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The
Shostakovich Variations (Excerpt) Paul
Mitchinson If the epic tragedy of Soviet history were ever made into a film, the music of Dmitri Shostakovich would surely provide its soundtrack. At the piercing blast of a factory whistle (courtesy of Shostakovich’s Second Symphony), peasants and workers would crowd the squares of 1917 Petrograd. The madcap 1920s, when Soviet Russia’s last capitalists flaunted their wealth and Western tastes, might be accompanied by the inspired silliness of "Tea for Two" from the ballet The Golden Age. And as the bitter night of Stalinism spread its gloom over Soviet Russia in the 1930s, an oboe would sing out in quiet anguish from the Fifth Symphony’s Largo. Finally, the Seventh Symphony’s "invasion theme"—an insipid scrap of a tune plucked out on hushed strings—would build gradually and inexorably into an earsplitting military march, as Hitler’s armies approached and then encircled Leningrad. In fact, with music this powerful, making a film might be superfluous. Shostakovich speaks a musical language that is familiar as well as evocative. He is heir to Gustav Mahler rather than Arnold Schoenberg. His melodies may not be hummable, and his harmonies may be sharp and astringent, but his music remains rooted in the grand symphonic tradition of the nineteenth century. Though he experimented with twelve-tone composition in his later years, he embraced tonality. He was the last great composer to work almost exclusively in the traditional genres of classical music: the symphony, the concerto, the string quartet, the keyboard prelude and fugue. The result is a body of work of both emotional power and technical achievement. Shostakovich is that rarest of breeds: a genuinely popular twentieth-century composer. Perhaps because the music is so accessible, audiences have wondered about the man—and the troubled age in which he lived. Born in 1906, Shostakovich spent his entire creative life as a citizen of the Soviet Union. When he died in August 1975, his Pravda obituary hailed him as a "loyal son of the Communist Party." The London Times agreed. Shostakovich was the "greatest figure in Soviet music over the last two decades," the Times wrote, who "saw himself equally as a Soviet citizen and a composer." Perhaps it was inevitable that his music came to be understood as a faithful reflection of pro-Soviet politics. He composed a song for the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin to sing in outer space and signed a letter denouncing Andrei Sakharov. His best-known musical offerings—the fifteen symphonies—were in many cases burdened with dedications that invited such a political reading: "October," "The First of May," "The Year 1905," "The Year 1917." But in October 1979, four years after the composer’s death, Harper & Row published a book that cast doubt on his Soviet credentials. A manuscript purporting to be the memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich had been smuggled out of Russia by a young Soviet music journalist who claimed to have interviewed the aging composer at length. It would become one of the most explosive documents of the Cold War and one of the most controversial books on music published in the twentieth century. The Shostakovich who emerged from its pages was not the legendary "loyal son of the Communist Party" but a bitter man who despised Soviet power. Audiences, it seemed, had got the political message in his music exactly wrong. "The majority of my symphonies are tombstones," this Shostakovich told his interlocutor. "Hitler is a criminal, that’s clear, but so is Stalin…. I haven’t forgotten the terrible prewar years. That is what all my symphonies, beginning with the Fourth, are about, including the Seventh and Eighth." Testimony, the book’s dust jacket read, The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov. But are the memoirs genuine? And if so, what do they tell us about the music? After twenty years of debate, scholars of Shostakovich seem more bitterly divided than ever.
Solomon Volkov was a sixteen-year-old student at the high school affiliated with the Leningrad Conservatory when he met his idol. In 1960, after writing an enthusiastic review of Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet, Volkov was introduced to the fifty-four-year-old composer. It was the start of a relationship that would be marked by respect and trust, if not close friendship. Several years later, in the late 1960s, Shostakovich agreed to contribute a preface to Volkov’s first book, a study of Leningrad’s young composers. Volkov reports that he interviewed Shostakovich at length about his former composition students, prodding the reluctant and notoriously private composer to reminisce about his youth. Volkov claims he "had to resort to trickery: at every convenient point I drew parallels, awakening associations" in order to overcome Shostakovich’s reserve. Unfortunately, Volkov says, the Soviet censor expunged these biographical details when the book was published in 1971. According to Volkov, this act of censorship provided the "final powerful impetus" for the creation of Testimony. The self-effacing and hesitant Shostakovich was transformed into an eager memoirist. "‘I must do this, I must,’ [Shostakovich] would say. He wrote me, in one letter: ‘You must continue what has been begun.’" At first, Volkov says, he and Shostakovich met at a retreat belonging to the Union of Composers in Repino, near Leningrad. Later, when Volkov became a senior editor at Sovetskaya muzyka, the official journal of the Union of Composers, Shostakovich invited Volkov to his Moscow apartment, which happened to be in the same building as Volkov’s office. They used no tape recorder, since Shostakovich would "stiffen before a microphone like a rabbit caught in a snake’s gaze." Volkov scribbled down the composer’s words in shorthand. As the "mound of shorthand notes" grew higher, Volkov says, he "divided up the collected material into sustained sections, combined as seemed appropriate…. Shostakovich read and signed each part." In this way, Volkov says, the manuscript of Testimony took shape. This piecemeal method is reflected in the book’s digressive, rambling style. But the composer apparently liked it, for he affixed his signature, along with the Russian word chital (read), on the first page of each of the manuscript’s eight chapters. According to Volkov, the composer’s only demand was that the book be published after his death. Shortly after Shostakovich died, Volkov immigrated to the West. His precious manuscript had already been smuggled abroad. The original shorthand notes were left behind and have never been located. Speaking from his New York home almost thirty years later, Solomon Volkov still considers the book a miracle. Testimony was "a product of this crazy era, with all the anxieties and all the imbalances that were typical of it," he reflects. "I was nervous because I was a young neophyte music journalist. Before me was a genius who was also under a lot of pressure, and this colored the whole situation irrevocably." Western critics greeted Testimony with enthusiasm, praising its depiction not just of Shostakovich and his music but of cultural life in the Soviet Union generally. Harold C. Schoenberg raved about it in The New York Times Book Review, calling it a "serious indictment of past and present Russia, as well as the recollections of a life apparently spent in fear and despair." The London Times called it the "book of the year." In the Soviet Union, however, the book was denounced as a fraud. Just two weeks after Testimony was published, the Moscow weekly Literaturnaya gazeta printed a letter signed by six Soviet composers—students and friends of Shostakovich’s—declaring it a "pitiful forgery." When a New York Times reporter visited the composer’s widow, Irina Antonovna, in her Moscow apartment, she claimed that Volkov had only met with her husband "three or maybe four times," clearly not frequently enough to create a book-length manuscript. .... for complete article go to Paul Mitchinson's website
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