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Music
in the Soviet Union Glenn
Gould
That he did not become so may be counted as one of the genuine tragedies of twentieth-century music. Shostakovich today is occupied with Symphony No. Fourteen or so. He turns out works which no longer speak with the intensity of Mahler because there is no longer anything that he wishes to be intense about. The rhythmic propulsion of the early works has turned into the incessant pulsing of an organism, fatigued and overworked and trapped by a treadmill of historical delusion which shows no sign of relinquishing its incessant demands of productivity. The skillful ambiguities of Schoenbergian double meaning have become frigid and tawdry, stylised clichés embarrassing in their frequency. All that remains is the occasional moment of some strange ecstatic adagio (Shostakovich, like all real symphonists, always had a sense of adagio) to indicate what might have been. Superficially, at any rate, Shostakovich would seem to be a victim of the stultifying conformity that the regime has demanded. And yet one wonders about this in the case of Shostakovich. To all intents and purposes, the first blow to his pride, the first genuine interference with his reative aims, took place in 1936, when he was denounced for the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and we have perhaps permitted ourselves to overdramatize the results of that particular denunciation on Shostakovich's future course. I would not, I think, have said that a month or so ago, because I was not yet familiar with the work. But within the last few weeks I have (with some difficulty) managed to acquire a photostat copy of the original, unexpurgated score of Lady Macbeth, and I have to confess that in my judgment those who condemned the work were precisely right: it is a piece of unadulterated trivia. We may still assume that they condemned it for the wrong reasons-that they read into its story of adultery and murder an anti-Party activity. We may even assume that to a man of Shostakovich's inordinately sensitive temperament, such criticism may hav ehad a long-range effect of inhibition and confinement. But the fact remains that whatever went wrong with Shostakovich as a creative artist had already begun by the time he wrote this work. I should say that Shostakovich suffers less from the nagging persecutions of Party-imposed direction (after all, a man of his ingenuity could surely urmount some of that simply by taking refuge in the spiritual ivory tower of his work) than from an overdose of the Russian guilt complex-that he struggles unsuccessfully against a conscience which encourages the idea that duty has named a certain goal for his talents and that, whatever the cost, he must adapt himself in the manner required to attain it. Dmitri Shostakovich may yet write another great work, but I doubt it. I suspect that the twitching, weak-eyed teen-ager put down in the First Symphony in one grand burst of synoptic power all his love of and fascination with Western culture. When that first fresh, uncomplicated exposure of youth had endeed, he became paralyzed by the unshakable conceit of duty and responsibility. He became a prisoner of a society in which this kind of love and admiration was condemned.
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