DIMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975) Part 1

Oh how I wish I could have known Shostakovich because, when writing about
his life, it gets difficult to get under the skin of this particularly introverted
individual. I always start off by wondering how grim his life is always portrayed
to be, the victim of a brutal regime from which he made no attempt to escape,
because he did not want to. Normally, I try to find some little cranny hole to
slot in an observation intended to make my reader smile. My first thoughts on
DSCH I propose to refer to him, here and there, as such, bearing in mind that
he would later include
the musical notation of his initials as a call sign of his own individual genius
those first thoughts encompass a number of characteristics - dark brooding,
going over the top, merciless, to name but a few. There is also joy and festivity
but always against that grim soviet background. These aspects are a view
taken through the lens from a Western standpoint. Like Khachaturian (born
1903) and Kabalevsky (born 1904) DSCH (born 1906) was an early product
reared by and during the Soviet system but let us remind ourselves that he
remained as Russian as Mussorgsky and at times could be as subjective as
Tchaikovsky. He was conceived out of one failed revolution, the year 1905 and
was a child of its more potent successor, October 1917. Although he would
not have had first hand knowledge of the 1905 uprising, its legendary
accounts, like that of the never to be forgotten Battleship Potemkin, would
have been absorbed by him from proud accounts at home and at school. It is
this which marks him as different from those who were not just that much
older than him but whose earliest memories were from the days of Tsarist
Russia. That is the big difference between Shostakovich, who rarely was away
from Russia, and Prokofiev (born 1891) who actually obtained leave of
absence in 1917 and became resident for the best part of the next twenty years
in the USA and France before finally returning. Stravinsky (born 1882) was
already resident in Switzerland from 1909 and finally left Tsarist Russian in
1914. It would be the best part of 60 years before he visited Russia again and
first met Shostakovich. As to Rachmaninoff, he left in 1917 with as much as he
could carry on a sledge, never to return, a pity as his exile and performance
workload virtually switched off his compositional tap over the next twenty five
years.
The problem that commentators have in coming to terms with Shostakovich is
that they see it only as a cold war problem, whichever side of the iron curtain
they happened to be. It always ends up with Shostakovich being the victim of
the system and Stalin being the villain, which from whatever ones
perspective, he undoubtedly was. However, DSCH was nurtured by the Soviet
system, a system which he accepted even if he did not agree always with its
judgments, like an Etonian who got the cane. His was an environment in which
he was very much at home, if not always at ease.
DSCH was first and always a composer, not a political personage except to the
extent that the powers that be could impose theories and principles on his
music by which he was bound. However he did not join the Communist party
until the 1960s and then only so as to be appointed as president of the Soviet
Composers Union. Unlike his contemporaries, Solzhenitsyn or Pasternak, or
later on, Rostropovich, he was not a dissident nor was it a case that he kept
his head down and his views to himself. What however what was not in his
blood stream was Socialist Realism introduced later by Zhdanov in the early
thirties in the name of Stalin where the composer/artist was a product of the
state and owed a duty of artistic allegiance to produce art/music which
reflected the political directives of the socialist system and in a manner as
would be understandable to the proletariat at large. Such a concept had not
been so under the revolutionary system when introduced by Lenin who did not
see art having a political place within the revolution other than, itself, to be a
reflection of the revolutionary system. Lenin left it to Art to find its own level
and was happy that it should produce the most modernist expression to reflect
what was had become the most modern state. It is against that particular
background from which the young Dmitri Shostakovich of the 1920s was to
emerge. Soviet Russia was to begin with as modern as Western Europe and
artistically comparable with the Bauhaus School.
The Shostakovich family had been undoubtedly middle class and comfortable.
His parents had each come from Siberia to St Petersburg as students in 1900.
His maternal grandfather had been the local administrator for mines. His
mother, Sofia, had received a good education and was a proficient pianist
such to be able to gain admission to the conservatoire at Petersburg. DSCHs
father, was also from Siberia but with quite a different provenance. His own
father and grandfather had been transported there after a Polish uprising in
the 1860s (Shostakovich is a Polish name) and, when his exile ended, rather
liked it there and stayed. Shostakovich pre became a chemical engineer. He
and Sofia met in the workplace, were married in 1903 and Dmitri, known as
Mitya, their only boy, was the second of their three children. He was no
apparent genius but a bright boy who had a flair for remembering a good tune.
We know that Sofia was a good pianist who started teaching Mitya the piano
when he was 9 whilst his father had a good singing voice, particularly for
singing Eugene Onegin in the bathroom. Mitya was taken to the opera and
was able to return home and start playing tunes from Rimsky-Korsakovs Tsar
Sultan. Now how many people can do that, I wonder! DSCH also related how
their neighbours in the adjoining flat played string quartets and how DSCH
would sit on the landing listening to Beethoven quartets, like one does.
Learning the piano was quite normal. All three children took lessons and there
was nothing spectacular as to Mityas ability to start writing a few musical
illustrations of his own. With the outbreak of the 1914 war, the familys
fortunes improved. Dimitiri (Dad) had become commercial manager of an
ammunition firm; they moved into a bigger apartment in Petrograd, renamed in
the wake of anti-German feeling; they now. had a country residence and two
cars. there were about 2,000 cars in all in Petrograd at the time. All of this was
against a background of terrible losses at the front, wastage and incompetent
leadership. Petrograd was a centre of the arts with symphony concerts and
theatre but German composers were left out of the programmes. The great
craze in the musical world at the time was Scriabin, the Beethoven of his day,
which didnt last after he died in 1915.
The war had started in a blaze of patriotism but as it progressed it became
apparent that there was a deep divide between those governing and those
governed. Only the Bolsheviks were against the war and their leader was out
of the country and cut off. There now arose limited democracy through the
Duma and the Kerensky government but the freedoms they promised could
only be promised to take place after hostilities had ended. Little wonder that
the all but stillborn democracy collapsed with the October revolution.
At this time, the eleven year old Mitya had just transferred from primary
education to the Gymnasium (Grammar School). For him it was all an
adventure. He had heard the single salvo from the Aurora, which had been
docked in Petrograd for repairs, which was fired off to call the Revolution into
motion with the overthrow of the provisional government by the reds. DSCH
joined in with the marchers and returned home to write his first music a
revolutionary hymn. He recalled later seeing a boy murdered and depicted this
subject in two works he wrote in memoriam, his second symphony in 1927 to
celebrate the tenth anniversary of the revolution and later in his twelfth
symphony, The Year 1917. For the young DSCH at school these were
momentous events which he would remember and affect him for the rest of his
days.
His musical education began at much the same time as his secondary school.
Up till then he had had piano tuition from his mother. He was then sent for
further lessons to Gliassers Music School where Frau Gliasser continued his
further piano tuition which included in 1917 his first public performance at a
school concert with his playing Handels Largo. With Herr Gliasser, whom he
found dull, he studied Bachs 48 preludes and fugues. Not only were these
part of the traditional backbone, but they were to be a foundation for his own
24 pairs of preludes and fugues, written in 1952 in each of the twelve major
and minor keys as Bach himself had done. Indeed DSCH frequently quotes
from the Bach in his own canon.
When he was 13, DSCH entered the Conservatory at Petrograd. Gliasser had
drawn the talents of this promising pupil to the attention of Alexander
Glazunov, the principal of the Conservatory. At about the same time DSCHs
father died. His standard of living had already gone into a downhill spin since
the revolution. Gone now were the summer house, the job, the maids and the
two cars. Conditions in Petrograd were worsening as the civil war which
followed worsened and class grievances remained to be settled. Glazunov
persuaded DSCH to sign up at the Conservatory. Theirs was a mutually
appreciative relationship and one where DSCH received every encouragement.
Glazunov himself was a brilliant orchestrator including music he salvaged
from Borodins Prince Igor. By now, thirty years on, he was a known
conservative as we have seen in respect of his opposition to and his resultant
chagrin when Prokofiev not only won first prize but did so by playing his own
first piano concerto. Glazunov was also instrumental in causing Rachmaninoff
a complete mental breakdown after having conducted whilst drunk the first
performance of Rachmaninovs first symphony in 1897. Fortunately,
Shostakovich was left with happier memories. In point of fact it was not from
Glazunov with whom Shostakovich studied composition but Maximilian
Steinberg, son in law of Rimsky Korakov. The relationship between principal
and pupil continued until Glazunov left the USSR. He settled in Paris in 1928
where he lived more happily at Neuilly-sur-Seine where he could walk along
the Bois de Boulogne with an independent air, not the man to break the bank
at Monte Carlo, happier than he would have been in Leningrad.
It was in Leningrad however, that, the Shostakovich family were struggling.
Sofia had obtained a position back with the Department of Weights and
Measures but was sacked when there was a discrepancy found between
money taken and the ledgers she had prepared. The three children, DSCH and
his two sisters, moved back into the flat and contributed to the depleted
finances. In the case of DSCH, he took a job at the local picture house where
he spent seven hours a day improvising at the piano to silent films. This is not
mentioned a great deal but it would have an enormous influence on his future
output. He would develop the knack to write music to fit both the mood and the
action and ultimately he himself would be a master of film music. In those
dark years when he was out of favour and had to keep a low profile, writing
incidental film music became a necessary earner for him. I would venture to
suggest that the discipline of writing music to fit the scene was not particularly
beneficial towards the self restraint needed for composing in symphonic form.
There is often in Shostakovichs music a cinematic quality where his music,
the eleventh symphony for example, can just let rip. When you listen to that
symphony, The Year 1905 you not only hear Shostakovich. You can also sit
on your settee, close your eyes, and almost see Eisenteins Potemkin as well.
In actual fact I have read that Shostakovich wrote a new score for this film but
my researches show that it was a compilation taken from his symphonies, not
the same thing. The music for it which I first heard was by Nicholas Kryukov
written in 1950 and for me that is Potemkin.
In 1925 DSCH was coming to the end of his course of studies and for his prize
he wrote his first symphony which was to be performed on the occasion. It
needed a conductor to take it on and the baton was taken up by Nicolai Malko.
It also contained some solo parts for the piano, not an instrument normally
forming part of the orchestra let alone be given solo parts to play. Here the
pianist in the conservatory orchestra was the composer himself. It has always
been hailed as a creation of extraordinary precocity and a great example of
conciseness, a quality which Shostakovich did not always later on observe.
The first symphony was no doubt written under the guiding advice of
Steinberg. For many years it was simply the brilliant first of the Shostakovich
canon at a time when the second and third symphonies were virtually written
out of history and the fourth withdrawn by the composer and kept under wraps
for 27 years. One therefore only knew the first as the inaugural stepping stone
in the series before jumping to the fifth. The first is and remains a student
work of quite mature perception but at the sane tune young Mitya was also
bidding farewell to his student years using music that has been recognized as
having been written in his childhood, like Brittens Simple symphony perhaps,
but technically miles in advance of that work.
The first symphony saw the light of day with fantastic success in 1926. Word
of it was passed by Malko to Bruno Walter, then conductor of the Berlin
Philharmonic who made space in its seasons programme to play the work. It
was followed two years later by its American premier under Leopold
Stokowski with the Philadelphia at which an aunt of the composer, then living
in America, was in the audience and who could aver that she recognized
themes written by the young Mitya as a child. How many students could dream
of such worldwide exposure. It is a very compact work in four movements and
lasts about 35 minutes. I should imagine it received some degree of pruning at
the suggestion of Steinberg. The first two movements are somewhat
chamberlike in part, often with a lone instrument being answered by another.
Its themes are pithy and succinct. Acerbic, sardonic and saucy are adjectives
which come readily to mind. The third and fourth movements are a different
kettle of fish, more romantic in the one and more heroic in the last, with clear
influences respectively of Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, his two heroes. Yet
behind it all I detect one further influence, one not normally associated with
Shostakovich, that of Stravinsky. He at the time had been absent from Russia
since before the outbreak of World War and his music was by now persona
non grata in the Soviet Union. Yet DSCH was obviously familiar with
Petrushka. The communications between solo instruments in the first
movement of the symphony remind one of the puppets in Petrushka. More
particularly, in the second movement of the symphony there is a sudden entry
by the solo piano similar to the entry of the solo piano in the Russian Dance in
Petrushka.
Now his studies were over and, with a first
symphony which had put him on the map, one
can say that the development of Shostakovich
starts from here. The artistic background is
much more revolutionary than that which
would later come about under Stalin. Lenin
had died in 1924 and Stalin had emerged the
victor against Trotsky in the political struggle
which followed. In the arts, modernism had
become the in word with Soviet writers, artists
and musicians. Modernism was the name given
to a philosophical movement that, apart from
cultural trends and changes, arose from
changes in Western society. Its influences were At the time of the first
the development of modern industrial practices symphony-Shostakovich,
after World War I. precursor of Harry Potter
Modernism, was taken up by those who felt the traditional forms of art,
architecture, literature, religious faith, philosophy and even the sciences, were
outdated in the new economic, social, and political order of an emerging fully
industrialized world. Tradition and all that went with it went out of the window,
as obsolete as the bourgeoisie it represented whilst failing to recognize that
todays traditional was but yesterdays insurgency. That was the background
to Symphony no 2 composed in 1927 as a tenth anniversary commemoration
of the 1917 revolution. It is a one movement symphony in four parts, which
leaves me cold. It is rarely played anywhere today. A chorus enters for the last
section following a factory siren which the proletariat in the audience would
supposedly recognize. A chorus joins in, declaiming October, the Commune
and Lenin. It was hailed by some critics but both it and its successor have
disappeared from the repertoire. DSCH later admitted that the second and
third symphonies were experimental failures. Volkov has suggested that a pair
of scissors be taken to the choral movement.. It is an odd mixture and it just
does not gel. In its favour, it is only 18 minutes 58 seconds in length. I am
thankful it is not more than 19 minutes.
Shostakovichs quest for modernism led to his searching for the latest
developments in the west. One wonders whether he may have got to learn of
the music of the American composer George Antheil whose surrealist Ballet
Mecanique was first played in Paris in 1925. The score for this has sixteen
pianos, an electric buzzer or two, three aeroplane propellers and a pneumatic
drill. As Constant Lambert pointed out this provided little more than the
background to a telephone conversation
Little wonder Shostakovichs flirtation with the modernist school was not
approved of by his teachers or his family. He had been introduced to Vladimir
Mayakovsky the leading modernist playwright and moved in with him. This
gave Shostakovich the chance to mix within an avant garde set and to write
incidental music for their theatre. One notable early success was a surrealist
play by Mayakovsky called the Bedbug where a former party member, a true
proletarian, is engaged to a bourgeois girl who is not allowed to call him
Comrade until they are married and only then can she be accepted as a true
proletarian. It was from within this group that Shostakovich would meet other
influentials including his great friend Solertinsky who introduced
Shostakovich to the music of Mahler. At this time Mahler was generally seen
as just one of those spent, long winded Austro-German composers no better
known or appreciated in Russia than he was in England. This initiation was to
have a significant effect on Shostakovich, particularly in his fourth and fifth
symphonies.
Apart from the modernist school, DSCH was spending his own free time in a
more populist field. He had developed a passion for American dance band
music, particularly the foxtrot. He would spend much of his time visiting the
local palais de dance with an ear for the music and an eye for the girls. We
have for a legacy his two jazz suites and the Turkey Trot, better known to you
and me as Tea for Two. It formed part of the incidental music, probably to
the ballet, The Age of Gold originally, but it was now being played on its own.
DSCH got very worried about the official reaction there would be to this and,
rather naughtily, put the blame at the door of the conductor, Nicolai Malko, for
allowing this to happen.
Another passion of DSCH then and all his life was football which he described
as the Ballet of the Masses. He was an avid supporter of Zenit Leningrad and
was often seen hollering from the terraces. He was also a qualified referee. His
fanaticism resulted in his early ballet, The Age of Gold, of which its synopsis
is as follows:
A satirical take on the political and cultural change in 1920s' Europe. It
follows a Soviet football team in the West where they come into contact with a
number of politically incorrect characters including a Diva, a Fascist, an Agent
Provocateur and a Negro amongst others. The team fall victim to match
rigging, police harassment, and unjust imprisonment by the evil bourgeoisie.
The team are freed from jail when the local workers overthrow their capitalist
overlords. The ballet ends with a dance of solidarity between the workers and
the football team.
So, what has changed? I can only add that if there were a production today,
say at the Coliseum, it would now be brought up to date with Sam Allardyce
cast as a buffoon, Soviet players on drugs and swapping their urine samples
and an effigy of the Chelsea owner, Roman Abramovich, being hanged from
the nearest lamp post.
In 1928 Shostakovich wrote the first of his three operas, The Nose. Based on a
story written in 1836 by Gogol, this would be more surreal than the Age of
Gold. It concerns a barber shaving off the nose of a civil servant and then
being unable to get rid of the nose which develops a life of its own. DSCH was
his own principal librettist. He used what is described as a montage of
different styles, including folk music, popular song and atonality. The chaotic
plot is given structure by the use of formal musical forms such as canons and
quartets, a device, it is claimed, from Alban Berg's Wozzeck. It has been
described as an electrifying tour de force of vocal acrobatics, wild
instrumental colours and theatrical absurdity, all shot through with a blistering
mixture of laughter and rage. As an opera, it has more in common with Monty
Python than it does with Modest Mussorgsky.
All of this was an early aspect of Shostakovich which we rarely see, although,
having said that, The Nose has had a recent outing at Covent Garden! This is
the Shostakovich of the roaring twenties, unaffected by the internal politics of
the Soviet Union. He had developed the parody first found in his first
symphony, now living in a surreal world when not pursuing mechanical
romanticism or proletarian themes. It could not and did not continue thus. In
the west, the mad, mad world was about to collapse with Wall Street; in the
Soviet Union it was soon to be wrapped up and disposed of more ruthlessly by
the lurking figure of Josef Stalin.
It was now time for Shostakovich to settle down and in 1932 he married his
first wife, Nina Varzar, a physicist. Initial difficulties led to a divorce in 1935 but
Nina then found herself pregnant with their first child and the couple soon
remarried. Much of this period was taken up by DSCH writing the opera, The
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which he dedicated to Nina. This was
meant to be a prologue opera for a vast project of four operas planned for
composition over some ten years, perceived as a sort of Soviet Ring Cycle. It
would never get beyond Lady Macbeth. It was based on a novel set in the 19 th
century but the production and music were modernist. The plot centres on
Katerina, wife of a factory owner, Zinovy who was sexually abstemious whilst
she set her sights on the new foreman, Sergei. He challenges her to a
wrestling match and..well one thing leads to another and eventually to their
murdering Zinovys father, who had also wanted a go, and then Zinovy himself.
On stage at - youve guessed it, the Coliseum - it got the usual treatment
including simulated fellatio to turn Sergei on, and the audience off. Well that
may not shock you but it certainly shocked Joe Stalin who turned up one day
and saw and heard more than he bargained for.
The opera was finished in 1934 and, its modernism notwithstanding, ran for
two years with several hundred performances. It also received productions in
London, seen and applauded by the 22 year old Benjamin Britten, and in
America. Then suddenly Shostakovich got a tip off to get down to the Bolshoi.
When he had taken his seat, there was Stalin sitting in front, with several
associates, among them, Molotov and Zhdanov, author of socialist realism in
relation to writers, having come to see this great socialist success. Stalin was
seen to shudder and Shostakovich to freeze. Some of its scenes were sexually
explicit but it had been lauded by party officials and the press the best
Soviet work, a master work of Soviet creativity." Before the end Stalin and his
retinue got up and walked out whilst the white faced Shostakovich had to take
a bow at the end. Two days later the famous opprobrium, "Muddle Instead of
Music" appeared in Pravda. It stressed the necessity of "good" popular music
and its role in Soviet progress. Shostakovich failed to provide such work for
an "appreciative audience." It described Lady Macbeth as coarse, primitive
and vulgar, a cacophony and a wilderness of musical chaos. It then accused
Shostakovich of leftist distortion, formalism and petty-bourgeois innovation.
Shostakovich was left to hang out in disgrace. The Bolshoi doors got closed
on Lady Macbeth which ended up completely banned. Those who had praised
it before were quick to distance themselves. Others, such as Isaac Babel,
Abram Lezhnev and Vsevolod Meyerhold spoke out in support of
Shostakovich. All three would be arrested, tortured and shot in the purges of
1938-40 although their crimes were linked to other alleged associations with
Trotsky and other state enemies than Shostakovich.
In parallel with writing Lady Macbeth, Shostakovich had been writing his
fourth symphony which remained unfinished. Its orchestral style was as
modern as Lady Macbeth and the two orchestrally go hand in glove. Ten days
following the Pravda outburst came another scathing editorial over his ballet,
The Limpid Stream. DSCH was castigated as a musical charlatan and a peddler
of "aesthetic formalism". He was obviously very shaken but continued writing
his Fourth Symphony and completed it in April 1936. However, on the advice
of the Union of Soviet Composers, he cancelled the premiere planned for
December 1936 and put the score under wraps in the bottom drawer where it
gathered dust till 1961
The fourth would never have passed muster at the time. Shostakovich was
never one to turn out a conventionally constructed symphony. This one was in
three movements with the outer two about a half hour each and the middle one
being a bridging scherzo of some eight minutes. It is an absolutely different
modernity to those works of the 1920s and has more substance with an
enormous orchestra. Its ending alone is worth waiting to hear, what I can only
describe as a noiseless under current with a distant glockenspiel in a void like
was that someone at the front door?
And who was it who wrote Muddle Instead Of Music? Some say it was Stalin
himself but I doubt that the Great Musicologist had time or knowledge to do
so. It was almost certainly written, albeit with Stalins knowledge and approval,
by Zhdanov who had devised the great principles of Socialist Realism and who
would later in the post war years lead the second great artistic purge.
Now Shostakovich had to pick himself up. He was living in trepidation of the
knock on the door to take him away. There was no way he could leave his
country and his family and probably never contemplated it. What he did do
was to ponder seriously his position and the criticism and, agree with it or not,
he accepted the system which allowed it. A lesser man might have turned out
some grovelling Ode to Stalin but DSCH set to work on his fifth symphony
where he had clearly taken on board the criticisms. He called it A Soviet
Artists Reply to Just Criticism but this was no tongue in the cheek response.
Some may believe he changed his style to assuage his political masters but
change his style he did not. There are many facets to Shostakovich, pithy,
sarcastic, modern, celebratory, tragic. In the first symphony, he had included
them all. Now he concentrated on the existing serious side of his nature. The
fifth contains still many aspects of which he had been accused. The first
movement for instance is a formal rondo-sonata. The second movement,
notwithstanding his tormentors, is as Mahler as St Anthony preaching to the
Fishes. The last movement is as overblown as his Festive Overture with its
culmination quoting the last movement of another famous fifth, that of his
hero, Beethoven.
It was a pronounced success and Dmitri Shostakovich was back in the fold.
Yes, it was a Soviet Artists Reply. What we need to know next is whether he
had learned to love Big Brother.