Introduction:
A Salute to Shostakovich Dmitri Kabalevsky Home | Back to contents | Power of music index
"In order better to master this music I shall play it once more, the composer said quietly, even shyly, when the applause subsided. And he again sat down at the piano, and even more energetically and convincingly than before, repeated his First Sonata. To tell the truth, I am not so sure that the auditors, who had assembled in the Beethoven Hall of the Bloc Theatre for that evening devoted to new works in Soviet music, sufficiently well "mastered" this complex, in many respects unusual, composition even after the second playing. But there is something else that I am perfectly certain about: those who were in that hall and heard and listened to that music, felt that our art had acquired a powerful, unusual talent. The performance was faultless as regards its musical and technical rendition. The music avoided superficial beauty but strove for depth of content - inspired, temperamental and violent, amazing for the unfamiliarity of its intonational nature, it somewhat resembled Prokofiev's works, in particular his Third Sonata. That was back in the year 1925. It was the first performance in Moscow by 19-year-old Dmitri Shostakovich. At last we Muscovites had the opportunity to become personally acquainted with a man whose name we knew only from rumors that reached us from Leningrad, where the young composer was living at the time. A year later Nikolai Malko conducted a rendition of Shostakovich's First Symphony in Moscow. That evening in the Large Hall of the Conservatoire, where this symphony was first heard in Moscow, has remained in my memory as one of the most striking impressions of my musical youth. In this symphony, shy youthful lyricism and unrestrained boyish mischievousness were interwoven in a way that seemed incomprehensible, but which, we later realized, was fully natural. And the rejoicing triumph of vital forces splendidly crowned the genuinely tragic conflict that broke through suddenly in the finale-the herald of Shostakovich's mature symphonic ability. The symphony was a huge and unanimous success with both musicians and ordinary auditors. Such happiness is not so often the lot of authors who are novices. We, Shostakovich's contemporaries, friends and colleagues, are happy at the fact that we were witnesses of the beginning of his creative life and also of its entire further trend. And its trend was such a violent and impetuous one, there were so many storms in it, so many waves unexpectedly swept over it! But Shostakovich continued to stand firmly on his feet, or, to be more exact, he continued to advance firmly, listening to and pondering all that raged around him, but without losing his course. However, Shostakovich's confident step took him along a path that was far from simple and far from straightforward. Many things along this path, especially if we look at them with a fleeting glance, might seem contradictory or simply incompatible. How indeed can we explain the connection between the experimental-constructivist opera The Nose, and his resonant, joyous Song about the Counterplan, which literally flew around the entire world? And what can be said about the close neighborhood of his comical vaudeville Lanterns and his profoundly tragic Eighth Symphony? What inner forces prompted the composer, for whose name the use of the epithet "tragic" has become a banal cliche, to compose the operetta Moskva-Cheryomushki, which cannot be called profound? With what psychological reasons can we explain the passion of this composer, who is the most modern of modern composers as regards the spirit and content of his work, for the ancient, formally constructed fugue and the passacaglia? Most often we merely state all these amazing and interesting phenomena, having become accustomed to them as "properties" of Shostakovich's gigantic talent and the "specific features" of his very distinctive personality. But all of them have their deep, vital roots, their inner reasons that determine their principles and make us perceive them not separately, as isolated contrasts, but in their unity, as a complex but integral alloy. Genuine humanism is the chief, the most important, factor that distinguishes the progressive art of our century, art that embodies mankind's aspiration for a better future and against all possible trends in modern philosophy and art which reflect disbelief in that future. This disbelief in the future, which means disbelief in man, is the fatal, inevitable result of the decline of bourgeois culture which has aged but is still desperately clinging to life. This dying culture now counters the idea of art for man not with the idea of "art for art's sake," but with something that is the most terrible that it can beget-"art against man." The boundary of the struggle between these two cultures is more complex, subtle and fantastic than all geographical, political and economic boundaries. Human culture, it seems, has never before witnessed such an explosive interweaving of contradictions, such a sharp struggle among them. And in this struggle Shostakovich's work plays such an active role; its significance we cannot fully evaluate today, and perhaps it is even impossible to do so. Here is where the real vanguard of world culture of our day is to be found. When defending, with his work, the great humanistic ideals, Shostakovich at the same time defends the ideals of great realistic art. His work, with its ideological significance, its national definiteness, its faith in the inexhaustibility of folk and classical music, and its melodious richness decidedly counters each and every present-day super-modernistic trend. "There is no real art without a great theme," he declares with each new, big composition of his, and after several profoundly pithy quartets, he gets down to work on the opera The Quiet Don. "Without having its roots in its native soil there is no real art," his music says, ever more convincingly and concretely. It amazes the auditor with the new turn of the Russian innovators of the 20th century, The Execution of Stepan Razin. Shostakovich's talent for melody, which becomes ever more generous, illustrates, with tremendous cogency, the justice of the thought that: "There is no greater mistake than to think that music can get along without melody, replacing it with fragments of speculatively constructed lines." Together with all great composers, innovators of the 20th Century, among them his compatriots and contemporaries-Prokofiev, Myaskovsky, Khachaturyan - he decidedly rejected the idea that the tonal system of creative work has seemingly been exhausted. He refused to join those who supported the idea of atonalism, those who proclaimed the approach of a new era in music but who, in the half-century of their existence, did not show the world any real results of the new system of art which they had speculatively created. On September 25, 1966 Shostakovich celebrated his 60th birthday on the crest of glory and at the height of his creative powers, which is natural for an artist of his scope. In concluding these "few words" about him I feel very dissatisfied at the realization that I am unable, at least sketchily, to describe his personality as I would have liked to do, and to present him to our readers as I see him. Perhaps there will come a time when I will be able to do so. And when that day comes, I will write about much which I could not even refer to here. In particular, I would like to write about how fortunately his art combines profound thought and the ability to joke merrily, to he witty, even to be mischievous. I very much value the last trait in Shostakovich's music, even if not all of his musical jokes are in my taste. A feeling of humor is a very valuable quality. I shall absolutely try to connect my thoughts about Shostakovich's work with my personal impression, so many of which have accumulated during the long years of our acquaintance and our joint public and musical activity, which has brought us so close to one another.
-Dmitri Kabalevsky Music Journal, Mar 1967.
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