Esteemed comrade… said a German, but already Shostakovich’s inner life was winging away with careful subtlety, in just the same way that the first prelude, the moderato in C major, begins with the very notes of Bach himself, sweet and melodious, classical, like a good Communist composer following the correct harmonic line; and then comes a dissonance. The melody returns, but muted and misted by chromatism. The prelude begins to soar farther and farther into the sky of absolute music, until that ordered landscape has been interred beneath clouds, and we rise beyond atonality into a sacredness beyond comprehension. Flashes of green and golden orderedness reveal themselves far below, then vanish because we are in the sky. We have escaped. We are beyond them. We have died.
In 1951 he was elected deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federated Soviet Republic. Taking his bench, he felt the gaze of the pale, titanic Lenin behind him. Lenin was stone. He was stone. They asked him when he would consecrate his symphony to Lenin, and he muttered something. His thoughts were as dull and brittle as war-metal. On the way home he took a detour toward Lebedinsky’s to pay him back for the bottle of vodka he’d borrowed last week, and a few old women, members of the former possessing classes who’d somehow escaped prison camps, were huddled against an icy wall, begging. With a shy grimace, Shostakovich approached them. He gave the nearest crone a few rubles, his face flushed with embarrassment, and rushed away, trying not to hear the others’ imploring cries. And then on the other side of the street, in a nice coat with a silver fox-fur collar, there she was, Elena Konstantinovskaya I mean, her hair now grey but only the more, what can I say, I’m afraid to say beautiful, because, well, she was as perfect, and as unlikely for being so, as a gold-framed prerevolutionary icon; and she saw him but both of them had been educated by those niches in corridors in which passing prisoners can be placed, faces to the wall, so that they won’t recognize each other. He hoped that she was better off with this, this, whatshis-name, this Vigodsky; their daughter must be very, well, he could ask his sister Mariya. Anyhow, hadn’t he possibly glimpsed her at the premiere of Roman Karmen’s “Soviet Georgia”? Because nowadays one’s eyes, you know, were not so very… He rushed home and collapsed. Thank God Ninusha was out! He sobbed for his life and for himself. He tried to keep silent at all times, but every now and then they gave him a speech to read, and he had to stand up and mumble it. In musical language, the phrase da capo al segno means repeat these measures until you reach the sign S. The sign S was Stalin. It was for D. D. Shostakovich to repeat and repeat what he’d been told.
He sat down. He reassured himself: There is no form. There is no content. No words mean anything.—His foot twitched, and his face erupted in grimaces.
He could not forget that time when the NKVD had interrogated him about his connection with Marshal Tukhachevsky. Down the hall he’d heard somebody screaming—very pure screams mostly in B-flat; in due time he’d wring them into Opus 110. Now he was a deputy to the Supreme Soviet. Tomorrow he’d be lying next to Tukhachevsky if that was what they wanted. How did that jingle go? It’s not enough to love Soviet power. Soviet power also has to love you.
He drummed his fingers on his knee, working out the cadences of his preludes and fugues, for which the Union of Composers would denounce him again as a “formalist.” At his summons, Nikolayeva came rushing to his flat to hear each composition as he completed it: Do have some more pancakes, darling. Ninusha really knows how to, that’s right, with sour cream. Sometimes she sat at the other piano and watched his flickering fingers; sometimes she sat on the sofa beneath Akhmatova’s portrait. When it was just him and her he was always able to play con fuoco, with fire.
The very first time she came, he’d finished the C major pair, which he played quite boldly, she thought; and then without a pause, gazing into her eyes, he commenced the Prelude in A Minor. When he played the accompanying fugue for her, richly allegretto, a deep flush began to ascend from the base of her neck. She understood that this music signified her. Even now, after Stalin and Zhdanov, no deficit barred him from the perfect world within the black keys, the chromatic world of sharps and flats and skittering celestial evasions, the place between yes and no. Needless to say, this piece got singled out for special criticism at that recital in the Union of Composers, whose flowerbeds are planted so that the blossoms form likenesses of Lenin and Stalin.
I absolutely reject such music, began our Union Secretary, a certain malignant S. Skrebov. And in my view, the A minor fugue sounds distorted and false, erroneous in its modulations and chords. As for the G major prelude…—
Nikolayeva turned the pages for him as he played.—Thank you, Tatyana, he whispered, his new spectacles sitting more heavily than ever on his flesh which was now of grandfatherly coarseness. In consequence of his anxiety he played extremely badly.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich needed to remember (his colleagues explained, as he sat at the piano with his head between his knees) that the intelligentsia no longer existed for itself; it was only an advance detachment of the working class. He was making the same errors he’d made with “Lady Macbeth” back in 1936. He was running a serious risk of being considered a deserter from the cultural front.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich, not only did you play atrociously, but the works are so gloomy that they’re going to impede your creative rehabilitation.
You’re absolutely correct, of course, replied the composer, while Nikolayeva stood comfortingly beside him, as if she were about to turn another page. You need, how should I put it, loyal lyrics and sanitary symphonies, people’s preludes and, and—let’s see now—
At least he understands that much.
If you don’t mind my saying so, you ought to listen to your own Seventh Symphony, Dmitri Dmitriyevich! There you succeeded in drawing your music from the life of the masses. I’m told that you based the third movement entirely on indigenous folksongs of our fraternal peoples. Isn’t that so?
Yes, yes, I assure you, whispered Shostakovich. He smiled faintly, and his spectacles flashed. He tried to light a cigarette, but his trembling fingers kept breaking the matches.
Now, this formalist trash you’ve just subjected us to, this is, well—why can’t you be guided by Party spirit?
I much appreciate your guidance, comrades. You certainly know how to, um, to light the way ahead with a searchlight. And what luminescence! It’s very… Could you recommend—
If you keep it simple you’ll never go wrong, Dmitri Dmitriyevich. For instance, do you know that song “Chapaev the Hero Roamed the Urals”? That’s a real Soviet classic.