everything and everyone is pulled into the line of fire. They shout obscenities on the Internet, publish articles and write books and plays about Shostakovich," she said in the New York Times article.
So could Shostakovich be conceivably anti-Communist? I posed the question to Yuri Temirkanov of the St Petersburg Philharmonic when they came to Malaysia a few years ago. "He HATED the Communists. We all do." He is convinced that Testimony is authentic. "They are jealous they did not get to do it first," he says of those who are attacking Volkov as a fraud.
It is at least now clear that two separate issues have evolved. The first concerns itself with the technical issue of the memoirs' authenticity. It hinges critically only on the puzzle of the borrowed material at the head of the seven chapters, in reality no more than fourteen pages of a 276-page book. Volkov maintains that he has no idea how these pages got there, while his critics insist he tricked Shostakovich into signing the fake memoirs using these articles. The situation is akin to one who is caught with the murder weapon, which alone is circumstantial and is insufficient proof of guilt.
The more important issue is divorced of the memoirs: the question of whether the music of Shostakovich was straight-faced ideology or a moral resistance to tyranny. This question, if not enlightened by the more controversial Shostakovich works like Symphony Nr 13 (subtitled 'Babi Yar', a vocal work of dissident proportions) and Rayok (the private satire on Stalin and his cronies), might well be answered by the din of voices that has chorused an overwhelming affirmation of the composer's moral courage.
These individual testimonies were published by Elizabeth Wilson in 'Shostakovich: A Life Remembered', a book that Volkov's critics curiously try to avoid addressing. While Wilson herself chooses to stay out of the fray, her collected reminisces of Shostakovich is highly consistent with the man portrayed in 'Testimony'.
For example Fyodor Druzhinin - of the Beethoven Quartet which premiered most of the composer's quartets - says, "People who lived in Shostakovich's epoch have no need to dig in the archives or to marvel at the evidence of repressions and executions and murders. It is all there in his music.
Shostakovich's favourite soprano Galina Vishnevskaya further testifies, "In his symphonies . . . there is protest and tragedy, pain and humiliation. If music can be called anti-Communist, I think Shostakovich's music should be called by that name." Her husband, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, says Shostakovich resisted the tyranny of starvation, cannibalism, concentration camps, mass executions and so on by "describing, in a musical language that could be understood without an interpreter, the entire history of the Soviet Union and Russia".
Grigori Kosintsev, a filmmaker with whom Shostakovich collaborated, says, "Music is not a profession for Shostakovich, it is the necessity to speak out and to convey what lies behind the lives of people, to depict our age and our country .... In Shostakovich's music I hear a virulent hatred of cruelty, of the cult of power, of the persecution of truth..."
A family friend Flora Litvinova reveals how Shostakovich said of his 'Leningrad' Symphony, that it represented "our system, or any form of totalitarianism ... this music is about all forms of terror, slavery, the bondage of the spirit."
Fay first wrote in her 1980 article, "If this Testimony of Shostakovich is authentic, then it will certainly lead to some radical re-evaluation not only of Shostakovich's life and music but of the history of Soviet musical and cultural life,". In the face of the vast amounts of personal testimonies that have surfaced today, her initial premise on the impact of Testimony's authenticity has lost its leverage.
The silver lining is that amidst the cacophony of harsh words and bitter scholarly battles, the shy, nervous man who did not care what the West thought of him is now heralded as the moral voice of a nation, and a musical genius. "He knew he was a genius, and he was embarrassed about it. In fact, he felt apologetic about it," says Temirkanov. One wonders if this genius planted the clue that sticks like a thorn in the side of Testimony's detractors.
For there is one chapter on which Shostakovich's authentic signature appears, it is on the very first page where he says, "These are not memoirs about myself, these are memoirs about other people. Others will write about us. And naturally, they will lie through their teeth - but that's their business."