-officers; little East German boys are beating on drums and blowing trumpets to celebrate the impending victory of socialism; that sunlight, the sylvan theme, hangs like a fading rainbow for a duration of several beats (this reminds me of the forest theme’s illusory return at the end of the Seventh Symphony’s first movement), then loses out forever to the grim seven-note motif42 which haunts the prison corridors of the third movement, and then, far past any skeletal rage-clacking or enemy pincer-thrust, which the perceptual filters of hopelessness have already translated from the menacing into the merely ludicrous (so what if that towering yellow skeleton reached down to snatch me into its talons and haul me up into its hard insectoid face as round and yellow and ruthless as the sun, then gnawed me to bloody pieces? So what if that treacherous little white skeleton came scuttling like a crocodile out of the darkness to kill me? I’m already long and uselessly past my own death), recapitulates the opening of the first movement because Opus 110 is no progression, only a prison, and the prisoner (one D. D. Shostakovich) has now paced the walls right back to his starting point. He’s at the center of the world, you see. (The center of the world is Leningrad, which is Stalingrad, which is Auschwitz.) Every place leads here. Hence Opus 110’s horror as intimate as the throat-slime of music, the strings dripping with bitterness and hate.
Afterwards his life became as calm as the fading sound of a German bomber which has just released its load. His friends prevented him from carrying out his threat involving sleeping pills. He never frightened them in that way again because, well, it would have been, so to speak, ridiculous. Moreover, Shostakovich does not, you know, abandon his children! Why not continue his work? Sooner or later, death would knock on the door anyhow; Comrade Shostakovich already has his suitcase packed… That same year, he whom the capitalists had misnamed “the Mozart of modern Russia” composed his Twelfth Symphony, whose subject at last was Lenin—a hateful, grotesque satire of Lenin. Oh, yes, it was, how should I put it, funny in its way, hilarious, really, almost as humorous as when the NKVD acted out the grovelings of Zinoviev on his way to execution (do it again! Comrade Stalin used to shout, his cheeks all dribbled with laughter’s tears). Feculent under-chords tainted the music, which rode over them just the same with businesslike viciousness, like a tank squashing down corpses on the roadside. Lebedinsky talked him out of that suicide attempt, and he completely rewrote it in four days, his normal rate of composition for film scores and other hack work; needless to say, it got praised for its subject (to most of these Soviet critics, music was as obscure as the electrical aspects of bimetallism.)—Dear comrades! he cried in drunken happiness.—Now his Fourth Symphony, which he’d completed in 1936, could finally be performed in public for the very first time. Not long after, our vigilant German allies erected the Berlin Wall.
42
The last three notes of this, stressed, sudden and sinister, recall in equal measure the triple knuckle-taps through which Russians in public places warn one another of the appearance of a known police agent, and the three short blasts of the all-clear which in an ominous reversal of their customary meaning admonish good Germans to prepare themselves for a possible air raid.