Dmitri Shostakovich: denouncement and rehabilitation
The life and works of Dmitri Shostakovich are inextricably linked to the politics of the Russian Communist regime. Although he was recognised as “perhaps Soviet Russia’s most loyal musical son, and certainly her most talented one”,[1] he found his creative freedom restricted by the Party. The first and most infamous example of such political mistreatment was the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which after two years of success was denounced and banned. Shostakovich had become the “sacrificial lamb”[2] through which the Party displayed its power over the arts: his fate served as a warning to those who strayed from the dictated aesthetic path of “socialist realism”. His official rehabilitation came with the polysemous Fifth Symphony, which reaped “an orgy of public praise” and later “Stalin prizes and titles and honorary posts”[3] – for the Party had to show it could deck with roses as easily as it could revile and humiliate.[4]
That Shostakovich was Russia’s most talented offspring there can be no doubt. His First Symphony, composed when he was still a teenager, skyrocketed him into international fame. His formative years corresponded to the era of artistic liberalism ushered by Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921. It was widely accepted that a revolutionary society had to have revolutionary art; the period was marked by the enthusiastic espousal of modernism and an exchange of ideas with the progressive West. Leningrad and Moscow became dynamic centres of cultural life where works by Schreker, Křenek, Berg, Hindemith, and the expatriate Stravinsky were performed.[5] Many Soviet composers devoted themselves to the creation of modernistic music. Socialist ideology “emphatically” rejected “the separation of Art from Life”; accordingly, their music often portrayed the shifting and grinding of factories and the bustling sounds of the city.[6] The organisation behind the Western-inspired musical avant-garde was the Association for Contemporary Music, the ACM, which propelled Russian music into an age of modernism. But a rival group, the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM), called for a simplified musical language that could be comprehended by the masses. From the outset, the RAPM’s attitude was vehemently anti-modernistic.
As soon as Shostakovich graduated from the Leningrad Conservatory in 1925 he embraced the cause of modernism. Perhaps most striking of the radical pieces he produced during this period are his Aphorisms for piano (influenced by Prokofiev’s Sarcasms) and his Gogolian opera The Nose. The latter work discarded convention to such an extent that it became a sort of anti-opera; in it we can find the naturalistic portrayal of snoring and other nasal sounds and a full exploitation of the satire of the story it is based on.[7] Shostakovich also undertook a commission to create the Symphonic Dedication to October (later to become his Second Symphony) for the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution in 1927.[8] That the work is characterised by clamorous dissonances and includes a factory hooter in its instrumentation suggests close affinity to the ACM; its choral ending, on the other hand, is undeniably propagandist, leading to approval by the RAPM.[9] The fact that many of Shostakovich’s works are on similarly revolutionary topics supports the hypothesis that he was “perhaps the most loyal” of Soviet Russia’s composers. His many film scores were often so propagandist that “Stalin himself attached great value to Shostakovich the film composer.”[10] His patriotic songs, ballets, and theatre pieces were written in the same vein of radical socialist ideals. Nevertheless, it is unclear whether Shostakovich truly believed in the ideology he supported; many have argued that he was actually a clandestine dissident.
In 1929, Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan brutally put an end to the artistic euphoria of the NEP. Russia underwent a Second Revolution, in which any potential opponents of Stalin were mercilessly liquidated. Land collectivisation and industrialisation put immense pressure on the country and caused a rapid decline in living standards.[11] In the arts, modernism was forcefully suppressed by the Party and became known under the black label of “formalism”, a slippery term that was plastic enough to mean anything the regime wanted it to.[12] Formalism, officially defined as the “separation of form from content”,[13] was seen as an esoteric expression of bourgeois-inspired corruption that had no place in the proletarian Soviet Russia. Accused of formalism, modernists such as Roslavets, Mosolov, and Lourié were ushered out of Russian musical life and had their names literally expunged from the history books.[14] The Party further dissolved the ACM and put the RAPM in domination over the Soviet musical world: after three years in power, the latter was replaced by the party-run Union of Soviet Composers in the perestroyka[15] of 1932.[16] Although most composers were relieved to be free of the hegemony of the RAPM, the Union soon showed itself to be even more intimidating: it was the instrument of political control over Russian musical life.
“Socialist realism”, introduced in 1934 at the First Congress of Soviet Writers, became the goal towards which all Soviet artists were to strive.[17] Officially defined as “the truthful and historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development”, it meant almost exactly the opposite.[18] The irony was biting: socialist realism was supposed to present an undyingly optimistic vision of Soviet life, “the harsh every-day reality…seen through rose-coloured glasses.”[19] Everything was portrayed as evolving towards the revolutionary ideal, a cheerfully uniform society.[20] It was clear from the outset that all new socialist art would have to be positive, comprehensible to the masses, and suffused by a kind of heroism. Soviet music cemented into a style of vulgar cliches that effectively hedged it off from the outside world: “there was a curious sense of disillusionment at the discovery that Revolutionary Russia could produce such far from revolutionary music.”[21]
In fact, “so little was socialist realism understood” at the beginning that Shostakovich’s second opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, “was accepted as the embodiment of it.”[22] When it was premiered in January 1934 it was a phenomenal success. The first Soviet opera to enter the repertoire, its fame soon spread abroad. It was soon being performed in Sweden, Czechoslovakia, England, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, Denmark, and America. At home, both the critics and the general public were ecstatic: Lady Macbeth was hailed as a work that “could have been written only by a Soviet composer brought up in the best traditions of Soviet culture.”[23] While the music met with disapproval from the conservative faction of the Union of Soviet Composers, they could do nothing to blight Shostakovich’s triumph.[24] At 27, he was the most famous composer in the Soviet Union. In the euphoria of success Shostakovich, who had initially planned a trilogy of operas on the theme of strong Russian heroines, announced that he would complete a tetralogy, à la Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Lady Macbeth was to be the Rheingold.[25]
Lady Macbeth was based on a story of the same name by the 19th-century writer Nikolai Leskov, which, according to Shostakovich, “expressively characterises the position of women in the old prerevolutionary time”.[26] Nevertheless, some significant alterations were made to the plot by the composer and his co-librettist Alexander Preis. Shostakovich sought to whiten the character of Katerina, the “Lady Macbeth” of the title; the murderess was interpreted as “a vigorous, talented, beautiful woman, who perishes in the dismal, cruel domestic environment of the Russia of merchants and serfs.”[27] The opera’s portrayal of the corruption of the old bourgeois society is relentless: Shostakovich was evidently attempting to apply the Marxist theory of progress to the story.[28]
Lady Macbeth was innovative in many ways. The orchestral interludes, which ensure a sense of dramatic continuity, “serve the purpose of developing basic musical ideas and illustrating the action.”[29] The unflinching realism of the love scene between Katerina and Sergei shocked audiences worldwide. Nevertheless, Lady Macbeth is less stylistically arcane than The Nose; in fact, it is relatively conventional. The voice parts are “built on broad cantilena, making use of all available resources of the human voice”.[30] Shostakovich showed himself the equal of a Verdi or a Mussorgsky in his scope for powerful dramatic clarity. “I have tried to make the musical language of my opera as simple as possible,”[31] he said. It was in Lady Macbeth that he achieved a balance between the conventional and the modernistic, creating a “psychological drama with socio-critical overtones.”[32]
In January 1936, Stalin announced the new criteria for Soviet opera: these were “a libretto with a Socialist topic, a realistic musical language with stress on a national idiom, and a positive hero typifying the new Socialist era.”[33] As has been demonstrated, Lady Macbeth’s portrayal of the bourgeoisie could be seen as socialist propaganda, and the “realism” of the musical language can hardly be questioned, although the national idiom is largely obscured by the parody of “the false and lying methods of the composers of bourgeois society”. Shostakovich’s Katerina could be perceived as a modern woman trapped in a stifling archaic society, acting as a revolutionary who topples her oppressors; thus she typifies “the new Socialist era”. But could she be perceived as a “positive hero”? Shostakovich indeed wrote that he wanted to “justify Katerina so she would impress the audience as a positive character”,[34] and it is possible to interpret her as a noble human being that has cracked under appalling outward circumstances. Thus it is arguable that, on one level at least, Lady Macbeth met Stalin’s criteria.
Despite the fact that Shostakovich was perhaps the most ideologically committed of all the composers of his generation, he was fated to become the proverbial tall poppy of Soviet Russia. On the 26 January, 1936, Stalin and his close colleagues attended a Bolshoi production of Lady Macbeth; they left before the end of the opera.[35] Two days later, an unsigned editorial titled “Muddle instead of Music” was published in the Party’s official newspaper, Pravda. The editorial attacked Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District as a formalistic, “leftist deformation instead of natural, human music”, and warned that if Shostakovich continued in the same vein things “might end very badly”.[36] As Taruskin notes, “the same merciless rhetoric of political denunciation was directed, for the first time anywhere, at an artist.”[37] As if to make things absolutely clear, another article appeared in Pravda on February 6, condemning Shostakovich’s ballet portraying life on a collective farm, The Limpid Stream, as “Balletic Falsehood”.
The editorials had far-reaching consequences. For Shostakovich it meant a sharp fall from grace, a loss of income, and, if he did not correct his “mistakes”, a threat to his freedom and possibly his life. Pravda took pains to make it clear that all the arts, not just music, must follow the same rules, and that whoever continued in a formalistic vein would suffer the same fate as Shostakovich.[38] As far as Soviet music was concerned, everybody involved felt the impact of the editorials; composers and musicologists alike endorsed the Pravda articles, afraid of the consequences of not stepping in line with official opinion.[39] The Quiet Don, a song opera by Dzerzhinsky that Stalin and his companions had seen and approved a week before Lady Macbeth, was declared the prototype of Soviet opera. It was a work of little artistic merit, ironically dedicated to Shostakovich.[40] Its optimism and lack of complexity surely endeared it to Stalin; this was the kind of “socialist realism” he sought. The sphere of Soviet opera was subjected to numerous emulations of the work; meanwhile, Shostakovich withdrew his Fourth Symphony, deeming it risky to perform such a complex, pessimistic work in the circumstances.
It took Shostakovich almost a year to work up enough courage to begin the composition of his Fifth Symphony; but when he did, the process was incredibly swift. The third movement, for example, was written over three days.[41] Infamously subtitled “a Soviet artist’s response to just criticism”,[42] it received its immensely successful premiere in November 1937 under the baton of the young, then almost unknown, Yevgeny Mravinsky. Shostakovich said that “the theme of my symphony is the formation of a personality. At the center of the work’s conception I envisioned just that: a man in all his suffering.”[43] That Shostakovich was talking about himself there can hardly be any doubt. The symphony was seen as a personal perestroyka, or restructuring, by the authorities, and as such was approved, abetted, praised. Here was the work in which Shostakovich “apologised” for his former mistakes and sought to rectify his “formalistic” impulses of the past, adopting a clear musical idiom. The symphony was written on a large, heroic scale, classically divided into four movements. Formally, it was a return to tradition.
But, contrary to what the exultant regime believed, the Fifth Symphony did not present a radical change of style. The influence of the Pravda article over Shostakovich cannot be called into question: the composer certainly felt the threat over his head, fully comprehended the situation he was in and feared for his own life. Nevertheless, the style he exhibited in the Fifth Symphony was not an artificial break with his former ouvre; rather, it was the result of a natural evolution towards a more mature idiom.[44] For example, the strikingly conservative cello sonata that Shostakovich wrote in 1934 before the Pravda attack demonstrates a connection with the form, texture, tonality and rhythm of the Fifth Symphony.[45] Thus, it could be argued that the Fifth, officially celebrated as the composer’s perestroyka, would not be much different if the Pravda attack had never occurred.[46]
Nevertheless, Shostakovich was painfully aware of what was expected of him. Sensing that the funereal slow movement might be criticised for its pessimism, Shostakovich endeavoured to justify it by writing that “Soviet tragedy, as a genre, has every right to exist; but its content must be suffused with a positive idea, comparable, for example, to the life-affirming ardor of Shakespeare’s tragedies.”[47] It was thus that the symphony was given the oxymoronic epithet of “optimistic tragedy”.[48] Yet the “triumphal” quality of the D major coda, which “resolves the tense and tragic moments of the preceding movements in a joyous, optimistic fashion”,[49] is an object of controversy: ever since the first performance listeners have detected an element of hollowness in the fanfares. The dry ostentations of the trumpets and timpani, combined with the sparse orchestration and the linear, almost sketchy quality of the music, give credibility to such a reading. To quote Solomon Volkov, “It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,’ and you go marching off, muttering, ‘Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.’”[50] It seems appropriate to conclude, then, that the ending is a monument to socialist realism, as it leads the imagination to wonder what would be revealed were the brightly-coloured paint peeled off.
The importance of the polysemy and latent content of Shostakovich’s music is enormous.[51] The Fifth Symphony’s mournful slow movement provoked open weeping during its first performance, which was, crucially, at the height of the Yezhovshchina period of political terror. By the end of the period in 1953, the number of innocent victims executed in Stalin’s purges amounted to millions. Others were sent to gulag prison camps and often did not return. The music offered an outlet for sorrow that was rare in a socialist society that was forced to put on a brave face in a time of catastrophe; it also unified its audience with what has been called geselleschaftbildende Kraft or community-binding power.[52] The long-lasting ovations at the end of the symphony were a testimony to its greatness; it was a work that could be understood on many levels, pleasing both the officaldom and the general public. Ultimately, Shostakovich was awarded four Stalin Prizes and became Secretary of the Composer’s Union, Member of the Supreme Soviet, and Hero of Socialist Labour.
The pattern established by the Party’s attack on Lady Macbeth and glorification of the Fifth Symphony would continue for the rest of Shostakovich’s life. And yet he remained productive throughout the whole of the oppressive dictatorship of Stalin, surviving personal persecution to become one of the greatest symphonists of all time. His masterworks, among which the Fifth Symphony must be numbered, speak with incredible depth to the human heart; their many levels of meaning and scope for different interpretations create an incredible psychological complexity. That complexity and elusiveness from objective definitions characterises the music of Shostakovich as it characterises that of no other composer; the imprint of the times he wrote in survives in his works and touches us all.
[1] Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermaneutical Essays (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), 508.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., 518.
[4] See ibid., Chapter 14.
[5] Gerald Abraham, Eight Soviet Composers (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1970), 14.
[6] Eric Roseberry, Ideology, Style, Content and Thematic Process in the Symphonies, Cello Concertos, and String Quartets of Shostakovich (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989), 2.
[7] When the opera was finally premiered in the form of a suite in 1930, it was ominously attacked by members of the RAPM as being “formalistic”. See Francis Maes, trans. Arnold Pomerans and Erica Pomerans, A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 261-262.
[8] Boris Schwarz, “Shostakovich, Dmitry”, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: MacMillan, 2001), Vol. 23, 283.
[9] See Gerald Abraham, Eight Soviet Composers (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1970), 16.
[10] Solomon Volkov, quoted in Eric Roseberry, Shostakovich (London: Omnibus Press, 1981), 99.
[11] Boris Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia: 1917-1970 (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1976), 109.
[12] Scott Davie, Lecture (Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney: 2008).
[13] Boris Schwarz, Music and Musical Life, 129.
[14] Francis Maes, trans. Arnold Pomerans and Erica Pomerans, A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 258.
[15] A term that meant “restructuring”.
[16] 1932 was also the year of Stalin’s second Five-Year Plan; “the atmosphere was one of crisis.” See Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 109.
[17] Francis Maes, A History of Russian Music, 253.
[18] Boris Schwarz, “Shostakovich, Dmitry”, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: MacMillan, 2001), Vol. 23, 284.
[19] Boris Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia: 1917-1970 (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1976), 139.
[20] Francis Maes, A History of Russian Music, 253.
[21] Gerald Abraham, quoted in Schwartz, Music and Musical Life, 135.
[22] Gerald Abraham, Eight Soviet Composers (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1970), 25.
[23] Quoted in ibid.
[24] Boris Schwarz, “Shostakovich, Dmitry”, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: MacMillan, 2001), Vol. 23, 287.
[25] Laurel Fay, Shostakovich: A Life, 78.
[26] Francis Maes, A History of Russian Music, 265.
[27] Boris Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 115.
[28] Francis Maes, A History of Russian Music, 264. The opera, described as a “satirical tragedy”, possesses lashings of the composer’s trademark humour – in this case black humour. Every character except Katerina is painted in a caricatural light: the father-in-law, the husband, the lover, the workers, the priest, and the police all sing to music filled with parodies of such popular genres as waltzes, foxtrots and polkas. Only Katerina’s music is pure, serious, and lyrical. It was through the music that Shostakovich sought to justify Katerina by “dehumanising” her oppressors. See Richard Taruskin, 498-504.
[29] Shostakovich, quoted in Nicholas Slonimsky, Music Since 1900, 5th ed. (New York: Shirmer Books, 1994), 366.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Boris Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 120.
[33] Ibid., 123.
[34] Quoted in Francis Maes, A History of Russian Music, 265.
[35] Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermaneutical Essays (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), 507.
[36] Ibid., 508.
[37] Ibid., 507.
[38] Boris Schwarz, Music and Musical Life, 129.
[39] Ibid., 128-129.
[40] Laurel Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 78.
[41] Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 150.
[42] This appellation was invented by a journalist, not the composer; see Wilson, 152.
[43] Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermaneutical Essays (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), 523.
[44] See J. D. Huband, “Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony: A Soviet Artist’s Reply…?”, Tempo, New Series, No. 173 (June 1990), 11-16.
[45] J. D. Huband, “Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony: A Soviet Artist’s Reply…?”, 13.
[46] See ibid., 11-16.
[47] Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, 523.
[48] Entelis, quoted in ibid., 524.
[49] Shostakovich. See ibid., 523-528.
[50] Quoted in Taruskin, 524.
[51] See ibid, 472; 477.
[52] “It is the power given only to the great symphonists – the power to weld an audience together, to uplift and to move masses of disparate people in one single emotion-controlled wave, sweeping aside all intellectual reservations.” Schwarz, Musical Life, 174.
Bibliography
Abraham, G. Eight Soviet Composers. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1970.
Ardov, M., trans. Kelly, R. and Meylac, M. Memories of Shostakovich. London: Short Books, 2004.
Fanning, D., ed. Shostakovich Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Fay, L.E., Shostakovich: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Fay, L.E., ed., Shostakovich and His World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Huband, J.D., “Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony: A Soviet Artist’s Reply…?” in Tempo, New Series, No. 173, Soviet Issue, (Jun. 1990), Cambridge University Press, 11-16.
Martynov, I., trans. Guralsky, T. Dmitri Shostakovich: The Man and His Work. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1947.
Norris, C., ed. Shostakovich: the Man and his Music. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1982.
Roseberry, E. Ideology, Style, Content, and Thematic Process in the Symphonies, Cello Concertos, and String Quartets of Shostakovich. New York: Garland Publishing, 1989.
Roseberry, E. Shostakovich. London: Omnibus Press, 1981.
Schwarz, B. Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 1917-1970. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1976.
Schwarz, B. “Shostakovich, Dmitry”, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. London: Macmillan Press, 2001. Vol. 23, pp. 279-311.
Sheinberg, E. Irony, Satire, Parody and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich: A Theory of Musical Incongruities. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000.
Shostakovich, Dmitri, Symphony No. 5. London: Ernst Eulenburg, n.d.
Taruskin, R. Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermaneutical Essays. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Discography
Haitink, Bernard, conductor. Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5; Symphony No. 9. Concertgebouw; London Philharmonic. Decca, 425 066-2.
Rostropovich, Mstislav, conductor. Shostakovich: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Galina Vishnevskaya, London Philharmonic Orchestra. EMI, 023500.
© Copyright Sigrid Harris 2008.
1 comment