November 21, 1937, can be considered a watershed day in the musical fate of Shostakovich. The hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic was overflowing: the cream of Soviet society-musicians, writers, actors, artists, celebrities of every kind-had gathered for the premiere of the disgraced composer's Fifth Symphony. They were waiting for a sensation, a scandal, trying to guess what would happen to the composer, exchanging gossip and jokes. After all, social life went on despite the terror.
And when the last notes sounded, there was pandemonium, as there would be at almost all later Soviet premieres of Shostakovich's major works. Many wept. Shostakovich's work represented the effort of an honest .and thoughtful artist confronted by a decisive choice under conditions of great moral stress. The symphony is riddled with neurotic pulsations; the composer is feverishly seeking the exit from the labyrinth, only to find himself, in the finale, as one Soviet composer put it, in "the gas chamber of ideas."
"This is not music; this is high-voltage, nervous electricity," noted a moved listener of the Fifth, which to this day remains Shostakovich's most admired work. The symphony made it clear that he spoke for his generation, and Shostakovich became a symbol for decades. In the West his name took on an emblematic quality for both the right and XXXl
the left. Probably, no other composer in the history of music had been placed in so political a role.
Shostakovich had revived the dying genre of the symphony: for him it was the ideal form in which to express the emotions and ideas that possessed him. In the Fifth he finally reworked the influences of the new Western composers, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and primarily Gustav Mahler, to create his own inimitable, individual style.
Most characteristic of Shostakovich's music are its strained, seeking melodics. Themes usually grow throughout the symphony, creating new "branches" (the source of the integrated quality of Shostakovich's symphonic canvases, often huge and almost always diverse) .
Another important element in Shostakovich's music is his rich, three-dimensional, varied rhythm. He sometimes uses rhythm as an independent means of expression, building large symphonic sections with it (for instance, the famous "march" episode in the Seventh
["Leningrad"] Symphony) .
Shostakovich imparted great significance to orchestration. He was able at once to imagine music as played by an orchestra and he wrote it down in score form from the start, not in piano reduction as many composers do. The orchestral timbres were individuals for him, and he liked personifying them (say, the predawn voice of the flute in the
"dead kingdom" of the first movement of the Eleventh Symphony) .
The monologues of solo instruments in his orchestral works often resemble an orator's speech; at other times they are associated with intimate confession.
There is also much in Shostakovich's symphonies that evokes analogies with the theater and with film. There is nothing reprehensible in this, although many critics still seem to think so. In its day the "pure"
symphonic music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven incorporated the programmatic images of the Enlightenment, and Tchaikovsky and Brahms, each in his own way, reworked the material of Romantic literature and drama. Shostakovich took part in the creation of the musical mythology of the twentieth century. His style, to use the words Ivan Sollertinsky applied to Mahler, is truly Dostoevsky retold by Chaplin.
The music of Shostakovich combines lofty expressiveness, grotesquerie, and penetrating lyricism with the unpretentiousness of narrative.
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The listener can almost always follow the "plot" of the music, even if he does not have much musical erudition and experience.
In the article "Muddle Instead of Music,'' along with the mocking jibes, there was a revealing slip: the statement that Shostakovich was not in the least untalented and that he knew : how to express simple and powerful emotions in music. Unquestionably this observation is connected with Stalin's reaction to films for which Shostakovich had written the scores. These films had been very successful in their day, not only in the Soviet Union, but in the West among the left-wing intelligentsia (though now they are rarely remembered), and certainly the longest-lived element in them is Shostakovich's music.
Stalin, who had a superlative appreciation of the propaganda potential of art, paid special attention to film. He saw that Soviet movies had a powerful emotional effect, which was much enhanced by Shostakovich's music. Thus his film scores met with Stalin's approval. For Shostakovich, writing for the movies was his "rendering unto Caesar"; it seemed an effective and relatively harmless way of staying alive and at work on his own music. The authorities greeted the Fifth and many subsequent compositions matter-of-factly. Some of these works were even honored with Stalin Prizes-the highest awards of the period, given annually and with Stalin's personal approval.
But the greatest propaganda value was extracted by Stalin from Shostakovich's so-called military symphonies, the Seventh and Eighth, which appeared during World War II. The circumstances surrounding the creation of the Seventh were publicized around the world: the first three movements were written during a month or so in Leningrad while .it was under fire from the Germans, who had reached the city in September 1941. The symphony was thus seen as a direct reflection of the events of the first days of the war. No one recalled the composer's manner of working. Shostakovich wrote very fast, but only after the music had taken final form in his head. The tragic Seventh was a reflection of the prewar fate of both the composer and Leningrad.
Nor did the first audiences link the famous "march" from the Seventh's first movement to the German invasion; that was done by later propaganda. The conductor Y evgeny Mravinsky, the composer's friend in those years (the Eighth is dedicated to him), reminisced that when he heard the march from the Seventh on the radio in March xxxiii
1942 he thought that the composer had created a universalized image of stupidity and crass tastelessness. *
The popularity of the march episode has overshadowed the obvious fact that the first movement-indeed, the entire work-is full of mournful emotions in the manner of a requiem. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, Shostakovich stressed the fact that for him the requiem mood held the "central position" in this music. But the composer's words were deliberately overlooked. The prewar period, in truth filled with hunger and fear and the mass deaths of innocent people in the Stalinist terror, was now painted in official propaganda as luminous and carefree, an idyll. Why should the symphony not be transformed into a "symbol of struggle" with the Germans ?
It was harder to do this with the Eighth Symphony, first played a year and a half later. Ilya Ehrenburg wrote: "I came home from the performance astounded: I had heard the voice of an ancient chorus from Greek tragedy. Music has a great advantage: without mentioning anything, it can say everything." Ehrenburg later remembered the war years as a time of relative freedom for Soviet creativity: "You could depict grief and destruction," for the fault lay with foreigners, the Germans. II). peacetime unclouded optimism was required of art; under such circumstances Shostakovich's "requiems" would certainly have been subjected to annihilating criticism. Ironically, the war rescued the composer.