At last, the score is settled
The Herald Shostakovich Series brings to an age-old debate writes MICHAEL TUMELTY

Michael Tumelty
Glasgow Herald, 30/10/00


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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.

 

 

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