SW(Final8/31) Written by Allan B. Ho and Dmitry Feofanov
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2004: I just spent a large part of two days with Ustvolskaya and her husband [Konstantin Bagrenin] (mainly with the latter, since she is a bit frail and had to rest a lot). I was told 136 The date given here is entirely consistent with the one in Testimony, p. 230 (i.e., c. 1939, before he began reorchestrating Boris Godunov), which Fay, Yakubov, and others dismiss because it is at odds with the dates on the manuscript itself. 469 Although Testimony does not mention the ‘Lenin’ subtitle specifically, 470 it does acknowledge, in that DS had shown her the completed score of No. 7 in 1939. To be on the safe side I asked several times: Was it really in 1939, not in 1941? Was the score complete, all movements, and orchestrated? To this the answer was definitely yes. Furthermore she stated that one of the reasons why he showed it was that he wanted to ask her for a suggestion how to name it. He wanted to name it after Lenin, whom he admired much. 469 The quotation from The Merry Widow, which had been staged very successfully in Leningrad in 1935, may make even greater sense given this earlier dating. The text of the Lehár is ‘Dann geh’ ich zu Maxim’ (‘Then I’ll go to Maxim’). In 1939, Shostakovich had a one-year-old Maxim, to whom he certainly would go frequently. When Skans asked about the ‘official’ dates, Ustvol’skaya’s husband responded ‘with a broad grin that even for a man like Shostakovich, that speed would have been impossible if one sums up everything else that he had to do at that time when the invasion just had started. Western musicologists tend to think that Shostakovich could withdraw to his chambers, working as usual, but that is pure nonsense, he had any amount of “worldly” things to do’ (email from Skans, 4 July 2004). Recently, Yakubov acknowledged on Bavarian TV (4 October 2006) that the assumption that the Seventh Symphony ‘might in reality be about Stalin, his monstrous terror in Leningrad in the 30s, the murder of Kirov, the eradication of large parts of the party leadership in the city etc. [. . .] cannot be dismissed: it is quite possible. But it also cannot be proved’. He goes on to conclude that ‘If we get into such a situation, playing various theories against each other as it were, we will soon end up in a labyrinth, knowing absolutely nothing’ (summarized by Per Skans, DSCH Journal, 26, January 2007, p. 67). Testimony, in contrast, openly acknowledges multiple inspirations for the Seventh and mainly rejects the earlier notion that it is solely (or even mainly) about the Nazi invasion. 470 The subtitle is not surprising. Sabinina notes in A Shostakovich Casebook, p. 156, that ‘As early as the 1930s, Shostakovich had been “encouraged” to compose a “Lenin” symphony’. If that were true, then any new symphony might have had Lenin as a possible subject, even if only momentarily. For example, in Sovetskoye isskusstvo (20 November 1938), Shostakovich said that his Sixth Symphony would be dedicated to ‘Lenin’s memory’, then in Leningradskaya Pravda (28 August 1939, 1 and 20 January 1940) and Moskovoskii Bolshevik (14 November 1940) he attached the same dedication to the future Seventh Symphony (Wilson, pp. 127–28, note 33). The composer’s true views of Lenin are evident in his aborted satire of Lenin in the original Twelfth Symphony, which was quickly replaced by a more acceptable one according to Lebedinsky (cf. Wilson, p. 346 and Shostakovich Reconsidered, pp. 248–49, note 23), his humorous anecdote about Lenin and Nikandrov in part of the unpublished typescript of Testimony (printed for the first time on pp. 234–35 below), and his letters to Tat’yana Glivenko. Regarding the latter, Volkov, p. 64, writes: ‘The cult of Lenin, being imposed from above, grew to unbelievable excess after his death in 1924: this makes Mitya’s favorite joke even more risky: He persisted in using “Ilyich” (as the press lovingly referred to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin) for Petr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. In a letter to Glivenko, Shostakovich wrote indignantly about changing Petrograd to Leningrad, which he sarcastically dubbed St. Leninburg’. Apparently, Shostakovich was under no illusion that Lenin was a saint, but rather a precursor of Stalin. The Russian émigré economist Nikolai Bazilli (Nicolas de Basily) noted that ‘In his views on dictatorship, as on many other points, Stalin is Lenin’s continuator and, as it were, a simplified edition of him’ (Russia under Soviet Rule: Twenty Years of Bolshevik Experiment, Allen and Unwin, London, 1938, p. 126). Ian MacDonald further notes that ‘Lenin was the same as Stalin in terms of being a dictator, an anti-democratic scourge of everyone not in his Party (Stalin was more democratic, including the Party in his purges), the inventor of the Gulag, the creator of the Cheka (KGB), the initiator of state terror (in 1918), the victimiser of the peasants (whom he hated as “backward” people), the instigator of the Civil War, the persecutor of the church, and [. . .] chips off the same bloodyminded block’ (email, 31 January 2000; also cf. ‘Shostakovich 137 the passage immediately before, that ‘the process of writing a new work is long and complicated. Sometimes you start writing and then change your mind’. 471 Shostakovich goes on to mention multiple inspirations for the Seventh, including the Psalms of David; Stalin, Hitler, and ‘other enemies of humanity’; and the ‘terrible pre-war years’. 472 (4) Yevgeny Yevtushenko recalls driving to Shostakovich’s place in March 1962, after the composer had phoned to ask permission to set his poem ‘Babi Yar’. According to the poet, Shostakovich ‘played and sung his just finished vocal-symphonic poem Babi Yar. Then he said, “You know, I feel it’s necessary to broaden and deepen it. One of my prewar symphonies 473 was about our own native fears, arrests. 474 And ‘they’ began to interpret my music, putting all the emphasis on Hitler’s Germany. Do you have any other poems, for example, about fears? For me this is a unique opportunity to speak my mind not only with the help of music, also with the help of your poetry. Then no one will be able to ascribe a different meaning to my music”’. 475 Shortly thereafter, Yevtushenko wrote the poem ‘Fears’, which was incorporated in the Thirteenth Symphony. And finally, (5) Volkov, in Shostakovich and Stalin, perceptively observes that Shostakovich, in describing the Seventh Symphony, did not speak of the episode or the theme of ‘invasion’ — that word appeared in articles and reviews by numerous commentators. On the contrary, in a highly evasive author’s note for the premiere, he stressed: ‘I did not set myself the goal of a naturalistic depiction of military action (the roar of planes, the crash of tanks, cannon fire), I did not compose so-called battle music. I wanted to convey the content of grim events’. What ‘grim events’ if not the war could be depicted in the work of a Soviet author in 1941? This question would evince either a total ignorance of Soviet history or a willful ignoring of it. The beginning of the war could not erase the bloody memory of the mass purges of recent years. and Lenin’ in Part 5 of MacDonald’s review of Fay’s book, on the Internet at Download Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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