I came to know Shostakovich during the years when he was perhaps most dissatisfied with himself. One could get the impression that he was trying to distance himself from his own music. The inner-not the external-tragedy of his situation became clear to me when, in the spring of 1965, I helped to organize a festival of Shostakovich's music.
It was the first festival of its kind in Leningrad, the composer's native city; symphonies, choruses, and many chamber works were performed.
I spoke with Shostakovich about festival-related activities in his rather elaborate hotel room. He was obviously nervous and avoided questions xii
about his latest works. With a wry grin, he said he was writing the film score for a biography of Karl Marx. Then he stopped talking, and drummed his fingers feverishly on a table.
The only concert of the festival that Shostakovich was willing to approve was the evening devoted to his students' works. He strongly implied that I should agree with him about its importance. It was impossible not to obey. I began studying the music of his students, burrowing deeply into the manuscripts. One of them in particular caught my eye: Veniamin Fleishman's opera, Rothschild's Violin.
Fleishman had entered Shostakovich's class before the Second World War. When the front moved up to Leningrad itself, he joined the Volunteer Brigade. These were condemned men and almost none returned. Fleishman left behind no grave and no compositions except for Rothschild's Violin.
The story of this opera, based on a Chekhov story, is full of tantalizing loose ends. It is known that Fleishman, at Shostakovich's suggestion, had begun composing an opera of that name. Before he left for the front, he allegedly finished the reduction. But the only thing available to researchers is the score, written from beginning to end in Shostakovich's characteristic nervous handwriting. Shostakovich maintained that he had merely orchestrated the work of his late student.
The opera is a marvel, pure and subtle. Chekhov's bittersweet lyricism is presented in a style that could be described thus: mature Shostakovich. I decided that Rothschild's Violin had to be staged.
I could not have done it without Shostakovich, of course; he helped in every possible way. He could not come to Leningrad in April 1968
for the premiere; his son, Maxim, the conductor, came in his stead. It was a stormy and rousing success with glorious reviews. A marvelous opera was born onstage, and with it a new opera theater-the Experimental Studio of Chamber Opera. I was the artistic director of the Studio, the first such group in the Soviet Union. A week before the premiere I had turned twenty-four.
Then the official administrators of culture accused all of us of Zionism: poor Chekhov, poor Fleishman. Their resolution read: "The staging of the opera pours water on the enemy's mill" -and it meant an irreversible closing of the production. This was a def eat for Shostako-xiii
vich as well as for me. He wrote me in despair: "Let's hope that Fleishman's Violin will eventually get its due recognition." But the opera was never staged again.
For Shostakovich Rothschild's Violin represented unhealed guilt, pity, pride, and anger: neither Fleishman nor his work was to be resurrected. The defeat brought us closer together. When I began work on a book on young Leningrad composers, I wrote to Shostakovich with a request for a preface. He replied at once, "I'll be happy to meet with you," and suggested a time and place. A leading music publisher agreed to do the book.
According to my plan, Shostakovich would write about the ties between the young Leningraders and the Petersburg school of composition. At our meeting I began talking to him about his own youth, and at first met with some resistance. He pref erred to talk about his students. I had to resort to trickery: at every convenient point I drew parallels, awakening associations, reminding him of people and events.
Shostakovich met me more than halfway. What he finally told me about the old conservatory days was extraordinary. Everything that I had read and heard previously was like a watercolor faded beyond recognition. Shostakovich's stories were quick, incisive pencil sketchessharp, clear, and pointed.
Figures familiar to me from textbooks lost their sentimental halos in his tales. I grew very enthusiastic and so, without realizing it, did Shostakovich. I had not expected to hear anything like this. After all, in the Soviet Union the rarest and most valuable thing is memory. It had been trampled down for decades; people knew better than to keep diaries or hold on to letters. When the "great terror" began in the 1930s, frightened citizens destroyed their personal archives, and with them their memory. What was henceforth to be thought of as memory was defined by each day's newspaper. History was being rewritten with dizzying speed.
A man without a memory is a corpse. So many had passed before me, these living corpses, who remembered only officially sanctioned events-and only in the officially sanctioned way.
I used to think that Shostakovich expressed himself frankly only in his music. We had all come across articles in the official press with his xiv
name at the bottom. • No musician took these high-flown, empty declarations seriously. People from a more intimate circle could even tell which "literary adviser" of the Composers' Union had stitched together which article. An enormous paper mountain had been erected which almost buried Shostakovich the man. The official mask sat tight on his face.
That's why I was so stunned when his face peered out from behind the mask. Cautiously. Suspiciously. Shostakovich had a characteristic way of speaking-in short sentences, very simply, often repetitiously.
But these were living words, living scenes. It was clear that the composer no longer consoled himself with the thought that music could express everything and did not require verbal commentary. His works now spoke with mounting power of only one thing: impending death.
In the late 1960s, Shostakovich's articles in the official press were preventing the audience he most cared about from truly listening to his music when it was played. When that final door was to close behind him, would anybody even hear it?
My book on the young Leningrad composers was published in 1971
and was sold out immediately. (Until I left the Soviet Union in 1976, it was used throughout the country in the teaching of contemporary Soviet music.) Shostakovich's preface had been cut severely, and it dealt only with the present-there were no reminiscences.
This was the final powerful impetus for him to give the world his version of the events that had unfolded around him in the course of half a century. We decided to work on his recollections of these events.
"I must do this, I must," he would say. He wrote me, in one letter:
"You must continue what has been begun." We met and talked more and more frequently.