I would link to Shostakovich's Testimony if it were a true record of his life. It looks, however, that it was largely faked by the journalist Solomon Volkov, who claimed Shostakovich dictated the volume to him. But they met only three times and Volkov has never granted anyone access to the Russian manuscript of the book, which has appeared only in translation. It's still an interesting read; more interesting, however - though much less surprising - is the way it was taken up in the West. Published in 1979, in the last period of the Cold War, it was received as proof that Shostakovich had been, all along, a secret dissident. He was a capitalist all along! One of us! Richard Taruskin, however, argues that Shostakovich always retained a loyalty to Soviet Russia. A communist? 'Communism is impossible', Shostakovich once said. Yes, but for all that, still necessary ...
Shostakovich was a star from the moment his First Symphony was performed in Berlin in 1928. He was twenty one years old; he had already received a commission from the state for a large scale choral-orchestral composition to make the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution (his Second Symphony). After composing incidental music for Mayakovskys's The Bedbug, he became the most sought-after composer for Soviet theatre and film.
It was Lady Macbeth, Shostakovich's second opera, which changed all that. Pravda contained an unsigned editorial called 'Muddle Instead of Music'. It was 1936; the composer was twenty-nine years old; the opera had been a brilliant success for two years. The opera was a reinterpretation of Leskov's story, whose central character was the embodiment of evil. She became, Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth, class warrior of a kind: a woman exacting a just punishment. But Stalin was appalled at what he saw as graphic sex scenes and commanded, I think, the editorial in Pravda.
Shostakovich allowed his Fifth Symphony to be called 'a Soviet artist's creative reply to just criticism'. Taruskin claims there is a stylistic change in Shostakovich's work in this period. Formerly, the composer's style was satirical; it was reminiscent of the Weimar aesthetic of Neue Sachlichkeit, 'New Objectivity', embodied by the young Hindemith.
Its satire arose out of a play of incongruities - a rhetorical doubleness - that undermined eloquence and 'seriosity'. The most primitive (and popular) examples were 'wrong note' pieces like the Polka from Shostakovich's ballet Golden Age, in which dissonance, normally an expressive device, is used pervasively within a trivial dance genre where expressive dissonance is rarely, if ever, employed.
A dissonant Polka - here the normal association of consonance with 'low' art and dissonance with 'high' art is reversed! Shostakovich would often employ the lyogkii zhanr, the 'light genre' in his Symphonies and Concertos in this period. One finds the same in Lady Macbeth (but not, of course, in the ardour of the Second Symphony or the grim seriousness of the Fourth).
After the 'Muddle' editorial, Shostakovich adopts what Taruskin nicely calls a 'heroic classicism'; his work is now organised around what musicologists call 'topics' which permeate rhythm, harmony, timbre and contour. Passages of music can now be identified as pastoral or as martial, as ecclesiatical or as scurrilous. He conforms to the dictates of the contemporary musicologist Boris Asafyev: the content of the music must be made as clear as possible. The same period sees the rise of the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM), who advocate the production of marches and mass songs. In the same period, Shostakovich repudiates lyogkii zhanr.
Taruskin writes of Scheinberg's study of irony, satire, parody and the grotesque in Shostakovich:
She astutely associates the watershed in Shostakovich's career in 1936 with a shift in the nature of his ironic practice. Once a (mere) satirist, for whom irony was a means toward a debunking end (irony as stimulus in Kierkegaard's terminology), the composer became, in the battered latter half of his career, an existential ironist for whom irony was a detached and melancholy worldview (irony as terminus).
Whence the suspicions of nihilism and hopelessness with which his work was dogged from 1936 onwards. I was troubled by Scheinberg's book and had been meaning for a long time to write about it here. But Taruskin has shown exactly what its problems are:
Shostakovich's doubleness, in her view, is entirely of his making. Her reluctance to acknowledge that irony is as much a way of reading as of writing is a dated prejudice that greatly limits the explanatory reach of her theory.
As much a way of reading as of writing? Taruskin makes an excellent case against those who would make Shostakovich into a saint or a hero. 'Better let the contradictions stand', he writes, and this is compelling. Otherwise, one might yield to the desire for an imaginary revenge against what became a terrible regime - supposing, far too quickly, that Shostakovich was a good capitalist like the rest of us. There are many interesting texts in the as yet untranslated Glinka archive which make Shostakovich a far more interesting figure.
How else might one understand the irony of Shostakovich's last years? As 'existential irony' - which would seem to mean, in the context, a kind of global disgust with life? Would this give us the key to the Third String Quartet or to the Eighth Symphony? To the bravery of the Thirteenth Symphony, written to commemorate the victims of Soviet anti-semitism?
Nestyev says, in an interview collected in the same volume as the Taruskin article:
Shostakovich demonstrated in his music a knack for 'combining what was uncombinable', an approprch later to be described by Russian musicologists as 'polystylistics'. In Russian music today, composers often combine ultramodern devices with old-fashioned ones, the complicated with the simple or even the hackneyed[....] He had no compunctions about using stridently grotesque combinations of style elements borrowed from the Baroque (Bach and Handel) with those borrowed from Romanticism (Mahler), sometimes also including elements from msuic of the sort you might hear on the streeet, including the most trite and commonplace.
Polystylistics! Doubtless this is why, according to Nestyev, Stalin unexpectedly phoned Shostakovich in 1949, asking him to travel to the United States as a delegate to the Congress for World Peace. Stalin said: ‘We have criticized you, but we criticized you because we love you.’
When Shostakovich's autobiography Testimony appeared in the West in 1979, it was greeted with delight. The great Soviet composer an anti-communist! He was one of us - a secret dissident all along! But this is to fall into the same trap as Stalin with respect to the 'polystylism' of Shostakovich's work. It is to say the same patronising because we love you which would ignore any aspect of the richness of his work which fails to conform to a particular model.
In a conversation with the theatre director V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, Stalin expressed his opinion about Shostakovich: ‘He’s probably a very talented individual, but much too much in the “Meyerhold” mold’. Stalin, of course, was referring to the renowned Russian avant-garde theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, who was arrested by the NKVD [later renamed the KGB] in the late 1930s and shot as an “enemy of the people”.
Let me write far too quickly that Stalin's strange ambivalence is the same as that of those who welcomed the publication of Testimony: on the one hand, like Meyerhold, the artist is always too avant-garde, too difficult, ahead of everyone. But then, on the other, it is always possible that the work can be made palatable, that it is explained such that it can become part of our culture, ending up as another monument in the imaginary museum (eliciting museum sickness). But let me say, too, that those who read Testimony with glee (he was one of us all along! a secret capitalist!) exhibit the same ambivalence: confronted by the work in its richness, its 'polystylistics', they interpret it only as a kind of protest, a cry to the 'free world'. But this is already a reaction to the unbearable richness of the work.
Richness, polystylistics: do not account for this in terms of what the composer would or would not like to 'express' by means of the work. The work did not place itself in Shostakovich's hands, but nor does it place itself in ours. Already, in the Weimar of 'New Objectivity', the old artistic ideals had crumbled: now 'high' and 'low' culture exist alongside one another. The claim that it was only after the Fifth Symphony that Shostakovich's work organised itself around 'topics' is too quick - after all, the Second Symphony 'To October - a symphonic dedication' was already programmatic. Shostakovich, I think, was sincere in this dedication.
Those were heroic times! What came after was horrible, but it is necessary to keep memory of the Soviets, of communism in its youth, its fire. But back to Weimar (and one might as well say to Dada and Surrealism): the work of art in that period was aswirl, ready to link itself to anything even as it was ready to withhold itself and maintain its joyful turbulence. Joy: yes, that is the word. Joy that was mercilessly crushed by what was to come in Russia and Germany. But the joy of art as it shattered every horizon in which it could be enclosed.
Joy: and what survives of joy in the Fifteenth String Quartet? Or in the first movement of the Tenth Symphony? It is the joy of the work which has not been extinguished. That it still lives, the work - that it issues as what Kafka called the 'merciful surplus' from profound tragedy. In the years of persecution, Shostakovich never stopped writing. Works poured from him. But what was it that poured forth? Dissidence? Protest? No: the work, only the work, still aswirl. Irony as stimulus? As terminus? No - the joyful irony which springs from that extraordinary self-division of the work. It gives of itself, endlessly, but it also withholds itself in joyful indifference.
