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Shostakovich
Howard
Taubman
Chapter 6. ShostakovichI met Dmitri Shostakovich only twice, yet he and his music are a thin but strong connecting thread that binds together my impressions of Soviet art and artists accumulated intermittently in more than five decades. I encountered the music long before I met the man. The First Symphony, which appeared in 1926 when the composer was nineteen, proclaimed the arrival of a greatly gifted composer. The opera *Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk* had its premiere in Leningrad in early 1934. Based on a story by Leskov, it told a tale of adultery, murder and suicide in raw colors made rawer by music of shocking rhythms and harmonies and savage instrumental outcries. It was reviled by *Pravda*, the party newspaper, in a furious editorial, as verismo with a vengeance and ordered off the boards. The symphony, written as a graduation piece with a brash impudence and sense of fun, delighted me. The opera, which reached New York only a few months after its Soviet premiere in a special production conducted powerfully by Artur Rodzinski, left me with ambivalent feelings: awe at the composer's command of parody, satire, violence and old-fashioned sentiment as well as unease that amid so much creative abundance there was a lack of discrimination. On my first visit to the Soviet Union in 1935 looked forward to a possible meeting with the young firebrand. I was told that as a young writer on music at *The Times* I might get to see him. It did not work out that way; he was not in Moscow. But I was granted an opportunity to talk with three Soviet musicians: Dmitri Kabalevsky and Aram Khatchaturian, composers, and Grigori Shneerson, musicologist. Shneerson spoke English well, and we had no need of an official interpreter. They came to my room at the National Hotel, responded without apparent concern to searching questions and expressed satisfaction that *The Times* would be interested in further information about Soviet musical life. Would I care to have a large sampling of Soviet scores to take back to the United States? Indeed I would! Would I like an occasional letter telling of new developments? Certainly. Shneerson and I did correspond for a time. Then, after the crackdown by Stalin and his culture hatchet-man, Zhdanov, on Shostakovich, Prokofiev and other so-called formalists and cosmopolites, the correspondence ended. I did not see Shneerson again until 1958 during my second visit to the Soviet Union. He was with a group led by Tikhon Khrennikov, the domineering secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers and a perfect model of a hardline apparatchik, and the poor fellow was at great pains to seem not to know English or me. After the 1935 session at the National Hotel, two large bundles of scores arrived. There were symphonies, sonatas, occasional pieces by Kabalevsky, Khatchaturian and other leading composers. The prize, in view of the world-wide commotion that *Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk* had stirred, was a piano and vocal reduction of the opera. I retied the bundles with the rough wrapping paper in which they had come and managed to find a stout cord with which to hold the scores safely together. I left Moscow by train on my way to Warsaw, where I planned to spend a night on the way to Vienna, then Salzburg and its festival. At the Polish border all passengers were debarked with their luggage to change to a far more modern and comfortable Wagon-Lits train. The Polish government was intensely anti-Communist and regarded anyone and anything emerging from the Soviet Union with unremitting suspicion. Its customs officials went through all luggage as if any piece might contain a bomb. In those days of travel by train and ship, no one traveled light, and there was a lot to examine. Nothing threatening was found, and the little labels denoting clearance were pasted on my valises. A customs official then turned to my two bulky packages. He began to undo the knots as he asked in Polish, of which I had not a word, what I presumed was "What's this?" In a mixture of English, French and German, none of which he understood, I explained that the packages contained music. He picked up a score; the printed legend in Cyrillic was enough. He shook his head emphatically. He glanced at other scores. More Cyrillic lettering, more Russian names. He opened the bound volume of *Lady Macbeth*, turned the pages and saw that they contained a Russian text. Now his head-shaking was almost furious. This score and all the others could not enter Poland -- they reeked of subversion. I argued vehemently. A superior officer approached. We must hurry, the train must leave. He spoke a little French, and I explained that I was spending just one night in Warsaw, not enough to be a carrier of Communist propaganda. Sorry, Soviet scores were not welcome in Poland. I argued, how could black notes on white paper infect his country? He just shook his head. I now resorted to the only tactic left to a desperate traveler -- a calculated tantrum. I ranted in English, threw my hat to the ground, literally jumped up and down. The customs officials looked at each other in dismay; I must be a lunatic. The station master came by to say that the train must go. At this point the senior customs official offered a compromise: the Shostakovich score could not under any circumstances enter Poland; if I gave it up, the other scores would be granted clemency. "But the Shostakovich," I shouted, "is the one I want most!" The official offered another compromise: wrap it and mail it direct to the United States. While the train lingered, I made a separate package of the score, with the official's help, paid the postage and left it with him, while I triumphantly though wearily carried the other scores onto the train. To my total disbelief, the Shostakovich score, which I had given up as gone for good, was waiting for me at *The Times* when I returned to New York. At that time it was a rare document, for it was the version that Stalin's government had suppressed. I daresay that under Gorbachev's glasnost, other copies have surfaced in the Soviet Union. If anyone is disposed to examine what was so heinous to Soviet and Polish authorities in the 1930s, my copy is now in the Cornell University archives. In 1958 I spent almost a month in the Soviet Union. My objective was to investigate the place of the arts under the more benign leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. I spent some time in Leningrad, Kiev and Tbilisi as well as in Moscow. I had a long, formal meeting at the Union of Soviet Composers with a delegation led by Khrennikov. Unfortunately, the man I wanted most to meet, Shostakovich, was not there. When I regretted his absence, Khrennikov assured me that a meeting would be arranged. The group discussion was amicable. Khrennikov made the introductory remarks and more often than not replied to questions, even though I tried to address them to others. With the experience of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, whose lives had been darkened by government and party ukases, in mind, I asked about judgments from on high. "Oh no," Khrennikov insisted, "it was not party leaders who criticized but other musicians." If a score strayed from the path of Socialist realism, it was composers who pointed the proper direction. What could be more democratic? As to music of consequence being created in other lands, Soviet musicians, he explained, had access to any scores and recordings they wished to examine. As to the Soviet public, Khrennikov contended, with the assurance of one who could fathom the minds of millions, that it wanted music that was clear, melodic, optimistic, joyous, affirmative. Like Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, I thought, with its black despair -- then and now a program staple in the Soviet Union. Could the public always be depended upon to be right in its response to a first or second hearing? Had it always been right about Shostakovich and Prokofiev? Khrennikov alluded to Prokofiev's *War and Peace*. The initial production was misconceived and ineffective. A better production turned the opera into a success. Ergo, producers and performers, not the public, had been wrong. In the days that followed, I asked repeatedly through my interpreter and a chap in the Ministry of Culture who spoke English and had been designated as my contact man, "What about an interview with Shostakovich?" "Not to worry. We'll be back in town soon; it will be arranged." I made my scheduled visits to the other cities. The farther one got from Moscow, the more relaxed artists seemed to be about talking to an American. The party line on the arts was not referred to as ultimate wisdom. These artists were ready for glasnost decades ago. Tbilisi was an unforgettable experience. The Union of Georgian Composers, apprised of my forthcoming visit, sent a message inviting me to lunch. The setting was a pavilion atop St. David's Hill to be reached either by funicular or a drive up a steep, twisting road. On a long table were heaping plates of caviar, sturgeon, fresh vegetables, delicious flat Georgian bread and a staggering collection of wine bottles, all full, representing every vintage of the Soviet Union's principal wine-producing area. No mention of Socialist realism here; only sly comment about cultural bureaucrats in Moscow. The party lasted from noon to 6 P.M. It comprised five Georgian composers, the southern republic's most important; a representative of Georgia's Ministry of Culture; my interpreter, who had flown down with me from Moscow; and since she did not know Georgian, a local interpreter. A long, gracious toast from the tamada -- the Georgian word for the man at the head of the table -- and a glass of wine, tradition requiring that it must be drained. It was my obligation to respond; my toast was a lot briefer and less flowery. A tall, exuberantly mustachioed composer rose and launched into a lovely Georgian folk song, beginning with a melismatic phrase that reminded me of the music of the Middle East, and the others joined in three-part polyphony with pinpoint accuracy. A handsome, gallant man named Otar Taktakishvili delivered a toast to America's writers beginning with Steinbeck, sat down happily flushed as we brought our glasses to our lips, then jumped up to apologise for the unpardonable omission of Hemingway. Toasts followed toasts; songs became livelier and, I guessed, bawdier. At one point I made a ghastly booboo: I offered a toast to the tamada, without realizing that such a toast in Georgia signifies the party's end. I wriggled out of it by insisting that I was toasting Alexei Machavariani in his role as composer and not tamada. He was, I had learned, a Lenin Prize winner, and I was to hear his music that evening for a long ballet based on Othello (alas, I dozed more than I heard or saw). At 6 P.M. we wove -- at least I wove -- our way to the cars, carrying, as ordered by the tamada, wine glasses. Halfway down the mountain, we pulled up at the side of the road, wine bottles were produced, and we drank -- this time without toasts -- presumably just for the road. Back in Moscow, before coping with the problems of getting to see people I wanted to see, like Shostakovich, I wrote what was a faithful and, I hope, amusing account of the six-hour lunch, which *The Times* ran on page one. Several years later there was a dividend. Paul Hofmann, Rome correspondent of *The Times*, was tracking down an important story about the Vatican and approached Cardinal Agaganian of the Curia for help. Did Hofmann know the man who had written about a lunch in Tbilisi? Hofmann did; the cardinal helped him in his quest, asking him to tell that writer that for him, who came from that part of the world, it was most agreeable for once to read the truth about "the kind of people we are." Finally I was told that an appointment had been made for me with Shostakovich. When my interpreter arrived at my hotel on the given morning, she was unhappy. Shostakovich was ill. Maybe he was; maybe not. A replacement was offered, Nikolai Pogodin, a Stalin Prize winner and author of the long-running play *Kremlin Chimes*. I accepted, even if he was, as I assumed, trustworthy by party standards. Not that Shostakovich had failed to behave after being abused and humiliated publicly. At least he gave me the appearance of toeing the line. The Fifth Symphony, which he wrote after the official excoriation in the thirties, was thoroughly conservative in style, and the Seventh, known as the "Leningrad," written passionately to honor that city and its heroic defenders who held out against the besieging Germans for many months, was similarly accessible. But in many of his works there were eruptions -- clashing rhythms and sonorities, anguished themes that expressed his bitterness and dissent, passages that seem to me to sing of rebellion. My interpreter and I drove to Peredelkino, the Moscow suburb where leading artists had their dachas. Pogodin, a small man with a glint in his eye and a cynical twist of the lips, received me correctly enough, though he was probably irritated to have this visit foisted on him. And I who did not believe that Shostakovich was ill, vented my annoyance by asking tough, undiplomatic questions. His answers were curt, deliberately insolent and provocative. We had arrived at the dacha at 11 A.M., and just before noon, feeling that I was getting nowhere, I said it was time to go. With a weary air Pogodin replied, "So our American friend will not accept our hospitality?" I was startled: what hospitality? "'He expects you to stay for lunch,'" my interpreter explained. "His wife and daughter are preparing it." We stayed for lunch. His wife and daughter, a bright, intelligent chemist, joined us. The conversation became animated. He showed me his state-of-the-art American shortwave receiving equipment. I asked whether it had been a problem to acquire. "No," he said, "not if you have the money, and if you mean black market, no again." He showed me shelves of boxed tapes. "I like your jazz," he went on, "and I have a better library here than some of you Americans." We talked about music, writing, the stage. My interpreter was struggling to keep up with question and answer, thrust and retort. Soon we were ignoring her. Pogodin evidently knew more English than he had admitted to and seemed to understand me, and I who knew no Russian but grasped words and phrases that belonged to the lingua franca of the arts understood much of what he was saying. There was absolutely no mistake: he was deploring the limits that the party and its Socialist realism were imposing on artists. Shostakovich, if permitted to see me and speak candidly, could not have been, if I may use an oxymoron, more indirectly forthright. I finally did meet Shostakovich the following year. I had no opportunity to talk to him alone, not even with an interpreter. He was a member of a distinguished group of Soviet musicians who came to the United States in 1959 as a phase of the cultural exchanges then in full flower between our country and the Soviet Union. In 1958 four of our composers -- Roger Sessions, Roy Harris, Peter Mennin and Ulysses Kay -- had toured the Soviet Union. The reciprocal delegation included Shostakovich, Kabalevsky, Khrennikov, Fikret Amirov and Konstantin Denkevich, composers, and Boris Yarustovsky, a critic. The pattern for these exchanges was relatively formalized, with the host country fixing itineraries and arranging meetings. In the Soviet Union our composers visited a number of cities, heard performances, met with musicians, discussed mutual problems, rarely got into individual homes. Here the situation was not much different, thanks to Soviet insistence that the delegation must make all appearances en masse. CBS invited Shostakovich and Kabalevsky to be guests on the Sunday program "Face the Nation", but the reply was that all six must be invited or none would appear. CBS decided that a half-hour program with six guests would be too unwieldy to be useful. One meeting with the visitors turned out to be less formal, more flexible and franker than most of the others with their routine politesse and obligatory toasts to peace and friendship. It took place in the New York City home of Norman Dello Joio, and the other Americans were Aaron Copland, William Schuman, Samuel Barber, Mennin, Kay, Nicolas Slonimsky, Russian-born musicologist who served as interpreter, and I. Shostakovich asked the first question. How many opera houses did the United States have? Touche! Very few three decades ago, compared with what we have now, and very few indeed compared with the many in the Soviet Union. An American countered. How many orchestras in the Soviet Union? Touche for us! Only a few compared with the multitude in the United States. The discussion turned to the duty and right of composers to be their own person, to be bold in pursuing their own creative inclinations. The visitors understood that this was the key issue. Khrennikov, who often arrogated to himself the privilege of answering and speaking for the others, argued that the greatest boldness lay in being simple and direct. Kabalevsky denied that the Soviet composer was restricted and contended that there were stylistic differences, for example, between Prokofiev and Gliere, between Shostakovich and Khatchaturian. I directed hard questions at Shostakovich. Why had his *Lady Macbeth* been suppressed after one performance? He replied that he had decided to revise the opera to "remove impurities and crudities." What had happened when he and Prokofiev were castigated by the party leadership for the sins of formalism and cosmopolitanism? I knew I was being ungallant and putting him on the spot. He flushed and labored to give an answer that, I surmised, would pass muster with Khrennikov, who with his apparatchik's zeal was undoubtedly the delegation's monitor. The answer w as painfully lame. It followed the Khrennikov, that is, the party, line about the need for simplicity and directness. With his myopic eyes and an almost defensive posture, Shostakovich was so palpably uncomfortable that I regretted my questions. When the meeting ended Shostakovich accorded me the coolest of goodbyes. Years before I had written an article for the Sunday music pages in which I argued that Shostakovich needed the freedom to write as he pleased, and he responded with an article in a Soviet publication asserting that he had complete freedom. We were antagonists at a distance of thousands of miles. At least so I felt, rather sadly, until an encounter in Washington months later, when I was there on a mission for *The Times*. I was staying at the Statler Hilton, and having arisen early, I was at the elevator bank, heading for breakfast and a newspaper at an hour when hardly anyone else was stirring. The door of the lift slid open. Inside was one passenger -- Shostakovich. I learned later that the Soviet delegation, which had visited Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Louisville and Boston as well as New York, had returned to the capital for a final debriefing. Shostakovich, like me, was evidently an early bird. Automatically I reached out to shake his hand, wondering whether he would respect it. He grasped mine warmly. We did not have time in the lift's swift descent to try for a language we both spoke. We just stood there and looked at each other. At the lobby level, as the door opened, Shostakovich impulsively rushed at me, embraced me, kissed me on both cheeks and plunged out into the lobby. I did not try to follow him. I never saw him again, but we both understood. Poor, unhappy man! How he must have suffered in chose years when he was made a whipping boy by tyrannous ignoramuses! There is some indication of how he felt in the book that Simon Volkov produced and that purported to be Shostakovich's testament. What about his music? As time passes we are able to achieve a perspective on it. It is no longer good enough to have a knee-jerk reaction like that of some American critics, who have tended to dismiss most of the music as the inevitable banal product of an imposed rigid doctrine like Socialist realism. One thinks of the way Mahler was dismissed a couple of generations ago as being too inflated for his own good. It took the commitment of a Leonard Bernstein to make a strong, fresh case for Mahler by playing all the major symphonic works in a coherent succession and then recording them for television. Shostakovich's music is being played increasingly not only in the Soviet Union but in other countries, including the United States. During one week his Eighth Symphony was offered in New York by two different orchestras. In a visit to the Soviet Union in 1986, I heard the Leningrad Philharmonic play the Sixth Symphony in that lovely Hall of the Nobles which the composer, a native of the city, might have had in mind when he imagined the sound and movement of his symphonic works. Nor is it only the symphonic works that should commend Shostakovich to us. He wrote fine, lively music for films. His stage music for dance and opera is too little known. And there is in his chamber music, particularly that of his final years, the sorrow and the pity and the occasional exaltation of a man who has endured and survived much. One wonders at times what Shostakovich would have produced and what paths he would have pursued if he had lived his entire life in a free atmosphere. One might as well wonder what Mozart would have achieved if he had lived beyond his thirty-sixth year. It is enough to be grateful for what Shostakovich, a composer of true genius, did manage to reveal of himself and his heritage in an abundance of music in many forms.
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