IN the end, wisdom prevailed. And Shostakovich,
the composer, won the battle. The international symposium on Shostakovich,
held in Glasgow throughout the weekend, to commemorate the 25th anniversary
of the composer's death and to coincide with the launch of The Herald
Shostakovich Series, proved to be a momentous affair.
Predictably, insults were
hurled, individuals slandered, and their reputations besmirched. At
the outset, the figurehead of one camp concluded by declaring that the
Shostakovich Wars - as they have become known - were worn out and that
the opponents should move on. At the very end, yesterday afternoon,
the leading figure of the opposing camp declared that he was withdrawing
from the conflict after one more conference, next month in the States,
and would speak no further on the subject.
And in between the poles
of opinion the 125 delegates from all over the world - Japan, China,
the United States, Canada, Belgium, Germany, Holland, the UK, and a
huge contingent from Russia and Israel - heard words of wisdom, first
from Scottish composer James MacMillan, in his welcoming address, and
later from a wonderful old Russian professor, himself too ill to attend,
his cool, profound, and infinitely perceptive message delivered for
him by a Scottish academic.
The Shostakovich battle
has raged, for around two decades, over a memoir, entitled Testimony,
allegedly dictated by the composer himself and smuggled out to the west,
which purportedly revealed the composer to have been a secret dissident
through Stalin's reign of terror, and to have encoded that dissidence
within his music. The essence of the argument has always been this:
one camp thinks it's authentic, the other believes it to be a monstrous
fraud perpetrated by Solomon Volkov, the writer who claims it was dictated
to him by Shostakovich.
Far from being the substance
of dry academic debate, Testimony has become the fulcrum of a series
of blistering diatribes between the two camps. And Professor Richard
Taruskin of the University of California, who is the most bitter opponent
of Testimony, did not miss and hit the wall in his opening keynote speech
on Friday night - given as Glasgow University's flagship Cramb Lecture
- when he lambasted everyone in and out of sight of the argument.
In a hugely entertaining
speech, which ran for almost 100 minutes, he declared the entire symposium
to have been set up as a media event, and a "staged conflict" between
the two camps. Employing the delivery of a US courtroom drama (soap-style),
Taruskin announced that he was "defending scholarship from its enemies
before an audience I must deem to contain enemies".
The insults flew like machine-gun
bullets. Testimony's believers were accused of being a cult, and publisher
Martin Anderson of being "the cult's main facilitator". (Anderson's
response is unprintable.) The co-authors of the book Anderson published
were alleged to have "completely missed the point". Journalist Norman
Lebrecht (not present) was accused of "smear tactics", scholar Ian MacDonald
of being "abysmal" in performance, and the whole pack of being perpetrators
of "a big lie that has spread to the internet, where it flourishes".
Taruskin dismissed them all. "Their dishonesty is as potent as Mr Volkov's,"
he said. "I hold more strongly than ever that Testimony is a fraud."
Perhaps significantly, Professor
Taruskin's speech was wholly about politics and polemics, and didn't
actually include any assessment of Shostakovich's music, or, indeed,
what the good professor thinks of it. He came over as a fundamentalist,
preaching against those who believe that there is an agenda or message
in the composer's music, which, in effect - in an irony that Shostakovich
himself would have appreciated - left the American stranded in a dead-end
alleyway of proscription.
Worst
of all, this character insulted the intelligence of all sophisticated
listeners by condescendingly allowing them to have their "happy catharsis"
with the music, while declaring that "the public impact of the cultists
is our collective problem". Really? Are we such ignorant listeners that
we cannot form an individual, intelligent response to the music?
The words "awa' an' bile
yer heid, ya bampot" flitted through the mind. Fortunately, however,
there were sufficient insightful responses to the music to leave the
American extremist (and the little empire he has made for himself out
of the controversy) wholly exposed.
James MacMillan's powerful
and personal observations drew attention to Shostakovich as "the public
atheist who provides us with a scorching vision of the human soul".
Pointing to the composer's "extraordinary double vision". MacMillan
outlined a music that simultaneously embraces "the lyric and the grotesque,
joy and irony, hope and despair; a music which holds a mirror up to
the human condition".
The words of Professor Mark
Aranovsky of the Arts History Institute of Moscow, movingly delivered
in the professor's absence by academic Stuart Campbell, quietly demolished
the thesis of American Taruskin. Aranovsky pointed to Shostakovich's
lines of defence against the State (through his "virtuoso way with the
official vocabulary"), to the fact that "all subjects are exhaustively
discussed in his music", and that the substance of that music contains
"not a primitive, programmatic quality, but broad picture of life",
as with the music of Beethoven, Brahms, and all the the others before
him. The music, said Aranovsky, was at once "topical and eternal".
And that image - reinforced
by illuminating documentary films, blistering performances in a recital
by cellist Alexander Ivashkin and pianist Tatyana Lazareva, and the
valedictory plea by pianist and scholar Dmitri Feofanov for "academic
integrity", all part of the richly-textured symposium - is the one that
will abide.
Home
Back to contents Top