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- 2. Shostakovich on Stalin and Politics a. Ideological Deficiencies
- 3. Shostakovich’s Works a. The Nose and Berg’s Wozzeck
385 Email from John Riley, 11 May 2000. 113 And Yudina sent this suicidal letter to Stalin. He read it and didn’t say a word, they expected at least a twitch of the eyebrow. Naturally, the order to arrest Yudina was prepared and the slightest grimace would have been enough to wipe away the last traces of her. But Stalin was silent and set the letter aside in silence. The anticipated movement of the eyebrows didn’t come. In 2009, the noted writer Daniil Granin confirmed that he, too, was aware of these events and had learned about them directly from Shostakovich: Once Stalin heard on the radio concerto No. 23 of Mozart performed by Yudina. He liked the concerto and the performance. The radio committee immediately organized its recording. Upon receiving it, Stalin ordered the sending of 20 thousand rubles to Yudina. After several days, he received her answer: ‘Thank you for your help. I will pray day and night for you and ask God to forgive you your enormous crimes before the people and the country. God is merciful, He will forgive. I shall give the money to repair the church I attend’. Shostakovich called this letter suicidal. Indeed, the order for the arrest of Yudina was immediately prepared, but something prevented Stalin from signing it. 386 o. Harsh Criticism of Other Composers and Performers Testimony documents the composer’s harsh criticisms of many fellow composers and colleagues. Although some have rejected these as being out of character for the composer, his letters show that he could be quite brutal in his assessments. In a letter to Yavorsky he says of Richard Strauss’s Sinfonia Domestica, ‘What kind of garbage this is!’ 387 Moreover, in a letter to the editorial office of the Short Soviet Encyclopedia concerning performers to be included in the music section, he writes equally bluntly of Soviet colleagues: I doubt whether there is a need to include in the Encyclopedia Gilels, Lemeshev, Obukhova, Khanayev, Stepanova, Flier, Shteinberg L. Emil Gilels, without doubt, is one of the outstanding Soviet pianists. But he is very young, and it is impossible to be sure whether he will be able in the future to play and work as well. Lemeshev, Obukhova, Khanayev and Stepanova are good singers, but one could not put them above the average level. Flier in the last years began playing just very badly and cannot be put among performers who are our pride, and Lev Petrovich Shteinberg 386 Daniil Granin, Prichudy Moyey Pamyati (Whims of My Memory), Moscow and St. Petersburg, Tsentrpoligraf, MiM-Del’ta, 2009, p. 337. 387 Dmitry Shostakovich: v pis’makh i dokumentakh, p. 33. 114 during his entire multi-year conducting career not once was able to conduct half-way decent. 388 p. Dislike of Western Journalists In Testimony, Shostakovich criticizes ‘the typical Western journalist’, who he says is ‘uneducated, obnoxious, and profoundly cynical’ and asks that I ‘risk my life [. . .] to satisfy the shallow curiosity of a man who doesn’t give a damn about me!’ 389 Galina Shostakovich, in her reminiscences, corroborates exactly this sentiment: Shostakovich specially disliked journalists. Not without reason, he considered them rude and uneducated, capable of asking the most tactless and provocative questions. 390 She also notes that this was one of the principal reasons why the composer disliked traveling abroad: First of all because he wasn’t able or at liberty to express his true thoughts and feelings. Also because he knew that persistent and unscrupulous journalists would ask him provocative questions. And lastly, as a world- famous composer, he found it humiliating to be abroad with insufficient money, for like all Russians he was only allowed very little. 391 2. Shostakovich on Stalin and Politics a. Ideological Deficiencies The Shostakovich revealed in Testimony is neither the most loyal musical son nor the most committed Party member. In Dmitry Shostakovich: v pis’makh i dokumentakh, his ‘ideological deficiencies’ are evident early on in his letters to Boleslav Yavorsky: 388 Letter to Steinpress, 14 April 1944, in Dmitry Shostakovich: v pis’makh i dokumentakh, p. 399. Harsh comments about Gauk, K. Ivanov, Lyatoshinsky, Myaskovsky, Stravinsky, and others also may be found in Shostakovich’s Pis’ma I. I. Sollertinskomu, pp. 26, 53, 64–65, 68, 99, 122, and 238. 389 Testimony, pp. 196–97. Flora Litivnova also has commented on Shostakovich’s criticism of Western humanists — people who closed their eyes to the real situation in the USSR, to the abasement and oppression to which the Soviet creative elite and Soviet people in general were subjected (cf. Testimony, p. 200, and Wilson, pp. 271–72). Other notable ‘Soviet’ memoirists who vented similar fury against Western ‘humanists’ include Nadezhda Mandelstam (regarding Louis Aragon) and both Mandelstam and Alexander Solzhenitsyn (regarding Jean-Paul Sartre); cf. MacDonald, The New Shostakovich, p. 254; rev. edn., p. 287. 390 Ardov, p. 143. One need only recall Shostakovich’s awkward experience in New York (25–28 March 1949), when he attended the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace (cf. Shostakovich Reconsidered, pp. 339 and 395–96). Irina Shostakovich also mentions Shostakovich’s problems with journalists in Sirén, ‘Irina Šostakovitš avaa vihdoin kotinsa’, p. C 1. 391 Ibid., p. 125. 115 [28 August 1926]: Concerning [the first piano sonata’s] speed, I am talking not about the tempo of the music (Allegro molto), but about its spirit-energy (spiriritual [opium!!!] energy). 392 [11 December 1926]: Today I received a summons from the conservatory, that the post-graduate examination in God’s Law marxist methodology will take place December 21 of t[his] y[ear], which put me in despair, because I am almost certain that I will not pass. 393 [6 May 1927]: At present I feel very lousy [after an appendectomy] and wish to die before the 1st of August (the date for submission of my patriotic work) [the Second Symphony]. Don’t even ask how it is going along. 394 [12 May 1927]: Every day I write 4 pages of the score of the patriotic music [the Second Symphony] and feel an itch — to Paris! to Paris! 395 b. Stalin after Victory in World War II In Testimony, Shostakovich states that ‘when the war against Hitler was won, Stalin went off the deep end. He was like a frog puffing himself up to the size of the ox [. . .].’ 396 The composer’s fear of what lay ahead is corroborated by his letter of 31 December 1943 (cf. Shostakovich Reconsidered, pp. 174–75), filled with irony and Aesopian language, and by Glikman’s comments accompanying it: Shostakovich’s detestation of Hitler’s fanatical tyranny coexisted with equal loathing for the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. In the later stages of the war, when unbridled paeans of praise for the ‘Great General’, to whom the army and the whole nation naturally owed all victories, began blaring out with renewed force everywhere, Shostakovich reflected with apprehension on what was likely to happen once the long-awaited victory actually came about. He feared a resurgence of the random terror that had been the reality of life ‘under the sun of Stalin’s constitution’, the canonical phrase which in reality existed only on the pages of the 392 Dmitry Shostakovich: v pis’makh i dokumentakh, p. 75. Here the misspelling is in the original. The word ‘spiritual’ was not encouraged in the 1920s because it was associated with a church-like state of mind, so Shostakovich creates a ridiculous abbreviation, and explains it, misspelling within the parentheses while alluding to Marx’s description of religion as an ‘opium’ for the people. 393 Ibid., p. 90. Here the strike out is in the original and suggests the equivalence of both in Shostakovich’s mind. Mishra, pp. 52–53, notes that ‘During the exam, Shostakovich was disqualified after he and another student burst into laughter while a third candidate attempted to answer a question on the social and economic differences between Liszt and Chopin. He was allowed to re-sit, and pass, the exam the next day. At his request, the student whose exam he sabotaged was also allowed to re-sit’. 394 Dmitry Shostakovich: v pis’makh i dokumentakh, p. 111. 395 Ibid., p. 111. This obviously is not the sentiment of a good Soviet. 396 Testimony, p. 140. 116 newspapers. Hence the bitter irony of the reference to ‘unalloyed joy’ with which he looked forward to a return to pre-war life and times. 397 In the film documentary The War Symphonies: Shostakovich Against Stalin, Glikman adds: When the war ended, I was in Moscow. Dmitri Dmitryevich did not come out to the square that day because his joy over the victory was mixed with a feeling of bitterness. He hid this feeling. He told only me about it. He was afraid that on the crest of this victory, Stalin would consolidate his tyranny, consolidate his despotism and his inhumanity. 398 c. Fear for Himself and His Family In several passages in Testimony, Shostakovich mentions his fear of ‘disappearing’. 399 Maxim recalls that this fear was very real: The fact is he and all his family were hostages of a criminal and merciless regime, and every word Father uttered was with a look back over his shoulder at his all-powerful tormentors. [. . .] Unfortunately Shostakovich happened to live not in Nicholas I’s Russia but in Stalin’s Soviet Union. There were times when Father felt he was a hair’s brea[d]th away from destruction. 400 Maxim’s testimony directly refutes Tikhon Khrennikov’s oft-repeated claim that the danger for Shostakovich has been exaggerated: Interviewer: They say Shostakovich lived in fear. Khrennikov: You know what? I think all of this has been terribly exaggerated. Shostakovich was such a cheerful man. Well, maybe he had some fears, I don’t know. But he was a normal man who acted normally 397 Story of a Friendship, pp. 23 and 239, note 165. 398 Larry Weinstein, The War Symphonies: Shostakovich Against Stalin, Bullfrog Films, Oley, Pennsylvania, 1997 (hereafter Weinstein, War Symphonies). 399 Cf. Testimony, pp. 122, 183, and 212–13. David Oistrakh described a very similar experience: My wife and I lived through ’37, when night after night every person in Moscow feared arrest. In our building only our apartment and the one facing it on the same floor survived the arrests. All the other tenants had been taken off to God knows where. Every night I expected the worst and set aside some warm underwear and a bit of food for the inevitable moment. You can’t imagine what we went through, listening for the fatal knock on the door or the sound of a car pulling up (Galina Vishnevskaya, Galina: A Russian Story, transl. Guy Daniels, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1984, pp. 215–16). 400 Ardov, pp. 143 and 159. Also cf. this topic in the Index of Shostakovich Reconsidered. 117 to everything that was going on, and there was nothing for him to be afraid of, because everyone saw him as the peak of our culture. 401 To this statement, composer Vladimir Rubin responds: ‘The wolf cannot speak about the fear of the sheep. [. . .] All were afraid. Khrennikov had his fear, Shostakovich his. We were programmed with it, it infiltrated our innermost life’. 402 3. Shostakovich’s Works a. The Nose and Berg’s Wozzeck As James Morgan notes in his article ‘Interview with “The Nose”’, ‘since the premiere of The Nose in 1930, critics have debated the presence of parallels between it 401 Weinstein, War Symphonies. This view was restated in Marcus Warren’s ‘Soviet Music’s Apparatchik Tikhon Khrennikov was one of Stalin’s Most Powerful and Feared Cultural Commissars, Who Ruled the Careers of Soviet Composers With a Rod of Iron; For the First Time’, The Sunday Telegraph, 27 December 1998, p. 8: Whatever the current state of the violent debate raging over Shostakovich’s real political views, Soviet patriot or crypto-dissident, in Khrennikov’s robust opinion the truth is straightforward: Shostakovich was ‘a normal Soviet man’. The notion that a ‘normal Soviet man’ could say one thing and think something completely different, as many argue Shostakovich was expert at, is dismissed out of hand. Thus, when in 1959 Shostakovich told a press conference in the United States that he believed the Communist Party to be ‘the most progressive force in the world’, he was not trying to wrongfoot the journalists and shelter [himself] from their trick questions. This was not Shostakovich’s irony at work. No, according to Khrennikov, he really meant it. ‘He wrote the music he wanted. He joined the Communist Party of his own free will; no one dragged him in’, he says, warming to the subject. ‘In his lifetime he was treated like a genius. Everyone, us, the Party and the government all treated him like a composer of genius’. In contrast, cf. pp. 36–37 about Shostakovich’s emotional turmoil over joining the Party and pp. 122–25 about the need to decipher his music in proper context. One can also refute Khrennikov’s oft-repeated claim that no composer was arrested during his tenure (1948–91) as head of the Composers’ Union. Aleksandr Veprik was arrested on 19 December 1950 and endured both physical and psychological torture during four years in the gulag. Details of his imprisonment are vividly described by his sister, Esfir Veprik, in Pamyati brata i druga (To the Memory of My Brother and Friend) (1960–61; Russian State Archive of Literature and Art [RGALI], Moscow). On 7 February 1953, Mieczysław Weinberg also was arrested, but he was released in June, a few months after Stalin’s death on 5 March. Khrennikov, in an interview with Nemtsov in autumn 2004, acknowledged the imprisonment of these composers immediately after stating, again, that ‘Our union was the only one in which there were no arrests’. On this occasion, he even took credit for their ‘quick’ release; however, it was Shostakovich, according to Veprik’s and Weinberg’s families, who actively petitioned to have them freed. Still other composers, who had been arrested before 1948, remained imprisoned under Khrennikov’s watch, including Matvey Pavlov-Azancheyev (from 1941–51), Mikhail Nosyrev (from 1943–53), and jazz musician Eddie (Ady) Rosner (from early 1947–May 1954). For excerpts from Esfir Veprik’s manuscript and additional information on these and other detained composers, cf. Jascha Nemtsov, ‘“Ich bin schon längst tot”. Komponisten im Gulag: Vsevolod Zaderackij und Aleksandr Veprik’, Osteuropa, 57, June 2007, pp. 314–39. 402 Weinstein, War Symphonies. 118 and Wozzeck’. 403 He then mentions that although Shostakovich saw Wozzeck ‘all eight or nine times it was given in Leningrad’, he denied that Berg’s work ‘had any direct influence on either of his operas’. 404 In a footnote, Morgan cites, but does not quote, the following passage in Testimony. He also finds it necessary to warn the reader that ‘as this denial appears in Shostakovich’s disputed memoirs, it should be treated with some skepticism’: 405 It’s said that Berg’s Wozzeck influenced me greatly, influenced both my operas, and I am so often asked about Berg, particularly since we have met. It’s amazing how lazy some musicologists can be. They write books that could cause a cockroach infestation in their readers’ brains. At least, I’ve never had the occasion to read a good book about myself, and I do read them rather carefully, I think. When they serve coffee, don’t try to find beer in it. Chekhov used to say that. When they listen to The Nose or Katerina Izmailova they try to find Wozzeck, and Wozzeck has absolutely nothing to do with them. I liked the opera very much and I never missed a performance when it played in Leningrad, and there were eight or nine performances before Wozzeck was removed from the repertory. The pretext was the same one they used with my Nose — that it was too hard for the singers to stay in condition and they needed too many rehearsals to make it worthwhile; and the masses weren’t exactly beating down the doors. 406 Whether or not one agrees with Shostakovich’s statement in the memoirs, the latter is entirely consistent with what the composer told G. Fedorov during exactly the same time (the early 1970s, when The Nose was being revived) in an article published only in 1976 (i.e., after the Testimony manuscript was complete and already in the West): In conversation, D. D. Shostakovich confirmed that The Nose’s connection with Wozzeck is exaggerated. I will hardly err if I say that such a ‘confirmation’ can be understood as a full rejection by the composer of a connection between The Nose and A. Berg’s opera. 407 403 James Morgan, ‘Interview with “The Nose”’, in Wachtel (ed.), Intersections and Transpositions: Russian Music, Literature, and Society, p. 119 (hereafter Morgan). 404 Morgan, p. 119. 405 Ibid., p. 134, note 31. This caveat echoes Fay’s in ‘The Punch in Shostakovich’s Nose’, Malcolm H. Brown (ed.), Russian and Soviet Music: Essay for Boris Schwarz, UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1984, p. 240, note 7: ‘In light of . . . the dubious authenticity of Testimony, Shostakovich’s belated claim must be treated with scepticism’. 406 Testimony, pp. 42–43. 407 G. Fedorov, ‘U poroga teatra Shostakovicha’, Teatr, October 1976, p. 26; translation in the text by Morgan, p. 119. 119 b. Ninth Symphony In Testimony, Shostakovich admits his inability to glorify the leader in his Ninth Symphony: they demanded that Shostakovich use quadruple winds, choir, and soloists to hail the leader. All the more because Stalin found the number auspicious: the Ninth Symphony. [. . .] I confess that I gave hope to the leader and teacher’s dreams. I announced that I was writing an apotheosis. [. . .] [But] I couldn’t write an apotheosis to Stalin, I simply couldn’t. 408 This passage is consistent with what the composer told David Rabinovich privately in 1944: that he ‘wanted to use (in the Ninth) not only the orchestra, but also a chorus as well as soloists’; however, ‘he was handicapped by the absence of a suitable text’ and ‘feared he would be suspected of wanting to evoke “certain analogies” (with Beethoven’s Ninth)’. 409 Shostakovich eventually wrote a more light-hearted work, intended to deflate the ego of Stalin, who after ‘the war with Hitler was won [. . .] went off the deep end [. . . and] was like the frog puffing himself up to the size of an ox’. 410 Glikman’s note to Shostakovich’s letter of 2 January 1945 elaborates on the composer’s quick change of direction: During the 1944–5 holiday period, Shostakovich was mentally at work on the Ninth Symphony. As was usual with him, it was composed in his mind before the task began of fixing the mature opus on paper. In this sense, he was in fact working at this time. At the end of April 1945 [. . .] one evening he decided to show me some sketches of the first movement, magnificent in its sweep, its pathos and its irresistible movement. He played me about ten minutes of it, and then announced that there was much in the symphony with which he was not happy, in particular its number in the canon, which might suggest to many people an inevitable but misleading comparison with Beethoven’s Ninth. [. . .] sometime later [he] abandoned work on the symphony. I cannot say why he did so, as I never questioned him about it, but on 25 September 1945 I was present at the Union of Composers in Leningrad when he played through a completely different Ninth Symphony, the one we know today. 411 408 Testimony, pp. 140–41; emphasis added. 409 Shostakovich Reconsidered, p. 462, Genrikh Orlov, Simfonii Shostakovicha (Shostakovich’s Symphonies), Gosudarstvennoye Muzykal’noye Izdatel’stvo, Leningrad, 1961, p. 221, and D. Rabinovich, D. Shostakovich, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1959, p. 96. 410 Testimony, p. 140. 411 Story of a Friendship, pp. 241–42, note 184. 120 At the end of 2003, Ol’ga Digonskaya discovered, in the Shostakovich Archive in Moscow, 322 measures of an unknown orchestral work folded in the autograph piano score of Shostakovich’s opera The Gamblers. She later was able to relate these 24 pages to three others in the Glinka Museum of Musical Culture dated 15 January 1945 and to identify this as the beginning of the first (aborted) version of the Ninth Symphony, totally different in style and instrumentation from the familiar score. 412 Digonskaya discusses in detail the evidence supporting her conclusion, including descriptions of this earlier Ninth Symphony by Rabinovich, Yevgeny Makarov, and Isaak Glikman. Significantly, none of her sources mention the peculiar instrumentation involved: “2 Piccoli, 2 Flauti, 3 Oboi, Corno inglese (F), Clarinetto piccolo (Es), 3 Clarinetti (B), Clarinetto basso (B), 3 Fagotti, Contrafagotto / 4 Corni (F), 4 Trombe (B), 4 Tromboni, 2 Tube / Timpani, Tamburo, Piatti / Silofono / Violini I, Violini II, Viole, Violoncelli, Contrabassi”. 413 In her ‘Comments’ to the published score, Digonskaya points out that the orchestra has ‘an unprecedented number of instruments, not heretofore seen in Shostakovich’s creative work’. However, she completely ignores that Testimony, p. 140 (quoted above), mentioned the call for quadruple winds in this aborted Ninth Symphony thirty years before the manuscript was even discovered. Quadruple winds are highly unusual in a Shostakovich symphony, found elsewhere only in his Fourth. Did Volkov guess about this, too? c. Eleventh Symphony In Testimony, Shostakovich states ‘I wrote it [the Eleventh Symphony] in 1957 and it deals with contemporary themes even though it’s called “1905”’. 414 This linking of past and present is also evident in other works by Shostakovich, including Satires, the Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Ten Poems on Texts by Revolutionary 412 Ol’ga Digonskaya, preface to Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony Fragment of 1945, DSCH Publishers, Moscow, 2008, pp. 9–10 (hereafter Digonskaya); also ‘Symphonic Movement (1945, unfinished)’, liner notes to Naxos CD 8.572138, 2009. The Symphony Fragment was first performed on 20 November 2006 by Gennady Rozhdestvensky and the Russian State Academic Symphonic Cappella, Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, Moscow, and recorded on 21 September 2008 by Mark Fitz-Gerald and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra. Louis Blois, in a review of the latter in DSCH Journal, 30, January 2009, p. 72, writes: Not only does the tone of the music stand in grim contrast to the grinningly mischievous 9 th that we know, it defies some of Shostakovich’s most tried conventions. In place of a firmly declared main theme, which usually is stated at the outset of a Shostakovich opening movement, we find a stormy sequence of short repetitive vamps that keep circuling round and round each other, as if hopelessly trapped in some hellish storm. The music churns, the vamps at one point becoming accompaniment figures to a second idea screaming in the high winds and later appearing as urgent exhortations in the brass. / The listener may wonder how a symphony that begins in such a heightened state of agitation could have possibly advanced. 413 Digonskaya, p. 14. 414 Testimony, p. 8. 121 Poets. 415 The notion that the Symphony is only about 1905 is questionable for various reasons. First, Glikman, in a note to Shostakovich’s letter of 31 March 1957 writes: Shostakovich attached great importance to his plans for the Eleventh Symphony. He felt that its programme was timely and to the point. He came to Leningrad on 10 January and told me he had begun work on a symphony with the theme of 1905, and significantly added (verbatim): ‘No, it won’t be anything like The Song of the Forests!’ 416 Clearly, this was not intended to be a propagandistic, socialist-realist work, such as the latter. 417 Equally as clear, the ‘timeliness’ of the work suggests the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, since the Eleventh Symphony was already two years late for the anniversary of the Year 1905. 418 Even though Fay claims that ‘available evidence does not corroborate [. . .] that delivering a personal commentary on the events in Hungary was the motivating impulse behind the composition of the Eleventh Symphony’, 419 she is contradicted by Irina Shostakovich and others: 415 Cf. Shostakovich Reconsidered, p. 171. Irina Shostakovich has stated that ‘in the Michelangelo Verses there is a parallel between Dante’s expulsion from Italy and Solzhenitsyn’s exile from the Soviet Union’ (‘More Thoughts from Irina Shostakovich’, DSCH Journal, 12, January 2000, p. 72), and Mishra, p. 193, has commented on the ‘slightly seditious’ use of revolutionary texts in the last work, concluding that ‘Drawing on a previous era in Russian history, Shostakovich would rely on his audience to draw the appropriate latter-day references’. 416 Story of a Friendship, p. 263, note 44. Basing her information on Glikman, Olga Fyodorova adds: In November the country was celebrating the 40th anniversary of the October revolution and Dmitry Shostakovich had decided to make his new symphony, already his Eleventh, to coincide with the momentous event. Shostakovich said his new work would go back to the days of the first Russian revolution of 1905 which was set off by the bloody massacre of a peaceful rally gathered on St Petersburg’s Palace Square. . . There was more to Shostakovich’s new symphony than just met the eye, though. In a letter to a very close friend, the composer wrote that with his music he was ‘consigning to perdition the bloodsucking butchers of the distant and not so distant past’ — a clear reference to Stalin’s henchmen who had caused such an irreparable damage to Russian culture . . . (‘Russian Musical Highlights of the 20 th Century: 1957’, on the ‘Voice of Russia’ website Download Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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