Surviving Stalin
Gerard McBurney talks to Judith Hall

Gerard McBurney Interviewed by Judith Vidal-Hall
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At first sight, the history of Soviet music appears to divide sharply between the official and unofficial. In fact, things were far more chaotic and fragmented, with musicians of vastly different talents and ideology flirting with both sides and things sometimes changing even from month to month, depending who was in charge. Though there was no lack of confrontation, the relationship was symbiotic rather than confrontational. One of the things that today embitters composers who went through all that is the revelation that their supposedly unofficial art was almost parasitic on the official music it purported to oppose.

The Soviets, like so many others, have always been great rewriters of history. For instance, both Stalinist and post-Stalinist rewriting of history encouraged a vastly oversimplified view of the situation before 1932 and the organisation of the arts unions. They characterised it as a straight struggle between the proletarian movements represented principally by RAPM (Russian Association of Proletariat Musicians) and the so-called ASAM (Association of Contemporary Music), supposedly the haven for the real artists, both the old-fashioned kind like Miaskovsky, inheritors of the Rimsky, Tchaikovsky mantle, and the out and out modernists like the young Shostakovich. Although the truth is more complicated, there's no doubt that the proletarian organisations and RAPM posed a serious threat to people's livelihoods.

The early 1930s sees the unionisation of the arts world. Art must be organised, brought under the rubric of propaganda and coopted for the so-called education of the people in something called social realism.

In the midst of all this, something extraordinary happens. Around 1926, the child prodigy Dmitri Shostakovich bursts on the scene. At the age of 20, he takes the world by storm with his First Symphony, written as a graduation exercise for the Leningrad conservatoire where he had been a child pupil. Within a few months of its appearance it has been performed hundreds of times all over the world. In one step he had become one of the most famous composers in the world, a position he retained for the rest of his on the whole fairly unhappy life.

This presented the Soviets with a problem: Shostakovich had become a much-sought-after cultural phenomenon abroad. The foreign press wrote about him and this was worrying. Remember, during this whole period the three most famous living Russian composers - Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Rachmaninov - are all living abroad. Now, suddenly, here was a boy already famous in the West and, understandably, there was an urge to say: `Look what our Soviet cultural system can produce: it produces geniuses.' You in the West no longer have Beethovens, only decadents like Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Here we have Shostakovich.' But there's a worry because it's clear this art is difficult, not `proletarian'.

For a while things go along reasonably enough; Shostakovich's Second and Third Symphonies, the October Symphony and the First of May Symphony, were written for famous revolutionary celebrations – the tenth anniversary of the October revolution in1927 and the May Day celebrations of 1928. In each case, they have slogan-like choruses at the end in a wild, whacky style and are written in very bold, very hyper, very avant-garde language, brightly coloured, at once abstract and bizarrely `concrete'.

The symphonies were a mixed success, though Shostakovich himself seems to have seen them as a compromise and was later angry with himself for having written in this way. Most of his time at this period was spent in the theatre, the cinema the music hall, the ballet. He wrote a number of film scores, for silent films and then for the talkies. He wrote for political theatre, he wrote for avant-garde Shakespeare productions He even worked with Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander Rodchenko and Vladimir Mayakovsky on the first production of the latter's Bedbug. He's still a boy, but he's swimming in this world of stars; he's one of the stars.

And suddenly they are all gone: almost every one of these people ends badly. Moreover, the political temperature is mounting and Shostakovich's overnight success in the West had made him enemies at home. There's naturally resentment and jealousy of him among less talented composers and these begin to play the political game. The politics of art in the Soviet Union is riddled with envy. Although he is well aware of all this, Shostakovich does little to endear himself. When he thinks what what others are doing is absurd, he scarcely conceals his scorn and, inevitably, lays up some of his future troubles.

After writing his early avant-garde masterpiece The Nose (based on a Gogol story), Shostakovich wanted to write a full length opera. With his librettists, he rejigged a short story by Leskov in a way that has been the subject of passionate debate ever since.

When you talk about music and text you are always in trouble. If the music is any good at all, there is a tension between the music and the words. Discussions of the text of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District tend to ignore its structure as a drama, treat it as a political text. Whether or not the changed status of its heroine Katerina is politically motivated, it is definitely dramatically motivated; certainly in terms of the time, you couldn't make a story like that stand up in the theatre without the audience being drawn to a classical or sentimental heroine.

At any rate, Lady Macbeth represents the young composer stepping out. Though the avant-garde language is still there in chunks, it is subsumed into a much broader, more urgent, film-music-like populist language designed to knock them flat in the back row of the ninepennies. It shows Shostakovich moving out from one relatively contained and clear area of operation, the avant-garde, but not transferring himself into another one, the writer of patriotic tunes or whatever. Instead, he's moved into an open area where it's hard to control him.

Moreover, in the first two acts, the piece has two scenes of stunning violence, one of which is the gang assault of a peasant woman. In the other, Sergei, the leader of the assault on the peasant woman, turns up in the heroine's room in the middle of the night and seduces her, a rape too, in a way, but quite different. Dramatically, he releases in Katerina, the heroine, a colossal erotic charge. She is bored with her stifling marriage, impotent husband and lustful father-in-law. She discovers what she really wants from this rough foreman, who says he's come to borrow a book.

And the music of this notorious passage is the music of climax: they have a duet of encounter – you can hardly call it a love duet – where the act of copulation is described in the most graphic way by the orchestra. The staging demands a huge bed. This was called pornography, but it's not; it's almost comedy, it's satire because what comes across is not the erotic charge you get from Tristan and Isolde, it's a sort of Gogolian mockery of the animal, the hollow laughter of humans as animals.

And the disaster came when Stalin got up with his cronies and walked out of the box. Some days later, Shostakovich, who was on tour playing in the north, got a telegram from friends saying buy the newspaper and on page three of Pravda, some say written by Stalin himself, he found the infamous article `Muddle instead of Music'. This legendary moment was unlike any other in the history of European music that I can think of.

And it launched a vicious campaign against Shostakovich. He returns to Leningrad and people cross the street to avoid him; his ballet The Bright Stream – a straight piece of early Stalinist tat – which has run for some months already at the Bolshoi, is suddenly denounced as `balletic falsehood' and taken off. He is described as a lacky, a toady of the West, a bourgeois composer, a man personally seeking to undermine socialism. The Fourth Symphony, one of his most extraordinary and abrasive scores, a huge work, was stopped in the middle of rehearsal in May the same year. It was a quarter of a century before he heard it again.

This single episode seems to have changed his life: it turned him into another kind of human being. Almost within the space of a few days, this brilliant boy, this wit, this savage ironist turned into another lind of artist altogether, the composer we now think of as the dark tragedian of the mid-twentieth century. For example, the language of the quartets comes out of this episode. Before this period there's no `abstract' music at all, it's nearly all theatre music, all drama, all parody.

From being a golden boy, he became a measure of the regime's desire to control artists. The official structures of Soviet musical life are galvanized to devour the man who is their king, their prize, their centre, their main export. It hardly seems an accident that Prokoviev is finally persuaded to return at this point. You could say his return fits into a completely different pattern: the return of Gorky and, in a different way, the return of Eisenstein; the assiduous courting of the men who have gone to the West whom the authorities would love to have home again. They even tried with Diagilev but to no effect.

In the end, they destroyed Eisenstein, they destroyed Gorky and, finally, they destroyed Prokofiev.

So, throughout 1935, 1936, 1937, you have the clearly intentional destruction, persecution and public shaming of this central figure, Shostakovich, who was virtually unperformed by that stage; on the other side of the same coin, you have an older `great' composer who is persuaded to return and be the new king, only to find, as Shostakovich reportedly put it later, that `he had fallen like a chicken into the soup'.

Meanwhile, Shostakovich, who seems to have considered all kinds of solutions to the situation, suddenly produces the Fifth Symphony. It was a tumultuous success. He had changed his language completely; for many this was a shock. There are those who believe the symphony to be the creation of a new musical language of double-speak that `fully expresses the tragedy': that when people first heard it, they understood it to be the appearance of a musical language that, unlike literature or painting, would be clear without being censored in the face of the purges then in full sway. But there are those who thought that it was quite the opposite: a gross reversion to a conservative, essentially corny and reactionary idiom, grossly dependent on film music and on the music of the past.

I refuse to believe that the issues can so easily be reduced. The pressures that produce a musical language are far more subtle; they exist at a level of eruption. And, one thing was clear: Shostakovich was under such pressure as a human being that he was reborn as an artist with a new language. It's extraordinary that this same period should have produced the Fifth as well as Prokoviev's nice little propaganda piece, Peter and the Wolf, both born out of an extremely ugly situation.

The Fifth turned him back into a hero, but of a new kind. It made him the hero of the intelligentsia, which he hadn't been before. The 1937 first performance of the Fifth seems now to have been a defining moment for the place of serious music in the endless moral debate that went on for so long among the Soviet intelligentsia. People who were at the Leningrad premiere tell you that so many people were in tears, even intellectuals. Even Ehrenburg felt this was a work that voiced a predicament. And more: it is in music's power to give dignity, sentimental dignity to a situation. Notwithstanding the fact that to many western musicians who heard this music it seemed precisely to be lacking in dignity, for those who heard it in context, it dignified their situation. Outside that context, its presumptions seemed false.

At the same time, the same piece did all the things that Soviet composers were being asked to do – write in a more conservative language, an official musical language – and it restored him to some kind of official favour. With the Fifth Symphony, we arrive at one of the central problems affecting all talented composers, even Prokofiev, as well as Shostakovich. For the next 20 years, like so many other artists until the death of Stalin, these men were to go up and down, up and down; they were treated like yo-yos. And I return to the idea of envy, to the festering politics of the Union of Composers. Prokoviev and Shostakovich were constantly being accused of letting down the Soviet people, of failing to write the music that the Soviet people needed. Yet the ideological demands made on them were, from their very conception, incoherent. Like the demands of critics in the West, or schoolteachers, or audience votes, they are dependent on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the artistic enterprise.

The moment you attempt to control style, the moment you confuse style and content, you fall into a morass which is as old as the hills. People are still tearing each other apart over the Fifth: some say the ending is what the Soviet authorities said it was – a tub-thumping affirmation of the victory of the Soviet ideology – others that it's what the intelligentsia at the time felt – a hollow, disastrous, tragic, grief-stricken depiction of the human soul being crushed under the weight of Stalinism. But it could be both at exactly the same time.

It's the ambiguity, even more, the ambivalence of this music tht is its shifting centre. The ambivalence is disturbing. All sorts of people want to claim this man for their own and everywhere they move, he shifts his ground, either to join them or undermine them.

Then comes World War II and Shostakovich writes another blockbuster in the form of the Leningrad Symphony. It was supposedly smuggled out on microfilm on a convoy. Russia was now the ally and this music became a huge piece of Allied propaganda, performed endlessly on US radio. Shostakovich appeared famously on the cover of Time magazine, wearing a fireman's helmet. These images are too hard to shake off. By the end of the war, Shostakovich is identified in the minds of the even mildly culturally aware world outside the Soviet Union with the aspirations of the Soviet people. Even the briefest perusal of the music with open ears tells you that simply doesn't work, but it colours the way he's been seen ever since. Yet at the same time, that's not to say this piece can simply be reinterpreted a a piece of anti-Soviet propaganda: interpretation is something done by the listener, not the composer.

It's curious tht after World War II, Shostakovich becomes, in spite of himself, the most `official' of official composers – except that all the official composers around him continue to hate him, resent his success and seek to undermine him more and more, largely because of the sheer scale of his talent. In 1946 and 1947, you have renewed attacks on writers and film makers, followed in 1948 by Zhdanov's attack on the Union of Composers. Musical conservatives such as Vladimir Zakharov, Tikhon Khrennikov and Ivan Dzerzhinsky back his onslaught on Shostakovich, along with Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Miaskovsky – who is very old by now – Shebalin and Popov, an interesting composer who took refuge in drink. Shostakovich is pilloried as an enemy of the people. This was a second devastating public humiliation.

Then comes the thaw under Kruschev; Shostakovich is perched, uncomfortably, between a large number of different worlds. He's already writing a musical comedy and tries his hand at pop songs, or estrada songs. He wrote a hilarious, sugary number, `The Motherland Hears', which, we're told, Gagarin sang on his first trip into space and broadcast back to the expectant world. It was a genuinely popular song and not a bad tune.

From the mid-1950s, he is under gathering pressure to join the Communist Party which, to the disillusionment of his friends and the younger generation, he finally did in 1961. After 1936 and 1948, it was the third of the landmarks that scar his life. By this time, Shostakovich is older, he is ill and his self-respect took a colossal dive.

He survived until 1975 by which time the post-Stalin generation of composers had emerged – Schnittke, Gubaidulina, Denisov, Pärt Hrabovsky and others – many of whom he knew and protected in one way or another. They became part and parcel of what was called `alternative', `unofficial', `leftist' `modernist' `westernising' `avant-garde' and their music was little performed at home despite being their being patted on the head abroad. Perhaps they made him feel isolated as an artist, even out of touch with the language of modern music. Late public works like the Thirteenth Symphony – the Babi Yar Symphony that uses Yevtushenko poems and had trouble with the censors – or the Fourteenth Symphony, do seem in part to be attempts to appeal especially to the conscience of the younger generation. Then again, perhaps Shostakovich was simply trying to restore a sense of his own worth.

By this stage, he is publicly treated as a great elderly genius – but there's no doubt he was lonely. Certainly the private chamber music he is writing is music of intense solitude. And there I go again, `interpreting' this music.

It's a difficult and complex story and it's a story that is rewritten every day. I said earlier that the Soviets are obsessed with rewriting their own history. Around 1989, when everything is starting to fall apart, secretaries from the Musicians' Union – the very people who had pilloried him – start repenting in public and jumping on the `revision' of Shostakovich's reputation. They talk of him as a saint, literally. He becomes the `Piman of our times'; the saintly monk in Boris Gudonov who writes the chronicle of the age in which, he says, he is secretly writing down the true history of Russia so that future generations shall know the truth about the brutally of the Tsars. It was revolting.

When you hear the battles, couched as they so often are in fashionable terms, about how we should `read' this music, I long for the day we no longer have to read it, but just listen to it.

At the height of his powers, this man produced works that moved people intensely. Within that society they held out a hand to those who wanted to listen. For those who needed that experience, they dignified a terrible waste of life, a senseless, pointless waste of time. Perhaps that's even truer now - and why the controversy surrounding his work continues so passionately.

Of course, there were and still are, especially in our own culture, serious musicians who hated his music for so long because it sounds `cheap', like a film track. Well of course it is; that's its whole point.

Gerard McBurney talking with Judith Vidal-Hall. He is a composer, broadcaster and teacher at the Royal Academy of Music, London

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