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Emerson
Quartet's Shostakovich Cycle Review of the concert of the complete cycle. "It really has become
like an historical event," says Emerson violinist Philip SeIzer. Daniel
Jaffe Shostakovich's string quartets, though rarely performed in toto, are widely regarded as the Russian composer's finest achievement and one of the greatest quartet cycles of the twentieth centuiy. Last Friday the Emerson String Quartet launched its series of five concerts playing all 15 quartets. Advance word of the performances in America has been such that the first three dates at London's Wigmore Hall sold out months ago. "It really has become like an historical event," says Emerson violinist Philip SeIzer, "not so much because of us, but because of the music." Composed by a man once widely paraded as "a commit- ted Communist", the music unmistakably reveals a far more troubled soul: nakedly expressive and bitter-sweet, with passages of poignant lyricism contrasting with vigorous, often ferociously angry movements. The quartets - written in the period from 1938, under Stalin's shadow, to the penultimate year of Shostakovich's life in 1974 - have been described as being like pages from a diary Hence, SeIzer explains, the Emerson's decision to play the quartets in compositional order: "hearing the quartets chronologically takes you into the story - it sort of speeds you along like an autobiography I feel these quartets are really his testimony the most personal and true utterances that he made." But the nature of this "testimony" has been heatedly contested by Shostakovich experts over the past 20 years. Scholars have been particularly divided over the book Testimony, allegedly Shostakovich's memoirs as related to musicologist Solomon Volkov. Published in 1979, Testimony first gave currency to the idea that Shostakovicb, far from being a loyal Communist, was an embittered dissident. Despite its authenticity having been challenged, the mounting evidence- not least from friends and relations of the composer - has convinced many that Testimony is what it purports to be, or at the very least accurately reflects Shostakovich's views. Born 11 years before theRussian Revolution,Shostakovich was in his early 20s when Stalin came to power. His life was indelibly formed by the dictator's reign of terror most notoriously in 1936 when he was attacked in an unsigned leading editorial in Pravda "Muddle instead of Music. Stalin had attended a perfor mance of the 29-year-old composer's controversial but internationally acclaimed opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and walked out before its end. Days later the article ap- peared, condemning the opera as "fidgety, screaming, neu- rotic music" while claiming that its tremendous interna- tional success was because it "tickles the perverted tastes of the bourgeoisie." The Pravda article was widely seen as a death sentence for the opera, and possibly for the composer himself. Many of Shostakovich's friends abandoned him during this time, and it was only the overwhelming popular success of his Fifth Symphony written in the wake of the Pravda editorial, which saved Shostakovich's skin. The Symphony's putative subtitle, The practical creative answer of a Soviet artist to just criticism, though much circulated, was never adopted by the composer His true feelings were in fact contained in the grief-laden third movement and - though hidden from his contemporary audience - in musical quota- tions woven into the Symphony's finale from a song he had composed on a poem by Pushkin, "Rebirth", which begins: "A barbarian painter with his somnolent brush / Blackens the genius's painting, / Slapping over it senselessly / His own lawless picture". Shostakovich then began his first string quartet, a medium widely regarded, as Soviet music specialist Dr David Fanning points out. as "the purest genre" of music. For all Shostakovich's apparent retreat into purely musical concerns, Fanning also hears "fragility,' and "sadness" in the First Quartet: "I think all music reflects the life of its creator and the times of its creator. Those were extraordinarily awful times and therefore they are bound to be reflected. What's at issue is the 'nature' of that reflection, how direct it is and whether there is some kind of comment on those times which is intended to be, as it were, the end-product rather than the starting point." This question is particularly pertinent to Shostakovich's most famous quartet, the Eighth. Composed in 1960, this was ostensibly his reaction on seeing war-devastated Dresden. But encoded throughout the quartet are Shostakovich's initials, D-S-C-H, translated into musical notation (in the same way Bach transcribed B-A-C-H into his own music): there are also quotations from key works of Shostakovich's career -he cited six in a letter to his friend Isaak Glikman including Lady Macbeth - and from other works including a Russian prison song "Tortured by Grievous Bondage". As the composer explained: "When I die, it's hardly likely that someone will write a quartet dedicated to my memory So I decided to write it myself. One could write on the frontispiece, 'Dedicated to the author of this quartet'." It has been suggested that the Quartet was Shostakovich's response to being pressured to join the Communist Party; he ultimately acceded not only at the cost of losing several of his friends, but also his own self- respect. As his son Maxim recalls, "My father cried twice in his life: when his mother died, and when he came home to say, 'They've made me join the Party' ... this was sobbing, not just tears, but sobbing." Some commentators have scorned Shostakovich's standing as a dissident on that basis, though Setzer is more understanding: "My gut feeling is that I believe in the basic good of the man. I also believe that it is very difficult to make judgements about people who lived under this kind of regime; when you make a decision under that kind of pressure, I don't think it's fair for us to sit here and judge it totally by saying that because he joined the Communist Party it negates everything else that he did. He joined the Party for a reason at the time which he soon after regretted." That reason, Selzer suggests, was to continue having his music performed - hidden dissident messages and all - and possibly to be of some help to others from a relative position of power. The tragedy as he realised, was that the position entailed his being a spokesman for cultural policies he disapproved of. Nonetheless, the subsequent Ninth and Tenth quartets, SeIzer argues, "are both really absolute masterpieces. I think in a way they reaffirm his desire to live." So should the rest of Shostakovich's quartets be heard simply as music, or are they equally richly encoded narratives about his life and struggle with the Soviet state? Fanning suggests a more subtle balance: "The trouble with Shostakovich is that he does have many different modes of communication: sometimes, yes, clearly there are coded messages waiting to be decoded. And at other times there are not. So sometimes the music seems to be pointing towards some kind of meaning that can be stated - if not in so many words, then certainly it approaches so many words; and at other times, whatever experience he was having or his country was having is a context for some kind of meaning which one would call more purely musical, but it's never entirely one thing nor the other: the music would not be the same without that context. and it would not be the same without its musical qualities." A sentiment which appears to be shared by Shostakovich's fiend, the cellist Rostropovich, as Setzer recalls: I was reading Ian MacDonald's book [The New Shosto.kovich] and I was asking [Rostropovich] rather a lot of questions. He had some problems with MacDonald's book because he felt it went too far in explaining what every note means and all that, but he basically supported the idea that Shostakovich was a dissident, not the 'favourite son of the Communist Party"' But Ian MacDonald believes there is still more to be discovered of the music's subtext. "Shostakovich's music is so full of hidden meanings. many of which we're still discovering, that it's simply too early to draw such distinctions. For example, Rostropovich didn't at first notice that Stalin's favourite tune. the folk-song 'Suliko', is quoted in the finale of the First Cello Concerto Shostakovich had to point it out. But this is part of a wider discussion on the nature of music - a discussion largely reactivated by what we're finding out about Shostakovich's work. It's the perceived division between pure music and programme music, which hasn't really been looked at since the days of Richard Strauss and Mahler. How much of a given composition is intentionally expressive and how much abstract or merely functional? It's a complex issue with which today's musicologists are no longer familiar. Shostakovich's work, which is essentially dramatic and contains much unannounced programmatic' material is a major test-case in this respect." Whatever revelations there may be, Setzer is convinced that the music speaks for itself. "If Testimony hadn't come out I think it would have taken a lot longer for us to really look at the other side of Shostakovich. But I think eventually the music will stand upon its own and will be understood, even if we didn't know any of his life." Daniel Jaffe is the author of "Sergey Prokofiev"
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