What’s that sound? The very first moment that Shostakovich arrived in Dresden, music flooded his skull in a hideous scream; he clutched at his chest and the world whirled, but nothing else did: An eighteenth-century maiden outstretched her stone hand, serenely gazing across the brokenness which could be Stalingrad or Leningrad. His interpreter had confided to him that for an instant this cityscape she used to love had resembled a log on the fire-grate, its flesh tortured into cheery cherry-colored facets, and then the crystal shattered, tumbling down between the iron teeth to become grey ash. While it burned, Hitler the Liberator drank in the last warmth he’d ever get from his storehouse of German summers. Then the Grail landscape turned cold, and no da capo al segno, no exit. Shostakovich believes this all too well. He didn’t escape; he won’t get away this time, either; so in Opus 110 he self-loathingly quotes himself: the opening motif of the First Cello Concerto, the “Jewish theme” from the Second Piano Trio: Well, Elena, you see how lucky it is that you didn’t marry me.—Where’s Elena now? Not with me, not with me. (As he scribbled out the chords of the second movement with his quavering, liver-spotted hands, he saw her as a brooding, smiling skeleton in burnt rags, with dust in her long silver hair; her skull was canted almost elegantly, as if in thought, and she gazed sweetly into his eyes; only gradually from her burned eye-sockets did the poison come, that inevitable poison which infects the relations between the living and the dead; there was still something sweet about her and in life she surely wouldn’t have meant him any harm, but now the eternal blackness within her smile couldn’t help but trap him, weigh him down so that he fell between the teeth and stayed there, wasting away until he died and forever after; he had to get away.) And whenever there’s any beauty at all in Opus 110, it’s dismembered; it drips with death like shitty guts hanging out of a woman’s marble-white torso (thus perish all enemies of Hitler and Stalin’s power). And death oozes out of the silences between notes, too, the silences of secret Nazi documents (Geheim), the eight-beat rest which hung between himself and Maxim when the boy confessed to having denounced him at school; the suffocating air of a Black Maria with its windowless cages—did I ever tell you that in the Lubyanka prisoners get led in silence, obeying the hand signals of their guards, ready at the appropriate gesture to turn their faces to the wall? He’s known that for so much of his life now. LIFE HAS BECOME MORE, more, you know… Some notes of Opus 110 get coffined up in chords, while others, solo, coffinless, become Leningraders falling one by one into the snow to die.
As for the rhythm, if you’ve ever been present when our Blackshirts in Berlin or their NKVD cadres in Leningrad are beating enemies of the people, you’ll know how it is, the screams alternating with gasps. What’s that sound? That’s the allegro molto.
Of course I’ve failed to describe Opus 110 just as I’ve failed to describe death; music remains ultimately indescribable unless Khrennikov and the other artillerymen of Soviet culture compose it for us in pre-measured clips of glittering copper-jacketed mediocrity. And Shostakovich, entering the negative spaces beneath the piano’s black keys at last, extends his front line beyond music into a perfect hell where his life, dekulakization and Operation Barbarossa become one.
Never mind the second movement, when he really opens up with his eighty-eights! I hear batteries on Pulkovo Heights; the Smolny’s now green-blotched, brown-blotched, grey-blotched under camouflage nets; my God, the Fascists have already established a strongpoint in the Leningrad Typewriter Factory! Time to strip the Aurora’s old guns… Never mind the third movement, even though I myself am all ears. A fireplace like a mouth, and red flames inside it; that’s very… The brief but tenacious resistance of a sylvan theme in the final movement recalls the patches of green-and-gold melodic ground revealed through the clouds of those high-flying, spectacularly chromatic fugues he’d once made for Tatyana Nikolayeva. But once again the fog has less in common with the obscurity of innovation than with blind melancholy. We fly high, fine, but we don’t know to shut off the X-ray beams which shine right through the earth to illuminate the mangled, tortured skeletons; we close our eyes, but can’t stop seeing right through our eyelids. According to Lebedinsky, when Shostakovich composed these measures he was remembering the old, verdigrised horses on the bridges of Leningrad, and suchlike frivolities which the Revolution hadn’t gotten around to smashing yet. They called him a formalist but he was really a classicist. Let’s call that mistake pure comedy. Anyhow, Shostakovich’s music always flitters from one mood to another with incredible rapidity, which is to say that he’s unstable. That’s his, his, so to speak, trademark (isn’t that what the capitalists say?). Turn and turn about with the NKVD Ensemble! What’s that sound? A quotation from the traditional Russian song “Languishing in Prison” illuminates the airless chamber of the quartet with history’s glare, but not brightly enough to show us whose prison or cyanide bath it might be, other than his. In Opus 110, nothing completes itself before perishing. For instance, that flash of prettiness near the end, perfumed by Elena Konstantinovskaya, affords the listener scant relief; rather, it reminds us that D. D. Shostakovich is dying with his eyes open. He knows what happiness is. He knows that he’ll never possess it. Hence the sylvan theme is, above all, cruel. Katerina Izmailova, who’s the heroine of his ill-starred “Lady Macbeth,” sings that same melody to her lover in the final act. The syllables of the tune comprise his nickname, Seryosha—oh, how she adores him! And the other convicts all listen, but… What’s that sound? Have you ever seen the expressionless faces of people in a queue to send parcels to their spouses in prison camps? They mask themselves out of knowledge that the “organs” are watching. Or perhaps they’ve developed this habit simply because our Soviet Union is a cold country; one learns to hide oneself simply to, so to speak, stay warm, to, to, to, well. In this opera, however, we’re in the ancient times of Russian bear-hunters: Swamps and forests of Russian misery press all around, besieging the walls which jail Katerina. In our time life will be more, so to speak, JOYFUL: The walls will grow higher; the Fifth Symphony will end with hordes of perfidiously bristling bug-legged notes and chords strung on the music paper’s barbed wire; Opus 110 will scream like invalids in a burning hospital (by the way, screaming is also the task of an intellectual in crisis); unfortunately, “Lady Macbeth” remains trapped in the prerevolutionary era; poor Katerina’s on her way to Siberia! But she’s happy, she sings Seryosha’s name. What is it that those idiots always say about Zoya? Not long but beautifully did she live! Ha, and then those Fascists hanged her! Beautifully, all right! Sometimes I want to spew. And Katerina’s just another, you know. They’ll want me to compose her in a major key: Not long but JOYFUL. What a… It might have been well for her had she troubled to consider the studied blankness of her fellow prisoners’ faces, because then she might have found the mockery interred so shallowly beneath the twitching earth of their grey lips—buried alive! Well, that’s par for the course in Opus 110. On the other hand, why not allow Katerina her little, her, her, you know…? She sings Seryosha, each repetition of the name she loves soaring from her throat right up to the heaven of tenderness beyond the prison wall! All this happens in the merest handful of measures. We couldn’t allow there to be too much happiness. Seryosha’s tired of Katerina. He’s found himself a newer convict-slut named Sonetka. With a cruelty which sickened me almost literally when I saw the opera in Leningrad, Seryosha struts around with her at stage right, mocking Katerina to her face. That is why when Katerina sings the sylvan theme, his name defiles it, and his contempt for her, which is visible to us on that stage but not to Comrade Stalin because he withdrew himself two acts ago and not to Katerina because love is truly blind, the murders she’s committed for adoration of him, and that selfsame adoration, which empowered her until now to suffer and to endure and even in some measure to remain happy, wavers and beautifully flutters only because a certain extremely cruel God, fate or dialectic, who is not D. D. Shostakovich at all but the unknown suzerain of this known stage we sing our hopes on, wants to exalt her up into sunlight for this instant only so that the shock and depth of her downfall into the uttermost darkness will have been magnified, on exactly the same principle that when Comrade Stalin condemned General Vlasov to be hanged, it was necessary to raise Vlasov somewhat above the dangling noose, in order that the rope be slack enough for convenient manipulation, after which he could be dispossessed from that height either by the operation of a trapdoor in the gallows or else by removing a stool or some other such expedient method; so Shostakovich, seeking even then in that long lost era of his innocent success to give utterance to what must have been his own fundamental, irrevocable despair, wrote that flash of evening sunlight into Katerina’s score in order to give her approaching darkness still greater definition, its hideousness being correspondingly enhanced into superior strike depth; and Glikman has personally assured me (not that he’s a one percent reliable element) that when Shostakovich composed those measures, hypnotized by the infinite divide between the white and black piano keys, he couldn’t help remembering that the German Fascist troops whom we’d cut off at Stalingrad stuck frozen horse-legs in the snow for road markers; those skinny dark posts of flesh must have resembled the black keys, but who played them? Victory did! LIFE HAS BECOME BETTER, COMRADES. Life’s a transfer prison. Sunlight between two darknesses isn’t sunlight at all; it’s central Europe herself, which is to say that it’s the fourth movement’s largo, which manages to convey the atmosphere of sickening expectation which overhung Shostakovich at this period; and that feeling is abstracted and generalized to include the naked women standing on a dirt-ledge, facing into the hill so that they won’t have to see the pit of white corpses and black blood in which they’ll soon lie, for across that pit, two soldiers are feeding a new clip into the machine-gun, waiting for the field telephone to ring. Once we learn that story (Estonian Jews), life alters—doesn’t it? Violin, viola, cello, violin! What’s that sound? Shostakovich becomes every victim; trembling silently, staring at Nina’s black round telephone-face with its perfectly round holes, he writes music which holds its breath, striving not to scream and scream.—In other words, it’s all sunlight, white and bright on the cheekbones of the execution squad. A Stuka from the Condor Legion strains up to swallow the sun; the bomber itself resembles a condor, but with whiskers; there it goes! Soon it will dive down and release its seeds, two by two; but in this instant it’s still ascending, harmlessly, gloriously. Katerina sings sunlight, then gets immediately assaulted by the fiendish torture of Seryosha mocking her and this new young Sonetka from nowhere also mocking her, and in practically the next instant, she who’s poisoned her father-in-law and strangled her husband for love now for the sake of utter and unblinkingly despairing hatred grapples Sonetka into her arms, then leaps into the river (Leskov writes in the nineteenth-century original that she threw herself on Sonetka like a strong pike on a soft little perch) so that they both drown. Over their perfect death-embrace the misty sun’s out, imparting to the river the warm whiteness of a musical score; it’s a summer day over the Elbe, with the skeletons of Dresden’s domes still clinging to their bits of brokenness wherever they can; East German schoolboys swim happily by the ruins of the Carolabrücke; the streets are clean and empty around the ruined bookend of the Frauenkirche (there goes the former Field-Marshal Paulus; they’re driving him to the office in his official car); the linden trees are in full police-green piping, like the caps of noncomissioned