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Behind
the monarch's mask Michael
Tumelty NEVER try to second-guess a Russian. In all the years that RSNO chief conductor Alexander Lazarev has been conducting the music of his compatriot, Shostakovich, his views have seemed not just clear, but explicit. From an early appearance with the RSNO at the Barbican in the eighties, where he directed a scorched-earth version of the tragic Eighth Symphony, through his various subsequent performances of the wartime trilogy of symphonies (numbers seven to nine), to the double-edged sword of the Fifth Symphony, and the savage criticism of Stalinism that seems to be the agenda of the Tenth Symphony, it has been widely inferred that, in the great Shostakovich debate - was the composer a secret dissident, encoding his true thoughts in the music, or was he a lackey of the state? - Lazarev is firmly in the latter camp. Don't you believe it. As he limbers up for the 18-month marathon of The Herald Shostakovich Series, in which he will conduct all 15 of the great Russian's symphonies over two seasons, Lazarev - for the first time on the record - opened up about his real feelings for the composer. And his views aren't so much unexpected or startling, as downright shocking. As a boy he had seen Shostakovich many times at concerts - the composer always sat in the same row at the Moscow Philharmonic - but first met him while he was a conducting student at the conservatoire. The young Lazarev was overawed to be taken, along with two fellow students, to Shostakovich's flat, where they were allowed to question the great man. As thrilled as he was to meet Shostakovich, Lazarev was even more impressed when he and a colleague, on questioning various technical aspects of the composer's music, were greeted by immediate acquiescence and a flood of apologies from Shostakovich for not having spotted these perceived weaknesses in the music. Needless to say, observed Lazarev, when the next edition of those scores came out, none of the proposed alterations had been included. Shostakovich's attitude was, of course, a mask, says Lazarev. And, while the conductor came to regard Shostakovich as the most secretive person he'd ever met, he was, and remains, deeply equivocal about the moral fibre of the composer. "Somebody said that Shostakovich suffered in the Soviet Union, and that he had all those difficulties. But in the Soviet Union he had all the privileges. He was music's No 1. He was the official face, the label, of Soviet music." He goes further, in his fluent but slightly fractured English. "He would never say something against anybody. At the time I didn't think about it. Now I collect all my impressions." And they are not favourable. "Now, when I hear about Shostakovich, and when I read his letters - about how he suffered, about how he cried when he had to become a member of the Communist Party - I have very strange, mixed feelings. "In the powerful, brave, great personal energy of his music he is an absolute monarch. At the same time he is the man who always said "yes", who never said anything about human rights. He never said anything against society, or against the system." Lazarev, a former hard man of Soviet musical society who, in his nine years as chief conductor and artistic director of the Bolshoi Theatre, was not exactly a shrinking violet, is reluctant but brutal in his assessment of Shostakovich the man. "He was, for me, a coward. He was not a dissident. Andrei Sakharov the physicist was a dissident. "I know Sakharov. I know what he said. He was always opposite the government, opposite the system. But Shostakovich? Never. I try to remember just one time - but never. He would sign anything to support the system. Always. He was a coward." This, of course, will be meat and drink to the anti-revisionists in the Shostakovich debate, who believe that the composer was either spineless or a tool of the party. But it isn't half as controversial as Lazarev's views on two sensational moments in Soviet history: when Stalin walked out of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth in the 1930s - which was followed within days by a devastating article in Pravda criticising the composer ("Chaos instead of Music") - and at the notorious congress in 1948, where Shostakovich was roundly condemned for writing music inappropriate to the state, and forced to humiliate himself in public. Lazarev doesn't buy the accepted versions of either incident. He claims he can prove that Stalin walked out because he thought he was to attend, not Shostakovich's opera, but another production that was in rep at the same time: he literally went on the wrong night, asserts the conductor. "If you think that Stalin would sit there in the theatre and actually understand something . . ." growled Lazarev, dismissing the Great Dictator with a wave of contempt. "It was Shostakovich's colleagues and other composers who organised the review against him in Pravda. "And they organised the famous meeting in 1948. I know who it was. It was not Stalin and it was not Tikhon Khrennikov." The latter, also a composer, was the head of the Soviet Composers' Union, and, allegedly, the musico-ideological hatchet man of the party. "I am no fan of Khrennikov," said Lazarev, "but I should say this. When he was chief of the union, not one composer was arrested or sent to the gulag." It was two composers, said Lazarev, who orchestrated the "trial" of Shostakovich and Prokofiev in 1948 at the special meeting of the central committee of the party. They're both dead, and he won't name them - let the past lie, he says - though, presumably, their names are on the record. Anyway, one of the main critics was, he says, a composer of "little education" who wrote tunes for factory workers, was jealous of Shostakovich's success, and said: "Do the people in the factories want to listen to Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony? No. They want to listen to my songs." "It's very funny and very scary to read this now," says Lazarev, drawing an analogy with medieval witch-hunts. "Prokofiev was strong. He didn't admit to any guilt. He said nothing, and sat with closed mouth. But Shostakovich?" And here Lazarev performs an excruciatingly embarrassing, withering caricature of the composer, wringing his hands, grovelling: "He said: 'apology, apology, never again, please forgive me, never again will I do wrong'." On top of all this, Lazarev doesn't buy into the "music as code" theory of Shostakovich performance: that the composer was a Janus-faced character who did anything necessary in public to get the apparatchiks off his back, while enshrining his most devastating criticism of the party in his music. So, does he not accept that the infamous, brutal Scherzo of the Tenth Symphony is a lacerating portrait of Stalin? "No. Fine if someone likes it that way: music is a subjective art. But for me this music is the hurricane, the wind that demolishes everything." And the 12th Symphony, dedicated to Lenin? "Forget the dedication. The music is much more important than that." Or the 11th, dedicated to the 1905 revolution? "It may be the most visual of Shostakovich's symphonies, like a painting. But forget that. It doesn't matter. It's such wonderful music." Okay, but what about the Leningrad Symphony, composed while the city was under Nazi siege, and, in its first movement march, surely containing a near-literal representation of the encroaching jackbooted hordes? Lazarev laughs, and refers to recent research: "Well, of course, somebody is now saying that the first movement was actually written before the war . . ." So. Lazarev doesn't think much of Shostakovich the man. And he doesn't buy into the theory of the music as revelatory of Shostakovich's true thoughts. But, as he says himself, music is a subjective art, and we don't have to agree with him. (I don't.)
But we should underline that, for Lazarev, these symphonies are the
greatest compositions of his country in the past century, "as great as
Beethoven and Brahms". He may not be influenced by the code books, history
books, or social treatises when he studies the music. But his absolute aim
in life is explicit. "Music can say much more than these titles and ideas.
If you take the titles away, nothing changes. Each time you look at these
scores, you find something you've seen 100 times before but didn't
recognise. Every time, I get new ideas, new inspiration. I will try all my
life to open all the secrets of these symphonies."
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