Another temporary shield was offered by the ever-increasing popularity of Shostakovich in the Allied countries. In England, sixty thousand listeners welcomed the Seventh rapturously when it was performed under the baton of Sir Henry Joseph Wood at Albert Hall. In the United States, leading conductors-Leopold Stokowski, Eugene Ormandy, Serge Koussevitzky, Artur Rodzinski-vied for the right to present the premiere of the sensational symphony. They wrote letters and sent telegrams to the Soviet embassy; their friends and agents campaigned to persuade the Soviet representatives to give the right of first
• From a purely musical point of view, it's not difficult to understand where this impression came from: the march theme assimilates a popular tune from Lehar's operetta The Merry Widow. For Shostakovich's close friends there was an "in joke" in that theme of the Seventh Symphony: in Russia the melody was sung with the words ''poidu k Maksimy ya" ("I'll go see Maxim") and probably it was often addressed within the family to Shostakovich's small son, Maxim.
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performance to "their" conductors, at the same time relating whatever
"compromising" information they could about the other competitors.
Arturo Toscanini entered the fray late, but he had the power of NBC behind him and won. He received the first copy of the score, on film brought to the United States by military ship: The radio premiere of the work was broadcast from Radio City in New York on July 19, 1942, and was heard by millions of Americans.
That first season the symphony was performed sixty-two times in the United States. It was broadcast by 1,934 United States stations and ninety-nine Latin American ones. In September 1942 a festival of Shostakovich's music was held in San Francisco, with the best American orchestras participating. Toscanini repeated the Seventh Symphony there in a vast outdoor amphitheater. CBS paid the Soviet government ten thousand dollars for the right to the first broadcast of the Eighth Symphony.
In those years Western audiences grew familiar with Shostakovich's face through photographs, portraits, and magazine covers: wary eyes behind round glasses, thin, tight lips, the boyish facial contours, and the eternal cowlick. (Much later, the corners of the mouth lowered, while the eyebrows rose; old age was trying to change the face's blueprint. The mask of fear was sharper.) Shostakovich responded to applause clumsily and grotesquely. He bowed convulsively, awkwardly, his foot jerking to the side. Shostakovich did not "look like a composer," but they liked that too.
Stalin paid close attention to the propaganda he directed to the Allies. For a time he held his xenophobic instincts in check, but when friendly relations with the Allies ended after World War II, the explosion of anger was that much stronger. On Stalin's orders a campaign began against "cosmopolitanism" and "kowtowing to the West." This was a political campaign. The millions of Soviet citizens who during the war had come into contact with another world and another way of life, who had learned to take risks and be brave, to assert an initiative, had to be brought back into a state of submission. Mass arrests and deportations began again; several harsh anti-Jewish drives were carried out. Simultaneously, Russian nationalism was celebrated at every opportunity.
The regime devoted particular "attention" to culture. Beginning in xxxv
1946, one Party resolution after another was proclaimed, containing attacks on books, plays, and films; the first victims were Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova. The culmination was the Resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of February 10, 1948, "On the Opera The Great Friendship by V. Muradeli." According to a contemporary Soviet commentary, the "historical world significance" of this unfortunately famous resolution lay in the fact that "having shown the true path of the development of the greatest musical culture of our times, it at the same time brought a decisive blow to the aesthetics of bourgeois decadence, exposing its putrid essence to the millions of simple people of all the countries of the world." The commentator added gleefully: "Bourgeois modernism will not survive this blow."
The "historical resolution" attacked composers "maintaining a formalistic, anti-people tendency." Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Shebalin, Gavriil Popov, and Miaskovsky were listed as composers "in whose work formalist perversions and antidemocratic tendencies in music, alien to the Soviet people and its artistic tastes, were particularly glaring." The resolution erased the most talented figures in Soviet music, foremost among these Shostakovich and Prokofiev. The hack Muradeli and his colorless opera condemned in the
"historical resolution" were onlt an excuse. Stalin was particularly angry at Shostakovich-both because of his popularity in the West and because of his refusal to present Stalin with a majestic triumphal Ninth Symphony at the end of the war that would have hailed the genius and wisdom of the leader. Instead, in 1 945, Shostakovich had written a symphony full of sarcasm and bitterness. The yurodivy wept at the festivities, when the majority thought that life would be cloudless. And his sad prophecy, as everyone could see, was correct.
After 1948, Shostakovich withdrew into himself. The split into two personae was complete. He continued making occasional mandatory public appearances, hurriedly and with visible revulsion reading confessions or pathos-filled pronouncements he had not written. This time he was not traumatized as he had been in 1936, because he was prepared for the worst. Events hurtled past him without impact; he seemed to watch them as from a distance. His works disappeared from the repertory-no reaction; the newspapers were full of "letters from xxxvi
workers" condemning his music-no reaction; in school, children memorized texts about the "great harm" Shostakovich had · brought to art-also no reaction.
He felt himself alone-his friends died or disappeared, or worked on their careers-but he was used to that too. He lived in Moscow now-a city that had never become home to him. His family remained a small bastion, but that last sanctuary was given a short life by fate: his beloved wife Nina Varzar died in 1954; his children grew independent. A second, unhappy marriage to Margarita Kainova quickly ended in divorce. And through it all, it seemed as though the witch hunt would go on forever. The world turned permanently gray. It was a world of betrayal, of fear, which had become as untemarkable as rain on the window.
But Shostakovich also composed privately, as the Russians put it,
"for his desk." One work, which mocked Stalin and his henchmen for organizing the "antiformalist" campaign of 1948, has yet to be performed or published. Other compositions became widely known later.