Category: Shostakovich

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.

I ask myself: why Shostakovich? – Because it is never just ‘pure’ music that he affirms. In the end, emphasising the materiality of the artwork (my own discourse) is insufficient with respect to Shostakovich. Is this the abyss that separates the Romantics from Shostakovich? – ‘Pure’ music, ‘pure’ materiality is not enough. No – it is the tune itself that has to be deranged. The old forms must be destroyed – not replaced or supplanted (after all, he was not a serialist) but destroyed in the body of the music. So that the music destroyed itself in some sense. Laughed at itself. Laughed at the imposture that music is. Until all that survives is the 15th String Quartet.

But what about the D, S, C, H motif as we hear it in the 10th Symphony or the 8th Quartet (a way for the composer to spell his own name)? Is it a question, here, of autobiography – of programme music (think of the dismal 12th Symphony)? No – but of a resonance to which his music always returns, over and again. But it is a question of finding that resonance. And it can only be found in desolation. The ruin that was close to him as soon as he began to compose. He knew this before his Lady Macbeth was banned. But he knew, later, that it was that resonance to which he had to lead his greatest work.

D, S, C, H: the tone Shostakovich imposes upon resonance. When D, S, C, H names only the way resonance resonates through a space without name.

Sometimes Shostakovich is unbearable. The last quartet, every movement marked adagio. You listen to Telemann instead, or Rossini. Sometimes the easy flow of Telemann is unbearable and anything other than the best Shostakovich (and a few other composers) seems indecent.

Indecent – why this word? Because of what happened, because the music that made Himmler weep belongs to a culture to which the Nazis could ally themselves. Is it the innocence of art that was sullied? Innocent art belongs to another time. A time before the genocides that were accomplished with the same technology that was supposed to liberate humankind. When culture was secure, when it was a flowering of the spirit.

The first world war already saw a great sense of the implausibility of culture. What was it all for? – The upsurge of avant-gardes, among them, Dada, Surrealism. Now the great attempt to escape art through art – to create another kind of work – to transform existence, to change life. The interruption of art – art as the interruption of the continuity of culture. Art had lost its innocence – or it had rediscovered its innocence as a mode of research, a voyage into the unconscious alongside the efforts of the analysts. Either way, it was no longer a question of the prestige of art, of the work that would lend itself to the unfolding of human potential celebrating the marvels of humanism.

But hasn’t the history of which Surrealism is a part simply run its course? Where are the avant-gardes? What are the political stakes of the existence of art, of literature? This question seems anachronistic. As if culture could matter in that way. As if it wasn’t debased, corrupted, indecent.

Levinas suspects that to enjoy art is to enjoy feasting during a famine. It is indecent…. It is that, or it is insignificant. And Celan? Blanchot? The latter wrote in 1945, ‘no more stories’. No more – the time of the work of art has passed. Innocence or indecency – is it so simple? Blanchot, after the war, no longer ascribes a specific genre to his fictions. They are works which come after, posthumously. But then Blanchot was a contemporary of the worst… What about those who come after?

Can art be as innocent again for us (who is this ‘us’)? Is it a question of a classicism – a return to the age of Telemann or Haydn, the age of politesse, the restraint of the passions? Then Romanticism, the time of the artist-creator, Beethoven, who thought of himself greater than kings and aristocrats. Not far from him to Berlioz, the artist who no longer believes in God or Bach – and Wagner, universal artist, artist-evangel, creator of the unified artwork, the Gesamtkunstwerk which would restore the original, vital relations of the mythos…

Now think of the broken artists – Beckett, Giacometti, Van Velde – artists who were born into a world that broke, and who work with fragments. But then wasn’t Avigdor Arhika one of that generation, rescued from Auschwitz, abstract painter? – He gave up abstraction. What does he paint? I remember a glorious still life of stacked towels in an airing cupboard.

I must stop these vague ramblings. Beethoven, Wagner, Berlioz: these are ghosts, however much I like to listen to excerpts from The Ring in my office. Ghosts – they are not present, living, for us (who is this ‘us’?). Depart from them entirely? No. Shostakovich quotes Rossini then breaks the tune, plays with it and smashes as if to say: it is not ours anymore. Breton wanders in Paris with Nadja. Ghosts everywhere. Bataille breaks up the novel into The Impossible. Then I think to myself: there are no new forms, only the ruins of old ones, like the ruined cathedral Gorchakov wanders around in Nostalghia.

From The Writing of the Disaster:
… sometimes concerts were organised. The power of music seems, momentarily, to bring forgetfulness and dangerously causes the distance between the murderers and victims to disappear. But, Langbein adds, for the pariahs there was neither sport nor music. There is a limit at which the practice of any art becomes an affront to affliction. Let us not forget this.

The illusion with Berlioz, Wagner, Scriabin: the attempt to purify musical ‘matter’, to reach the nudity of music. With Shostakovich (the best Shostakovich …)? Ecstasis is not there (except in the worst pieces, and there are many of those …) This is music for those who are tethered to themselves, bound to an unavoidable burden. For those for whom the impossible is possible – ecstasy as superabundance, as sheer excess – but only for an instant. An instant: for we are tethered to ourselves, brought back to ourselves. The thresholds can no longer be remade. You are returned to yourself. It is the return that is unbearable. But you become used to the unbearable. And prefer the sardonic music which laughs at lyricism. You recognise yourself in a music that has grown old, and laughs at youth.

Youth: lyricism, romance, transport. Age: you come back to the same. You know how the world works and how it smashes inspiration. Occasionally, Shostakovich permits himself a lyrical passage, a section of compelling rhythm, excitement. Then – he crushes it. To say: it is impossible, do not lose yourself. No ecstasy. Why? Because of the world, the way the world is. Think of his horror at the anti-Semitic excesses of Stalin. What kind of art is possible after that? In the midst of that? The 13th Symphony. And his last works, the 15th Symphony and the 15th String Quartet? Truly the work of one who lived alongside the worst.

Think of Berlioz composing, tears running down his face. Why does he weep? At the terrible strength of the music. And perhaps because he is the custodian of this beauty; he feels thankful. This is a scene of inspiration. The music reaches you – and let’s say you weep, too. You are inspired – the music has brought you inspiration. What does this mean? Berlioz’s ‘gift’: he makes music out of rhythms and sonorities. Music is born from his fingertips. It is a kind of matter, a materiality that is shaped by him. Shaped, but in such a way that it is not wholly determined. Was he not the first composer who foregrounded nuances, tones, sonorities – the texture of sound for its own sake? Nude and barely adorned? Bare sound: it is a kind of matter that is affirmed.

– And what do you receive from the work? The gift that gives you giving – for are you, now, the locus of creation? – As though you had grown newer, finer organs in order to receive what you have heard. For it is a question of growth, of alteration, of a becoming which does not leave a ‘limit’ intact. There was never a limit. The self was never the form of the same. Inspiration: the self increases its powers. If it is a question of superabundance, of excess, this is not a transgression of a fixed prohibition. The thresholds are remade as you move across them. If it is matter that would bind you to Berlioz, it is matter as it unbinds you from yourself.

A whole line of composers lend themselves to be treated in this way. But what of those who do not? What I would like to think: a lugubrious ecstasy, a mournful rapture. More: a rapture that is suspicious of itself, its excesses. I will come to this one day or another. It is Shostakovich I want to write about – the composer of the 15th Symphony and the 15th String Quartet.