|
Shostakovich
in shades of grey Tamara
Bernstein Will the silly season in Shostakovich studies -- and open season on one of the finest musicologists of our time -- ever end? You wouldn't think that the publication of the first meticulously researched, trustworthy biography of the Soviet composer -- and the first Western biography of him that draws on Russian language sources -- would inspire hysterical controversy. You'd think, as Martha Stewart would say, that this was a good thing. But Oxford University Press' recent release of Shostakovich: A Life, the long-awaited study by U.S. musicologist Laurel Fay, has triggered drearily predictable howls of protest from a cult of fanatics who insist that Shostakovich (1906-1975) was a lifelong dissident; that every note of his music expresses this in easily understood codes; and that anyone who denies this is an idiot, a Stalinist, or both. If you think this sounds silly and sophomoric, you're right. No decent music -- and Shostakovich's is much more than decent -- can be reduced to this kind of simplistic, literalist narrative. Shostakovich himself ridiculed such attempts. The Shostakovich-as-dissident cult began in 1979, when a Russian emigre named Solomon Volkov published Testimony, claiming it was Shostakovich's dictated memoirs. The Shostakovich of Testimony is indeed a deeply embittered man who resisted Stalinism his whole life, and through his music. Testimony begat The New Shostakovich -- a trite, 1990 biography by British journalist Ian MacDonald, who conscripts all data into the service of his own anti-Stalinist agenda. Since then, MacDonald and other Volkov disciples have invested a staggering amount of energy -- not to mention ego -- in their cause. But as U.S. musicologist Richard Taruskin has argued, they're essentially using Shostakovich as a blank screen on which they can project their own fantasies of political and moral heroism. The ''Volkovists'' declare intellectual war on anyone who disagrees with them -- I once had the honour of being lumped with Taruskin and Fay in an Internet diatribe by MacDonald that rivalled War and Peace in length (but not, alas, literary quality). But they have a particular phobia of Fay, principally because she has found serious cracks in Volkov's claims for the authenticity of Testimony, and because she didn't include the book as a reliable source in her new biography. Taruskin has earned the Volkovists' hatred because, among other things, he's pointed out that even if Testimony were authentic, memoirs are never infallible sources -- every human being to some extent rewrites his or her life in old age -- and anyone who survived a totalitarian regime will have plenty of reasons to do so. These are fascinating, complex questions; in a healthy intellectual environment they could be bandied about constructively. But the Volkovists will allow only for black and white; right and wrong; good guys and bad guys. They've waged their ongoing campaign against their opponents primarily over the Internet, but also in the ludicrously polemic Shostakovich Reconsidered, published by a small U.K. firm in 1998. ''The atmosphere of hostility and organized slander that Ms. Fay has had to endure,'' Taruskin noted recently in The New York Times, ''is more than a little reminiscent of the atmosphere in which Soviet dissidents -- and even Shostakovich at times -- had to carry on.'' Even more disturbingly, a number of influential journalists have jumped on the MacDonald-Volkov bandwagon. In a particularly odious column in The Daily Telegraph a few months ago, Norman Lebrecht compared Fay's refusal to accept Shostakovich's alleged dissidence to David Irving's Holocaust denial. I first met Laurel Fay in 1993, when I interviewed her at her Staten Island home for a series of radio documentaries on Shostakovich that I was preparing for CBC Radio's Ideas. I came like a typical journalist, looking for simplistic sound bites, which Fay politely but steadfastly refused to supply. Choosing her words carefully (now I understand why!), she was a voice of reason and thoroughness, and a model of intellectual integrity. ''I wanted Shostakovich: A Life to be a quiet book,'' she said wryly over the phone a few days ago. ''I wanted it to be useful -- so that when people want to know the background to a piece of music, for instance, they can go to something that will be accurate. ''What I've provided is just the tip of the iceberg; the first step,'' she stressed. And Fay would know: Since 1971, she's spent a total of two or three years in Russia and the former U.S.S.R., researching Shostakovich and other composers in archives. (MacDonald, incidentally, does not list a single Russian language source in his book.) Fay, who just likes to get on with her work, is understandably wary of discussing the Shostakovich wars with reporters. But she's ''going back on the stump'' over the authenticity, or lack of same, of Testimony next month, when she presents a paper at Princeton, Cornell and New York universities. ''I'm very conscious of the fact that a lot of people are very bored with this debate -- including me,'' she said. ''But I'm still of the opinion that it does matter, whether Testimony is authentic. And there's a ton of evidence that was not reported in Shostakovich Reconsidered that needs to be aired.'' When asked whether her biography was shaped by the Shostakovich ''wars,'' Fay paused for a long moment. ''Yes, but it's hard to explain in what ways. I bent over backwards to keep myself out of it. I do have opinions [about his politics] that are not in the book. In the long run, it's probably better that way -- it allows people to use the book and make up their own minds. ''Besides, I couldn't fit everything I know about Shostakovich into the book, so it would have been dangerous to venture into opinions [without all the evidence on display]," she added. Fay would also have loved to have written about Shostakovich's music, as she originally intended. ''But I don't think the present atmosphere is right.'' Fay's sense of Shostakovich the man is ''a little hard to put into words. He was a brilliant, brilliant man -- talented beyond anything that most of us can imagine. And ... he was a very conflicted person. On the one hand, he resisted and resented some of the things that happened to him [under the communist regime]. On the other hand, he was a wuss. He knew this, and it was a source of great agony to him. So in a sense he ate himself up from inside. ''When I look at the picture used for the frontispiece of my book, I see a man who has chewed himself up -- I see not what other people did to him, but what he did to himself."
|
