Among them are several major works (the First Violin Concerto, the vocal cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry, the Fourth Quartet) in which Shostakovich speaks, using echoes of Yiddish folklore, with compassion about the fate of the Jews-exiles on the brink of extinction who miraculously survived. This theme blended into an autobiographical motif: the lone individual against the raging, stupid mob. *
It was also a period of contradictions, as is clear in Shostakovich's astounding dialogue with Stalin, to be found in this book. On the one hand Shostakovich's major works were not performed-and yet Stalin personally telephoned him to urge him to make the journey to New York in March 1949, to attend the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace as a leading representative Soviet artist. Despite his heated exchange with Stalin, he went-and it was a profoundly unhappy experience for him. He played the scherzo from the Fifth Symphony on the piano to a huge audience at Madison Square Garden.
But he felt like a pawn in a cynical political game. Except for his visit
•Shostakovich came out openly against anti-Semitism in his Thirteenth Symphony. It was 1 962 then and Khrushchev was in power, not Stalin, but the official attitude toward Jews was, as always, hostile. The moralizing Thirteenth (which incorporated Yevgeny Yevtushenko's famous poem "Babi Yar") was the cause of the last sharp and well-known conflict between Soviet power and the composer.
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to Warsaw for a piano competition as a young man, with a side trip to Berlin, this was his first trip abroad, and in the uncomfortable role of a mock celebrity to boot. His attitude had already formed toward things "Western" as being inimical and alien to his inner strivings.
His brief American stay, which took place under extremely harried circumstances (like subsequent visits, in 1959 and 1973), merely reinforced his prejudice. Shostakovich was particularly traumatized ,by the aggressiveness of American reporters, and the bleakness of his life upon his return seemed almost welcome to him.
In 1953, Stalin died, leaving the country in shock. The Soviet Union began changing, tentatively, cautiously, but in a direction that the browbeaten intelligentsia had never let themselves dream of-that is, for the better and not for the worse. The "thaw" began. An enormous world power stood at a crossroads; and many human beings saw themselves at a crossroads too.
Shostakovich summed up Stalin's era in the Tenth Symphony (1953). The second movement is inexorable, merciless, like an evil whirlwind-a "musical portrait" of Stalin. In the same work he introduced his own musical monogram, DSCH (the notes D, E fiat, C, B), which would take so important a place in his subsequent compositions.
It was almost as though with the dictator's death the yurodivy could begin to assert his own identity in his work.
It goes without saying that Shostakovich stood wholeheartedly with the liberals. When Khrushchev dethroned Stalin in 1956, the facts he made public came as no surprise to Shostakovich. All it meant was that one could now talk about the crimes of the "leader and teacher"
openly, though this freedom would prove to be short-lived. Shostakovich wrote music for the very progressive (by Soviet standards) poet Yevtushenko; he wrote and signed petitions for the "rehabilitation" of musicians who had been sentenced to the camps by Stalin, and helped the survivors return and find work; he tried to influence the relaxation o( harsh cultural edicts established by Stalin. A new Party resolution, made on Khrushchev's orders in 1958, announced that Stalin was
"subjective" in his approach to works of art; this removed the label
"formalist" from Shostakovich and noticeably improved his standing.
The composer devoted the greater part of his time to helping ordinary people in many ways, defending them against bureaucracy.
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When the authorities decided to appoint Shostakovich to the post of first secretary of the proposed "Russian" division of the national Composers' Union, he had to join the Party for the first time. On September 14, 1960, the open meeting of the Composers' Union, convened for the admission of Shostakovich into the Party, attracted a large group of people expecting something unusuaclass="underline" they anticipated a spectacle from the yurodivy. And they were right. Shostakovich mumbled his prepared text without lifting his eyes from the paper, except for one. moment when he suddenly raised his voice dramatically: "For everything good in me I am indebted to . . . " The audience expected the standard and obligatory "the Communist Party and the Soviet government," but Shostakovich cried out, " . . . to my parents!"
Six years later, on the eve of his sixtieth birthday, he wrote a small vocal work, full of painful self-irony, titled "Preface to the Complete Collection of My - Works and a Brief Meditation on This Preface,"
with his own text. A major element in this work is a mocking list of the composer's "honorific titles, extremely responsible duties and assignments." These are grotesque jokes for those in the know. To understand them one m.ust know the rules of the game. * But despite his titles and awards, the Russian intelligentsia itself did not see the composer as part of the official system until the late 1 960s. For decades the emotional truth of his music had helped them survive morally. Russia had no other Shostakovich.
In the years of the "thaw" Shostakovich wrote several major works that had a noticeable resonance in Soviet society; and other compositions, previously inaccessible to audiences, were performed-among them Lady Macbeth (retitled Katerina lzmailova), the Fourth Symphony, and instrumental and vocal works. of the late 1940s. However, a gulf gradually formed between the greatest living Russian composer and the most freethinking intellectuals.
A brief chronology indicates the tension of developing events. In 1962 the journal Novy mir printed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In 1966 the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, who had printed their satirical works in the West,
• For instance, in order to appreciate fully the meaning of Opus 1 39, March of the Soviet Police for band, composed in 1 970 between the Thirteenth Quartet and the Fifteenth Symphony, one must be aware that the writer Mikhail Zoshchenko, Shostakovich's idol, had served briefly on the force in his youth. The list of such private jokes in the composer's works is long.
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were tried in Moscow. This trial rocked the Soviet creative elite. Dissent mounted throughout the "Prague Spring" and the Warsaw Pact troops' invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. That same year academician Sakharov made public his essay "On Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom." The essay was widely distributed in samizdat, which by then had won for itself the status of a
"parallel" Russian literature, at home and abroad, often much more influential than the official one.
Dissidence was turning into a political movement. Shostakovich watched with interest and sympathy, but he could not join in. The yurodivy cannot infringe on the social order. He confronts people, not conditions. He protests in the name of humanity and not in the name of political changes. Shostakovich was a moralist-eventually, as is clear in this book, a very embittered one-but he never had a political program.*