MIKHAIL SEMYONOVICH DRUSKIN, the Leningrad pianist and musicologist, was very close to Shostakovich during the years he lived in Leningrad. They were introduced by their mutual friend Ivan Sollertinsky in the late 1920s. In the following extract Druskin writes of how the young composer was perceived by his contemporaries in the 1920s:
His exterior was deceptive: fragile and nervously agile, Shostakovich preserved his youthful charm for many years. From his adolescent years, he was very observant, and showed curiosity for all sides of life. He had a keen eye for the ridiculous, often noticing the absurd where others paid no attention. He was gifted with an abundant sense of humour. Gogol and Chekhov remained his favourite authors throughout life. He loved satirical literature, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Zoshchenko amongst Soviet writers. Humour and high spirits, which in Shostakovich sometimes acquired a youthful daring, are a sure sign of vitality and zest for life.
This was one aspect of his complex make-up. There was another deeply arcane side to his nature. In his adolescence, he experienced hardship: he lost his father early, suffered deprivation and ill health, and had to take mundane jobs to help support the family. These sufferings were reflected in his First Symphony, with its dramatic collisions. But simultaneously, it seemed to forebode more distress and suffering in the future, both personal and general; it was this that gave rise to his predilection for the tragic in art. It was Shostakovich’s vocation to realize the concept of tragedy, for this was how he perceived the world. One can draw an analogy in this with Dostoevsky’s work; in particular, the last act of Katerina Izmailova [Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District] was written under the influence of Dostoevsky’s From the House of the Dead.
The polarities in Shostakovich’s psychological make-up also found their expression in his music. These sharp contrasts stare you in the face in works which were created side by side in chronology. For example, the ‘neighbouring couples’, the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Eighth and Ninth, the comic opera The Nose and the tragic opera Katerina Izmailova, then the same Katerina Izmailova and the First Piano Concerto, where parody is evident throughout. Then this last work was followed by the more traditional Cello Sonata.
These ambivalences became evident by the age of twenty, by which time Shostakovich as an individual and an artist had been formed. It goes without saying that the successive decades brought their changes and corrections; some features of his character weakened and dimmed, while others were strengthened, especially during the 1960s, when his health went into a steep decline. Can one point to analogies in his music?
While noting these polarities, one must not forget that there existed a multitude of psychological nuances between their extremes. Already in his youth, Shostakovich was unpredictable and given to sudden vacillations of mood; at one moment, jolly and easy, the next pensive; then suddenly he would switch off altogether. And as the years went by these changes intensified. And does not this mass of varying moods also exist in his music, with its exclusively wide range of genre, often in diametric opposition, and the unexpected twists in the unfolding of its drama?
Without doubt his individual destiny was not easy, to live with exposed nerves and to react acutely to everything surrounding him. But he also had remarkable self-possession, and however difficult the circumstances, he was always able to contain himself and did not give in to his whimsical moods; for his deep sense of responsibility towards life and art was an organic constituent of his make-up, and he totally accepted the moral principles behind these concepts.
It seems to me that in Shostakovich’s nature one can discover a quality that is genetically traceable to the best features of the old-world St Petersburg intellectual; but these characteristics have been touched by the spirit of his ‘Soviet’ surroundings, with their peculiar demands, human contacts and civic duties.1
He was disciplined and restrained. Although this restraint cost him great moral effort, it became the mainstay of his stoic spirit. He was sociable and absolutely lacking in arrogance; he was well disposed towards people and at the same time aloof (only in his own music could he be completely open and sincere); he had natural good manners, but simultaneously kept his distance from the vast majority of people whom he met (he was secretive because he was vulnerable). At the same time, despite his enormous workload – or you might say his obsession with work – he never refused any requests for help of a personal or professional kind. (His favourite phrase was, ‘Not a day without writing a line.’) He was like this both in his youth and in his mature years.
… And life seethed around the young Shostakovich, sucking him into its vortex. Anyone who did not experience those years together with Shostakovich must find it difficult to imagine the intensity of this whirlpool, which threw up an explosion of creative energy and provided the strongest impulse to increased artistic endeavour and innovation.
The fresh wind of the Revolution revitalized the whole pattern of life, thrown up as it was on the open spaces of the streets and squares. Youth, driven by the force of its tempestuous gusts, avidly reached out for all that was new and futuristic; often their ideas were idealized and illusory, and did not relate to reality. For only a few creators of spiritual values knew how to listen to the true voice of history, the ‘Noise of Time’, to use Alexander Blok’s expression. One way or another the times held sway over people, and left their imprint on them, the impressionable Shostakovich included. His future as an artist was conditioned and formed by those years. Shostakovich had many diverse and significant sides to him, comparable to the multifarious levels of artistic and cultural life of the time.
… Shostakovich did not develop good relations with his Conservatoire teachers, the adherents of Rimsky-Korsakov, including his composition teacher Steinberg. But Shostakovich did not belong to the other camp which opposed these ‘scholastic’ circles, headed by ‘the disturbers of the peace’, Boris Asafiev and Vladimir Shcherbachov, each of whom had his circle of pupils and associates and his own sphere of influence. Shostakovich did not take an active part either in the Circle for New Music or the LASM (Leningrad Association of Contemporary Music), and what is more, he evaded their leaders. On the other hand, he willingly made music with his contemporaries, and often met with his fellow composers, especially the Muscovites Vissarion Shebalin and Lev Oborin. (With the first he preserved close ties, especially during the 1930s and 1940s. With the latter his friendship later weakened.)
So, from his first creative efforts, Shostakovich, already crowned with success, occupied an independent position and defined his own terms in art without submitting to the aesthetic of the recognized authorities. He also did not succumb to passing fashion or temporary enthusiasms for new music, but accepted them with discrimination.
As far as I know (and in those years, as concert pianists, we were on close terms), Shostakovich had no interest in avant-garde trends in art (after all, Malevich, Tatlin and Filonov were all working in Leningrad) or in the theatre. The premieres of productions by the talented director Terentyev and the young Kozintsev and Trauberg, the directors of FEKS, ‘The Factory of the Eccentric Actor’, caused much stir in Leningrad. In Moscow there was the analogous studio of Nikolai Foregger. As for Meyerhold, Shostakovich, while holding him in the greatest respect, remained sceptical about some of his productions.
Shostakovich was also not touched by the polemics in the literary world, under the volatile leadership of LEF, which centred around Mayakovsky. Shostakovich met Mayakovsky when he wrote the music for The Bedbug, but he failed to establish a personal contact with him. I think that he was indifferent to the poetry of Pasternak and Khlebnikov. He was not affected by the furious arguments about ‘constructivism’ and ‘urbanism’ which were supposed to reflect the spirit and requirements of the age – for instance, Tatlin’s model for the Tower of the Third International, Rodchenko’s work, Lyubov’ Popova’s theatrical constructions, and so on. Whereas in music Alexander Mosolov acquired fame in the West during the 1920s as a constructivist. All this speaks not so much of his narrow cultural horizons as the fact that from the beginning of his career Shostakovich swept aside all that was alien to his individuality as a composer, and did not seek to examine it more closely.
In his youth Shostakovich aspired to Rachmaninov’s double role of virtuoso pianist and composer (incidentally, he didn’t like Rachmaninov’s music). He started to perform in public from 1923, and soon his concert activity had grown extensively. Apart from his own works, he only played music from the standard classical and romantic repertoire. One exception was Prokofiev’s First Concerto, which he performed towards the end of the 1920s when his concert career was in decline. Soon he was only to perform his own works.
… It was his independent position that served to underline Shostakovich’s basically traditional musical outlook, notwithstanding some daring innovation in his composition of this period … With his Aphorisms, the opening of the Second Symphony, and likewise the thirteen-voice fugue in the same work, the kaleidoscopically shifting episodes in the Third Symphony, where, according to the composer’s concept, not one idea was to be repeated, and the amazingly daring Percussion Entr’acte in The Nose – all these were symptoms which meant that, had he wanted to, he could have become the leader of the musical avant-garde. However, his ‘sorties’ into different expressive spheres were not the result of external pressure but of his conscious recognition that he should break away from the limitations of the petrified traditionalism that was imposed on him during his Conservatoire years. He searched for a more dynamic, complete expression of the national tradition within the context of modern-day actuality, resonant as it was with the dramatic events of a turbulent history, and a threatening sense of catastrophe.2
Shostakovich conceived the idea of the First Symphony in July 1923. Probably his early Scherzo Op. 7 was initially intended as its third movement. The young composer noted, not without satisfaction, that he had provoked Steinberg’s displeasure with this piece: ‘What is this obsession with the Grotesque? The [Piano] Trio already was in part Grotesque. Then the cello pieces are Grotesque and finally this Scherzo is also Grotesque!’3 Steinberg’s comments did not have much effect. The young composer went on to ridicule the traditional tenets of his teacher: ‘The inviolable foundations of The Mighty Handful, the sacred traditions of Nikolai Andreevich [Rimsky-Korsakov] and other such pompous phrases. Unfortunately, I can no longer indulge him with my music.’4
In the autumn of 1924 the Conservatoire set a symphony as the composers’ graduation test piece. This prompted Shostakovich to get down to work in earnest. He knew what he wanted; hence, when he wrote to his friend Lev Oborin in early December saying that the first two movements were completed, he declared that ‘it would be more fitting to call this work ‘Symphony-Grotesque’.5 Shostakovich worked in fits and starts, with various interruptions ranging from cinema hack work to composing a completely different piece: in December 1924 he completed a Prelude ‘and the beginning of a Fugue’ for string octet.6
The composer was developing a pattern of work that was generally to hold true throughout his life. He wrote with great intensity and enormous speed. Shortly after completing his Conservatoire studies, Shostakovich gave this explanation of how he experienced the compositional process:
I observe that I always suffer from insomnia in a period of creativity. I smoke a great deal, I go for walks (this helps the thinking process); I pace up and down the room and write the music down while standing up, I cannot keep in a calm state. […] The impulse to compose comes from within me. This preparatory stage can last for anything from a few hours to a few days (at most a week). […] I always feel the ‘initial form’; it’s always completely clear to me how the beginning, the middle and the end of the piece should be, where the moments of tension and release are. I imagine the work still not fully in its real sound, but rather in its ‘timbric’ aspect. And I sense the complete inner form, rather than its external fulfilment. […] the first element to rise to the surface is the timbre, then melody and rhythm, after that the other aspects […] The external fulfilment happens only after the complete internal working out of the invention, even if this only consists of independent links in the chain. […] The external takes place considerably faster than the internal process, and can give rise to new possibilities within the form. […] Once I have fixed the score in notation I don’t return to it. When I complete the work in its external form I have a sense of complete satisfaction […]7
In his letters to friends of that period Shostakovich writes of great contrasts: on the one hand of the thrills of inspiration and the happiness of creating music, and on the other of the gloom and doom of everyday life. Before completing the Symphony, he wrote to Lev Oborin:
I am in a terrible mood. I cannot find a room in Moscow, I cannot find work, Volodya8 is dying, darkness surrounds me, and to cap it all my neck has started to swell up. The horrid town of Moscow doesn’t want to nurture me in its cradle. Its teeming masses make a terrible impression on me – its low houses, the crowds on the streets – but nevertheless I yearn to go there with all my soul. So there. Sometimes I just want to shout. To cry out in terror. Doubts and problems, all this darkness suffocate me. From sheer misery I’ve started to compose the Finale of the Symphony. It’s turning out pretty gloomy – almost like Myaskovsky, who takes the cake when it comes to gloominess.9
The Finale was completed shortly on 26 April 1925, and by early July Shostakovich had put the finishing touches to the orchestration of his symphony.
Shostakovich showed the score to Moscow’s musical luminaries, Myaskovsky, Zhilyaev and Yavorsky. They were warmly appreciative and talked of immediate performances. At home Steinberg was supportive, but the matter was in Shostakovich’s opinion clinched by the weight of Yavorsky’s influence. Seeing Malko at a concert, Dmitri was initially diffident about approaching him. As he explained to his Moscow mentor:
Then I said to myself ‘you fool’ and called after him ‘Malko’. I told him, ‘I have a symphony. I’d like to show it to you.’ He answered, ‘Please do. Why haven’t you asked me about this before? Yavorsky wrote to me about it.’ ‘I didn’t know that Yavorsky had written, I’m asking you myself.’ ‘Bring it to the lesson tomorrow.’ Today I brought the score and played it through at the end of the lesson. He liked it and said it should be performed and that I should start writing out the parts.’10
As Shostakovich pointed out, this contrasted sharply with his attempts to interest Asafiev in the symphony’s existence; Asafiev, when answering Dmitri’s phone calls, claimed to be ‘far too busy’. The young composer was put off. As he acknowledged to Yavorsky, ‘But if you had written to him, perhaps Asafiev might have had a bit more free time.’11
For the next few months, Shostakovich was kept busy writing out the orchestral parts. His moods swung from excitement to despair in anticipation of hearing his music in the ‘real’ sound of the orchestra. Despite his fears that the orchestration might not be effective, he displayed remarkable confidence in his own music. When Malko and Steinberg declared the Finale unplayable at such a fast tempo, Shostakovich decided to find out for himself. Having written out the relevant parts, he took them to the clarinettist and trumpeter in the cinema orchestra, who had no difficulty in playing them. Shostakovich, vindicated, was able to convince Malko and Steinberg that his speeds should not be altered. The young composer obviously quite enjoyed proving his teachers wrong. This episode confirmed his opinion that practicalities should be learnt from performers and not from academics.12
The First Symphony was premiered on 12 May 1926 by the Leningrad Philharmonic under Malko in a programme entirely made up of new music. (Joseph Shillinger’s March on the East and Julia Weisberg’s symphonic cantata The Twelve were the other works.) Shostakovich celebrated this date for the rest of his life as his ‘second birth’. He dedicated his work to his friend Misha Kvadri, the moving spirit behind the Moscow group of composers called ‘The Six’.
Malko first met Shostakovich in Leningrad, probably in 1923, when he heard the boy composer play his Scherzo for Orchestra.13 Malko judged it to be ‘the scholastic work of a talented pupil’.
Malko held the position of chief conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic from 1925 to 1928. Steinberg was responsible for Malko’s appointment as professor of conducting at the Leningrad Conservatoire during this period. Shostakovich attended these classes during the academic year of 1925/26.
Shostakovich’s attitude to Malko was one of grudging respect for his musicianship, and a certain intolerance of his pomposity. He wrote to his friend Oborin: ‘I believe Malko to be a rather ungifted person. But professionally, he knows his stuff.’14 As for Malko’s conducting classes, he complained to Oborin:
I am incensed by his verbosity. He chatters away and wastes our time. If he is asked a question, he gives the most lengthy answers which leave you dumbfounded. I prefer practice to theory. But his lessons are all social chit-chat, such as: ‘Nikisch, in one of his letters to me …’, or ‘When I was a guest at Mahler’s summer house …’ This is only of possible interest to Malko’s future biographer.15
Here is the other side of the story, NIKOLAI MALKO on Shostakovich:
One day Steinberg asked me to listen to a symphony by one of his students – and thus it was that I again came into contact with Dmitri Shostakovich. He had changed greatly by that time. He was no longer a child, although he was still frail, shy, and silent.
Since all the classrooms were filled, we went into the big concert hall, and there, in that quiet and empty auditorium, Mitya Shostakovich played his symphony for me.
I was amazed both by the symphony and by his playing…. It was in no sense a ‘pupil’s work’, for nothing of the boy-composer of the ‘Scherzo’ was now evident. An entirely different composer seemed to be before me, and it was extremely noticeable that this symphony did not have the ‘academic stamp’ that usually characterizes the beginning composer…. It was immediately clear that this First Symphony by Shostakovich was the vibrant, individual, and striking work of a composer with an original approach. The style of the symphony was unusual; the orchestration sometimes suggested chamber music in its sound and its instrumental economy….
Shostakovich played his symphony on the piano remarkably, producing the effect of a full score in spite of his small, non-pianistic hands. But characteristically, as do most composers, he played with great attention to the notes and without much expression. No single counterpoint or technical passage seemed to hinder him; no intricate harmony upset his attention. Everything was fluent, clear and accurate, although his tempi were constantly too fast. By his own estimation the symphony should last twenty-five minutes. Toscanini used to play it in twenty-six minutes forty-five seconds. Other conductors need from thirty-two to thirty-three minutes. However, if the symphony were played in the tempi indicated it would be physically impossible in many sections and would actually take less than twenty minutes.
… After I had heard Mitya Shostakovich’s symphony, I decided immediately to perform it. There was a certain amount of displeasure on the part of some members of the Conservatory who thought that Shostakovich should wait another year, but I did not pay much attention to this.
In passing I should like to mention that when I performed this symphony in other cities, and when I showed it to Bruno Walter, I met with real opposition from a group of prominent musicians who grumbled that I was pushing Shostakovich too energetically. (Time, as always, has shown who was right.)
Our concert was scheduled for sometime in the spring. Meantime I had many opportunities to listen to the symphony played by Mitya himself. Each rendition was a real pleasure, and this alone speaks much for the symphony.
At last the exact date for the concert was fixed, 12 May….
The presence of the composer during the rehearsal of a new composition has great significance. Much depends upon how much the composer hears and how he listens. By ‘hear’ I mean just that … Shostakovich immediately showed what we call attentiveness to listening. He did not reveal his nervous state and did not fidget,16 but listened with full concentration and answered sensibly when questions were asked…. I remember clearly that he never stopped the rehearsal nor interfered with it, nor did he interrupt the work of the conductor during the rehearsal. This might be explained by his shyness and his youthful good behaviour, but I do not think so. Mitya, for all his shyness and reserve, was quite self-assured and never, prior to the performance of his symphony or as a regular student of the Conservatory, had exhibited any tendency toward compliance. The fact is that he knew exactly what he wanted when he wrote his score. The first sounds that issued from the orchestra confirmed the correctness of his imagination, and he had no reason to make any fuss.
An orchestra is like a responsive barometer, … and always takes young composers with a grain of salt. When we rehearsed the First Symphony of Shostakovich, this attitude was scarcely noticeable: there were almost no mistakes in the parts, the composer himself having carefully checked the orchestral material. Technically everything was playable, and the orchestra musicians could not overlook the quality of the music itself. The usual mistrust disappeared fairly quickly. An elderly cellist did grumble when he had to play a solo (without a mute) while accompanied by other strings (celli), also without mutes.
At the concert, the symphony had a pronounced success. The second movement, the Scherzo, was encored. The audience was thrilled, and there was a certain festive mood in the hall. This kind of response is a difficult thing to describe in words, but it is positive in character and, in this instance, there was no mistake about it. Such a feeling is usually apparent when something really outstanding and exceptional is performed. It is not a casual success warmed by casual conditions, but a genuine, spontaneous recognition. And so it was on this occasion.17
Shostakovich’s mother, SOFIYA VASILYEVNA, left a moving description of the premiere of her son’s symphony in this extract from her letter to Klavdia Lukashevich, her son’s godmother. She also copied this letter and sent it to her sister Nadejda Galli-Shohat:
At last came 10 May, the day of the first orchestral rehearsal. (The symphony has been postponed from the 8th to the 12th May because Salome was being performed at the Mariinsky Theatre, and many of the brass players needed in our symphony were occupied there.)
While at work, I was unable to think about anything else, and only awaited the telephone call. At last I heard Mitya’s happy voice. ‘Everything sounds good – everything is all right.’ Mitya was given his first ovation by the musicians and those present in the hall. I managed to get away from work to attend the next rehearsal on the 11th. I heard all the musical authorities heap praise on Mitya. Glazunov told me that he was particularly struck by Mitya’s mastery of orchestration – something that is usually acquired only after years of experience and study. But it shone through brightly in this first large-scale orchestral work. Again much praise and compliments – another ovation – and Mitya’s happy little face.
At last the day of the concert dawned. Our anxieties started from early morning. Mitya hadn’t slept all night, and could neither eat nor drink anything. At half past eight we arrived at the Philharmonic. By nine o’clock the hall was completely packed. I cannot describe my emotions on seeing the conductor, Nikolai Malko, about to pick up his baton. I can only say that even the greatest happiness is very hard to bear! Everything went off brilliantly – the magnificent orchestra, and the superb execution! But the greatest success went to Mitya. The audience were very attentive, and the Scherzo was encored. It was over, and Mitya was called out again and again. When our young composer came out on stage, seemingly still only a boy, the audience expressed its joy and enthusiasm in a long and tumultuous ovation.
After the concert we celebrated at home with the luminaries of the musical world in attendance (Steinberg, Malko and Nikolayev). Glazunov couldn’t come, as, still weak after his illness, he couldn’t walk up the five flights of stairs. When Mitya arrived with Malko, Nikolayev and Steinberg played Glazunov’s Fanfare on the piano and gave him three cheers…. The guests stayed until five o’clock in the morning.18
MAXIMILIAN STEINBERG wrote of this occasion in his diary:
A most memorable concert. The enormous success of Mitya’s Symphony. The Scherzo was encored. After the concert we supped at the Shostakoviches’ until 2 a.m., predominantly in the society of youth. We returned home with Malko and his wife by foot as far as the Sadovaya [street]. A white night, but cold (2°C).19
The First Symphony was given its first public performance in Moscow at the packed-out Grand Hall of the Conservatoire. Shostakovich’s young friends attended in force; many of them did not however possess a ticket. Pavel Lamm’s daughter OLGA writes of this exciting occasion:
The ticket controllers had to fight off the students who were pushing their way through. They succeeded in grabbing hold of Misha Kvadri, who, waving the score in his hand, demanded loudly that he should be let into the hall, because they ‘are going to perform my symphony, the author himself has dedicated it to me’. While Kvadri gesticulated and expounded, the others, with Shebalin at their head, quickly slipped into the hall.20
Shostakovich himself had mixed feelings about Kvadri. In his letters to Yavorsky he often wrote about his friend, swithering between delight and disdain, feeling alternatively let down or sustained by Kvadri and his wife (who were always hospitable, even if their spare divan-bed was uncomfortable). Sofiya Vasilyevna, on the other hand, confessed to Yavorsky that she had an irrational distrust of Kvadri, and worried dreadfully when her son was under his care. She believed his influence had a roughening effect on Mitya’s character, and further suspected that Kvadri encouraged her son to drink, and alcohol was dangerous to his health.21
By January 1928, Shostakovich had abandoned the friendship.22 Kvadri suffered a tragic fate, for in 1929 he was arrested and shot, an early victim of the aggressive militancy of the proletarian cultural revolution where any ideological deviation was mercilessly punished.
At NIKOLAI MALKO’S instigation, Shostakovich was invited to play two concerts in Kharkov in July 1926. At the first, on 12 July, he was soloist in Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, conducted by Malko. On 15 July he played a solo recital. In another symphonic programme Malko conducted his First Symphony. MALKO also wrote about these Kharkov performances:
The rehearsals for the symphony were getting along nicely. The orchestra liked the composition, and the presence of the young composer intrigued the musicians, particularly since the nineteen-year-old Shostakovich still looked rather like a child.
In the role of ‘composer’ he again behaved very modestly and tactfully. He did not come to the platform, did not interfere, and in no way made a show of himself. It was not on his part a lack of interest in the performance but quite the contrary. Since everything had been previously discussed with the conductor, he was simply displaying good professional upbringing.
The symphony was a pronounced success. As I had expected, the presence of the boy-composer thrilled the public and resulted in the announcement of his forthcoming piano recital.
So Mitya had to practise.
Our kind host arranged for him to work on a fine Steinway located in a club. Here he was allowed to play as long as he desired. I must admit that Shostakovich actually practised very little. Instead, we discovered a billiard table in the club and he started practising on that ‘instrument’. Neither of us had ever played before, so our initial attempts were rather poor. Finally, after long fiddling around, I succeeded in getting two balls into a pocket. Mitya got one in. I was called to the telephone and when I returned he said, ‘While you were away I went on playing and I got another ball.’
‘Splendid,’ I congratulated him, and we continued our game.
The programme for his recital was in two parts: his Trio for piano, violin, and cello,23 then his own piano works and some Liszt. Mitya, as I have already mentioned, did not trouble himself with much practising. My own orchestral rehearsals were also not too time-consuming. Thus we had sufficient leisure for trips to the country, visiting and café sessions. He was interested in absolutely everything and possessed a critical mind plus a good sense of humour. When he was given to playing pranks, these were not always childish. There was something in his make-up, stemming from his unsettled and nervous nature, that seemed to interweave his dignity and his bright and observant mind with a petty and silly vanity, a mischievousness, and a bent for tomfoolery.
… At last came the night of his recital. I started in due time to prepare Mitya for his appearance. He was dressed in a white shirt, white trousers and white shoes, but alas! the shoes proved to be far from white. What to do? I mixed some tooth powder into a paste and daubed his shoes. Satisfactory. Something was wrong with his belt. I happened to have a suitable one, but for him we had to fasten it with safety pins. Everything else was in order. (In passing I might mention that in the course of the week I had become accustomed to looking after his clothes and linen – and to picking up his socks and everything else from the most unexpected places.)
We took a coach to the hall. On the way Mitya started talking about the mating instincts of animals and insects. He became so engrossed that I had to stop him, saying, ‘We have only half an hour left. The club is next door; go practise a bit.’
In twenty-five minutes I went after him. ‘How do you feel?’
‘OK.’
‘Did you play?’
‘Yes, some Liszt.’
‘And your own works?’
‘I rehearsed the Trio before.’
‘But the other pieces?’
‘No.’
‘Are they ready?’
‘I hope so. I did not play them.’
‘What? Not at all?’
‘No.’
‘Not a single time during the whole week?’
‘No.’
‘But why not? You are starting your recital in one minute.’
‘Yes, but they are my works. I do not need to repeat them. And I have rehearsed the Trio.’
With these parting words, Shostakovich went on to the stage. He performed quietly, without any trace of nervousness, and with self-assurance, precisely, without any special enthusiasm; I should say even with a little reserve.
The audience was not very large, but it was warmly appreciative.
Shostakovich made about three hundred rubles, so he went to the Caucasus, where he spent several weeks.24 This was a very important thing for his health. He was indeed a happy boy. And I, probably even more so because everything had succeeded so well.25
The young SHOSTAKOVICH did not share Malko’s opinion that the Kharkov performance of the First Symphony was a success. The following extract is from a letter to his mother dated 6 July 1926:
[At the rehearsal] I listened and was in despair: instead of three trumpets there were only two, instead of three timpani, only two, and instead of a grand piano a revolting, rattling old upright. All this I found most upsetting. Then the solo violinist is useless. At the second rehearsal, despite all Malko’s efforts, nothing much was achieved, or rather nothing at all. Malko himself said that he was satisfied, so I didn’t pursue the matter. The third rehearsal took place yesterday evening. It went better than the second, and the musicians gave me an ovation. At last it came to the concert. Malko came out. (The concert took place outside in the Gardens. The acoustic was garden-like, with the strings sounding terribly thin, while the upright piano was inaudible; on the other hand the timpani drowned everything else.) Malko stood at the conductor’s desk, and somewhere close at hand some dogs started to bark loudly. They went on barking for an awfully long time, and the longer they went on the louder they got. The public was beside itself with laughter. Malko stood there motionless on stage. At last the dogs stopped barking. Malko started. The trumpet (there were three players at the concert) immediately bungled his first phrase. He was followed by the bassoon playing piles of wrong notes (we stumbled on an exceptionally awful bassoon player here). After about ten bars, the dogs started barking again. And throughout the first movement the dogs often added their solo. The orchestra barely got through the first movement. Then the second movement started. In the first two bars, however much Malko had gone over them at rehearsals, the celli and double-basses made a terrible hash-up. Then the clarinet started playing slower than the strings … Here I was rather surprised by the following: Malko, after a lot of effort, managed to steady the tempo; but he did so at the expense of the dynamics. Instead of playing piano, the violins played forte, and Malko somehow didn’t bother to call them to order. Then it was the turn of the bassoon solo. No words can describe it. The bassoonist caused me dire distress. And do you remember the wonderful bassoon solo at the [Leningrad] Philharmonic? Then they dragged the middle section, and a certain amount of confusion ensued. I almost burst into tears at that point. Instead of good strong chords on the piano, all one could hear were some pitiful, watered-down and out-of-tune plinks; the timbre didn’t resemble that of a piano, rather a cymbalum or a toy harpsichord. I sat there thinking, ‘What rubbish.’ They finished the second movement. Applause broke out, they clapped for a while and some voices cried out ‘encore’. Malko bowed, and they started playing again. I should say straight away that the third and fourth movements went considerably better. The cellist played his solo very well. They rushed the coda, and the percussion made such a racket that you couldn’t hear anything else. It was over at last. The applause started, and the composer was called. I didn’t want to take a bow, but Malko started clapping in my direction (I was sitting in the front row). It was awkward not to go. So I took a bow, and then another one, and then clambered on to the stage and bowed again. Outwardly it was successful, but of course the audience didn’t understand anything, and only clapped from inertia. But there was no booing. Afterwards I went backstage to see Malko. He was satisfied and basked in glory. The musicians came backstage and there was a lot of hand-shaking. The rituals were observed.
When we got home, Malko said, ‘It’s a good thing that the Symphony was played.’ A good thing or not, it wasn’t all right. It’s all right that I am going to be paid the author’s rights, and also that on 12 July I’ll play the Tchaikovsky Concerto with orchestra. It means that I’ll be earning money. But there’s nothing good in the fact that the local orchestra has spattered dirt all over my symphony.26
To Yavorsky, Shostakovich expressed himself more frankly: ‘The local orchestra poured filth all over my symphony. I could only raise my hands in horror […] I am terribly upset. It felt like seeing your girlfriend raped by ten hooligans and being unable to do anything about it.’27
The success of the First Symphony catapulted Shostakovich overnight to international fame. In May 1927, Bruno Walter performed the work in Berlin, and before long it was taken up by Arturo Toscanini and Otto Klemperer, amongst others. Such diverse figures as Darius Milhaud and Alban Berg were impressed by it.28
In the meantime, in April 1926 Shostakovich was accepted on the postgraduate composition course at the Leningrad Conservatoire, and continued his piano studies, while simultaneously embarking on a concert career. His concerts started to provide him with good earnings by the standard of the day; from 1927 his fee was established as 75 roubles a concert, which was equivalent to half of Sollertinsky’s monthly salary in 1929 as musical consultant at the Philharmonia.29
After completing the First Symphony and the Octet Op. 11 (both in July 1925), Shostakovich underwent something of a creative block and for the best part of a year he stopped composing. At some point during 1926 he reached a point of despair and burnt many of his manuscripts, including sketches for an opera based on Pushkin’s poem ‘The Gypsies’. Shostakovich emerged from this crisis about a year later, and on 30 August (1926) he was able to inform Yavorsky:
I am in a really good mood, and not without reason. I have just finished composing a large chunk of (guess what?) a piano sonata. I gave up the idea of a concerto. With false modesty I can say it’s turning out nastily. It starts with an Allegro molto and for the moment it continues like this. Judging from the beginning, it’ll take me a maximum of two weeks to complete, or a minimum of two days. The indicated speed has nothing to do with the tempo (Allegro molto) but with the spirit and impetus (spiritual – opium! – impetus).30
In fact his prognosis was over-optimistic, and with various distractions (preparing the parts of the First Symphony for Persimfons, a new teaching job, and a wonderfully happy birthday party), it was only on 21 October that Shostakovich wrote to Yavorsky of the sonata’s completion.
The composer gave the first performance in Leningrad on 2 December at the Small Hall of the Philharmonia as part of LASM’s first chamber music concert, soon followed by a second performance on 9 December for the Circle of Chamber Music.31 His piano teacher Leonid Nikolayev did not much appreciate the music and remarked wryly, ‘Is this a piano sonata? No, it’s a sonata for metronome to the accompaniment of piano.’32
On 20 February 1927 Shostakovich played the sonata for Prokofiev at an evening of new music by Leningrad composers at Scherbachov’s home. The first work offered was by Joseph Schillinger, ‘a complicated and uninteresting piece’, as Prokofiev noted in his diary. ‘The second person to play’, he continued, ‘is a very young man who is not only a composer but a pianist. He gives me the score and plays boldly, by heart. […] it is so much more lively and interesting [after Schillinger] that I am quite happy to start praising Shostakovich. Asafiev laughs at me, saying I like Shostakovich so much because the first movement is so clearly influenced by me.’33
For his part Shostakovich had been thrilled by Prokofiev’s performance of the Second Piano Concerto the evening before in a concert of his works conducted by Malko. He had also heard Prokofiev’s recital, where the composer performed his Second and Fourth Sonatas, as well as Schubert waltzes for four hands. ‘He played marvellously,’ Shostakovich commented.
Although at the time officially still a postgraduate student of Steinberg’s, Shostakovich felt increasingly alienated from his Conservatoire teachers. From the autumn of 1926 he started an independent study of such Western composers as Schoenberg, Bartók, Hindemith and Krenek, which he felt liberated him from the over ‘technical’ and ‘correct’ style forced on him during the years of his Conservatoire course.34 This period was one of searchings, which was in turn a result of the painful experience of his ‘composer’s block’. No doubt this was why he now felt more inclined to work on his pianism. On 12 December he was one of the four piano soloists in a performance of Stravinsky’s Les Noces under Klimov at the Philharmonia (the other pianists were Mariya Yudina, A. Maslakovets and I. Renzin).
It was through Yavorsky’s initiative that Shostakovich was chosen in December (very much at the eleventh hour) to be one of the Soviet team to take part in the Chopin Competition in Warsaw in late January 1927. Shostakovich did not seem the obvious choice to represent Nikolayev’s School, if one bears in mind that there were some outstanding Chopinists amongst his students, notably Vladimir Sofronitsky. Shostakovich calculated that he had only thirty-three days to prepare the programme for the Chopin competition. He accepted the challenge, although he had certain doubts:
The very concept of a competition […] is highly disturbing. I have decided nevertheless to go, because the competition is not in L[eningrad] or Moscow but in Warsaw – that means abroad. It’ll be terribly interesting for me (as for any living mortal) to see a new country. Apart from that I am very vain, and I don’t want to fail and spatter my name with mud. But even if I fail, at least in Warsaw there will be some musicians to whom it would be interesting to show my scores.35
Sofiya Vasilyevna, Dmitri’s mother, was supportive but worried: would Nikolayev approve of Mitya’s candidature? And what would her son wear? Doctors had forbidden any clothing that could irritate the scars of surgery on his neck after removal of tubercular glands. This in her opinion excluded formal dress (‘tails’), which required a stiff starched collar. Furthermore, some of his comrades were enticing him to drink alcohol, and wine was bad for health. Apologetically Sofiya Vasilyevna pleaded the excuse of her widowhood, and asked Yavorsky to use his influence on her son.36
In the event all were anxious to help, and Nikolayev set to work intensively with Shostakovich on his new programme in the weeks prior to departure.
Shortly after arrival in Warsaw, Shostakovich started suffering from stomach pains, and on 23 January at the competition opening ceremony, he underwent what turned out to be a very unpleasant attack of appendicitis. Dmitri described his illness to Yavorsky in some detail, while imploring him not to breathe a word to his mother. Obviously the incident was highly distressing, and at times Dmitri admitted he was reduced to tears of despair. But through the attention and kindness of members of the Soviet Embassy delegation, who organized hospitality and medical care, he pulled through the crisis.37 In the circumstances it was surprising that he managed to play at all. He reported to Yavorsky with some pride that he played with inspiration and that his first-round performances were heartily applauded.38 Certainly he did well enough to reach the finals, where he performed the required piece: Chopin’s First Concerto.
The Soviet team was undoubtedly very strong, and there were suspicions that the jury was not unbiased; of the thirty-one competitors seventeen were Polish, and satisfaction was expected from that quarter too. Nevertheless, the jury’s decision produced considerable dismay; despite his own and others’ expectations Shostakovich did not figure among the prize-winners.39 Here he justifies the unexpected turn of events to his mother in a letter dated 1 February 1927:
I played the programme well, and had a great success. Eight people were selected for the final round with orchestra…. Everybody said that there were two candidates for first prize, Oborin and myself. And, what’s more, they wrote in the press that the Soviet pianists were by far the best, and that if they were to award the four prizes, then all of them should go to us. But the jury decided, ‘with grief in their hearts’, to give only the first prize to a Russian, so it was awarded to Lyova [Oborin]. The decision regarding the other prizes bewildered the audience. I only got a diploma. Malishevsky, who read out the order of prizes, even forgot to mention my name. In the audience cries of ‘Shostakovich, Shostakovich’ were heard…. Malishevsky then read out my name, and the audience gave me a great ovation – rather demonstratively at that. But don’t you be upset. There is an impresario here who wants to talk about some concert tours. I’m off to Berlin next week, and I’m playing a concert on Saturday.40
The concert in question was a recital in Warsaw on 5 February (shared with Oborin). It in some way made up for his disappointment over the competition results since its proceeds financed a week-long visit to Berlin (again, in Oborin’s company), although the money did not suffice to extend the trip to Vienna as hoped.41
While in Berlin, Shostakovich experienced another ‘inspiratatory vision’ in regard to his composition:
I conceived the piece [Aphorisms] as I was going to bed one night in early February while in Berlin. At the time I was thinking a lot about a certain law of nature, which provided the impulse to compose Aphorisms. As a cycle it is guided by a single idea; what this idea is I don’t want to disclose just now. I started composing them back in Leningrad in early March, and wrote the ten pieces in one go. […] The preparatory stage of work lasted a month […] and I lived in a heightened emotional state for the month of their actual composition.42
It was Yavorsky who suggested the title ‘Aphorisms’ to Shostakovich, who dedicated this set of piano pieces to him. The Aphorisms were obviously intended to be subversive. For instance, Shostakovich talked about writing a waltz, combining it with another piece and calling it ‘Dance of Shit’, a play of words produced by changing one letter in the usual title of ‘Dance of Death’.43 Not content with the first ten pieces, Shostakovich tried to extend this piano suite. While recovering from an operation to remove his appendix44 he wrote to Yavorsky on 6 May informing him that he had completed his ‘Suite’ of twelve pieces, but had discarded two of them.
If I recover my strength then I’ll play Aphorisms on 19 May at the Association of Contemporary Music. And if fate is kind to me, then some day I’ll play them for you. Just now I feel really awful, and dream of dying before 1 August, the deadline for presentation of my patriotic work.45 Don’t ask me how my composition is getting along.
While I was healthy I worked every day on my pianism. I wanted to work until autumn to see if I started to play better, otherwise I would give it up. There’s no point in being a pianist who plays worse than Szpinalski, Etkina, Ginzburg and Bryushkov.46
In the last three years of the decade Shostakovich once more turned to intensive composition and turned out a staggering volume of work in a remarkable variety of genres and styles. As Shostakovich became increasingly busy and successful as a composer, his career as a pianist receded into the background. In the new season he still found time to concertize, performing recitals and Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos on 21 and 22 November 1927 with Gavriil Popov and the Leningrad Philharmonic under Stiedry. Three days later he played Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto under Malko (the conductor berated Shostakovich for rushing!47). By 1929 he was performing much less, but played Prokofiev’s First Concerto on 3 February of that year with orchestra. By the end of the decade Shostakovich had (practically speaking) given up performing all music other than his own.
The Leningrad pianist NATHAN PERELMAN was an exact contemporary of the composer. He recalls Shostakovich’s performance at Leningrad’s Philharmonic Hall prior to departure to Moscow:
His Chopin playing didn’t resemble anything I have heard before or since. It reminded me of his performances of his own music, very direct and without much plasticity, and very laconic in expression. It was an altogether idiosyncratic manner of playing.
While he was preparing for the competition he was no longer officially studying with Nikolayev, but he would go to his home and play for him there. Nikolayev was an extraordinary personality, a man of great erudition and a wonderful musician. He was also a musicologist and composer, in fact the old-fashioned type of Russian intellectual who had an enormous range of interests and grasp on things. He was an outstanding teacher.
Few people now remember Shostakovich’s amazing and idiosyncratic pianism. He expressed his individuality in his approach to performance. He never allowed himself the slightest hint of ‘Chopinesque’ sentiment, and this in its own way had much charm. He had a wonderful technique, with fantastic octaves. He played Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto excellently, with brilliant octave passages. There was nothing left to chance in his playing, it was all very closely and precisely heard in his head. If he chose to use little pedal, it wasn’t because he did not know how to use it, but because he heard the music this way. It didn’t at all coincide with our notions and expectations of piano playing. In our youthful years we were very sensitive, aiming for beauty of expression, using a range of soft and delicate dynamics and nuances. I participated at the next Chopin competition in 1932, and, together with others of my generation, I was reproached for playing too softly.
Shostakovich emphasized the linear aspect of music and was very precise in all the details of performance. He used little rubato in his playing, and it lacked extreme dynamic contrasts. It was an ‘anti-sentimental’ approach to playing which showed incredible clarity of thought. You could say that his playing was very modern; at the time we accepted it and took it to our hearts. But it made less impression in Warsaw, where Oborin’s more decorative, charming and ‘worldly’ approach, albeit somewhat militaristic, was the order of the day. However, Shostakovich seemed to foresee that, by the end of the twentieth century, his style of playing would predominate, and in this his pianism was truly contemporary.
Shostakovich played his own works marvellously. I heard him perform his own First Piano Sonata in the foyer of the Leningrad Philharmonic Hall. It was interesting that during the 1920s and 1930s he continued working at the piano and giving concerts, but increasingly he performed his own music. Later in the 1930s he played some concerts with the cellist Arnold Ferkelman. I remember with great pleasure how sensitively Dmitri Dmitriyevich performed in this duo.48
PERELMAN, like Shostakovich, played in the cinema, providing sound for the silent movies. Here he remembers these experiences:
Shostakovich, or Mitya as he was to us in those years, played a lot in the cinemas during the 1920s, illustrating the silent movies. However there was nothing exceptional in this, we all played at various cinemas to earn money. Mitya played in the Piccadilly cinema on Nevsky Prospect which today is now called the Aurora. Another well-known composer used to play at another cinema on the Nevsky called the Coliseum. I played at a cinema on Liteiny Prospect. After its closure, it became the home for TRAM,49 the theatre where Shostakovich worked for a couple of years.
I believe that Dmitri Dmitriyevich used to improvise while playing for the films in much the same style as he wrote music in the 1920s – very ‘progressively’. The audiences now and then protested. Once there was such a terrible scandal that the director of the cinema decided to dismiss Mitya and to deprive him of the payment he was already due. As this was the only means we had of making a living of any kind it was no laughing matter. I remember that an article appeared in the magazine Rabochii i Teatr in his defence, saying what a talented young man he was, how well he improvised, and so the affair ended happily and he was reinstated. I heard some of his improvisations, but wasn’t present during these scandalous episodes. We all knew about them through the cinema grapevine.
I also had my share of scandals. I arranged a mirror at the piano which reflected the screen, and this allowed me to read a book simultaneously, without having to glue my eyes continuously on the film. It meant that I often played music that didn’t fit the action. As they were dying on the screen, I was dancing on the piano, and while they were dancing on the screen, I was playing tragic funeral music. The director came to reprimand me: ‘How much longer are you going to mock the viewers?’ I also learnt a lot of repertoire while playing at the cinema, like the Chopin concertos, a Metner sonata, and so on. I think that many people went to the cinema to hear Shostakovich, certainly those who were in the know. Of course the crowd preferred the more sentimental music played by popular composers of the day.50
For Shostakovich, the scandals sometimes had an element of fun in them:
I have now given myself over to serving in the cinema. Yesterday an event occurred not without a certain interest. They were showing a picture called Marsh and Water Birds of Sweden. I started to illustrate it. I got worked up into a passion and depicted such birds that the sky itself grew hot. Suddenly in the hall there was a loud volley of applause and some penetrating whistles. Usually applause in the hall is a sign of protest and not of delight. I thought to myself, ‘I suppose the picture is a load of rubbish and that the public is protesting.’ Then everything grew quiet. After a while, another burst of applause. Then the picture finished. A certain lady, Scheffer, came up to me and declared, ‘The public say you must escape from such “Musik”.’ Then the head of the theatre went up to Vladimirov [the conductor] and started to speak to him. I asked Vladimirov what he had said. Vladimirov laughed and said, ‘The public complained to the boss during the show, saying, “Your pianist is undoubtedly drunk.”’ But Vladimirov defended me and told the boss, ‘The illustration is first-rate and your public doesn’t understand a thing.’ Afterwards the musicians of the orchestra came up to me and shook my hand. I was left with a feeling of real satisfaction that I had managed to exasperate the cinemagoers. It was only a pity that none of my friends were in the cinema yesterday.51
Shostakovich worked at the cinema for the best part of three years, from 1924 to 1926. Apart from the Piccadilly he played at the Bright Reel and the Splendid Palace cinemas. The musicians at these cinemas often had difficulty in getting their wages, and Shostakovich actually went so far as to sue his employer, Akim Volynsky:
… for non payment of two weeks’ wages to us musicians for our work at the ‘Bright Reel’ cinema. It’s all rather unpleasant. I never thought that I would ever have to take somebody to court, let alone Volynsky, whom I previously used to respect. But now I see that he is only a rogue and exploiter.52
In March 1927 Shostakovich was commissioned by the agit-prop department of the State Publishing House to write a symphonic work in honour of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. The resulting Opus 14 was finished in August, and first performed by Malko and the Leningrad Philharmonic on 5 and 6 November.
In ‘To October’ Shostakovich set verses by the poet Alexander Bezymensky which he heartily disliked, frequently referring to them as disgusting. The work called for special effects, such as factory whistles tuned to a particular pitch. Many people found the music bewildering and difficult; not least the musicians. Malko noted that in rehearsal Shostakovich was very demanding on the orchestral musicians, who ‘curse him for the uncomfortable writing (pizzicato)’. Two days later he stated, ‘Shostakovich suggested changing the pizzicato to spiccato. It works better. He keeps saying either, ‘I have capitulated ignominiously’ or, ‘One day they will learn to play pizzicato.’53
Maximilian Steinberg remarked on the symphony’s ‘utter emancipation from vertical line’, while wondering ‘can this really be “New Art”? Or is it only the daring of a naughty boy?’54 Shostakovich himself remained satisfied, pleased to be called out on stage four times.55
During this period Shostakovich’s relationship with Malko underwent ups and downs; in particular he took great offence that Malko, having suggested that his new symphony should be entered in a competition organized by the Leningrad Philharmonic, did not see that it was awarded first prize.56
However, Malko continued to remain an important figure in Shostakovich’s life at this period, both musically and socially. It was in Malko’s house that Shostakovich met Sollertinsky, and there, as a consequence of a bet, he transcribed and orchestrated in forty minutes flat Victor Youman’s ‘Tea for Two’ (known in Russia as ‘Tahiti Trot’). At Malko’s request he also made transcriptions of two Domenico Scarlatti pieces for wind orchestra. Together with ‘Tahiti Trot’, they were first performed in Moscow on 25 November 1928 as a complement to the Suite from the newly finished opera The Nose.
Here are NIKOLAI MALKO’S reminiscences of ‘To October’:
After his graduation from the Conservatory, Shostakovich’s attitude towards the academic status of the school was very critical. This was quite natural. Moreover, neither could he sympathize with VAPM57 and its limited ideas of simplification. Thus his interests and leanings became very understandable. With such attendant circumstances, Shostakovich was commissioned to compose a cantata for the Tenth Anniversary of the Soviet Regime – 7 November 1927 – set to the words of Bezymensky’s poem ‘To October’. Although the acceptance of the European calendar had changed the date of the Revolution from 25 October 1917 to 7 November, the terminology ‘October Revolution’ has continued to exist.
One must admit that Bezymensky’s words were bad. Shostakovich did not like them and simply laughed at them. His musical setting did not quite take them seriously, and it showed no enthusiasm whatsoever.
Shostakovich quite often, and willingly, would play this cantata on the piano. It has a long developed introduction, several independent episodes, and a final chorus. Some of the chorus phrases were to be recited rather than sung. In one of the episodes, Shostakovich tried to express the personal impression he had experienced when he had seen a boy killed in Liteyny Prospect. The boy’s crime had been stealing an apple. This episode, described in music, brings forth some intricate atonal fugato, partly in a very high register. Why the memory of that poor boy was expressed in precisely this way remains forever a mystery to me … Shostakovich later named this cantata his Symphony Number Two.58
Shostakovich’s first close friends from his Conservatoire years were Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky and Leo Arnshtam. The Arnshtams’ house was a lively centre for the Conservatoire youth. Lydia Zhukova, one of the bright sparks of that circle, recalled that the young composer was nicknamed ‘Shtozhtakovich’ (roughly meaning ‘What’s-the-matter-ovich’), and that his best friend was Volodya Kurchavov, who had a ‘mystical’ resemblance to Shostakovich. Kurchavov’s main talent was to be a sympathetic listener, and he appeared to be Shostakovich’s shadow rather than equal partner. He fell ill and died in 1925, ‘as if fading into oblivion’.
It was sometime during 1927 that Shostakovich got to know Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinsky. By profession a specialist in the Spanish and Romance languages, Sollertinsky was a man of amazingly diverse gifts and interests. Endowed with a phenomenal memory, he was a brilliant linguist, an expert on philosophy, art history and theatre. But it was in the sphere of music that he came to have most public recognition and influence. He founded the Gustav Mahler and Anton Bruckner circles, and was responsible for having the music of these composers first performed in the Soviet Union. Later he assumed the position of artistic adviser to the Leningrad Philharmonic. His pre-concert talks at the Philharmonic were often considered more inspiring than the music that followed. He became vital to Shostakovich as a loyal and ardent supporter of his work, and in particular of his stage works.
SHOSTAKOVICH wrote of a first meeting with this paragon during the exams on Marxism/Leninism which he sat when applying for the post-graduate course in 1926:
I was extremely nervous before the exam. We were called up in alphabetical order. After a while Sollertinsky was called in to answer for the examining commission. Soon he came out of the room. I summoned up my courage and asked him: ‘Tell me, please, was it a difficult exam?’ He answered: ‘No, not in the least difficult.’ ‘And what did they ask you?’ ‘Oh, the easiest questions imaginable: about the origin of materialist philosophy in Ancient Greece, Sophocles’ poetry as an expression of realistic tendencies, the English philosophers of the seventeenth century, and something else.’ I need hardly say that Sollertinsky’s account caused me no uncertain anguish.59
Shostakovich’s sister Zoya recalled her brother coming home to announce:
‘I have met a wonderful new friend.’ This, of course, was Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinsky. They had an insane friendship. Sollertinsky came to see us every day in the morning and stayed until the evening. They spent the whole day together, laughing and chuckling. Sollertinsky was an incredible witty person, but he had a horrible squeaky voice. His tongue was poisonous, and it was no fun to be the butt of his wit. On the days they didn’t meet, Mitya and Ivan Ivanovich wrote to each other.
Zoshchenko also came to see us. Mitya loved him. He visited us frequently after he was denounced in 1946, when he was very unhappy. He was by nature quite a despondent character, you couldn’t expect any fun from him. Even before the Decree of 1946 he was pretty gloomy; he only knew how to be jolly in his stories.
Then later on we used to see a lot of Isaak Glikman. But the really close friendship of Mitya’s was with Sollertinsky. Sollertinsky’s son told me how during the evacuation from Leningrad most of the family’s things got left behind, but all of Mitya’s letters got taken as part of his father’s most treasured belongings.60
IRINA DERZAYEVA, Sollertinsky’s first wife, described the two young men’s early encounters:
We lived in those days in a large communal flat on Pushkin Street. Sollertinsky, like Shostakovich, was absolutely oblivious of his everyday surroundings and to any form of comfort. Usually they retired by themselves and indulged in non-stop conversation. Shostakovich would make music. They demanded an unlimited supply of the strongest, bitter tea. When they didn’t manage to meet, Shostakovich would usually ring up. They called each other with comic reverence by name and patronymic – Van Vanich, and Dmi Dmitrich – while using the ‘thou’ form of address. They were simply in love, and didn’t conceal their delight in each other. Sollertinsky never tired of repeating: ‘Shostakovich is a genius. This will be understood with time.’61
LYDIA ZHUKOVA describes how their youthful circle perceived Sollertinsky:
As a university professor, he seemed to us to belong to another generation, although actually the age difference between us was insignificant. He would appear unexpectedly and noisily in our ‘Arnshtam’ circle with news and gossip. He would spread his shaggy greatcoat on the floor and recite Petrarch Sonnets, or sing right through a Mahler symphony in his funny falsetto, recalling every voice note for note with complete precision. Our jaws dropped open, we revered him like a god. But this great and erudite original remained on an equal footing with us; he would fall about with laughter or get involved in some quarrel; would swear – sometimes not at all elegantly either – and behave boisterously; and then suddenly he would disappear….
Sollertinsky was no mean drinker. We, great purists that we were, shunned drink and made do with cranberry juice. Once we all went in a gang to the beach near Stroretsk. The bathing wasn’t much in that shallow puddle, as you had to wade out half a kilometre, and even then you only got your heels wet. Two figures – that of Sollertinsky and our slim Mitya – could be seen striding through the water, staggering from side to side, until they became shadows in the distance. We saw them swigging down brandy from the same bottle. Sollertinsky, it is said, taught Shostakovich to drink. But Mitya never learnt … he was just a boy wishing to appear like an adult. When Kolya Chukovsky and Lyonya Mess discoursed on ladies’ legs, Mitya surveyed the beauties on the beach and with a sense of importance held forth knowingly …
Today Sollertinsky’s name is venerated. Much of what he wrote with such temperament and genius has retained its freshness. But alas, many of his brilliant, erudite articles display a vulgar sociological vein, a reminder of those ‘Marxist’ times.62
And lastly the reminscences of NIKOLAI MALKO:
Involuntarily I was instrumental in bringing into his life another very important influence, aside from that of his mother. This influence gradually spread into the innermost corners of his spiritual interests and, as time went by, it did not diminish but instead strengthened, continuing for many years. The influence I speak of came from Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinsky, whom I introduced to Mitya. They became fast friends, and eventually one could not seem to do without the other.
When Shostakovich and Sollertinsky were together, they were always fooling. Jokes ran riot and each tried to outdo the other in making witty remarks. It was a veritable competition. Each had a sharply developed sense of humour; both were bright and observant; they knew a great deal; and their tongues were itching to say something funny or sarcastic, no matter whom it might concern. They were each quite indiscriminate when it came to being humorous, and if they were too young to be bitter they could still come mercilessly close to being malicious.
… Each of these young men had a profound knowledge of music. They accepted it as though it were a live thing, a living body. They experienced it emotionally, with a deep admiration and love. They would esteem and praise something, or they might hate, despise and ridicule a composition. Once they hit upon a sad and monotonous melody from the symphony of a contemporary composer. They started singing it in a humorous fashion. The caricature was so apropos and so genuinely funny that it stuck permanently.
Both knew Russian literature well and often cited witty quotations. Shostakovich loved and admired Gogol, and when quoting him he would speak the words with a special deep sense of enjoyment as he brought out the inner meaning of each word.
… Mitya was vibrantly interested in all music, not just in his own compositions. This statement may seem odd, but there do exist composers who are completely uninterested in anyone else’s music…. But the young Shostakovich was interested in everybody, and he listened attentively, thoughtfully, and critically to everything. He often played for me whatever I might ask. I remember his performance at my home of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite. At that time I was sharing an apartment with a family of ballet people. The two daughters were dancers, and the mother had been a member of the corps de ballet. While listening to Mitya’s playing, I opened, by chance, the door into the corridor, and there they all were, sitting and listening in rapture to his playing. The old lady was experiencing again the entire ballet. Her daughter told us later how the mother, with tears in her eyes, had recognized every note, and how from time to time she would say, ‘Here comes the Mouse King,’ or, ‘Here the Nutcracker turns into the Prince,’ or, ‘Here comes the cannon.’
Mitya was interested not only in music and literature, but in everything. He had a passion for roller coasters (in Russia they were called ‘American Mountains’) which were put up in the ‘People’s House’.
… However, Sollertinsky knew much more than Shostakovich. He was stronger in criticism and less reserved. His outlook in music, strange as this statement may sound, was much wider than that of Shostakovich. Rumour had it that Shostakovich had given Sollertinsky a few music lessons. I do not know what it was that he taught him, but I am sure that Sollertinsky learned more in those few sessions than someone else would have learned in two or three full courses.
Sollertinsky knew the symphonies of Gustav Mahler and Bruckner very thoroughly. It was certainly his influence that made Shostakovich interested in Mahler…. Let me say that from his own personal standpoint this influence was quite natural. The angularity of Mahler, his sharpness, the peculiarity of his humour, and his tendency towards grandiose forms with stretched-out expositions – all of this, as well as his musical grimaces, found a vivid response in Shostakovich both in himself as a person and as a musician, in fact, perhaps more as a person than as a musician.63
The political and social climate in the USSR changed radically after Lenin’s death in January 1924, marked by the gradual but irresistible rise to power of Joseph Stalin. Until the late 1920s opposition groups within the Communist Party still enjoyed an official existence, but Stalin, in his role as General Secretary, developed a cunning and lethal strategy of manipulating and eliminating his rivals. By 1927 he had stripped his arch-enemy Leon Trotsky of all power and had him sent into exile. Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev, the principal leaders of the ‘right’ opposition, were suppressed somewhat differently; forced to recant and submit to the role of obedient puppets, the road was open to their eventual destruction in the political show trials of 1936/7.
The principal problem that faced the Party in the mid-1920s was that of regenerating the country’s bankrupt economy. The free-market policies of the NEP had been successful up to a point, but they were much resented because the NEP’s ‘capitalist’ values flew in the face of all that the Party was meant to stand for. The term ‘Nepmen’ was coined as a pejorative not only for the entrepreneurs who were able to exploit the free market, but for all those who indulged in such ‘bourgeois’ pastimes as dancing, American jazz, living it up in restaurants, and so on. This aspect of the NEP was heavily satirized in the literature, films and plays of the period, of which Mayakovsky’s play The Bedbug and Shostakovich’s ballet The Golden Age are striking examples.
In order to resolve the social problems that had been thrown up by the NEP, the Party got embroiled in an urgent debate over how to create socialism in a workers’ state and how rapid a pace could be set for the industrialization of the country. At the 15th Party Congress in 1927, a decision was taken to collectivize the land, which was implemented from 1929. The following year, 1928, saw the introduction of the first Five Year Plan, with its ambitious programme of industrial growth. The social consequences of these measures cannot be overstated. The doors were opened for a new ruling class of workers who gained education and privilege by joining the Party. These future Party plutocrats were to oust the ‘bourgeois specialists’, the products of the old-time professional classes and intelligentsia.
When it proved impossible to meet the quotas set by the Party for the enforced pace of industrialization and collectivization, scapegoats were required. Accusations of sabotage, wrecking, hoarding and espionage were bandied about with frightening results. In 1928, at the notorious ‘Shakhti’ trial, fifty-three mining engineers (or ‘bourgeois’ specialists) stood accused of wrecking equipment. This was the first of a series of public trials which convulsed Soviet society between 1928 and 1931. These sweeping purges were set in motion by Stalin as a means to reinforce his political power and to execute his often unpopular policies. The climate of suspicion and distrust that characterized the Stalinist era came into being.
On the other hand, the challenges of meeting and ‘overfulfilling’ quotas for the Five Year Plans stimulated a pioneering spirit and a certain pride in the country’s progressive achievements. It was an era of heroic deeds and daring feats, which culminated in the much-publicized exploit of Alexei Stakhanov, a Donbass miner who in 1935 allegedly exceeded the ‘norm’ of production for a single shift by nearly fourteen times.
This ‘Revolution from above’ was based on the principle of class warfare, which threatened not only the intelligentsia but the richer peasants (the kulaks) and the professional and managerial classes. From 1928 the educational institutions were subject to attack from militant groups, and in addition a virulent anti-religious campaign was unleashed. In the countryside the ‘dekulakization’ campaign saw wide-scale arrests and deportations. The beleaguered intelligentsia seemingly had two choices open to them – to conform, or to lie low. Only a few outspoken voices dared challenge the authorities. The writer Evgeni Zamyatin, who had worked on the libretto of Shostakovich’s The Nose, (1927–8), had the courage to tackle Stalin directly, declaring his view that to be deprived of the freedom of expression was equivalent to ‘the death penalty’. While other writers such as Daniil Kharms and Osip Mandelstam suffered arrest, Zamyatin was allowed to emigrate in 1931.
The writer Mikhail Bulgakov was another victim of enforced silence. He wrote to his brother, recently emigrated to Paris, of his unhappy position. ‘My destruction as a writer was completed in 1929. I have made one last effort and have submitted my application to the USSR Government, asking to be permitted to travel abroad with my wife […] If the application is rejected then we can consider the game is over, put away the pack, and snuff out the candles […] I am not being faint-hearted, brother, when I tell you that my death is merely a question of time […]’64 Bulgakov also appealed directly to Stalin, and after a phone call from the Leader himself, concessions were made which ensured the writer’s further physical existence. However, attempts to stage new productions or let old plays make a short comeback were not followed through, and in effect the writer was doomed to silence and a catastrophic decline in health. One might add that Bulgakov’s fall into disgrace took place notwithstanding the fact that The Days of the Turbins (in the Moscow Arts Theatre production) was known to be Stalin’s favourite play.
Shostakovich inevitably found himself involved with topical political themes, particularly in the theatre and cinema. His ballet The Bolt (1930–1) takes sabotage in industry as its subject, and The Limpid Stream (1934–5) is concerned with collectivization (albeit the rather idealized life at the collective farm of the title, complete with dacha-dwellers riding bicycles and a complex romantic plot, involving swapped identities – Shostakovich’s perhaps intentional nod at The Marriage of Figaro). The vaudeville show Declared Dead,65 for which Shostakovich wrote the music in 1931, is populated by such archetypal caricatures as ‘Mr Beat-the-Bourgeois’ and crafty priests and depraved dancing girls. Most of the films that Shostakovich wrote music to had historical-revolutionary subjects. But of all the works of this period it was the music for the film Counterplan (1932) that brought Shostakovich enormous popular success. The film describes the spontaneous creation of a workers’ plan (or ‘counterplan’) to boost production and increase their factory’s norm. The ‘Song of the Counterplan’66 became Shostakovich’s greatest hit, and was sung all over the country. It was later reused in the composer’s own scores, and acquired popularity in the USA when in 1942 Harold Rome added English lyrics to the tune and entitled it ‘The United Nations’. A year later a slightly changed version became the hit song of the MGM musical Thousands Cheer, which starred Judy Garland and Gene Kelly.
Such was the background to the cultural revolution which gripped the country from 1928 to 1931. The multifarious society that had been a positive feature of the 1920s gradually disintegrated; from 1928 onwards it was totally stamped out by the militant groups acting in the name of the proletariat. In 1932, the Party, intolerant of all independent associations, including the militants’, decided to assume control in cultural matters. It did so by creating ‘unions’ (initially of writers, soon followed by unions of artists, composers, cinematographers, and so on) which became servants of its policy. Conformity (or uniformity) was imposed in all walks of life, from the sphere of economics to that of culture.
The early and mid-1920s had been characterized by a proliferation of independent associations and groups in the world of literature and arts. The most experimental of them embraced elements of revolutionary ideology and were referred to in Russia as leftist. They included LEF, which was associated with Mayakovsky, FEKS, the cinema laboratory of Kozintsev and Trauberg, and OBERIU,67 to which the absurdists Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky belonged. Others were overtly political, claiming the right to represent the proletariat’s views. In the minority were those who merely wished to defend professional artistic standards.
In music the most important of the proletarian groups was VAPM (the All Union Association of Proletarian Musicians), whose ‘Russian’ branch, RAPM, was by far the most active. RAPM, a direct counterpart to RAPP, the writers’ proletarian association, was founded in 1925, and by the late 1920s it was very powerful. (Like all other independent organizations, it was dissolved in 1932 to make way for the Union of Composers, which lay under exclusive Party control.) RAPM’s platform proclaimed that music should have a social message and be accessible to the wide masses, whether it be the mass song or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Tchaikovsky was seen as decadent (even Lunacharsky criticized his music as too ‘salonish and perfumed’), whereas most modern experiment was labelled ‘formalist’.
RAPP and RAPM’s policies are often confused with those of Proletkult,68 which, under the leadership of Alexander Bogdanov, advocated an anarchic ideology towards the arts. RAPM advocated a simplification that debased professional standards, while Proletkult believed in training workers to become artists, in sweeping aside all inherited bourgeois values and destroying habitual context. The climax of Proletkult’s activity was the mounting of an enormous public spectacle in the squares and streets of Petrograd: ‘The Mystery of Emancipated Labour’ was held on May Day 1920, involving thousands of participants. Although Proletkult was disbanded by Lenin in 1920, its spirit lived on in the work of Russia’s most progressive artists (e.g. in Sergei Eisenstein’s Proletkult theatrical experiment The Wise Man [1924] and in the work of FEKS and OBERIU, and elements of it are also present in Shostakovich’s opera The Nose).
Shostakovich consciously evaded all these groups, preferring to remain an outsider. Whereas in Moscow ASM, the Association for Contemporary Music (founded in 1924), energetically propagated new music, both Western and Soviet, the Leningrad LASM, founded in January 1926, was far more conservative. Shostakovich, as a rank-and-file member of LASM, was outraged not to have been invited to vote for the committee, which in his view smacked of the ‘Rimsky-Korsakov clan’ appointing themselves without consultation. He summed up the situation to Yavorsky as ‘the heirs of Nikolai Andreevich clinging to power’.
For a while LASM co-existed with the smaller Circle for New Music, where a more informal atmosphere reigned and avant-garde ideas were discussed and new music performed. Because of its meagre funds, the circle could organize very few concerts. Shostakovich attended some of the Circle’s concerts and meetings, as did Boris Asafiev, the most influential voice in the Leningrad contemporary music scene. Shostakovich expressed considerable reservations about Asafiev, feeling he was keeping his feet in both camps, while waiting to be elected to a more powerful official position at LASM. The composer’s inherent dislike of Asafiev is evident from frequent mention in his correspondence with Yavorsky, and it was reinforced when Asafiev failed to attend the premiere of the First Symphony, programmed in LASM’s first symphonic concert. The day after Shostakovich wrote to Yavorsky, ‘Asafiev did not come on principle […] because he has principle differences with the Association. The reason lies not in this. Simply he is not the Chairman of LASM.’69
Shostakovich’s feelings towards LASM were highly ambiguous and he remained detached from it, while nevertheless enjoying its support. Both his Piano Sonata and Aphorisms were programmed in LASM concerts.
The Circle for New Music was absorbed into LASM in February 1927, but unity did not provide strength. By the end of 1928 LASM had stopped functioning altogether, thereby avoiding the harassment accorded to ASM in Moscow by RAPM, which led to its enforced disbandment in 1931.
The fact that Shostakovich wrote music celebrating revolutionary events (notably the Piano Sonata and the Second and Third Symphonies) was probably prompted as much by a desire to be seen as artistically ‘progressive’ as to prove himself politically in tune with the ideals of the Revolution. However, these works did not gain him support from RAPM or its break-away organizations, such as PROKOLL.70 They criticized his Second Symphony and regarded The Nose as not merely experimental but ‘formalist’ and ‘decadent’.
After 1928, radical groups such as RAPP and RAPM increasingly took it upon themselves to act as spokesmen for the Party as well as ‘the proletariat’ during this period of cultural revolution. These vigilant groups also took every opportunity to harass and humiliate intellectuals, and they wreaked havoc within the institutions of higher education. Officially Shostakovich only finished his post-graduate course at the Leningrad Conservatoire in autumn 1929; his Conservatoire report is full of statements to the effect that he wishes to create music for the people, although emphasizing that accessibility did not mean debasing standards. Earlier that year the Conservatoire had been ‘purged’ of ‘unwelcome elements’; a notable victim was Mariya Yudina, who was dismissed from her professorship for her espousal of religion. In the spring of 1929 Shostakovich himself was dismissed from a teaching position he had held for a few months at the Choreographic Technical College.
No musician could afford to ignore the implications of RAPM’s militancy. The need to protect himself from their attacks was a guiding factor in Shostakovich’s decision to accept a position at TRAM in 1929, and also influenced his choice of themes in the Third Symphony and the ballet scores.
The musicologist DANIIL ZHITOMIRSKY, an exact contemporary of Shostakovich, made his early career in the circles of RAPM and PROKOLL. In 1929 he wrote a polemic article in the journal Proletarsky Muzikant condemning Shostakovich’s opera The Nose, noting that Shostakovich ‘had strayed from the main road of Soviet Art’.
After the dissolution of RAPM in 1932, Zhitomirsky, like many of his colleagues, changed his radical ideological position. While increasingly sympathetic to Shostakovich, he never established a friendship with him. Here Zhitomirsky records meeting Shostakovich (from an unpublished article – see annotated sources).
I first saw Shostakovich close to in the winter of 1927, when I met him in the cramped room of Nikolai Sergeyevich Zhilyaev, one of my teachers at the Conservatoire. I was labouring over an exercise in ‘strict style’ counterpoint. Somewhere from the opposite end of this enormous communal flat the signal of ‘four short buzzes’ sounded and Nikolai Sergeyevich shuffled off in his slippers to the main entrance to open the door. It was his guest from Leningrad. He seemed only a boy, although the expression of his eyes through the thick black framed glasses was adult. He was very sparing with words. Soon, at Zhilyaev’s request, he sat down at the piano to show us his newly finished Piano Sonata. At that time I already knew his First Symphony, with its vivid theatricality, humour, its refined lyricism; the music, whose features obviously converged on those of Stravinsky and Prokofiev, was markedly individual and accessible. The Piano Sonata was completely different, and I hardly understood it. But this hearing created a strong impression on me. The composer was unusually severe, very concentrated, and played with faultless clarity. As an artist he had great authority, and he seemed to hold one in a hypnotic grip with his seriousness and conviction. He was not simply playing, he seemed to be casting spells and imposing his will upon us.
His Second Symphony (‘October’ from 1927) was not only hardly comprehensible to me, but I actively disliked it. Why was this? I belonged to a student circle which aimed to create a new ‘revolutionary’ music. Our ideal was music that, while completely professional and serious, would be accessible to the People. The musical language of Shostakovich’s Second Symphony seemed to be artificially complex, and the composer made no concessions to the tastes and the habits of the ‘proletarian listener’. Now I dislike the Symphony for other reasons. In itself the aim which motivated the composer (or had been instilled in him by official propaganda) to glorify the October Revolution was a false aim. It was a child of our illusions of the 1920s.
Only a very few people would have been able to guess where this ‘Path of October’ would lead us, attended as it was at the time by hymns and fanfares. In addition the picture of revolution depicted in the symphony was extremely schematic; it did not originate out of contact with real life, but out of the Marxist textbooks of the time.
Shostakovich conceived the idea of his opera The Nose (Op. 15) in 1927. It is not known when Shostakovich first started thinking about the opera, although he stated that the preparatory stage of composition took place over two years, an unusually long period for him. The first recorded mention is to be found in a letter to Yavorsky dated 12 June 1927 when the composer wrote that once he had finished his Symphonic Poème [The Second Symphony], he was going to start an opera on Gogol’s story The Nose. He informed Yavorsky that he would write his own libretto, and that he was already at work. He had nearly completed the overture.
To whom the libretto can be finally accredited is still unclear. Shostakovich acknowledged assistance in the Third Act from Grigory Yonin and Alexander Preis, but said that he discarded the suggestions and rewritings of Evgeni Zamyatin, despite which he remains in the list of contributors to the libretto. No doubt his new ‘best friend’ Sollertinsky will have exerted considerable influence on Shostakovich’s concept, but this is something that remains undocumented.
Because of other commitments Shostakovich worked at the opera spasmodically. In January 1928, his month-long stay in the director Vsevolod Meyerhold’s Moscow flat provided him with a good opportunity to push on with work. Here he completed the First Act and worked on the Second, which he finished when back in Leningrad on 1 May 1928.71 The final Third Act was completed by the end of that summer.
The composer’s sister Zoya recalled that:
Mitya had great difficulty finishing the third act of The Nose. It simply wouldn’t come. But then I remember him coming into our living room one morning and telling us that he had heard the whole of the third act in a dream; he there and then sat down and wrote it all out.72
Shostakovich’s mother has left us some more precise detail, recalling that her son had dreamt that he was late for the dress rehearsal of his opera, and arrived at the theatre after the second act had finished. In his dream, he stood at the back of the hall and listened to the whole of the third act. On waking he was able to recall every note.73 This was not the first occasion when Shostakovich experienced the phenomenon of ‘hearing’ in his sleep an entire piece of music. The composer mentioned writing an ‘ultra-modern’ cello piece ‘not in my style’ (one of the Op. 9 cello pieces dating from 1924). He recounted how late at night he heard the whole piece in all its polyphonic complexity as if it were being dictated to him note by note. His own role in all this was merely that ‘of copyist’.74
In July of that year the opera was accepted for production by the Leningrad Maly Theatre (MALEGOT), in whose chief conductor, Samuil Samosud, Shostakovich found a champion. A concert performance was put on to vet the new work in June 1929, against Shostakovich’s wishes. In a letter to the director, Nikolai Smolich, Shostakovich reiterated the principles that lay behind his stage work, akin to those which he adopted when writing music to Kozintsev and Trauberg’s films:
The Nose loses all meaning if it is seen just as a musical composition. For the music springs only from the action…. It is clear to me that a concert performance of The Nose will destroy it…. And offering The Nose at 10 per cent of its potential, instead of 100 per cent will provoke a terrible song and dance.75
Shostakovich further cited Rimsky-Korsakov’s declaration that an opera is, first and foremost, a musical work. ‘If one takes this position then all opera houses should be closed […] But when I wrote The Nose I was coming from a completely different position than Rimsky-Korsakov […]’.76
As Shostakovich predicted, the concert performance only caused bewilderment. The inaccessibility of the music became a subject of heated controversy. The most ferocious attacks came from RAPM; Shostakovich was forced to defend his work strongly, backed by Samosud, Nikolayev, Asafiev and, principally, Sollertinsky.
Malko stated that Samosud had an inordinate number of rehearsals in the year preceding the stage premiere on 18 January 1930: 150 piano rehearsals, 50 orchestral rehearsals, and innumerable stage rehearsals. This may well be an exaggeration, but undoubtedly the new music was difficult for the performers.
Malko spoke of the opera’s ‘tremendous success’. Indeed, sixteen performances, with two alternating casts, were staged within the space of six months, a considerable number by any standards. In fact, the closure of The Nose, and of the ballet The Golden Age, within the space of a year, was as much due to the deteriorating political climate as to adverse criticism. In Moscow the situation was no better; Mosolov’s opera The Dam, in rehearsal for a new production at GATB (the Bolshoi Theatre) was taken off just before its premiere in December 1930, and the production of The Nose (in a planned production by Meyerhold) due to open at the Bolshoi in 1931 was also cancelled. In the theatre the situation was even worse, if we remember that by 1929 all of Bulgakov’s plays were banned. Lunacharsky, an intellectual of the old style with wide-ranging cultural knowledge and relatively liberal views, was removed from his position as Commissar of Enlightenment in 1929, allowing the proletarian associations to – temporarily – take control of cultural life. This too, coincided with Stalin’s appeal to the country to intensify class warfare.
Apart from the unfavourable reviews of The Nose – RAPM’s representatives Lebedinsky and Zhitomirsky respectively labelled it ‘a nonsensical joke’ and an ‘ugly grimace’ – the opera also met with incomprehension from many musicians. Shostakovich’s teacher Steinberg, having recently acquired the latest novelty – a radio – noted with some irritation in his dairy on 29 January 1930:
the other day we listened to The Nose […] terrible rubbish, but nevertheless, as always, in some places it’s incredibly talented. I didn’t get to its premiere, nor to that of the ‘Mayday’ Symphony;77 my nice, grateful pupil Mitya didn’t think of arranging it. Well, God be with him, nevertheless it is terribly hurtful.78
The young cellist Boris Dobrokhotov, who attended the opera’s Leningrad premiere, also had difficulty assimilating its ideas:
We were amazed at its unusual angularity and the expressionist musical language – the scene with the gorodovoi, the vocal parts with their incredible unusually high registers and the small orchestral line-up. And when the entr’acte with fourteen percussion instruments started, the stunned audience started rushing out of the hall. I repent that I too, fearing damage to my ear drums, also ran out.79
The accusation of ‘Formalism’ was first directed at Shostakovich in connection with this opera. A certain Gvozdev wrote that ‘it cannot be considered a Soviet opera; rather an example of decadent Western traditions, of an outlived genre in the process of extinction.’80 Shostakovich bitterly remarked to Smolich:
[The reviews] will make me suffer a week, and I will have to bear the malicious delight of my friends at the flop of The Nose for the next two months. Then I’ll calm down and work; I’d like most of all to write something on [Nikolai] Oleinnikov’s story, ‘The Carp’.81
In the meantime Shostakovich had written his first film score, and embarked on a career as occasional cinema composer. This was to be a useful fall-back when times were hard. At the end of December 1928 the film directors Kozintsev and Trauberg invited him to write the music for the silent film New Babylon. The film called for the accompaniment of a large orchestra, but the complexities of the score proved too much for the cinema orchestras and the film had only a few showings with the music until it was revived in the 1980s. Shostakovich was able to reuse some of the score for the music to Mayakovsky’s play The Bedbug, which he wrote more or less simultaneously.
GRIGORI KOZINTSEV and Trauberg worked as members of FEKS, the Factory of the Eccentric Actor. The ideas of FEKS were embodied in their first films. The two directors worked as a team until the beginning of World War II.
Shostakovich not only wrote the music for their film New Babylon, but he continued his association with the Kozintsev/Trauberg team when sound was introduced into the cinema. Many of their films achieved lasting popularity, not least The Maxim Trilogy (1934–8). Later, when the directors went their separate ways, Shostakovich continued to work with Kozintsev, writing music for his stage productions and notably for his Shakespearean films Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1970):
The film makers of the 1920s were all young men. I was probably the very youngest of all; at the time of shooting The Adventures of Octyabrina I was only nineteen years old. I became used to this idea, as the next generation of film directors were all older than I was. And then suddenly there appeared to work with us a man who was still younger than me.
Happily for us, rumours reached us about a young composer who had just composed an opera on the subject of Gogol’s The Nose. This was the best recommendation we could have.
I soon saw a rehearsal of The Nose at the Maly Opera Theatre. Vladimir Dmitriev’s sets spun and reeled to the sounds of rollicking gallops and dashing polkas; Gogol’s phantasmagoria was transformed into sound and colour. The particular imagery of Russian art that was linked to urban folklore – the signs of taverns, shops and picture booths, cheap dance orchestras – all burst into the kingdom of Aida and Il Trovatore. Gogol’s grotesque raged around us; what were we to understand as farce, what as prophecy? The incredible orchestral combinations, texts seemingly unthinkable to sing (‘And what makes your hands stink?’ sang Major Kovalyov) … the unhabitual rhythms (the mad accelerando when the Nose is being beaten up at the police station and the chorus shrieks: ‘Take that, take that, and that!’; the incorporating of the apparently anti-poetic, anti-musical, vulgar, but what was in reality the intonation and parody of real life – all this was an assault on conventionality….
When in 192882 Shostakovich came at our invitation to the cinema studios to compose music for the silent film New Babylon, his face was almost that of a child. He was dressed unusually for an artist in a white silk scarf, a soft grey hat, and he carried a large leather briefcase. He spoke with a slight stutter, using ordinary phrases. Often, to his own delight, he would recall from memory whole chunks of Chekhov or Gogol: isn’t it well put, how wonderful!
After viewing the film, which was still not edited to final cut, he agreed to write the score. Our ideas coincided. In those years film music was used to strengthen the emotions of reality, or, to use the current terminology, to illustrate the frame. We immediately came to an agreement with the composer that the music would be linked to the inner meaning and not to the external action, that it should develop by cutting across events, and as the antithesis of the mood of a specific scene. Our general principle was not to illustrate, and not to complement or coincide on this point. In the score the tragic themes intrude on to vulgar can-cans, the German cavalry galloped into Paris to the accompaniment of Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène (transformed suddenly out of the ‘Marseillaise’); the themes interwove with great complexity, changing the mood from the farcical to the pathetic.
There was much that was unusual for those times. Even the repertoire committee of those days evokes particular memories. The viewing hall was situated in the basement of the Sovietsky Kino83 building, which was under repair. There were puddles on the concrete floor. Several varicoloured chairs were placed at random on the floor. The composer, balancing on boards, had to make his way across the water to sit down at the piano and try it out. His face expressed complete bewilderment. One experiences all kinds of viewing sessions: happy ones, sad ones. Film directors are constantly irritated by bad lighting, mediocre copy, the rasping quality of the sound, but, my God, on this occasion the screen was ghastly, the piano out of tune, the hall filthy. And yet how wonderful that session seemed when Shostakovich himself played the first music he had composed for cinema.84
As the young Dmitri began to earn money from commissions and concert performances, the Shostakovich family gradually emerged from its years of poverty. Undoubtedly, financial as well as artistic considerations motivated Shostakovich to accept the job of music director at Meyerhold’s Theatre in Moscow from January 1928. In fact it allowed him to give up the ‘drudgery’ of playing at the cinemas.
Shostakovich had first met the brilliant theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold in Leningrad in 1927. After a subsequent hearing of the First Symphony, Meyerhold declared that he was greatly impressed by the young composer’s talent. It is Malko who takes the credit for suggesting that Shostakovich be employed at Meyerhold’s Theatre; but no doubt Leo Arnshtam, Shostakovich’s predecessor in the job, also promoted his friend. In all Shostakovich remained at Meyerhold’s Theatre for only two months (January and February). During this time he lived in Meyerhold’s flat.
The ecstatic ‘hot-house’ atmosphere that reigned at the Meyerhold household provoked ironic comment in a letter to Sollertinsky where Shostakovich described the behaviour of the ‘geniuses’: the director himself, his wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh and her two children from Esenin, the daughter a ‘genius’ poet and the son a ‘genius’ composer:
‘Well done, children. Well done,’ says V[sevolod] E[milievich]. ‘Shostakovich, it’s true, isn’t it, they’ve done very well?’
Raikh: ‘And tell me, Dima (that’s what they call me here). Now Tanya has inherited her father’s talent, but where did Kostya get his talent for music?’
Meyerhold: ‘From you, my dear!’
Raikh: ‘Why from me? I’m an actress not a musician.’
Meyerhold: ‘You are an actress. But you perceive the Word in its fullness. Where the Word ends, there Music starts, that’s what Heine said. Isn’t that right, Dima?’
He slightly hunches up, and often repeats, ‘That’s right, Dima, ah Dima?’
I just sit and gloomily keep silent.’85
At the end of the year Meyerhold was looking for a composer to write music for his production of Mayakovsky’s new play, The Bedbug. After receiving a refusal from Prokofiev, the director turned to Shostakovich, who wrote most of the music for the play in January 1929, while simultaneously working on the music for New Babylon and on a commission from MALEGOT to compose an Overture and Finale to Erwin Dressel’s opera Armer Columbus (Poor Columbus).
As the conductor Smolich recalled, Shostakovich had already earned a reputation at MALEGOT where his opera The Nose was being rehearsed. Now he was called in at the eleventh hour to spice up Dressel’s opera. In the finale-epilogue entitled ‘What is America Today’ Shostakovich found himself dealing for the first time with the theme of the decadent West and Americans – a theme he took up again in The Golden Age and Great Lightning. (It provided a legitimate opportunity to show off his skills as writer of light music and foxtrots.) In the epilogue Shostakovich’s music was to be accompanied by a projected film cartoon (the film is lost, but the surviving manuscript score bears captions such as ‘dreadnoughts, steamships, aeroplanes’, ‘Enter Yankees’, ‘The Kellogg Pact’).
Not surprisingly music from The Bedbug found its way into New Babylon, and from Armer Columbus into future works, including the First Piano Concerto. Shostakovich went on to write music for many theatre productions, but he never collaborated with Meyerhold again, much to their mutual regret.
The painter NIKOLAI SOKOLOV was a member of Kukryniksy, a collective group of artists who achieved fame for their theatre designs, illustrations, and in particular for their political and satirical cartoons which appeared in the magazine Krokodil. Here are his memories of Shostakovich at Meyerhold’s Theatre:
I first got acquainted with Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich in 1928. In fact it wasn’t so much an acquaintance as a working contact with him at Meyerhold’s Theatre during the time when our collective, Kukryniksy, mounted the staging of the first part of Mayakovsky’s play The Bedbug. I was then twenty-five years old and Shostakovich was several years younger than me. ‘Mitenka’, as V. E. Meyerhold fondly called him, was writing the music to the play. His appearance was that of a boy – very thin and scrawny, pale, with a thick head of hair; he created the impression of being very modest and shy. His light-coloured myopic eyes looked out in bewilderment through his spectacles at all that surrounded him. His gait was nervous and rapid, as were the constant movements of his hands.
He also spoke very quickly, but quietly, and he didn’t open his mouth often. He came down from Leningrad for the rehearsals, bringing with him the music composed for the scenes of the March and the Intermezzo. The music was sharp, angular and unusual, but it was easy to remember, and Meyerhold himself commented, ‘That’ll blow away the cobwebs in our brains!’
At the rehearsals we several times observed Meyerhold, Mayakovsky and Shostakovich sitting together.
Once we met Shostakovich looking distraught and upset. It turned out that somewhere in the theatre he had lost the music of the March that he had just brought with him. The theatre workers, including Meyerhold himself, were all urgently set the task of finding the vanished March. On seeing how upset his darling Mitya was, Vsevolod Emilievich said to him gently, embracing him around the shoulders, ‘Don’t you worry, my dear, your March will be found. And if the worst comes to the worst, we’ll manage without it.’
The music was found shortly and the happy composer was soon walking around the theatre smiling.86
In 1929 Shostakovich accepted a position at TRAM, the theatre collective founded by the talented director Mikhail Sokolovsky in 1925, loosely following Brechtian principles. In its original concept, TRAM directly involved workers in ‘agitprop’ and ‘placard’ art with spontaneous performances in factories and workers’ clubs. But by 1929 TRAM had established itself along more professional lines (something that appealed to the young composer). Nevertheless TRAM’s choice of themes remained of immediate political and social relevance. For Shostakovich, his position at TRAM served as a useful shield from RAPM’s harassment, for he could not afford to ignore the militant hostility of the proletarian organizations, which were then at the height of their power.
In his Conservatoire progress report of October 1929, Shostakovich set out to prove his ideological ‘correctness’, declaring that he was about to start work on a ‘Soviet’ opera, and in connection with this he was working at TRAM, where ‘real workers’ art is being forged’, and that he wished to imbibe the principles of ‘Tramism’. In the same document he moots the conviction that music was one of the arts most accessible to the ‘masses’. While wishing to write accessible music, he also considered it a duty to wage war on the ‘musical pornography’ which was being heaped on the mass listeners in the name of accessibility.
Shostakovich wrote music for three plays (none of which he actually liked!) during his time there, Alexander Bezymensky’s The Shot, A. N. L’vov and N. F. Gorbenko’s Virgin Soil, and Adrian Piotrovsky’s Rule Britannia.
PAVEL MARANCHIK, one of the founders of TRAM, recalled the polemic discussions that took place at the TRAM commune in Nekrasov Street, Leningrad:
Dmitri Dmitriyevich used to come to our meetings often … I remember one occasion when some representatives of RAPM came to see us. A fierce argument arose over the various ways in which Soviet musical culture should be developed. Shostakovich proved that in itself the term ‘proletarian composer’ was absolutely meaningless, that an enormous amount of work lies ahead in the assimilation of our cultural heritage, and that many proletarian composers write noisy declarations and very mediocre music.87
The Georgian composer ANDREI BALANCHIVADZE met Shostakovich in Leningrad when he came to take his entrance exam at the Conservatoire in 1927. The two composers became close friends and Shostakovich enjoyed visiting Balanchivadze at his Tbilisi home in Georgia, where in 1932 he wrote part of the second act of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Balanchivadze had followed Shostakovich’s example and started working as music director in a collective theatre founded along TRAM principles so as to avoid hounding by the Georgian proletarian organizations.
Once, in answer to my question about the essence of musical ideology, Shostakovich wrote to me:
‘Ideology in my view can be demonstrated in this manner. Let us take literature. In two different works we have the description of one and the same subject. For instance, Gogol’s description of the River Dnieper (“Wondrous Is the Dnieper”), and then the description of the same River Dnieper in the Afinogenov play Construction on the Dnieper. Here we are dealing with two authors’ completely different attitudes to the same subject.
‘It is the attitude of the author that gives rise to the ideology. And the same in music. Let us suppose that the two composers Ivanov and Petrov each decide to write a composition on the theme of “The Factory”. Ivanov goes to the factory and sees the machines, the stock, the activity and motion, the clatter and grinding, chugging and churning of the machinery. Ivanov comes home and conscientiously attempts to depict all these noises and movements using the greatest professionalism. Petrov also goes to the factory and hears the same noises, clatter and grinding, but notwithstanding also notices something else. For instance, he notices the pathos of socialist labour, the enthusiasm and dynamic energy of the creative force of the working class, its tragedy in relation to its failures and its joys at the success in the overfulfilling of the Plan. Petrov comes home, and, with the same professionalism as Ivanov, depicts the noises of the factory, but additionally that important thing that has excited him, which Ivanov was not able or did not want to notice. Here we now have two compositions on the theme of “The Factory”. Which of them is closest to us? Clearly, Petrov’s. In this way it is the attitude of the composer to a particular subject which he wishes to illustrate that defines his ideology.’88
Shostakovich was invited by the director Nikolai Akimov to write music for his controversial production of Hamlet at the Moscow Vakhtangov Theatre. He started work on the music in December 1931. The play’s premiere was on 19 May 1932, just a week after his marriage to Nina Varzar. The violinist YURI ELAGIN led the Vakhtangov Theatre orchestra for several years, where he got to know many of the best Soviet composers:
Soon after I started work in the theatre, the rehearsals for Hamlet started. The plan for the production of Hamlet was conceived by the artist and director, Nikolai Pavlovich Akimov, who co-produced and created the sets for Treachery in Love. His plan was eccentric to the highest degree, but Akimov presented it so entertainingly at the meeting of the artistic council that it was difficult to raise any objections to it.
‘Nobody in this turbulent age of ours is interested in the philosophical ponderings of the Danish Prince,’ said Akimov. ‘The contemporary theatre-goer doesn’t wish to languish from boredom during the abstruse, time-worn monologues. The adventurous element of the tragedy holds much greater interest; duels, sword-fights, bloody and deceitful intrigues, brilliant court feasts, the young prince Fortinbras returning victorious to his native country. And Ophelia will not be the usual pale, weak-minded girl, but a seductive beauty, dissolute in her behaviour, and of dubious moral standards. Our Hamlet will be a hearty young rake and a good fencer. We will have hunts and spectacular battle scenes. Horses will charge across the stage ridden by knights in shining armour. The audience will gasp at the sight of the royal banquet. We will fill our Hamlet with music – music that is sharp-edged, brilliant and witty, and full of innovation. And we will invite Shostakovich to compose it.’
… I remember first seeing Shostakovich at the rehearsals of Hamlet in 1932. He was still a very young man, of about twenty-five or twenty-six. He behaved with extreme modesty, and made no comments at the rehearsals, but also seldom handed out praise.
One evening a dinner was arranged in his honour at the home of one of the actors. It was here that I met him personally for the first time. He drank a lot at the table, but instead of getting drunk he became more reserved, silent and polite. The only visible sign was that his usually very pale face grew still paler. Our girls paid court to him incessantly, but he gave them scant attention. Towards the end of the evening, one of the actresses started singing gypsy romances to guitar accompaniment. Shostakovich sat down next to her and listened in rapt attention. She sang marvellously. When everybody started to leave, he thanked her and kissed her hand. He himself never touched the piano throughout the evening, however much we urged him.
The music he wrote for Hamlet was exceptional in its originality and innovation. It was much closer to Shakespeare’s Hamlet than anything else in Akimov’s production. Of course there were moments of great eccentricity in the music which were in the style of the production; for instance, at the ball, under a biting, spicy jazz accompaniment, the drunken Ophelia (played by our most beautiful actress, Valentina Vagrina) sang a jolly song with a frivolous text in the style of German chansonnières from the beginning of the century. It was interesting how, in the famous scene with the flute, Shostakovich angrily mocked both the Soviet authorities and a group of proletarian composers who at that time were at the height of their power and caused much harm to Russian music and musicians. In this scene, Hamlet held the flute to the lower part of his torso, and the piccolo in the orchestra, accompanied by double bass and a drum, piercingly and out of tune played the famous Soviet song ‘They Wanted to Beat Us, to Beat Us’ written by the composer Alexander Davidenko, the leader of the proletarian musicians. The song had been written on the occasion of the victory of Soviet troops over the Chinese in 1929.89
Shostakovich met Tatyana Glivenko in 1923, when he was sixteen, while recuperating from tuberculosis at the Crimean sanatorium of Koreiz near Gaspra. Mariya Shostakovich, who accompanied her brother on this trip, wrote home to her mother: ‘(Mitya) has grown, got a suntan, is cheerful and has fallen in love. This is now clear to me. The girl in question is a bit strange, a flirt, and I don’t like her; but then it is hard to please your sister in such matters.’90
Evidently Sofiya Vasilyevna was sufficiently alarmed to write a cautionary letter to her son. His reply is an interesting document, showing him to be in tune with the fashionable spirit of free love that had been strongly instilled in Russian youth of the day:
You write that I should be careful, and not get entangled. In reply I want to submit a little philosophy. Pure animal love … is so vile that one doesn’t need to begin to speak about it. I don’t think that was what you had in mind. In such an instance, a man is no different from an animal. But now, suppose that a wife ceases to love her husband and gives herself to another, and that they start living together openly, despite the censorious opinions of society. There is nothing wrong with that. On the contrary, it’s even a good thing, as Love is truly free. The oath sworn before the altar is one of the worst features of religion. Love cannot last for long. Of course the best thing one could imagine would be the complete annulment of the institution of marriage, with all its fetters and responsibilities, but that is of course a utopian wish. If there is no marriage then there can be no family, and that would be a terrible thing. But there can be no question but that Love is free. And, Mamochka, let me warn you, that if I at some point fall in love I do not intend to bind myself by marrying. But if I do marry, and if my wife loves another, then I won’t say a word; if she wants a divorce, I’ll give it to her, and take the blame on myself…. But at the same time I know that there exists the sacred vocation of parenthood. So, when you start to ponder the subject, your head bursts. But in any case, Love is free!91
On return to Leningrad Shostakovich set about writing his first Piano Trio (or Poème) which he dedicated to Tatyana.92 Their ensuing relationship was not an easy one, due to the pressures of separation, Shostakovich’s inability to commit himself and the innuendoes of family disapproval. However, it continued over several years and was of real importance in both their lives. In 1929 Glivenko met and married Alexander Berlin, a professor of chemistry, while in the meantime Shostakovich had met Nina Varzar, his future wife, in the summer of 1927. His relationship with Nina likewise had its ups and downs, both before their marriage in May 1932 and afterwards. Here are TATYANA GLIVENKO’S memories of their relationship:
My family comes from Moscow. My father was a philologist by profession, whereas both my husband and son were professors of chemistry. I was the only one in the family not to complete a university course, and, so to speak, never had a ‘profession’.
I met Shostakovich in the summer of 1923 at Gaspra in the Crimea. We were exact contemporaries; we shared the same birth date, only his birthday was on 25 September New Style, and mine 25 September Old Style; in other words I was two weeks younger than him. Mitya had been sent to recuperate; he had been seriously ill with inflammation of the lymph glands (a form of tuberculosis), and had swellings on his neck. Times were very hard then. Alexander Glazunov, the director of the Petrograd Conservatoire, arranged a grant for him to be sent to a sanatorium on the grounds of his poor health. My father, a great lover of social work, held a position in the state organization responsible for sanatoriums and ‘rest-houses’. He was the representative of the ‘House of Scientists’, which had its sanatorium at Koreiz. He decided that my sister and I should go there that summer for a holiday. It was at this sanatorium that I got to know Mitya, although unfortunately this only happened towards the end of his stay. Later Mitya wrote to me saying what a pity that we had lost so much time there before we met.
We fell in love then. It was a love that endured throughout our lives; here I believe that I am not only speaking for myself. For both of us it was the experience of first love. It turned into a complicated story, as we lived in different cities. We kept the relationship alive through corresponding regularly. Mitya was a complex person, and his family’s situation was extremely difficult. After his father’s death in 1922, they suffered great deprivations. True, it was a time of hardship for us all, the country was in a state of ruin and devastation and there was widespread hunger. His mother, Sofiya Vasilyevna, was left with three children to fend for. Marusya, the eldest, was only seventeen, a student at the Conservatoire, and she had to go out to work. Mitya was fifteen and very sickly. Zoya was only a young girl, and before long she too went out to work. Later, when she married and came to live in Moscow, we became the greatest of friends. There was only two months’ difference in the age of our eldest sons.
Mitya and I met only occasionally, usually when he was visiting Moscow. We spent a summer together at Anapa in the Caucasus when we were nineteen. In those days it was accepted that you didn’t have to marry; people were not aiming at marriage as they seem to today. We were in no hurry to tie ourselves down. When Mitya wrote to invite me to join him I replied that he should find me a room there, and then I would come down and live and work there independently. He was terribly offended and said, ‘Why this way, why can’t we live together?’ In the end we spent most of that summer together, and I intended to go and live with him in Leningrad.
In general Mitya found it very difficult to commit himself, as his moods kept fluctuating. All this when we lived in different cities contributed to the instability of our relationship. I never knew what was going on in Leningrad. Perhaps he had another girlfriend there? In the end it was I who didn’t wait for him and married someone else. But even then Mitya continued to come down to Moscow to see me and on many occasions tried to persuade me to leave my husband and to come and live with him in Leningrad. Only when I became pregnant with my first child did he accept that the relationship was over.
I was twenty-two when I married in February 1929. My husband took a very firm stand and said, ‘Either you marry me or I’ll stop coming to your house.’ Then Mitya came to Moscow and rang me. I went to see him in the hotel and told him that I was going to marry. He thought I was having him on. His face just darkened. The very next day we were celebrating the wedding at my parents’ house. In those days there were no ceremonies or other formalities. We had a modest sort of celebration at home with just a few friends present to drink a toast to our good health. My niece and her nanny lived with our family in the apartment. They were also very fond of Mitya. Suddenly, during this party, the nanny came up to me and whispered in my ear, ‘Tatyana, go to the phone, it’s Mitya for you.’ I picked up the phone.
‘It’s me – Shostakovich …’
‘Yes, I’m listening …’
No more was said, and that was that. He returned to Leningrad. According to Zoya, when he walked into his flat his first words were, ‘Tanya’s got married.’ Thereafter my name wasn’t mentioned for some time in their house, but later on he got to know my husband and they became friends.
However, a year later Mitya wrote to me, asking me to come to see him and saying that he would like me to live with him. We started corresponding again. I agreed to go up to Leningrad. I said I’d consider his proposal on return to Moscow and would write to him from there with my final answer. It’s very hard to explain, on the one hand he had asked me to come to stay with him, on the other he was curiously non-committal. When I came up to Leningrad, his sister Marusya burst into tears, saying, ‘Thank you for coming, stay with Mitya and with us now.’
For two months Mitya and I corresponded, and I wrote telling him that yes, I was about to take the decision to leave my husband and to be with him. Then Mitya would answer, ‘But you probably love your husband more …’ And so it continued until he informed me one day that he had got married himself – in secret. Of course there wasn’t an ounce of truth in it, it was all invention on his part. (He wrote saying, ‘Of course, she’s a real fool, but I’ve committed myself.’) He was trying to call my bluff, and to provoke me to leave by giving me a fright.
Maybe this is conceit on my part, but his marriage to Nina Varzar in 1932 was connected with the birth of my first child. Mitya’s sister Marusya came to see me while on a visit to Zoya, who had recently married and moved to Moscow. She told Zoya, ‘Now it’s really all over, Tanya is pregnant.’ Her intention had been to persuade me to leave and come and live with Mitya. My son was born on 3 May. Zoya, who was shortly expecting her first child, came to see me and my new baby and then left for Leningrad to have her baby at home. Only two weeks later Mitya and Nina got married. Zoya wrote to tell me that they had gone ahead with the marriage, and in secret! Although Mitya was by then a man of twenty-five, his mother had also tried to dissuade him from this marriage.
However, Sofiya Vasilyevna was a strange and complicated woman. You would think that she would have been delighted that her son had found happiness, as she was always complaining how miserable he was. But no, Mitya was forced to act in secret. His relationship with Nina had been going on and off for some time prior to this; they had decided to marry, then he withdrew, then he wrote asking me to come and live with him, so it was a complicated affair. In the middle of May 1932, Mitya was going to Moscow to attend the premiere of Akimov’s strange production of Hamlet at the Vakhtangov Theatre for which he’d written the music. The Shostakoviches lived very near the station. Mitya announced to the family that he was taking the night train to Moscow, but that he would go to the station on his own as it was within walking distance of their house. ‘There’s no need to accompany me.’ No sooner was he out of the door than Sofiya Vasilyevna rushed out and followed in order to see what was going on. According to Zoya, when she came back home, she sat down and cried. Zoya asked what the matter was and her mother replied, ‘I saw the silhouette of Nina Vasilyevna in the window of the compartment.’ Then the two of them sobbed all night long, although Zoya now says she can’t think why she joined in, there was nothing to cry about. After all Nina was an interesting, highly educated woman and a hundred times more intelligent than I was.
Mitya’s mother was largely responsible for preventing the development of our relationship. It’s true that she felt Mitya couldn’t take on the responsibility of marriage as he had no regular source of income. There’s no doubt that she did much to dissuade him from being with me. However, Sofiya Vasilyevna felt she could afford to love me once I was married to somebody else and wasn’t going to take Mitya away from her. Amother’s jealousy can be a terrible thing, particularly once a woman is widowed.
Sofiya Vasilyevna was very ambitious for her son. Sometimes I blame her for pushing Mitya, despite his fragile health. He was the centre of her world, and she paid far more attention to him than to his sisters, who were physically much stronger than him. I don’t think this did him much good. She followed every step in his education and professional career very closely, and was always delighted and thrilled by his every success. But this close identification with his professional life also created a lot of pressure on him. As it was, Mitya worked incredibly hard.
I remember for instance one occasion when I visited them in Leningrad. Mitya had pressed me very hard to come up, so I came. He was writing some piece and he wanted to finish it. He asked me to sit beside him while he wrote because it gave him a sense of security and pleasure if I just sat there quietly beside him. Then his mother came into the room and said, ‘Go out and leave Mitya to finish his work.’ But Mitya said, ‘No, I want Tanya to stay here, it helps me.’ This was only a detail, but typical of Sofiya Vasilyevna’s over-solicitous and interfering attitude to her beloved son.
Once, many years later, Mitya said to me when I was visiting him in his hotel in Moscow, ‘Why are you friendly with my mother? She is responsible for everything.’ Indeed, after I married my husband, I became a good friend of Sofiya Vasilyevna’s. In the 1930s I always saw her during her visits to Moscow, when she came to intercede for her son-in-law, Marusya’s husband Vsevolod Fredericks, who had been arrested. I even accompanied her when she visited those unpleasant institutions like the GPU.93 By this time Marusya had actually already divorced Frederiks, and I must say it was Sofiya Vasilyevna who made the most effort on his behalf.
I feel it was a real pity that Mitya and I didn’t marry. At the age of seventeen we had a wonderful love and we let it go. It may sound conceited, but I do think that Mitya would have been happier with me. He didn’t really have much happiness in life. He always wanted children. Nina created a family for him and he was terribly attached to his children. However, she lived much of the time with another man, and this cannot have been good for his self-esteem, however much he loved her. But Shostakovich would never have left her, he was a man of principle. He used to say, ‘Shostakovich will never abandon his children,’ and it was he more than Nina who created a sense of family. After her early death in 1954, he married again, first very briefly (Zoya called the woman in question a charlatan) and then to Irina Antonovna, who was a devoted wife. It was her fate to look after him in the years of his sickness.94
Tatyana Glivenko’s claim that Shostakovich’s mother was often over-solicitous and interfering in her relationship to her son is reinforced by NIKOLAI MALKO:
After the performance of his First Symphony, Shostakovich assumed a definite position in the musical sphere of Leningrad. Gradually his name became known outside of Leningrad. This obliged him to ‘grow up’, and he did, but he still had much childishness within him. It originated in part from his position in the family. He was the centre of life and the idol. His mother was so devoted that she constantly petted and spoiled him. She worked for him when he should have been working for himself, and often, thinking only of him, she even did his worrying for him…. He was automatically freed from any household worry, and it made him impractical to a degree. He always bore the imprint of his mother’s influence.
… The guardianship of his mother never relaxed. Sofiya Vasilyevna would telephone almost every day to tell me her worries and to ask for advice or help concerning Mitya.
The telephone would ring. It would be she, worried. ‘Mitya wants to marry.’
‘Well. What then? Let him.’
‘How can you say that? He’s still a child.’
The next day the telephone would ring again. ‘It is not so bad.’
‘What?’ I ask.
‘Mitya’s getting married.’95
‘Why?’
‘I looked through his diary and found a note, “Find a room.” I know him. He will never start looking. He does not even know how to start.’
Usually, after such a telephone call, my wife and I would ask Mitya to come over to the house; but I definitely do not remember that we had to discuss any of these matters with him or to comfort him in any such problems. It was not in his nature to mope, after the fashion of the old-time, romantic Russian student. In spite of all the hardship and deprivation he went through, Mitya remained spiritually strong and self-assured. He showed no signs of strain. This was partly due to his mother’s devoted care, and partly to the environment of Soviet times in which there was no room for slobbering or whimpering. But chiefly it was simply not his nature to whine. He had a positive attitude, and he was spiritually strong and self-reliant.96
Shostakovich was undoubtedly susceptible to female charm, and romantic attachments also fuelled his creative impulse. Yet suffering as he did from frequent swings of mood, Dmitri found it difficult to make decisions. After his return from Warsaw, Shostakovich wrote to Yavorsky, complaining of his loneliness; his mother blamed his bad manners. ‘Mother reproaches me for my boorishness and lack of joy in life. “Every young person of your age is cheerful,” [she says]. This is something that also perplexes me. Apart from the fact that TRRRRR-agedy just provokes laughter in me, I’ve written four pieces which you can’t exactly call jolly. My dreams are mostly very melancholic.’97
At the end of April Shostakovich had his appendix removed in hospital. He reported to Yavorsky the terrible pain and outburst of hatred that he suffered after waking from the operation: ‘I shouted the hospital down, beat up the nurse and “expressed myself” with the most terrible swear words, until they administered morphine and I fell asleep. I was filled with compassion for Mother (Mamochka! I am dying, and how will you manage without me, Mamochka?). I remembered Valerian Mikhailovich [Bogdanov-Berezovsky], and asked for a militia-man to come, so he would take pity on my suffering and shoot me. They didn’t call a militiaman. I didn’t die, and now I am enjoying life.’98
As he convalesced the young Dmitri quickly recovered his good spirits. The summer was an eventful one for him, for at the end of May he met Ivan Sollertinsky, with whom he instantly became inseparable. Later on in the summer, while on holiday outside Leningrad in Detskoye Selo (as Tsarskoye Selo had been renamed), Dmitri met Nina Varzar, the woman who eventually became his wife. Irina, the eldest of the three attractive and talented Varzar sisters, recalled that the young ‘crowd’ at Detskoye Selo gathered together to play tennis, and in bad weather met indoors to play cards. Mitya Shostakovich first took note of Nina at the tennis court, and immediately made a point of getting acquainted.
Irina Varzar was witness to the start of her sister’s love affair:
Nina was a charmer, with ash-gold hair, and a wonderful complexion. Mitya was attracted to her, and he started coming on Thursdays to our flat on the Krasnyi Flot (Red Fleet) embankment. Mother was strict, and during the week only allowed us this one day off study so we could have fun and entertain guests. […] Mitya would play waltzes and foxtrots. […] Their prolonged courtship underwent many difficulties. Everything was very complex. The wedding was put off several times. Mother wanted Nina to complete her University studies and gain independence.
In 1929, the Leningrad Theatre Commission, in an attempt to help the creation of a modern and significant ‘Soviet’ ballet, announced a competition for a ballet libretto. The cinema director Alexander Ivanovsky won it with Dynamiada (later renamed The Golden Age), the story of the triumph of a Soviet football team over its bourgeois-fascist rivals. Shostakovich was invited to write the score for it, which he completed by the end of February 1930. The ballet went into rehearsal at the Leningrad Kirov Theatre (known also by its official acronym GATOB; formerly known as the Marinsky Theatre) with a strong team of dancers (including the young Galina Ulanova in the role of the ‘Western Komsomolka’). The dancers found the music hard to assimilate but Shostakovich absolutely refused to simplify or in any way to compromise his brilliantly orchestrated score. Due to the many problems that arose in its production, the premiere was postponed more than once, eventually taking place on 26 October 1930.
Initially Shostakovich had doubts about the libretto and claimed that he did ‘everything possible to fight away’ from it.99 In a letter to Zakhar Lyubimsky, the director of Leningrad’s State theatres, Shostakovich talks of an anti-religious ballet libretto called Morals for which he expresses his preference over that of Dynamiada.100 However, Smolich, the director of The Nose, and Sollertinsky encouraged Shostakovich to tackle Dynamiada; the composer himself was attracted by the sporting element in its subject. His declared aim was that the music should play a primary role by creating ‘real symphonic tension and dramatic development’.
Shostakovich had mixed feelings about the reception of the ballet. Immediately after the first performance, he wrote to Lyubinsky to inform him that the ballet had been successful and that the second and third acts in particular had been heartily applauded.101 Soon, as critical reviews started to appear, Shostakovich redefined public reception of the ballet as enjoying a ‘frosty success’.
Four days after the premiere on 26 October 1930, the composer wrote to Smolich:
I am more than ever convinced that in every piece of music theatre the music must play the main, and not the supporting role…. But this didn’t happen in The Golden Age. The staging functioned on its own, the music on its own…. I cannot defend my ballet convincingly, since, in regard to the artistic content, I know I have written an anti-artistic work. And I hold you, Lyubimsky, Sollertinsky and others responsible. I can answer for the music of The Golden Age; I believe it to be exceptionally successful. But in future I shall write only on subjects that truly kindle my imagination.102
In fact The Golden Age enjoyed nineteen performances at GATOB over the 1930/31 season – a number that overtook all the records at the time of any other Soviet ballet shown in a season. Further productions of the ballet in Kiev (in 1930) and in Odessa (in 1931) pointed to the ballet’s real success. In reality The Golden Age, like the The Nose, was a victim of the currently deteriorating political situation within the country.
As if trouble with one ballet was not enough, Shostakovich immediately took on another!103 He was soon aware that he was again dealing with a defective subject. He informed Sollertinsky:
Comrade Smirnov has read me the libretto for a ballet, The New Machine. Its theme is extremely relevant. There once was a machine. Then it broke down (problem of material decay). Then it was mended (problem of amortization), and at the same time they bought a new one. Then everybody dances around the new machine. Apotheosis. This all takes up three acts.104
Smirnov, who at the time was director of the Moscow Arts Theatre Second Studio, had had a varied experience as soldier, diplomat and follower of Walt Disney. Shostakovich’s facetious account of his scenario describes the basis of a plot, which even after modification could not disguise its banality, and which, as Sollertinsky warned his friend, risked becoming schematic.105 The topical theme concerned industrial sabotage, where a lazy (and drunken) worker incites a friend to throw a bolt (rather than a spanner) into the works. Contrast (whether between hooligans and Komsomol workers, the village church and the factory workshop) nevertheless provided good compositional material, and gave Shostakovich the opportunity to compose some set dances satirizing such stock figures as the ‘Bureaucrat’, the ‘Conformist’, the ‘Lady of the Intelligentsia’, the ‘capitalists’ and ‘the textile workers’.
The constructivist artists Tatiana Bruni (1902–2001) and her husband Georgii Korshukov were responsible for the sets of the ballet which were conceived as an elaborate assemblage, functioning on multi-levels with tricks of lighting and moving decor. Bruni recalled (many years after the event) that the ballet was unfortunate in its timing, coming into being as the political climate was veering towards the rigid and unimaginative tenets of socialist realism. The final rehearsals, which were open to the public, became a testing ground for audience reaction to the music and to the constructivist sets. As she recalled, ‘As soon as the curtain opened applause rang out; when the factory started to move, it transformed into an ovation that did not let up till the end of the spectacle. The dancing chapel and individual costumes delighted the public. […] The catcalling of those in opposition (manifest philistinism) was drowned out by applause.’106
The ballet’s sets and Lopukhov’s choreography cast a backward glance to constructivist experiment of the 1920s (Prokofiev’s Le Pas d’acier, Mosolov’s Factory, and Foregger’s Dance of the Machines) as well as to the idea of the ‘physical culture’ as an independent art form, as manifested in the organized ‘festival’ parades that became such a feature of the Stalinist era. In fact one of the main problems with The Bolt was its aspect of ongoing experiment, where not even the scenario was fixed by the time of the first (and only) performance on 8 April 1931.
Predictably perhaps, the ballet provoked negative reaction in the press. Rabochii i Teatr’s review was menacing: ‘The Bolt was a flop and should serve as a last warning to the composer.’
It was made clear that Shostakovich’s music was too flippant to deal seriously with the proletarian theme. Nevertheless the music’s immediate appeal to the audience was the most obviously successful part of the ballet.
Reflecting on the ballet’s failures at a distance of twenty years, its choreographer Lopukhov wrote, ‘It seemed and still seems to me that the attempt to choreograph political satire in The Bolt bore an influence on variety shows. […] The Bolt showed that in ballet new heroes such as factory workers are possible, and that if one extracts from labour the poetry of dance one can represent a factory workshop on stage.’
In fact Shostakovich borrowed (and reused) various parts of the score from his other music written for theatre and cinema and from his own vaudeville Declared Dead.
Undeterred, three years later he embarked on writing another ballet for Lopukhov, The Limpid Stream. It was premiered by a new ballet troupe at MALEGOT on 4 June 1835.
Once more Shostakovich was landed with a simplistic libretto (about life on a collective farm), for which he decided to adjust his musical language. In the event the ballet’s music was considered by some its single redeeming feature, whereas others disparaged its banality. However, The Limpid Stream enjoyed great public success and ran until it was subjected to a vicious attack in the newspaper Pravda with the article ‘Ballet Falsehood’ (6 February 1936). Following hard on the heels of the notorious article ‘Muddle Instead of Music’, it sealed Shostakovich’s disgrace.
The conductor Alexander Gauk studied at the St Petersburg Conservatoire and made his name as a ballet conductor at the Leningrad State Theatre of Opera and Ballet (formerly the Mariinsky Theatre and later re-named the Kirov Theatre). His contact with Shostakovich dates from the late 1920s, when he gave the premieres of the ballets The Golden Age and The Bolt. From 1930 he briefly held the position of director of the Leningrad Philharmonic. With this orchestra he gave the first performance of the Third ‘Mayday’ Symphony on 21 January 1930.
The comments on Gauk attributed to Shostakovich are far from flattering.107 Allegedly, Gauk was responsible for the loss of the manuscript of the Fourth Symphony, which was kept in a suitcase that disappeared during the Second World War. According to that source, the manuscripts of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies were lost at the same time.
Here is ALEXANDER GAUK on the production of the two ballets:
I was working at the time as chief conductor at the Kirov Theatre.108 One day I was approached by the director, Emmanuil Kaplan, with the proposal to start work on a new ballet. He said that the designer was to be the artist Vladimir Dmitriev, whom I already knew.
‘What is the subject of this ballet, and who’s the composer?’ I asked. He replied, ‘It’s called The Golden Age, and Shostakovich is writing the music.’
I was delighted, and at the same time a bit intimidated. It would undoubtedly be very interesting to work on Shostakovich’s music, which promised to be full of innovation and surprises, and would display the wonderful orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre in all its glory. But on the other hand, I feared that the ballet company would create problems….
Kaplan had just completed his studies at the Conservatoire as a singer, and also had studied stage direction. He was a fanatical admirer of Meyerhold. But he had no experience, and The Golden Age was his first production…. The choreographic side was consigned to the care of Fyodor Lopukhov, L. Leontev and M. Petrov. It turned out that Kaplan did not have the necessary authority to deal with the ballet company or the choreographers.109 Soon, arguments started which sometimes brought our work to a halt. In certain newspaper bulletins, hints were dropped that the music of the ballet was not up to standard. Naturally, this aroused the fury of Shostakovich….
In the end, Lopukhov took over the choreography, leaving Kaplan as the producer.110
Unfortunately, the ballet was not successful. This was natural in so far as success was defined by the ballet buffs, who were addicted to tradition and unable to accept this unusual music. And yet the music was the best part of the whole production. Dmitri Dmitriyevich later made a concert suite from the ballet, which I conducted with the Leningrad Philharmonic.
While learning the orchestral part, there was a certain section that never came off in rehearsal. It was written for strings, with the first violins in an extremely high tessitura. I once suggested to Shostakovich that he should double this line in certain places with piccolo, as this might cover the intonation problems. But Dmitri Dmitriyevich immediately refused. I now realize that this would have ruined the sound effect he wanted to achieve….111
Dmitri Dmitriyevich amazed us with his extraordinary professionalism and punctiliousness. He was never late in providing a new piece for the ballet or in orchestrating it. He was very restrained in his bearing. He never argued; what he had to say or demonstrate was always of interest, and we all tried to fulfil his every demand. He already had tremendous authority. I remember that before the first orchestral rehearsal I was extremely nervous, as the music was very difficult … I admit that I was worried that I would not hear the wrong notes. But on the contrary, it all worked out well. The musicians found that their parts were very comfortably written. The logic of the composition was so clear that the slightest fault of intonation was immediately obvious. I felt that I had never before heard so well. That is an inherent feature of Shostakovich’s music.
Shortly before writing The Golden Age, Dmitri Dmitriyevich had made a transcription of ‘Tahiti Trot’.112 At my request Dmitri Dmitriyevich included this piece as an entr’acte before the third act of the ballet. The audience always applauded it vigorously and demanded its encore.113
Gauk also conducted the only performance of Shostakovich’s second ballet The Bolt, and was much distressed at the work’s failure.
The music of The Bolt is permeated with Russian intonations. When Shostakovich was accused of cosmopolitanism, I always tried to point to the forgotten score of The Bolt, but nobody knew the music. There are some wonderful musical characterizations there worthy of Chekhov’s short stories. Dmitri Dmitriyevich allowed me to make up a suite from the ballet score, which I then performed frequently. It enjoyed an overwhelming success, and we always had to encore some of the numbers from it.114
The ballerina TATYANA VECHESLOVA, who danced in the premiere of The Bolt, confirms the difficulties that Shostakovich’s new music created for the ballet company:
I first heard Shostakovich’s name when I was twenty years old. His opera The Nose appeared on the stage. Soon after that the premiere of his ballet The Bolt was given. P. Gusev and I danced the roles of the young Komsomols.115 We found it difficult to assimilate the music of the ballet; it was full of complex harmony which sometimes acquired grotesque overtones. We had never met with such music before, and it soon opened up new horizons which were not by any means immediately evident to everyone. To be honest, at the time we did not understand how significant it was that this musical genius and contemporary of ours was making a new contribution to ballet. Much of his music just seemed incomprehensible to us. We had to ‘grow’ in order to learn to appreciate it …
Although I had no further occasion to dance to Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s music, I was fortunate to enjoy the friendship of his family, particularly of his mother, Sofiya Vasilyevna, and his sister Mariya Dmitriyevna. I remember how warmly I was received by them. After the premiere of The Bolt, several of us dancers went to celebrate at their home. Sofiya Vasilyevna very touchingly kept insisting, ‘Tanyusha, please, I beg you, dance with Mitya.’
But ‘Mitya’ for a long time stubbornly refused, although he eventually gave in. We danced a foxtrot. And to his embarrassment he kept treading on my feet! Yes, he was unable to keep time! And this threw him into even greater confusion.
What a remarkable man he was, so modest and shy!116
Despite a period of intense creativity, by 1930 Shostakovich had produced no major work (apart from his First Symphony) that could claim a permanent place in the concert repertoire. His overriding urge now was to dedicate himself to an opera on a serious or tragic subject; he had no intention of lumbering himself with a ‘topical’ libretto and a mediocre production as he had done in the ballets. In an article entitled ‘Declaration of a Composer’s Responsibility’ he wrote that it was intolerable for a composer to have to subjugate his personality to a producer’s superficial tastes or a theatre’s inflexible methods, where ‘music is employed as a series of clichés – a “jolly” dance for the hero, a “foxtrot” to portray decadence, and “brisk” music for the optimistic finale’.117
Shostakovich’s first opera The Nose (1930) had provoked much polemical discussion as to the ideological validity of avant-garde experiment. To placate his critics he made frequent statements that he was now engaged in a search for a ‘Soviet’ theme for his next opera. In the event, he turned to a nineteenth-century Russian writer, Nikolai Leskov, for his subject. Leskov’s story ‘Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District’ was reputedly suggested to Shostakovich by Boris Asafiev, the original dedicatee of the work. Initially Shostakovich himself undertook the writing of the libretto, but later he sought the aid of the writer Alexander Preis to consolidate his work. The composer started to work out his ideas in October 1930, and then worked intensively on the opera in the autumn of 1931. He informed Sollertinsky, his confidant in all his creative projects, that he had completed the first act on 30 October in the Black Sea resort of Batumi, and ‘in the intervals between bathing and partaking of food, I’m orchestrating it’.118 He combined work on the opera with other commissions for cinema and theatre music. Lady Macbeth was finally completed in December 1932, and Shostakovich dedicated it to his new bride, Nina Varzar.
In March 1933 the Leningrad Maly Theatre (MALEGOT) approved the decision to stage Lady Macbeth, with the same team that had worked on The Nose. (Director – Smolich; designer – Dmitriev; conductor – Samosud.) The opera opened in Leningrad on 22 January 1934, and two days later the Moscow premiere took place at the Nemirovich-Danchenko Theatre, under the title of Katerina Izmailova. It was directed by Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, the co-founder with Konstantin Stanislavsky of the Moscow Arts Theatre. (It is a reflection of the times that the Moscow performances were announced as part of the production campaign for the 17th Party Congress to keep on a par with the ‘production quota’ of the Donbass coal-miners.)
The opera was given a triumphant reception in both cities. Shostakovich professed himself satisfied with both productions, although in private he expressed a preference for MALEGOT’s. He confided to the director Smolich: ‘Overall, I have to say that your production of Lady Macbeth reaches the audience. It sustains the tension and interest throughout, and evokes sympathy for Katerina.’119
Naturally, the opera stimulated much discussion. The conductor Alexander Gauk recalled that it provoked an enormous number of arguments for and against:
Many people were put off by some of the naturalistic scenes and situations. It seems to me that this defect originated from the desire to give utmost expression to the subject, and better to convey the sordid character and the depraved atmosphere in which the action takes place.120
A more critical point of view was expressed by Daniil Zhitomirsky, who pointed out with hindsight that the opera:
was not free from the propaganda tendencies of the 1920s. Both composer and librettist considered it necessary to portray the image of the ‘dark ages’ of Old Russia. They removed from Leskov’s story all the poetic pages which illustrated the deluded beginnings of Katerina Izmailova’s love – the illusion of her first womanly passion which led to such a tragic end. They introduced primitive satire into the opera. The caricature of the priest in the end of the fourth scene, the whole of the seventh scene at the police station remind me of the so-called ‘Blue Blouses’,121 who presented collective propaganda in clubs and factories, and in which I participated in my student years to earn some money. Yet it is in the final scene of Lady Macbeth that Shostakovich revealed with incredible force the expression of human sorrow and the despair of the lost soul.122
Shostakovich felt it necessary to justify his sympathy with a heroine who was driven through passion to brutal murder. He explained that ‘Leskov was unable to interpret correctly the events taking place in his story. My role as a Soviet composer consists in retaining the power of Leskov’s narrative while using a critical approach to explain these events from our Soviet point of view.’123 In effect Shostakovich maintained that Katerina was a victim of the sordid circumstances of her narrow-minded, provincial, petty merchant background. Conveniently, these happenings belonged to the bad old days of Tsarist Russia.
Overall, Lady Macbeth was an unprecedented success and secured Shostakovich’s reputation as a composer of dramatic genius both at home and abroad. Within a year from its premiere, MALEGOT had given fifty performances, and outside the Soviet Union the opera reached stage production in the USA (Cleveland and the Metropolitan Opera House in New York), Argentina, Czechoslovakia and Sweden, all before the end of 1935. Not that the opera lacked its critics. Igor Stravinsky, who was present at a performance in Cleveland, dismissed the work as ‘lamentably provincial; the music plays a miserable role as illustrator in a very embarrassing realistic style’.124
But the opera’s fortunes were dramatically reversed with the publication of ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ in January 1936, when it was effectively dealt a sudden death-blow.
Here are memories of the writing and production of Lady Macbeth, the first from GALINA SEREBRYAKOVA. A writer and expert on Karl Marx, she was on friendly terms with the Shostakovich family during the 1920s. Arrested in 1937, she languished in the Gulag camps until the years of the Nikita Khrushchev ‘thaw’. Reputedly, her experiences in the camps did not shake her Marxist convictions. After her rehabilitation, Shostakovich renewed his contacts with her:
[Shostakovich] was thirsting to re-create the theme of love in a new way, a love that knew no boundaries, that was willing to perpetrate crimes inspired by the devil himself, as in Goethe’s Faust. Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk attracted him because of the fierce intensity and the fascination of Katerina’s magnetism …
In the murky room he was writing this new work on a large desk. He would play bits of it through on the piano. I was entertained to tea by two beautiful light-haired girls, Shostakovich’s sisters, and his charmingly simple and affectionate mother. The young composer admitted to me that he was about to get married. He was unable to hide his agitation, and, gulping down his words, he told me about his fiancée, trying to remain cool and objective about her, an impossible feat for those in love!125
The singer NADEZHDA WELTER played the part of Sonetka in the original MALEGOT production of Lady Macbeth. Shostakovich praised her performance as the Countess in Meyerhold’s renowned production of Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, describing it as ‘quite marvellous’.126 Here she describes the first rehearsals of the opera.
Long before rumours had reached us about this new opera, we became accustomed to seeing in the theatre a slim young man in glasses, who was very shy, modest and unusually refined. He came to all the preliminary rehearsals with singers, and also all the stage and orchestral rehearsals of whatever opera was currently being produced. He usually arrived with Samosud, and, sitting somewhere in the corner, he listened and observed very attentively. In this way he got to know the company, which had been reformed after The Nose had been taken off the MALEGOT repertoire.
He spoke very little. One only occasionally caught a glimpse of his feelings through a hardly perceptible smile or a flash from the depths of his eyes.
The company, and particularly the singers, were intrigued to know what this daring experimenter had brought to us now. And Samosud, who was totally enthralled by Shostakovich’s exceptional talents, was engrossed in studying the score of the new opera. The lights burned in his study long past midnight; he and the composer were discussing the new opera.
At long last our meeting with Shostakovich was fixed. It was not to be the usual play through of a new opera for the company, as the decision had already been made to produce it. Neither was it our first acquaintance with Dmitri Dmitriyevich – we had already known each other for several years.
The meeting took place in a relaxed atmosphere, which Samosud knew so well how to create. Here for the first time we saw that Shostakovich’s restraint was only a superficial skin, and that a passionate spring of energy and dynamic creative force was bubbling underneath it.
At this memorable meeting, Sollertinsky explained to us with characteristic passion and brilliance how Shostakovich was not only revealing the cruelties of an old world, but how this world had crippled and disfigured the life of this woman. Samosud sang various phrases for us with enthusiasm, and at his bidding Shostakovich played various episodes from the opera with great sincerity and extraordinary expression.
The music captivated and disturbed us. My heart literally stopped beating as I was gripped by a passionate desire to take on the part of Katerina. The next day I went to see Samosud. When I entered his study I was overcome with confusion on seeing Sollertinsky there sitting in an armchair. All the same I asked Samosud if he would ask Shostakovich to add some phrasing and articulation to Katerina’s part as, in his time, Bizet had done with the part of Carmen. I assured him that the dramatic intensity of the part and the whole character of Katerina’s image was best suited to a mezzo-soprano.
Samosud laughed heartily and said, ‘Surely you are not so spell-bound by this opera that you are prepared to risk losing your voice altogether? The problem has nothing to do with phrasing, but with the tessitura.’ And Sollertinsky, nervously pacing up and down the study, came to a halt opposite me and shrieked, ‘The thought should not even cross your mind that the slightest change can be made in this brilliant music.’
Samosud supported him wholeheartedly and suggested that I take on the role of Sonetka. But I didn’t want to hear of it, still cherishing my dream to sing Katerina.
Then something unexpected occurred. Having learnt the part of Katerina, trying it out at home, I gradually became convinced that Samosud was right: the tessitura of the part was hard even for a soprano. Then, watching A. Sokolova rehearsing the role of Katerina, I was struck by the simplicity of her theatrical interpretation and the accuracy of her feeling for the part. In her vocal and dramatic gifts she corresponded to both Smolich’s and Samosud’s prerequisites. As a performer she was young and inexperienced, having previously only sung the role of Micaëla [in Bizet’s Carmen], but I understood why the composer should have chosen her in particular. Her naivety and ingenuousness in combination with the tragic pathos of the music created an amazing contrast. The purer her Katerina, the more terrible the tragedy. Sometimes one was overcome with a feeling of cold fear and horror at Shostakovich’s brilliant manner of offsetting the eternal themes, good and evil, the striving for freedom and the struggle with brutality.
Both our piano and orchestral rehearsals always took place in Shostakovich’s presence, and the reigning atmosphere of agitation intensified with each new-found detail of the staging. We were all gripped by a special feeling; before our very eyes a new and exceptional work of art was coming to life.
At the first orchestral rehearsal, Shostakovich was trembling from anxiety. He was so thoroughly engrossed by the production that only when Samosud stopped the orchestra and put some question to him, ‘Well, Mitya, how goes it?’, ‘Dmitri Dmitriyevich, how does it sound?’ did he return to reality.
While Smolich was running down from the stage on the ramp which covered the orchestral pit to say something to the conductor, Shostakovich and Sollertinsky were already standing beside the conductor’s desk. Ivan Ivanich, who was also present at all the rehearsals, usually sat next to Shostakovich and responded animatedly to every little success and failure. Helping first the singers and then the orchestral musicians with his advice, he could not keep still; he was forever jumping up and running to either the conductor or the producer.
Shostakovich’s intense concentration during rehearsals was manifested in the sudden lighting up of his eyes and the involuntary movements of his hand, with which he mechanically stroked his temples, his ears or his lips each time the orchestra paused. It would appear that he had stopped breathing, but when he covered his eyes with his hand and nervously rubbed his temple with his thumb and middle finger, we soon recognized this as a sign that he was about to voice some comment. Shostakovich would explain something, and the experienced musicians would perform his demands without a murmur, while Sollertinsky nodded his head approvingly. Sometimes friendly laughter burst out in the orchestra: Sollertinsky had cracked another brilliant joke.
Overtaken by the general atmosphere of enthusiasm, I gradually became immersed in my work on the role of Sonetka. However, I didn’t succeed in keeping it up for long. Once I arrived for a rehearsal at the theatre early and saw Shostakovich on his own by the window. He hurriedly greeted me and continued writing in his notebook. I nevertheless took my courage in my hands and asked, ‘Am I in your way?’
‘No, not at all, not at all.’
‘Dmitri Dmitriyevich, I am finding it very hard to feel the essence of Sonetka’s character. I don’t only want to see her as vulgar and coarse.’
Shostakovich put the pencil to his lips and thought for a second, and then, as if thinking aloud, he said, ‘It is difficult to speak of a definite image because that is only born during the process of work. Each role is a part of an actor’s soul. In my conception of her, Sonetka is not so much vulgar as reckless and unbridled. Her actions are guided not by cruelty but by the bitterness caused by the injustices and continual humiliations she has suffered. But she has preserved up to a point her youthful passion and feminine spirit.’127
Shostakovich spoke so simply and vividly that I saw my Sonetka at once. In the last scene, it is not so much cruelty but the daring of a degraded street urchin that dictates her image. Uncontrolled and hasty in her whims, she cruelly torments Katerina out of envy for her genuine passion; she laughs at the joys of love, which she herself has never experienced.128
LEVON ATOVMYAN, a composer by training, became Shostakovich’s lifelong friend and ally. They met in 1929, when Atovmyan, as a member of the All-Russian Society of Composers and Dramaturgs, roundly defended professional standards from the ideological attacks of RAPM. When the Union of Composers was founded he became director of the Gorkom, becoming responsible for organizing concerts and giving composers commissions. In 1936 he was ‘repressed’ and sent to work in Turkmenia. During the war he was rehabilitated and became an indispensable part of musical life in his role of director of Muzfond. Shostakovich trusted Atovmyan at every level, and allowed him to make arrangements of his film and theatre music.
Atovmyan, who travelled to Leningrad to hear the opera’s first performance at MALEGOT, recalls his impressions of Lady Macbeth’s different productions:
The premiere of the opera made a shattering impression on me; I was stunned by the power of Shostakovich’s talent and after the opera was over I was unable to say a word or speak to anybody. I don’t remember how I made my way back to the hotel; I was in a state of complete numbness and sat for a long time on the divan in my room, and eventually fell asleep without undressing. Quite early the next morning Shostakovich called by. I was delighted by his arrival, and spontaneously I found myself quoting the words, ‘Well, Mitya you are a God and do not know it yourself.’ We had breakfast and chatted for a long time.
I saw the opera over a hundred times in all, in the MALEGOT, the Nemirovich-Danchenko Theatre and the Bolshoi Theatre Filial productions, conducted respectively by Samosud, Stolyarov and Melik-Pashayev. I have to say that MALEGOT’s was the best production, although the MALEGOT team was vocally inferior to the others. There could be no talk of formalism or naturalism. I must mention the wonderful dramatic qualities of A.Tulubieva, who transmitted so wonderfully the tragic life of Katerina Izmailova in the Nemirovich-Danchenko production. In respect of the vocal quality the best Katerina was O. Leontieva (at the Bolshoi Theatre Filial). […] Many years later E. Andreeva won me over in her portrayal of Katerina at the Stanislavsky Music Theatre. But whoever heard Galina Vishnevskaya’s performance of Katerina’s two extended arias at Shostakovich’s home (she was accompanied that time by Mechislav Weinberg) can testify that her performance was at least three heads higher than the others, something she was able to confirm with her interpretation of the title role in the film of Katerina Izmailova.129
The director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko noted in his diary that certain aspects of the rival MALEGOT production were superior to his own production in Moscow:
The conductor Stolyarov does not possess the masterly poise of Samosud. This is the main difference between ours and the Leningrad productions. We show a tragedy; in Leningrad they play it as a lyrical opera. Our production is filled with strong emotion and suffering, theirs shows caution, a fear of exaggeration, of upsetting the nerves. And furthermore [at MALEGOT] they simply do not feel these strong emotions. Somebody cracked a witticism: in Moscow the opera is called Katerina Izmailova but they play Lady Macbeth, and in Leningrad is called Lady Macbeth but they play Katerina Izmailova.130
Shostakovich himself was loath to express a preference between the Leningrad and Moscow productions, saying both were very dear to his heart:
Nemirovich-Danchenko, with his great talent, has infused his production with the whole dramatic concept and culture of the Moscow Arts Theatre system. There are moments when he achieves quite shattering results. But at the same time I feel that his concept is derived more from Leskov than from the opera’s libretto. Smolich’s vision is rooted in his deep knowledge of how opera works. The musical culture invested in his production is of the highest level.131
As was to become a life-long pattern, Shostakovich combined ‘serious’ composition with commissions for film and theatre music. One of the first Soviet composers to compose for cinema soundtracks, Shostakovich wrote music to no fewer than fifteen films and seven theatre productions in between 1930 and 1940. The opportunity to work with Soviet directors of great distinction, whose ideas had been formulated during the experimental era of the 1920s, contributed much to Shostakovich’s outlook. Thus Arnshtam, Yutkevich, Trauberg and Kozintsev, Mikhail Tsekhanovsky and Friedrich Ermler were all influential figures in his development.
Not only did Shostakovich enjoy testing out his own professional skills, but he was able to appreciate the professionalism of others in every kind of musical genre; he definitely had no time for musical snobs. In 1930 he made the acquaintance of Leonid Utyosov and his ‘Tea Jazz’ orchestra in Odessa, the term being derived from Teatralny Djazz or ‘Theatre Jazz’. Utyosov had a chequered career, working his way from being a violinist, acrobat, restaurant crooner and actor to become the most famous and popular Soviet ‘jazz’ musician. His jazz orchestra played a mixed bag of music, much of which it would be fairer to describe as popular light music than jazz. Shostakovich informed Sollertinsky of his impressions: ‘I’m not enraptured by “Tea Jazz”, although they play well … But undoubtedly Utyosov is the greatest living artist in the USSR that I have come across. He reminds me of Meyerhold.’132
In 1931, Utyosov, together with Isaac Dunayevsky, the writer of popular songs and marches, decided to create a vaudeville entertainment ‘Declared Dead’133 at the Leningrad Music-Hall. The choreographer Fyodor Lopukhov was responsible for the dance numbers, and Shostakovich wrote the music, while the script was entrusted to Evgeni Ryss and Vsevolod Voevodin. The show dealt with the subject of an air alert, a relevant subject at the time, given that a campaign of orchestrated hysteria was set in motion, as Stalin entrenched his power and systematically eliminated his political enemies. Practice drills were organized for civilians at large as the possibility of enemy attack was rumoured. During the alert, should any disobedient citizen be found ‘above ground’, he would have been ‘declared dead’ and whisked away to a sanitary point in a militia van. The vaudeville follows the adventures of a ‘dead’ hero, involving his visits to some strange versions of purgatory and paradise, which were a good excuse for some topical anti-religious propaganda. The show called for a disarming array of styles from agitprop to parody, as well as additional tricks, from inclusion of live film to the barking of a trained German Shepherd dog, Alpha. But undoubtedly the main purpose of the plot was to allow Utyosov a lion’s share of the limelight in his double role as singer and actor. However, the fun was too outrageous and the vaudeville was soon closed after a hostile reception from RAPM activists.
Despite this setback, Shostakovich later returned to jazz, wishing to raise its level from light music played in cafés and music-hall to music with a professional status. In 1934 he agreed to form part of a jazz commission to organize a competition in Leningrad. This prompted him in turn to write his First Jazz Suite which reveals Shostakovich’s brilliance and wit as orchestrator, although the music hardly corresponds to the accepted understanding of jazz. Rather the composer utilizes a light music idiom he had already used extensively in his film and theatre music. This Suite was followed four years later by his Second Jazz Suite in three movements written at the request of the newly formed State Orchestra for Jazz and its conductor Victor Knushevitsky.
Matvei Blanter, the well-known song-writer and jazz composer, was instrumental in encouraging composers to write for this new orchestra, and went up to Leningrad to persuade Shostakovich. They became firm friends, discovering a love of football in common. Blanter recalled that when Shostakovich had completed the Suite ‘we gathered in Knushevitsky’s [Moscow] flat to hear it. The orchestration sounded good, but the music was not jazz. [Dmitri Dmitriyevich] came to hear the orchestra in rehearsal, and sat and listened for an hour, paying particular attention to the saxophonist and the percussionists. Then he brought the work back to us in a newly orchestrated version and it sounded wonderful.’ This latter work should not be confused with a ‘Suite for Variety Stage Orchestra’134 which was compiled by Levon Atovmyan in the 1950s from the most catchy numbers of Shostakovich’s film music. One suspects that this latter work, which is rooted in the world of Johann Strauss, was prepared not only with dance bands in mind, but with the Red Army Orchestras as well, which provided popular concert entertainment throughout the country. Although the piano score of the Second Jazz Suite was recently rediscovered by Manashir Yakubov, the full score is not extant.
Since 1930 Shostakovich had virtually stopped performing in public, but riding high on the crest of the wave after completing Lady Macbeth, he felt the need to return to the concert platform. With this in mind, he immediately embarked on the composition of his Piano Preludes Op. 34 in December 1932. In the spring of 1933 he followed this with his First Piano Concerto Op. 35, which had a prominent solo trumpet part written for the Leningrad Philharmonic trumpeter. It is reputed that the composer added the cadenza, after showing the concerto to his friend Lev Oborin, who was dismayed at the omission of the central showpiece. Initially Dmitri had refused, saying, ‘This is not a concerto like Tchaikovsky’s or Rachmaninov’s, which runs all over the instrument to prove you know how to play scales. It’s a bird of a different feather.’ Nevertheless he acquiesced to Oborin’s suggestion, and included in the cadenza an ironic quotation from Beethoven’s song ‘Rage over a lost penny’.135 Both the attractive and varied Preludes and the exuberant, high-spirited Piano Concerto, with its wealth of in-joke quotations and parody, won immediate popularity. Shostakovich played the premieres of both pieces in Leningrad, and before long was performing them widely across the country.136
For Shostakovich, concertizing was a way of escaping from the pressures of life, and provided a welcome opportunity to travel. Whether on holiday or on a concert tour, he reported on his many adventures in his correspondence – with caustic humour to Sollertinsky, and more cautiously when he wrote home, since he was careful not to upset his mother. He was even given the rare chance to go abroad in his capacity as a performer, when, in April and May 1935, he formed part of a Soviet delegation of artists sent to Turkey.
Shostakovich was anxious to follow up the success of Lady Macbeth with another opera and considered many projects during the mid-1930s, ranging from an operatic farce to a full-blown Wagnerian trilogy of operas on the theme of women. Shostakovich often complained about the poor quality of opera librettos. Wishing to avoid the compromises he had been forced to accept in the subject matter of his ballets, he penned an article in 1933 where he stated, ‘Time and again I would try to recruit the co-operation of professional writers, but for some reason or other all of them turned down my offer of such “insignificant work” as writing an opera libretto. Nikolai Aseyev, it is true, wrote a libretto of a comic opera The Great Lightning for me, but this was not work in my line.’137 Until Gennadi Rozhdestvensky rediscovered parts of the score in 1980, it was assumed that Shostakovich had not even embarked on writing music for The Great Lightning. From the nine surviving items, it is not possible to reconstruct the complete libretto, but its subject deals wittily with the visit of a Soviet delegation to a capitalist country. The theme, so popular at the time in Soviet theatre and literature, served to demonstrate the superiority of the Soviet social system through ideological confrontation and cultural contrast. As he had already done in The Golden Age, Shostakovich used the opportunity to write brilliant light music, and showed up American ‘decadence’ – but hardly to its detriment! He also enjoyed scattering many ‘in-jokes’ in the scores, including a merciless parody of Glière’s famous ballet The Red Poppy.138 The press published reports that the composer had joined forces with Mikhail Sholokhov to create an opera from his novel Virgin Soil Upturned, while Shostakovich himself approached the writer Alexei Tolstoy for a subject, and asked Alexander Preis to start writing a libretto on a compilation of works by Chekhov and Saltykov-Shchedrin.139 In 1933 he actually embarked on work for a ‘Cinema opera’ based on Pushkin’s poem ‘The Priest and his Servant Balda’ with the director and animator Mikhail Tsekhanovsky. Shostakovich, much taken by this new form, completed the music ahead of the animation. However, the project met with a blow when Lenfilm annulled its contract with Tsekhanovsky. Shostakovich valued his own work sufficiently to create a Concert Suite on ‘The Priest and His Servant Balda’, which was performed in Leningrad in the spring of 1935. What existed of the animation footage was largely destroyed during the Second World War.
The symphony’s pure instrumental form next claimed Shostakovich’s attention. He now set out to write his compositional credo, a large-scale work that could be a worthy successor to Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. In the spring of 1935 he started composing an opening movement of a symphony, a substantial fragment of which has recently come to light. It starts as a slow meditative introduction, where the Hamlet-like musings of the solo viola point forward to the mood of the Fifth Symphony. On the other hand the few bars extant of the ensuing Allegro are charged with the same rough and vigorous energy that characterizes the opening of the Fourth Symphony as we know it.
For whatever reason, Shostakovich discarded this first symphonic attempt, and went on to another work for orchestra. The Five Fragments that he completed in June 1935 were conceived as contrasting miniatures, as short and aphoristic as the Fourth Symphony turned out to be long and extended. They served as études in orchestral colour and texture, and unusually are created within the abstract.
By the autumn Shostakovich started composing the work that became his Fourth Symphony, and from the outset it had all the makings of an epic drama realized on a vast, Mahlerian scale.
This work was written during August and September 1934, at a time of emotional turmoil, when Shostakovich was involved in an affair with the translator Elena Konstantinovskaya. He wrote to her from Polenevo where he was holidaying:
I cannot compose anything, but, as I am incapable of being idle, I have started writing a fugue every day. I’ve already composed three. They are turning out very badly, and that makes me miserable. In general it is much pleasanter to work feverishly without a let-up than to sit around doing nothing, ‘resting’.140
In August Shostakovich and his wife decided on a temporary separation, and in a state of despondency he turned to the composition of his Cello Sonata. It was completed by 19 September.
The work was dedicated to the cellist Victor Kubatsky. Shostakovich had originally met him when, as a member of the Stradivarius Quartet, he participated in the first performance of the Octet Op. 11 in 1925. During the 1930s Shostakovich maintained close ties with Kubatsky, who actively promoted his music. Kubatsky, a member of the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra, also conducted this orchestra in concert repertoire.
Even before composing the Cello Sonata Shostakovich had declared his intention to compose the work in classical style. In a radio broadcast of the Sonata given with the cellist Arnold Ferkelman the composer introduced the piece to his listeners by saying, ‘This is my first, but I hope not my last instrumental sonata. It is written in classical form. The first movement is an ordinary sonata allegro, the second movement a minuet [originally marked Moderato], the third movement an adagio, followed by a finale.’141
The cellist Boris Dobrokhotov recounted that Kubatsky, the first performer of the sonata, after receiving the manuscript from Shostakovich introduced considerable changes into the cello part, including octave passages. Not everything went smoothly at the first rehearsals with the composer, and the cello part was further edited (evidently some of Kubatsky’s suggestions were eliminated). The first performance was given in Leningrad on 25 December 1934 by Kubatsky and Shostakovich. Dobrokhotov described Shostakovich’s interpretation of the first movement on this occasion as ‘not at all like a romance, but with an inner feeling of sharpness and sense of evil’.142 The Cello Sonata underwent considerable interpretative evolution over the years. In particular the tempi of the second and fourth movements grew considerably faster, something that Shostakovich not only did not object to, but as a performer was in complicit agreement with.
Rostropovich recalled that when he first played the sonata with the composer, he refrained from too much rubato, knowing that Shostakovich was inclined to emotional reticence in his music-making. But to his delight Shostakovich requested more rubato, and this feature became a hallmark of their joint performance, in particular in the third movement Largo, where the music’s dynamics and give and flow do not necessarily accord with the markings in the score.143
Shostakovich subsequently performed his Cello Sonata with other famous cellists, including A. Livshits, Arnold Ferkelman, Daniil Shafran and notably Mstislav Rostropovich, with whom he recorded it.
ARNOLD FERKELMAN lived in Leningrad during the 1930s. After becoming a prize winner in the First All-Union Competition for performing musicians, he played concerts all over the USSR. He met Shostakovich in the early 1930s, and they made music together for their own pleasure. In 1939 they gave two concerts as a duo in Moscow and Leningrad. The programme consisted of three sonatas, by Grieg, Rachmaninov and Shostakovich. Here are his memories of the Cello Sonata and of Shostakovich:
I heard the first performance of the Cello Sonata in Leningrad, played by Victor Kubatsky with Dmitri Dmitriyevich at the piano. Kubatsky played at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, he conducted and he taught at the Conservatoire. He had a great talent as a musical organizer, but his technical skill as a cellist was limited. Undoubtedly the sonata has received many better performances since then, and of course is now a part of every cellist’s repertoire.
I have to say that when the sonata was first performed, it got a hostile reception. People didn’t understand it and were somewhat disappointed, and I regret to say that I was amongst them. It wasn’t the sort of new music we were used to. Later I played the sonata very often, not only with Shostakovich but with many other pianists, and then I understood the great value and beauty of the work.
Over the years I used to make music with Dmitri Dmitriyevich for fun. Then, in 1939, we decided to go on a concert tour. In the event we performed together only twice, once in Moscow, once in Leningrad. When it came to deciding on the programme, it was Shostakovich who selected from a list of sonatas I put forward. I remember suggesting Brahms and Chopin, but he very much wanted to play the Rachmaninov sonata, as he was very fond of it.
During our rehearsals, Dmitri Dmitriyevich made very few remarks; apparently he accepted my interpretation of his sonata. In general he was very modest, and it was very easy to play with him. He had no sense of ambition or pride, and he wasn’t offended if one made a suggestion. Most of his comments in regard to his sonata related to the tempi. Dmitri Dmitriyevich was a brilliant pianist and had an incredible technique, but in those years he didn’t practise very much. He must have been a natural pianist, and of course he had a sound technical grounding as a Nikolayev pupil. He knew all the music from memory, not just his own sonata. When we started rehearsing, he gave the impression he had been practising day and night. He had no difficulties with the virtuoso passages in the Rachmaninov sonata and the finale of his own sonata. In fact he liked playing quickly, and he took incredibly fast tempi. I never succeeded in getting any other pianist to take such tempi. His playing was on the dry side, but on the other hand he played very loudly, no doubt because of his great force of temperament.
In life Shostakovich was very nervous. His moods would swing very suddenly from one extreme to another. We would be sitting and having a conversation, or rehearsing, and it was as if something in him suddenly switched off. He would go quiet and limp, then, just as suddenly, he would switch on again and become lively and active. These contrasts of moods could also happen when he was playing, although not during a concert, when he pulled himself together and was very concentrated.
When the war started I was evacuated to Tashkent and then came to live in Moscow in 1943. Shostakovich also came to Moscow at that time and we saw quite a lot of each other. During that period we got together to play cards – usually poker – with his pupil, the composer Yuri Levitin. Sometimes Tikhon Khrennikov joined our party. Dmitri Dmitriyevich was quite a poker fiend. Those were hard and hungry years, and food was rationed, but we were able to get coffee with our ration cards, and my wife used to bake pancakes out of the used grounds. They were much appreciated by Dmitri Dmitriyevich. Although it was a difficult time, life went on and we enjoyed ourselves.144
The following two descriptions are of Shostakovich’s physical appearance in the early and mid-1930s. The first is by ISAAK GLIKMAN:
I was enthralled not only by his talent, but by his outward appearance. I was captivated by the refinement of his face, its individuality, its noble aspect, with his wonderful grey eyes flashing from behind his spectacles, with their wise expression, penetrating, thoughtful or splintering with laughter.
In many early descriptions, Shostakovich is depicted as physically weak, frail, and even puny, but these are extremely misleading statements. In my view, Shostakovich was of decent height, slender, yet supple and strong. His clothes always suited him, and he looked irresistible in tails or a dinner jacket. His head was crowned with wonderful dark copper-coloured hair, which was carefully combed, or else fell in poetic disorder with that dashing unruly lick of hair falling forward onto his forehead. When he smiled, his excellent teeth were visible. In the 1930s, Dmitri Dmitriyevich looked much younger than his years.145
This is image reinforced by the film director MIKHAIL TSEKHANOVSKY, who worked with Shostakovich on the animation film/opera based on Pushkin’s ‘The Tale of the Priest and His Servant Balda’:
Shostakovich is twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old. He is at the age when a person can live for four or five years without any external changes in appearance. He is very handsome … It would appear that such handsome people are always talented or even ‘brilliant’!… When Shostakovich played today, I looked down at the crown of his head with its reddish hair. He brushed aside a strand that fell on to his temples, but his curly hair obstinately kept covering his forehead, almost reaching his eyebrows. This feature, a kind of uncontrollable disorder on the head, the oval of his pale face, the form of his lips, the round receding chin and his intelligent eyes, which seem clouded as if in some kind of fog – all this recalls the inspired images of the heads of Beethoven and Mozart.146
The first half of the 1930s was not only a period of intense creative activity, but also of important events in Shostakovich’s personal life. Shostakovich had declared his intention to marry Nina Varzar on more than one occasion – it was the talk of Leningrad. At the end of 1931, Nina and Mitya fixed a wedding date, but in an episode of Gogolian black farce and to the chagrin of all concerned, the bridegroom simply failed to turn up at the wedding service.147 In the throes of a severe emotional crisis, Shostakovich disappeared from circulation for several days. His neurotic state was reflected in three songs written at this time, which completed the cycle of Japanese Songs.148 Shostakovich dedicated the songs to Nina, but one wonders if their titles ‘The First and Last Time’, ‘Hopeless Love’ and ‘Suicide’ were likely to placate a jilted fiancée; more probably they served in lieu of explanation. Fortunately the couple were reconciled shortly, and with Sollertinsky’s intervention registered their marriage in secret at a civil ceremony on 13 May 1932 at Detskoye Selo.
Nina Varzar was the youngest of three sisters from a well-known Leningrad family. She was a physicist by profession and had a wide knowledge of music and culture. Relations between Dmitri’s mother and the Varzar family were far from easy. Sofiya Vasilyevna perceived the Varzars as pushy and ambitious, and felt that they had forced her son into marriage. But Nina’s buoyant spirits and sharp practical intelligence made her an excellent foil to Shostakovich’s sensitive and neurotic nature. Their marriage was explicitly based on the recognition of each partner’s freedom. It survived some shaky moments and rough patches, including a temporary separation caused by Shostakovich’s open affair with the translator Elena Konstantinovskaya. Divorce proceedings were initiated early in 1935. Shostakovich wrote to Sollertinsky from Moscow on the eve of his departure for Turkey saying he might never return to Leningrad.
The matter of my transfer is being pursued energetically. On the 16th I will speak to Voroshilov. The question of my going abroad has been confirmed. The trip will last a month. By that time the apartment which I have been shown here will be ready for me. I am very sad to leave Leningrad, but nothing can be done. But it is the will of the Government. If there was a more positive attitude to me in Leningrad then I would remain; but the incident with the room for N.V. [Nina Vasilyevna] has proved that their attitude is indifferent and cold. […] I will leave our apartment to N.V. and I will transfer to Moscow with Mama.149
Although the divorce went through, Shostakovich started to see Nina again in the late summer. He explained his change of heart to Sollertinsky: ‘There can be no question of divorcing Nina. Only now do I understand and appreciate what a wonderful woman she is and how dear she is to me.’150 Shortly afterwards he telegraphed his friend Levon Atovmyan, ‘Remaining in Leningrad. Nina pregnant. Remarried. Mitya.’151
Atovmyan was well aware of Nina’s importance for Shostakovich:
The restoration of family life turned out to be of the greatest beneficial influence on Dmitri’s life and work. I have to say that Nina Vasilyevna not only had a marvellous mind, but was spiritually a person of great beauty, and she proved to be a unique friend to Dmitri Dmitryevich, a wonderful companion who under all kinds of circumstances never lost spirit. During the most difficult times, she exercised great tact in maintaining a cheerful atmosphere in the house, and she knew how to transmit a firm confidence to Shostakovich. I was never to see another such true and steadfast friend in the Shostakovich circle.152
Nina herself spoke of the couple’s divorce and immediate remarriage when they realized that they were indispensable to each other. Their daughter Galina was born in May 1936, and their son Maxim two years later in May 1938. The birth of their children stabilized the marriage and brought the Shostakovich family happiness.
On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, Shostakovich had, so it would seem, all a man could wish for: happiness, imminent parenthood, fame, success and an enviable list of compositional achievements. However, any sense of security or peace of mind were rudely shattered for Shostakovich in January 1936. While he was on tour in Arkhangel’sk with Victor Kubatsky and the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra, the defamatory article ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ appeared as a Pravda editorial. This vicious attack on Shostakovich had consequences that were felt by all who were involved in Soviet musical life.
1 During my interview with him in January 1990, Druskin elaborated on this idea: the features of a St Petersburg ‘official’ (he used this word rather than ‘intellectual’) were punctuality (‘Neither DD nor I would ever have arrived late like you did today!’) formality (‘answering like a good schoolboy’), a terror of officials (which produced in Shostakovich a total incapacity to say ‘no’), and a deep mistrust of everybody (which on occasion included his closest family). The last two features were exacerbated by the conditions of Soviet life.
2 Mikhail Druskin, ‘Shostakovich in the 1920s’, in idem, Sketches, Articles, Notes, pp. 45–59.
3 From letter to T. Glivenko dated 26 February 1924; see Sotheby’s auction catalogue for 6 December 1991 (London, 1991), p. 148.
4 Ibid.
5 Letter dated 4 December 1924 (G. M. Kozlova, Letters to Lev Oborin, p. 244).
6 Letter from ‘St Leninsburg’ dated 14 December 1924 (ibid., p. 245).
7 From ‘A Questionnaire on the Psychological Aspect of the Creative Process’ filled in by DDS on 20 September, Detskoeye Selo, in Bobykina, Dmitri Shostakovich in Letters and Documents (Glinka Museum, Moscow, 2000), pp. 477–8.
8 A reference to Shostakovich’s friend Volodya Kurchavov.
9 Letter dated 17 April 1925 (Kozlova, Letters to Lev Oborin, p. 247).
10 Letter to Yavorsky dated 3 November 1925, in Bobykina, Shostakovich in Letters and Documents (Glinka Museum, Moscow, 2000), p. 36.
11 Idem.
12 Letter dated 1 November 1925 (D. D. Shostakovich, Letters to Tatyana Glivenko).
13 This was his Opus 1 (1919), also known as ‘The Officer’s Scherzo’.
14 Letter dated 6 October 1925 (Kozlova, Letters to Lev Oborin, p. 257).
15 Letter dated 26 September 1925 (ibid., p. 249).
16 Steinberg, DDS’s teacher, had a different story, as shown by this extract from his diary: ‘Mitya’s symphony sounds very good. Mitya himself is in a state of such indescribable excitement from hearing the sound of his own music that I only restrained him with difficulty from gesticulating and displaying his agitation’. From article ‘Shostakovich in M. O. Steinberg’s Diaries’(Olga Dansker commentary) in Shostakovich between the Moment and Eternity, compiled and edited by Lyudmila Kovnatskaya (Kompozitor, St Petersburg, 2000), p. 102.
17 Nikolai Malko, A Certain Art, pp. 160–67.
18 Compiled from Victor Seroff in collaboration with Nadejda Galli-Shohat, Dmitri Shostakovich: The Life and Background of a Soviet Composer, pp. 138–9, and Khentova, Shostakovich, vol. 1, p. 141.
19 From article ‘Shostakovich in M. O. Steinberg’s Diaries’ (Olga Dansker commentary) in Shostakovich: Between the Moment and Eternity, compiled and edited by Lyudmila Kovnatskaya (Kompozitor, St Petersburg, 2000), p. 102.
20 Olga Lamm, ‘Vissarion Yaklovlevich Shebalin’, in A. Shebalina, In Memory of Y. Y. Shebalin: Reminiscences, Materials, p. 213.
21 Letter of 25 January 1927, in Shostakovich in Letters and Documents (Glinka Museum, Moscow, 2000), p. 99.
22 Kvadri’s impossible behaviour at a Moscow performance of the First Symphony is described in a letter dated 10 January 1928, from DDS to I. Sollertinsky. Mikheeva Sollertinskaya’s article in Lyudmila Kovnatskaya (ed.), D. D. Shostakovich: Anthology of Articles for his 90th Birthday (St Petersburg, 1996).
23 The Trio was performed with local musicians, the violinist I. Dobrzhints and the cellist A. Kassan.
24 Shostakovich went to Anapa in the Caucasus on 17 July, where he met up with Tatyana Glivenko (see p. 96).
25 Malko, A Certain Art, pp. 173–6.
26 D. D. Shostakovich, ‘Letters to Mother’, p. 173.
27 Letter to Yavorsky, 6 July 1925, in Bodykina, Shostakovich in Letters and Documents (Glinka Museum, Moscow, 2000), p. 36.
28 Darius Milhaud wrote in his book Notes sans musique: ‘Despite its rather conventional form and construction [the Symphony] betrayed genuine gifts and even had certain qualities of greatness, if it is to be remembered that its composer, Shostakovich, was only eighteen at the time …’
Alban Berg wrote to Shostakovich after hearing a performance of the symphony in Vienna on 28 November 1928: ‘It was a great joy for me to get to know your symphony. I find it quite marvellous, especially the first movement’ (Khentova, Shostakovich, vol. I, p. 152). In Solomon Volkov’s Testimony it is alleged that Shostakovich complained that this letter never reached him, since it was sent to Asafiev, who didn’t pass it on.
29 Lyudmila Kovnatskaya article ‘Shostakovich in the Annals of LASM’ in Kovnatskaya (ed.), D. D. Shostakovich: Anthology of Articles for his 90th Birthday (St Petersburg, 1996), p. 61.
30 From DDS letter to Yavorsky in Bobykina, Shostakovich in Letters and Documents (Glinka Museum, Moscow, 2000), p. 75.
31 This coincided with the time of Shostakovich’s quarrel with LASM, which he left demonstratively in protest at their refusal at the time to recognize and incorporate the Circle for New Music. Nevertheless, he had no qualms about performing his sonata under LASM’s auspices!
32 Khentova, Shostakovich, vol. 1, p. 213.
33 S. Prokofiev, Soviet Diary and Other Writings, edited by Oleg Prokofiev and Christopher Palmer (Faber and Faber, London, 1991), p. 106.
34 From Shostakovich’s answers to ‘A Questionnaire on the Psychological Aspect of Composition’ in Bobykina, Shostakovich in Letters and Documents (Glinka Museum, Moscow, 2000), p. 472.
35 From Letter to Yavorsky dated 19 December 1926 in Bobykina, Shostakovich in Letters and Documents (Glinka Museum, Moscow, 2000), p. 92.
36 Letter from Sofiya Vasilyevna Shostakovich to Yavorsky dated 20 December 1926 in Bobykina, Shostakovich in Letters and Documents (Glinka Museum, Moscow, 2000), p. 94.
37 Information derived from his letter to Yavorsky dated 27 January 1927, ibid., pp. 100–101.
38 His all-Chopin programme included the obligatory pieces: F sharp minor Polonaise Op. 44, the Preludes in F sharp minor and B flat minor (from Op. 28) and the Ballade in A flat major Op. 47. The rest of the programme was made up of his own choices: Etudes in C sharp minor Op. 10 no. 4, and in A flat major Op. 25 no. 1, as well as a selection of Nocturnes and Mazurkas. See Shostakovich’s letter to Yavorsky dated 27 January 1927, ibid., p. 101.
39 The prize-winners were: first prize, Lev Oborin; second prize, Stanislav Szpinalski; third prize, Roza Etkina; fourth prize, Grigori Ginzburg. Szpinalski and Etkina were Polish. The other Soviet competitor, Yuri Bryushkov, had to withdraw from the final after hurting his finger, but like Shostakovich was awarded a diploma.
40 D. D. Shostakovich, ‘Letters to Mother’, p. 175.
41 The pianist Natan Perelman recalled the impression that Dmitri made on return to Leningrad sporting his first hat acquired in Berlin.
42 From DDS’s letter in Bobykina, Shostakovich in Letters and Documents (Glinka Museum, Moscow, 2000), pp. 477 and 499.
43 Tatyana Glivenko in interview with EW. The play of words is achieved by turning ‘Tanets Smert’i’ (‘Dance of Death’) into ‘Tanets Smerd’i’ (‘Dance of Shit’).
44 The operation took place on 25 April. Dmitri gave a dramatic description of how ill he had felt the night afterwards, throwing up twenty-two times! He concluded that Scriabin was completely mistaken in claiming that pleasure could be gained from suffering. Letter to Yavorsky of 6 May in Bobykina, Shostakovich in Letters and Documents (Glinka Museum, Moscow, 2000), p. 110.
45 Shostakovich refers to what was to become his Second Symphony.
46 Letter to Yavorsky dated 6 May 1927 in Bobykina, Shostakovich in Letters and Documents (Glinka Museum, Moscow, 2000), pp. 111–12. The names quoted are of Chopin competition prize-winners.
47 Khentova, Shostakovich: Life and Work, vol. 1, p. 189.
48 Nathan Perelman: recorded interview with EW.
49 Workers’ Youth Theatre.
50 Nathan Perelman: recorded interview with EW.
51 Letter dated 28 October 1925 (ibid., p. 252).
52 Letter dated 16 February 1925 (Kozlova, Letters to Lev Oborin, p. 247). Akim Volynsky, pseudonym for Khaim Leybovich Flekser (1861–1926) was an art historian and influential ballet critic. Although his main interest was ballet he evidently became involved in the cinema towards the end of his life.
53 From Malko’s Philharmonic Diary, 2 and 4 November 1927, archive of the Leningrad Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinema.
54 From article ‘Shostakovich in M. O. Steinberg’s Diaries’ (Olga Dansker commentary), in Shostakovich: Between the Moment and Eternity, compiled and edited by Lyudmila Kovnatskaya (Kompozitor, St Petersburg, 2000), pp. 103–4.
55 Letter to Lev Shulgin, director of the Leningrad Philharmonic, 7 November 1927.
56 Shostakovich shared second prize with a presumed protégé of Boris Asafiev, who, like Malko, was on the jury. (Later it transpired that the presumed protégé was actually a composer from Argentina! [Malko, A Certain Art, p. 206.])
57 The All-Union Association of Proletarian Musicians (acronym VAPM), but usually referred to as RAPM (Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians), being VAPM’s most active branch.
58 Malko, A Certain Art, p. 204–5. The work was published in 1927 with the title ‘To October: A Symphonic Dedication with Final Chorus on Words by Bezymensky for Large Orchestra and Mixed Chorus’.
59 Lyudmila Mikheeva, In Memory of I. I. Sollertinsky: Reminiscences, Material and Research, p. 92.
60 Zoya Shostakovich: recorded interview with EW.
61 Khentova, Shostakovich, vol. I, p. 217.
62 Zhukova, Epilogues, pp. 35–7.
63 Malko, A Certain Art, pp. 187–97.
64 Vitaly Shentalinsky, The KGB’s Literary Archive (Harvill Press, London, 1995), pp. 79–80.
65 More commonly known as Hypothetically [or Conditionally] Killed (see p. 117).
66 Often (incorrectly) translated as ‘Song of the Meeting’ or ‘Song of the Passer-by’.
67 Association for Real Art.
68 Proletarian Cultural and Educational Organization.
69 From Letter to Yavorsky dated 13 May 1926 in Bobykina, Shostakovich in Letters and Documents (Glinka Museum, Moscow, 2000), p. 65.
70 Production Collective of Student Composers.
71 See letter to Yavorsky dated 12 June 1927 in Bobykina, Shostakovich in Letters and Documents (Glinka Museum, Moscow, 2000), p. 114.
72 Zoya Shostakovich in interview with EW.
73 I. Schwarz, ‘Some facts and events’, from L. V. Nikolayev, Stati i Vospominaniya Sovremennikov, pis’ma (Leningrad, 1979), p. 122.
74 Tatyana Glivenko in interview with EW.
75 Gavriil Yudin, ‘Letters to Smolich’, p. 90.
76 DDS letter to Smolich dated 7 June 1929 (quoted in G. Yudin’s article, ‘For me your work is an event for the whole of musical life’, Sov Muzyka no. 6, 1983, p. 90).
77 Steinberg refers to the Third Symphony, premiered on 21 January 1930.
78 From article ‘Shostakovich in M. O. Steinberg’s Diaries’ (Olga Dansker commentary) in Shostakovich: Between the Moment and Eternity, compiled and edited by Lyudmila Kovnatskaya (Kompozitor, St Petersburg, 2000), pp. 103–4.
79 In B. Dobrokhotv’s ‘Reminiscences of Shostakovich’ in Bobykina, Shostakovich in Letters and Documents (Glinka Museum, Moscow, 2000), p. 514.
80 Review in Krasnaya Gazeta, no. 17, 20 January 1930.
81 Letter dated 2 January 1930 (Yudin, ‘Letters to Smolich’, p. 91). Nikolai Oleinnikov, a member of OBERIU, was a well-known children’s writer. This was the period of Shostakovich’s short-lived fascination with OBERIU, the group of Leningrad ‘Dadaist’ writers, which included Daniel Kharms and the poets Alexander Vvedensky and Nikolai Zabolotsky. Although Oleinnikov reputedly started writing a libretto for Shostakovich he never delivered it. Perhaps, given the subject – a farewell to a carp about to be fried – DS was pulling Smolich’s leg.
82 Shostakovich signed his contract to write the film music on 28 December 1928, and wrote the score in January and February 1929.
83 Soviet cinema.
84 Grigori Kozintsev, The Complete Works, vol. I, pp. 156–7; vol. IV, pp. 253–4.
85 Letter to Sollertinsky dated 10 January 1928. Quoted in Mikheeva Sollertinskaya’s article in Lyudmila Kovnatskaya (ed.), D. D. Shostakovich: Anthology of Articles for his 90th Birthday (St Petersburg, 1996), p. 88.
86 Nikolai Sokolov, Sketches from Memory, pp. 52–3. The composer recounted another instance of Meyerhold’s touching concern. When a fire broke out in his flat, the director immediately picked up DDS’s manuscript score of The Nose. Meyerhold had been more concerned to rescue Shostakovich’s work than his own personal belongings.
87 Pavel Maranchik, The Birth of Komsomol Theatre, pp. 225–6.
88 Andrei Balanchivadze, ‘Contemporaries Write on D. D. Shostakovich’, in L. V. Danilevich (ed.), Dmitri Shostakovich, pp. 96–7.
89 Yuri Elagin, The Taming of the Arts, pp. 38–40, translated from the Russian by EW.
90 D. D. Shostakovich, ‘Letters to Mother’, p. 168.
91 Letter dated 3 August 1923 (ibid., p. 168).
92 Shostakovich was fond of dedications. The first girl (apart from his sister) to whom he dedicated a piece of music was the unsuspecting ten-year-old Natalya Kubé’. Nos. 6–8 of the Op. 2 Preludes for Piano (written in 1919) bear the initials N.K. The dedicatee discovered about this honour only after Shostakovich’s death.
93 State Administration for the Struggle Against Espionage and Counter-Revolution.
94 Tatyana Glivenko: recorded interview with EW.
95 This, or another similar occasion, is confirmed by Maximilian Steinberg’s diary entry for 8 May 1929: ‘Mitya Shostakovich has got married …’ See article ‘Shostakovich in M. O. Steinberg’s Diaries’(Olga Dansker commentary) in Shostakovich between the Moment and Eternity, compiled and edited by Lyudmila Kovnatskaya (Kompozitor, St Petersburg, 2000), p. 106.
96 Malko, A Certain Art, pp. 187, 191–2.
97 Letter to Yavorsky dated 6 March in Bobykina, Shostakovich in Letters and Documents (Glinka Museum, Moscow, 2000), p. 109.
98 Letter to Yavorsky dated 6 May 1927, idem, p. 112.
99 From DDS letter to Smolich dated 30 October 1930 (Yudin, ‘Letters to Smolich’, pp. 91–2).
100 Letter dated 1 July 1929 (V. Kisilev, ‘Letters from the 1930s’, p. 85).
101 See M. Yakubov, ‘The Golden Age: The True Story of its Premiere’, from Lyudmila Kovnatskaya (ed.), D. D. Shostakovich: Anthology of Articles for his 90th Birthday (St Petersburg, 1996), pp. 76–7.
102 Letter dated 30 October 1930 (Yudin, ‘Letters to Smolich’, pp. 91, 92).
103 He received the commission to write the music for The Bolt in February 1930, while in Moscow.
104 Undated letter February 1930 (Lyudmila Mikheeva, ‘The Story of a Friendship’, Part 1, p. 29).
105 See Krzysztof Meyer, Shostakovich Life, Work and Times (St Petersburg, 1998), p. 131.
106 See Tatiana Bruni’s article ‘On ballet with undying love’, in Soviet Ballet 5 (1991) quoted by Simon Morris in his excellent and informative article, ‘Shostakovich as Industrial Saboteur’, in L. Fay (ed.), Shostakovich and his World (Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 122–3.
107 Solomon Volkov, Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, p. 28.
108 Formerly the Mariinsky Theatre.
109 Shostakovich evidently also did not trust Kaplan. In a letter to Smolich dated 3 February 1930, he wrote, ‘Two days ago, in the office of the Director of Leningrad Theatres, and again in the evening at a meeting of the artistic council, I spoke very strongly against Kaplan’s outline of the production’ (Yudin, ‘Letters to Smolich’, p. 91).
110 In fact the choreography was entrusted to a team made up of Leonid Yakobson, Vasiliì Vainonen, and Vladimir Chesnakov, while the sets were designed by Valentina Khadasevich.
111 As Gauk points out, this was an effect that Shostakovich used frequently in the future (e.g. in the Fifth Symphony).
112 As Youman’s ‘Tea for Two’ was known (see p. 71).
113 Alexander Gauk, ‘Creative Contacts’, in L. Gauk, R. Glezer and Y. Milstein (eds), Alexander Vasiliyevich Gauk: Memoirs, Selected Articles, Reminiscences of His Contemporaries, pp. 127, 128.
114 Ibid.
115 Amember of the Communist Youth Organization.
116 Tatyana Vecheslova, About All That Is Dear, pp. 169, 170.
117 Rabochii i Teatr (The Worker and The Theatre), no. 31, 1931, p. 6.
118 Mikheeva, ‘The Story of a Friendship’, Part 1, p. 31.
119 Letter dated 18 February 1934 (Yudin, ‘Letters to Smolich’, p. 92).
120 Gauk, ‘Creative Contacts’, in Gauk, Glezer and Milstein, Alexander Gauk, pp. 127, 128.
121 A reference to the educational form of agitprop, also known as the ‘speaking newspapers’. Items of news, culture and art were explained (often with an element of theatre) through direct contact with the masses. The audience were usually factory workers or peasants. The ‘blue blouses’ referred to the dress of the instructors.
122 Zhitomirsky, ‘Shostakovich’, unpublished article.
123 Introduction to the libretto of Katerina Izmailova (State Music Publishers, Moscow, 1934), p. 11.
124 From a letter to Ernest Ansermet dated 4 April 1935 (Selected Correspondence, vol. I, [Faber and Faber, London, 1982], p. 224).
125 Galina Serebryakova, ‘About Myself and Others’, pp. 309, 310.
126 DDS article ‘From Reminiscences’ in Sovietskaya Muzyka, no. 3, 1974, p. 55.
127 Shostakovich wrote to Smolich on 28 February 1934: ‘There are a couple of shortcomings, which are a shame in view of the overall high quality of the production. The first concerns the scene after Zinovy Borisovich’s murder. Each time Sergei starts humping the corpse away, the audience bursts out laughing. The second defect lies in Sonetka. All the performers (Welter, Golovina and Leliva) make Sonetka into a female vampire, a hoity-toity courtesan, or a worldly coquette…. As far as I remember, you persuaded them against such an interpretation, but they have all reverted terribly since your departure. Sonetka, as I see her, should be a simple, flirtatious girl, without any demoniacal side to her.’ (Yudin, ‘Letters to Smolich’, p. 92.)
128 Nadezhda Welter, About Opera and Myself, pp. 78–83; also from her reminiscences in O. L. Dansker (ed.), S. A. Samosud: Articles, Reminiscences, Letters, p. 84.
129 Atovmyan’s reminiscences in Muzykal’naya Akademiya, no. 4, 1997, p. 70.
130 From P. Markov, Theatre Direction: V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko and the Musical Theatre (Moscow, 1960), pp. 223–4.
131 DSS, ‘Thoughts about Musical Drama’, Sovietskoye Iskusstvo, 5 December 1935.
132 Mikheeva, ‘Story of a Friendship’, Part 1, p. 30.
133 Usually known as ‘Hypothetically Killed’, ‘Conditionally Killed’ or ‘Allegedly Murdered’. Shostakovich’s music to this vaudeville show had been preserved only in sketches and a few piano arrangements, although recently two original numbers fully orchestrated by Shostakovich himself have turned up in the archives. They were found in a folder with his music for The Bolt, since he reused much of the music in the ballet. In 1991, the English composer Gerard McBurney reconstructed much of the music on the basis of these sketches, finding in it a wealth of material which the composer reused in his ‘serious’ compositions of those years. I am grateful to Gerard McBurney, and in particular to Laurel Fay, for information about the content of the piece. Both Fay and I felt that all the translations of the title, including the striking ‘Hypothetically Killed’ are misleading. Hence the decision to offer yet another translation of the title.
134 Further elucidation on the matter can be found in Manashir Yakubov’s article in Shostakovich between the Moment and Eternity, compiled and edited by Lyudmila Kovnatskaya (Kompozitor, St Petersburg, 2000), pp. 328–45.
135 Victor Seroff, in collaboration with Nadeja Galli-Shohat, Dmitri Shostakovich (New York, 1943), p. 188.
136 Shostakovich gave the first performance of the complete cycle of Preludes in Moscow on 24 May 1933, having played groups of them earlier in Leningrad. The First Piano Concerto was premiered in Leningrad on 15 October 1933.
137 DDS, ‘A Crying and Laughing Matter’ (‘Plakat’i Smeyat’sya’), Sovetskoe Iskusstvo, 3 March 1933.
138 See Editor’s Note from volume 23 of Collected Works: Operas.
139 Krzysztof Meyer instead says that Shostakovich had suggested to Preis a libretto on Gorky’s The Mother. See Krzysztof Meyer, Shostakovich: Life, Work and Times (DSCH/Kompozitor, St Petersburg, 1998), p. 176.
140 Letter dated 26 July 1934 (Sofiya Khentova, ‘Dmitri Shostakovich: We Live in a Time of Stormy Passions and Actions’, p. 13).
141 Article by Andrey Kryukov, in Lyudmila Kovnatskaya (ed.), D. D. Shostakovich: Anthology of Articles for his 90th Birthday (St Petersburg, 1996), p. 164.
142 Bobykina, Shostakovich in Letters and Documents (Glinka Museum, Moscow, 2000), p. 505.
143 Many years later, in 1974, one of Rostropovich’s pupils, Vagram Saradzhan, had occasion to play the sonata through to the composer. Saradzhan told me that Shostakovich drew his attention to the fact that the second movement was now a scherzo, although originally it had been conceived as a minuet. To my mind he may have used as a model the second movement of Brahms’ E minor Cello Sonata Op. 38.
144 Arnold Ferkelman: recorded interview with EW.
145 Isaak Glikman, Letters to a Friend, p. 6.
146 From his unpublished diary (Khentova, Shostakovich, vol. I, p. 308).
147 Krzysztof Meyer, Shostakovich: Life, Work and Times (DSCH/Kompozitor, St Petersburg, 1998), p. 143.
148 The first three songs of the cycle were written in 1928.
149 Letter dated 10 March 1933, in L. Mikheeva-Sollertinskaya, ‘D. D. Shostakovich reflected in his letters to I. I. Sollertinsky’, p. 92.
150 Undated letter from DDS to Sollertinsky, preserved as fragment; idem, p. 93.
151 Atovmyan’s reminiscences in Muzykal’naya Akademiya, no. 4, 1997, p. 70.
152 Ibid.