Dmitri Shostakovich
The Last Classic Composer
The Late, Great DSCH
We all know who the late, great Dmitri Shostakovich was.
He was the famous Russian composer who put all those hidden anti-Communist and secret dissident messages into his music.
Or wait! He was the famous Russian composer whose music was blatantly pro-Communist and pro-Soviet and who hated dissidents.
Sorry, my mistake. He was the famous Russian composer who hoped for a better world under socialism but became appalled at its perversion into the personality cult of the mass-murderer and all around сукин сын Iosef Dzhugashvili, whom we know by the infinitely more pronounceable name of Stalin.
Hold on there! He was the sensitive apolitical composer striving to help create the new musical genre that were arising in the early 20th century and whose work influenced later generations of musicians and will do so for centuries to come.
Dang, we're wrong again! He was the hack composer whose music added nothing to the development of Western music as he kept flip-flopping back and forth trying to write whatever would give him a good review in the official Communist Party newspapers and even lowering himself to writing scores for blatantly propagandistic Soviet motion pictures.
Well, now that we've got that settled.
Chronologically, Dmitri was indeed a composer of the Modern Era as he was born in 1906 and died in 1975. But he was a classic composer in the sense that his music entered what assistant professors of music call the standard repertoire. That means you can put on a concert of Dmitri's music and people will show up without having to be enticed by including music written by composers whose music people actually like such as Mozart and Beethoven.
Now the author and illustrator of CooperToons has an admission that will shock! shock! all readers. Try as he might, he has never been able to be a great fan of Mitya's music. The first song he heard by the composer was his least typical work - which is probably why he liked it. But personal opinion should not be considered a criticism of Dmitri Dmitrievich. After all, can we ever expect any symphonic or operatic composers to rise above the artistry of Gid Tanner, Riley Puckett, Clay McMichen and the Skillet Lickers?
Of course, we should remember that the Skillet Lickers and other musicians of their genre are the most resounding affirmation of freedom and democracy in the United States. After all, is there any better way than playing Old Timey Music to say, see, it's free country?
Not so in the Soviet Union. There the arts were rigidly controlled. But few realize the state-control of art really began only in the mid-1930's after Stalin finally got his grubby little рукавицы on the government. In the 1920's and into the 30's Russian art - representational, musical, and theatrical - was among the most experimental and innovative in the world.
The type of music that the new European composers were writing - Paul Hindemith, Bela Bartok, Arnold Schoenberg, and the like - even today is often sneered at as (ptui) contrived and artificial, music without melodies, themes, or motifs that only eggheads listen to convince themselves that they're hip and cool. But actually what Paul and his friends were writing was music suitable for that newly emerging art, the cinema. Listen to Paul's Kleine Kammermusik and you can almost see Elmer Fudd trying to sneak up on Bugs Bunny.
Dmitri began writing in such an ilk in his Symphony #1 in F Minor - written for his graduation thesis - and you can get glimpses of Elmer and Bugs. He was only 20 years old when the Symphony was performed by Bruno Walter in Berlin, and Dmitri soon acquired quite a following. One of his biggest fans was Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the hero of World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Russian Civil War in that order. By the mid-1920's Mikhail was one of the highest ranking military commanders in the Red Army and made a special effort to meet Dmitri. Dmitri would come over to Mikhail's apartment, visit with his family, and the two men would play piano together. Things were looking quite rosy for the young composer.
But...
Stalin saw Dmitri's opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, in 1936 and there soon appeared the notorious review, Muddle Instead of Music (Сумбур Вместо Музыки) in Pravda. Simply put, the review said the opera was a pile of дерьмо. But Mikhail wrote a strong defense of his young protégé directly to Joseph - and although we make no claim it's cause and effect - the letter was soon followed by Mikhail's arrest and execution.
Again we emphasize there was not necessarily a cause and effect here. But it certainly doesn't help an up-and-coming composer when one of the world's most ruthless and murderous dictators declares your staunchest and most influential supporter to be an enemy of the state.
The consensus was that Joseph himself either wrote Muddle Instead of Music or it was written on his orders. However later research uncovered an archival report of a conversation between Stalin and his - ah - "assistants" including the long lived Vyacheslav Molotov (yes, THE Molotov of "Molotov cocktail" fame). The topic of the review came up and Joseph mentioned he had read the review and agreed with the sentiments.
But far from screaming his head off and demanding mass arrests of traitorous composers, Joseph comes off as pretty calm. Everyone at the meeting agreed that the Soviet Union had great composers - they mention Dmitri by name - but they just aren't being given proper direction. So it was up to the party to provide the direction. No big deal. The transcript - if accurate - tells us Joseph was not the author of the review nor directly involved in its writing.
Some historians now pin the review on a fairly low level lackey named Platon Kerzhentsev, chairman of the Committee of Artistic Affairs. He may have written the review when he learned of Joseph's (evidently) negative reaction, and as a means of self-aggrandizement and in competition with others in the artistic bureaucracy. Kissing the boss's жопа by trashing your co-workers is by no means limited to modern capitalistic corporations.
Dmitri was certainly worried after Joseph and his buddies walked out of Lady Macbeth. But he really began to sweat when Pravda published another negative review, this time against his ballet, the Limpid Stream, just ten days later. Dmitri then arranged to meet with Platon who advised the now very nervous composer to write stuff more accessible to the average citizen - and also to submit any ballet or opera libretto before he began writing the music. Dmitri never wrote another ballet or opera.
But it's interesting that it was the libretti that Dmitri was told to submit. So as much as Pravda trashed the music of Lady Macbeth, it seems it was the message that the State - or at least Platon - really didn't like. That the words, not the music, was the real problem has some support in that the following year the librettist for the Limpid Stream, Adrian Piotrovsky, was arrested, tortured, and shot.
Actually, Joseph's immediate response to Lady Macbeth when he saw it at the Bolshoi Theater was simply that it was just too damn loud. Attendees remembered that Joseph and his entourage were sitting in a box right above the brass section and for that performance the conductor decided to have the horns, trumpets, and trombones really blare out. Whenever there was a particularly strong blast, Joseph's buddies, Andrei Zhdanov and Anastas Mikoyan, would flinch and then turn and look their boss's way. The group left after the third act, and we don't have to ask whose idea it was to clear out. But we do have to wonder if Joseph had seen the opera in a smaller theater - where the music would have to be toned down - whether Dmitri would have had the problems he did.
But if it was only a low level bureaucrat who wrote the review, why did it have such a horrible effect for Dmitri? Well, this was just Joseph's modus operandi. For some reason - maybe because he was indeed a murderous сукин сын - Joseph would impose quotas on the bureaucrats regarding persecutions, arrests, and executions. He didn't necessarily care who it was or if they had done anything. So if one of his junior lackeys wanted to go after Dmitri - the guy who wrote that loud opera - that was fine with him.
But whatever the actual cause, there's no doubt that Dmitri suddenly found himself transformed from the most fêted Russian composer to one of the formalist bourgeoisie. He immediately withdrew his Fourth Symphony from rehearsals and began to work on his Fifth (symphony, that is) which was subtitled - possibly by Dmitri himself - A Soviet Artist's Response to Just Criticism.
You'll read today that the Fifth Symphony is a bombastic crowd-pleaser written to get back into the good graces of Uncle Joe and the Official Circle. But you'll also read there were "hidden messages" of "critical despair" in the music. So if you listen carefully, we are told, you can hear an actual protest against what the Soviet Union had become under Stalin. More on these hidden messages later.
The Fifth Symphony and the Seventh - the Leningrad, partly written while Dmitri was in Leningrad during the horrible siege of 1941 to 1944 - were received enthusiastically by the public and the leaders of the Soviet Union. He then wrote the Eighth Symphony which also went down well.
Then came the Ninth.
Leonard Bernstein remarked the Ninth Symphony was Dmitri's way of having a musical joke. Think of Beethoven's 9th - majestic, uplifting, and an achievement crowning all his previous works. And it does look like that was what Dmitri first started composing.
But by the time it was premiered in November 1945, the symphony was comfortably short - it only lasts 25 to 27 minutes and the Russian conductors tend to play it faster - and is amazingly easy to listen to. Strictly instrumental it is notable for its bouncy toe-tapping first movement (with the famous series of "false" trombone entrances) followed by four other movements of five to six minutes with the exception of the 3 minute presto.
One story is that Stalin expected a personal apotheosis and instead got a Mickey Mouse nose-thumbing. An obvious explanation for Dmitri's second major fall from Official Grace.
Actually the first reviews weren't that bad and for a few years nothing untoward really happened. The audiences liked it and the critics praised its light-hearted themes. Ironically one place where the symphony was poorly received was in the United States where critics mentioned it wasn't an appropriate symphony to celebrate winning the war.
It's no coincidence the first crackdown on Dmitri in the 1930's when Lady Macbeth was banned was just in time for the Great Purge. A number of Dmitri's friends, supporters, and relatives - including his older sister, his mother-in-law, and his wife's brother - were arrested, imprisoned, and some even executed. But Dmitri survived.
The estimates of how many people Joseph killed vary considerably and the numbers also depend on how you define your terms. You'll read that Joseph personally approved the executions of over 40,000 people - maybe even a low end number when you realize he would sometimes approve lots of 3000 executions at once. Deaths in the Gulag were in the millions as were those who died by famine. All in all, the various estimates of those who died directly due to Stalin, those caught up in his direct orders, in famine, and in labor camps ranges, from 20 to 60 million. Regardless of what numbers you choose, it's a lot.
So how did Dmitri survive? Some of the biggest names in the arts - such as the actors and directors Solomon Mikhoels and Vsevolod Meyerhold - were killed on Stalin's orders. And remember Dmitri's librettist for the Limpid Stream, Adrian Piotrovsky was also arrested and executed. How did Dmitri beat the odds?
Notice that the artists who did survive the Stalin years - not just Dmitri but Sergei ("Peter and the Wolf") Prokofiev and Aram ("The Saber Dance") Khatchaturian - had international reputations. Stalin's victims, on the other hand, were famous in Russia but virtually unknown abroad. World famous artists were simply more useful alive than dead.
In someways the second crack-down in the late 1940's was worse for Dmitri artistically if not as deadly. Or rather the official trashing of Dmitri's music was contrived to force him to compose for the people. If so, it worked since to make a living, Dmitri had to go to writing film scores.
Of course film makers over the years have used Dmitri's works as background music. But Dmitri specifically wrote the music for a total of 34 Russian films. In fact, Dmitri had been writing music for films almost from the start, not because Uncle Joe ordered him to, but because he wanted to.
Dmitri composed his first film score in 1929 when he was just 23. This was for The New Babylon, a silent film (except for the music) written and directed by Grigori Kozintsev, one of Russia's earliest and most important cinematographers. Ostensibly The New Babylon was about the 1871 Paris Commune (whatever that was). But the film was clearly celebrating the not-that-distant Russian Revolution and Civil War that stretched from October, 1917 to October, 1922. We see the poor of Paris are starving in their sweatshops while the rich are going to night clubs, eating drinking, and dancing. The fancy ladies behave themselves in a most scandalous manner, flirting with their sugar-daddies and smoking cigars.
Looking back almost a century, this serious film is hilarious. Before the Commune takes over we see the poor of Paris, slaving away at their cobbler stands, washing tubs, and sewing machines, their haggard and miserable faces showing they are barely able to survive. Then when the Commune is in power, we see the poor of Paris at their cobbler stands, washing tubs, and sewing machines and slaving away at twice the previous rate - but with happy, smiling faces.
Move over Reefer Madness.
Dmitri and Grigori remained lifelong friends and collaborators and continued to work together on films almost until the end of their lives. Girgori's last film was King Lear with Dmitri providing the score. That was in 1970. Grigori died the next year which was four years before Dmitri.
Whatever it's inspiration The New Babylon was the perfect film if you love Marxist propaganda. So it was inevitable that Joe would want more of the same.
And what do you do when you're the absolute dictator of one of the world's largest countries, and you need a composer to write a bang up score for a film? Why, nothing could be simpler. You just ban his serious music, throw him off his teaching jobs, and leave him with nothing else to do.
So in 1948 at the First Congress of Composers, Tikhon Khrennikov, the new head of the Union of Soviet Composers, gave his famous speech against the "formalist" composers like Dmitri, Sergei, and Aram. Their works were quickly banned and Dmitri lost his teaching job at the Leningrad and Moscow Conservatories, which happened to be an important source of income.
Bad luck, Dmitri. But at least now he was free to put out what was surely the hackiest of his hack work, the score for the film The Fall of Berlin in 1949. One of the funniest movies ever produced, it's hard to think Dmitri felt anything but distaste as he composed the music for a film that portrayed Stalin as the flawless hero and military genius, single-handedly leading the nation (and the world) to victory in World War II and making a triumphant appearance at the Berlin Airport, which, of course, the real Stalin never did.
Of course, hack work does not necessarily mean bad work. Some of George Orwell's best writing are what he termed "hack" articles and essays published in newspapers and magazines. The music from the Fall of Berlin is surprisingly good although a bit overwhelming and at times lapses into comical hagiography.
It would be nice to report that after Stalin died on March 3, 1953, the government finally let up on Dmitri. Well, they did to some degree, but they still liked to show him who was boss. When he premiered his Thirteenth Symphony in 1962 - this time with a full chorus singing the poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko about the 1941 massacre of the Jewish population at Babi Yar in Kiev - the government interfered in the production and rewrote the lyrics. After a couple of other performances the symphony was only played in the West and was effectively banned in Russia or other Communist countries until the fall of the Soviet Union.
There are a number of voluminous biographies about Dmitri. They take you from Dmitri's birth in 1906 in the Twighlight of the Tsars to his death in 1975 which was the height of the Brezhnev era where the Soviets were led by a series of increasingly dottering senile leaders ("Commandant! Leonid Ilyichovich is standing in his room mumbling to himself and staring glassy-eyed out the window!" "Don't worry, comrade, he's just rehearsing his next speech."). Most of the books are quite good, not the least because they detail what life was like in one of the most turbulent countries of the twentieth century. But none of Dmitri's biographies should be read without some background of what has been called the Shostakovich Wars and the controversy around the book Testimony.
During his lifetime, no one - that's no one - doubted that Dmitri was anything other than a true supporter of the Soviet system. Not only did he do his best to get back into the good graces of the authorities every time his music fell afoul, but in 1973 when he was in the United States (among other things getting an honorary degree from Northwestern University), he made some uncomplimentary remarks about the young Soviet dissidents that had begun springing up during the Brezhnev years. (In 2014, the same university, by the way, awarded the Doctor of Fine Arts, Honoris Causa - the same degree bestowed on Dmitri - to a young musician named Stevland Hardaway Morris - known to us, of course, as Stevie Wonder - and an honor well deserved).
Then in 1981, Dmitri's son and grandson, Maxim and Dmitri Maximovich, defected to the West. In an interview, Maxim said that the reasons for their defection was the artistic isolation of the Soviet Union, the increasing anti-Semitism in the country (making it difficult to hire Jewish musicians), and the requirements of the arts to praise the Soviet regime which tolerated no criticism. Still, many people were flabbergasted that the son and grandson of a member of the Communist Party and the Supreme Soviet, recipient of the Lenin and Stalin Prize, and all-around True Son of the Soviet Union would defect.
But it was not so much a surprise for those who had read Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich. In 1979, Testimony hit the bookshelves and caused a sensation. Here - in what was given as Dmitri's own words - we learned Dmitri was really a secret dissident - the юродивый, that is the yurodivy or Holy Fool and Jester of Russian tradition. His music had hidden messages which were devastating criticism, not support, of the Communist regimes.
The Dmitri Shostakovich of Testimony was at total odds with, not just the official picture, but the picture commonly held in the West. We can only guess what problems the book caused for the Shostakovich family, particularly since the publication was with perfect timing for the rise of the Soviet Dissident Movement.
For some Dmitri scholars, though, the timing was a bit too perfect. They noted that some of the stories from Testimony were not new but were older stories and anecdotes about Dmitri - and sometimes almost word for word from other sources. This seemed strange since according to the editor, a young Russian Jewish journalist and recent émigrée to the United States, Solomon Volkov, the book was compiled from interviews he personally conducted with Dmitri.
According to Solomon, he met dozens of times with Dmitri. But Dmitri was a taciturn informant. To get information, Solomon had to draw him out with questions, and Dmitri would respond in brief answers. Solomon would catch everything down in "a kind of a shorthand" and then go back home and recast the answers into a coherent continuous narrative. He'd take the typed pages back to Dmitri who would approve the writing by signing the first page of each chapter.
One historian and musicologist who specialized in Russian music and in particular Dmitri's work was Laurel Fay. Laurel was one of the doubters - "Traditionalists" as they are politely called. She was able to examine a copy of the original Russian typescript. She paid particular care to look at the pages with Dmitri's signature.
Those pages, it turned out, were near verbatim passages from Dmitri's own essays which had been previously published under the Soviet regimes. Even more inexplicably - or explicably if you're in the Traditionalist School - is whenever the pages/cum signature break off (sometimes in mid-sentence), the next page continues with new words that are not from the published essay. More to the point controversial material occurs only when Dmitri's signature no longer graces the pages. And when we say the pages were "near verbatim" of previously published material, we mean there were some words that were whited out if their retention would reveal they were written at the earlier dates.
But wait, some have said. Page 1 of Chapter One has a scathing trashing of Soviet life (where Dmitri talks about "mounds of corpses"). And remember, the first pages of the chapters had Dmitri's signature.
Uh, sorry. The first page of Chapter 1 had no signature. You had to go to Page 3, Chapter 1 to see the 
scrawl.
And what's on page 3? It isn't new revelations about Dmitri's secret messages in his music or a scathing denouncement of Communism. It's simply another page from a previously published essay. The first line of the page is also dropped down a bit - in a manner typical for initial pages of manuscripts but not a third page. The pages with Dmitri's signature also retain the original punctuation of the published works. So the only pages with Dmitri's signature were those already with the Good Housekeeping Seal of Soviet Approval.
Shostakovich scholarship is now pretty much divided into Traditionalist and Revisionist camps. It's probably fair to say that many Traditionalists believe Testimony is fabricated à la Clifford Irving's biography of Howard Hughes. It looks like Dmitri had only signed pages of earlier (and approved) essays for some editorial reason and the rest of the book written as if they were first-person stories from Dmitri.
Revisionists, on the other hand, say the book is authentic, and they have a number of explanations of the lack of originality of the pages with Dmitri's signature. One was that Dmitri had a photographic memory and started his answers with verbatim recitation of previous published material. The Traditionalists hold that this "explanation" not only stretches credibility beyond the limits of reality, but it also contradicts the story of how the interviews were conducted and the book was written.
Remember the story was not that Dmitri dictated the memoirs. But he answered short questions that were recorded in "a kind of a shorthand". Then the chapters were written up and brought back for signature.
So somehow short answers that were recast into longer prose by an interviewer came out as the first page of previously published works of Dmitri, down to punctuation and wording that immediately changes to non-published and controversial material on the following page. And we still have the mysterious Page 3/Chapter 1 signature and the whiteout of passages that would give away an earlier writing.
Most Dmitri scholars concede that there was some kind of manuscript that Solomon compiled, and he did meet with Dmitri. The question remains as to how often they met and how close Dmitri's own words were to the final published text. In short, how much of Testimony is what Dmitri really said?
People who knew Dmitri disagree whether Testimony reflects his views and some have flip-flopped on the issue. Dmitri's third wife, Irina, has always maintained - even after the fall of the Soviet Union and does so to this day - that there could not have been more than three or four meetings between her husband and Solomon. And certainly not enough for the extensive information in Testimony.
In perhaps what is more an indictment for late 20th and early 21st concepts of truth than the veracity of Testimony, some readers hold that even if the book is not a memoir, it is still a great book, which means, we suppose, that it should be accepted as a memoir even if it really isn't. After all, we know, don't we, that Dmitri was a secret dissident. Even the most dense can realize that by just listening to the music, for crying out loud. And Dmitri the Dissident is confirmed because that's what the screenwriters have put in the recent movies (including the cinematic version of Testimony starring Ben Kingsley).
Unfortunately, we do have some standards for historical research. Adopting Great-Fiction-Is-Great-Truth Argument is not one of them - no more than is using Gone with the Wind as primary source material for researching the American Civil War.
All right, was Dmitri a secret dissident, sending us subliminal messages?
Well, if he was, he wasn't very good at it. Or if Dmitri was a secret dissident, he was so secret that no one knew it until they read it in Testimony. Worse, he was such a secret dissident that during his lifetime everyone thought he was a - a word sometimes used - toady for the Commies. A strange way to be a dissident.
The Shostakovitch Wars have been at times quite personal and downright nasty. The Traditionalists have at times been accused of being tools of the Soviet propagandists and (at times) of the KGB. Revisionists are accused of using pseudo-scholarship and rewriting history for their own agendas - exactly as history was rewritten by that сукин сын ....
Well, no names.
One thing to keep in mind is that even if Testimony is not Dmitri's memoir, this doesn't mean Dmitri liked the Soviet system, particularly in it's horrible and Draconian version under Stalin with it's arrests, imprisonment, and even executions of his friends and family. It would really be nice to know what Dmitri thought, but if Testimony is not a memoir, then we have nothing - that's nothing, keins, nichts - that Dmitri said himself, only what people say he said.
Еб твою мать! It looks like scholarship about Dmitri has finally reached the point we've hit in the study of George Armstrong Custer. George, as historian Robert Utley has said, is who we want him to be. If we want to believe he was a military genius who lost his last battle because he was betrayed by disloyal and incompetent subordinates, then we can find all we need to prove our case. If we want to believe he was a glory-hunting martinet, sacrificing his men for his own reputation, then we can find all the evidence to prove that.
And so it is with Dmitri. If we want him to be a champion of the Soviet System who would write thank-you notes to Stalin for giving him a state-sponsored Black Sea дача, we can find in his writings and life all the evidence we want to prove our case. If on the other hand we want to believe he was a secret subversive and dissident, writing coded anti-Communist messages in his music, we can find all we want to prove that.
Well, enough хуйня́.
Now bring out the Skillet Lickers!
References
Shostakovich: A Life, Laurel Fay, Oxford University Press, 1999
Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, Elizabeth Wilson, Princeton Univ Press, Princeton (1994)
Shostakovich Reconsidered, Allan Ho, Dmitry Feofanov, Toccata Press, 1998.
Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, Solomon Volkov (Editor), Harper and Row, 1979
"Volkov's Testimony Reconsidered", Laurel Fay, A Shostakovich Casebook, Malcolm Brown, (Editor), 2005, Indiana University Press. Analysis of the typescript of Testimony that Laurel examined.
Music Under Soviet Rule, Ian MacDonald, http://www.siue.edu/~aho/musov/musov.html.
"Maxim Shostakovich Plays Overture to a New Life", Francis Clines, the New York Times, May 26, 1981.
"Unauthorized: The Final Betrayal of Dmitri Shostakovich", Alex Ross, The New Yorker, September 6, 2004, with an online copy at http://www.newyorker.com/critics/music/?040906crmu_music.
"Free Shostakovich", http://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/07/the_case_of_the.html. Alex Ross.
Revisionism in the Music History of Dmitry Shostakovich: The Shostakovich Wars, G. C. Ginther, MA Thesis, University of Canterbury, 2008.
"Shostakovich, the Musical Conscience of the Russian Revolution", Alan Woods, In Defense of Marxism, Part 1, http://www.marxist.com/shostakovich-conscience-russian-revolution211206.htm, December 16, 2006, Part 2, http://www.marxist.com/shostakovich-conscience-russian-revolution221206.htm, December 22, 2006.
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