Hitler’s troops invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Two years previously the Soviet–Nazi pact had been signed, and Stalin had thereby lulled the country into a false sense of security. The Soviet Union found itself unprepared for war, and the German armies made spectacular advances into Soviet territory. By the end of August they had encircled Leningrad; the ensuing siege lasted for 900 days, and was finally lifted on 17 January 1944.
The outbreak of war found Shostakovich examining the graduation composition students at the Leningrad Conservatoire. His immediate preoccupation was to be of use to his country, but his poor eyesight prevented him from enlisting in any kind of active service or home guard. Nevertheless he did a stint as a volunteer, working with brigades assigned to digging ditches for anti-tank barriers and weapon placements on the outskirts of the city. His subsequent enrolment in the Leningrad Conservatoire’s firefighting brigade was exploited first and foremost for propaganda purposes, for the Conservatoire administrators were determined to keep the composer away from danger, believing he was more useful otherwise employed.1 But a posed photograph (taken on 29 July) showing Shostakovich holding a fire-hose on the roof of the building was printed in newspapers throughout the world, an immediate symbol of Leningraders’ determination to resist the enemy. It was suggested that Shostakovich use his talents to make song arrangements for concert brigades to perform at the front. In the first weeks of the war he arranged twenty-seven operatic arias, romances and popular songs, by composers from Beethoven to Glinka to his contemporaries Dunaevsky and Blanter – mostly for a small and relatively portable formation of voice, violin and cello. He also wrote the song that became the Home Guard’s anthem (‘The fearless regiments are on the march’).
Once this task was over, the composer settled down to serious composition, and initially started composing a choral work based on texts from the Psalms of David.2 But by 19 July he had abandoned the idea, and started writing the work that evolved into his Seventh Symphony. Shostakovich originally conceived it as a one-movement piece, with a possible choral section introduced at the end.3 But in the process of work, the Symphony quickly assumed its four-movement form. The massive first movement was written in less than six weeks, the next two movements in under three weeks.
Shortly after completing the second movement, Shostakovich invited a group of composer friends to his home on 17 September to hear what he had written. Just as Shostakovich had finished playing the first movement, sirens started screaming. The composer excused himself to accompany his wife and children into the air-raid shelter, but suggested he would return immediately so as to continue the session. Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky recalled the extraordinary experience of hearing Shostakovich playing the Scherzo and showing them the third movement sketches against the dull thud of falling bombs:
The enormous sheets of manuscript paper, lying open on the composer’s desk, testified to the grandiose orchestral scoring. Shostakovich played very nervously, but with great élan. It seemed that he aimed to draw out of the piano every nuance of orchestral colour. It made a colossal impression. This is an extraordinary example of a synchronized, instant creative reaction to events as they are being lived through, transmitted in a complex, large-scale form, yet without the slightest hint of compromising the standard of the genre […]4
The authorities decided to evacuate the Shostakovich family from Leningrad on 1 October. They could take with them only the barest of essentials, amongst which the composer counted not only the manuscript of the three completed movements of the Seventh Symphony, but the score of his opera Lady Macbeth, and the original score and his own four-hand piano transcription of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. The composer’s daughter Galina recalled the family’s departure from the city airport, already by then encircled by German troops. The military plane was small:
Apart from my parents and myself and my brother, there was only room for the pilots, three or four of them. There were no seats at all, only a plank-board floor and some wooden boxes. We were told we shouldn’t sit on them, so we somehow arranged ourselves on our suitcases. There was a transparent hood in the roof of the plane, and one of the pilots, a sniper, stood under it, and looked out, scanning the skies. He warned us, ‘If I wave my hand you must all lie down on the floor.’
The three-year-old Maxim was fully alert to what was going on, and was curious about the bursts of light he saw out of the pilots’ cockpit window: ‘I asked my mother and father, “What are those?” and they explained that it was the Germans trying to shoot down our plane.’5
The plane landed late at night in a clearing in woods on the outskirts of Moscow. The pilots immediately started felling trees to cover and camouflage the plane, while the Shostakovich family spent the rest of the night in a nearby hut. They were then transferred next morning to the Moscow Hotel in the town centre. One of the first things that Dmitri and Nina did was to buy their children toys to replace the ones left behind at home.6
Shostakovich also lost no time in getting fresh reactions to his new symphony. Aram Khachaturian described how ‘Shostakovich played the Seventh Symphony through to me at my flat on Miusskaya Street, straight after getting off the plane from besieged Leningrad. Shostakovich was very agitated and said, “Forgive me, will you, if this reminds you of Ravel’s Bolero.”’7 Two months earlier Isaak Glikman noted an almost identical reaction from the composer after playing through the first movement: ‘Idle critics will no doubt reproach me for imitating Ravel’s Bolero. Well, let them, for this is how I hear the war.’8
The Shostakovich family spent the next two weeks in Moscow before being allocated places on a train heading for Sverdlovsk. But they decided to stop in Kuibyshev rather than continue what turned out to be a nightmarish journey further east.
The Seventh Symphony was completed on 27 December 1941 in Kuibyshev, and first triumphantly performed there by the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra under Samuil Samosud on 5 March 1942. By the end of the month, Samosud gave the first performances in Moscow. Performances in other Soviet cities soon followed, and the score was sent abroad. Henry Wood performed the Seventh Symphony in London on 22 June, and and a month later Toscanini gave the American premiere in New York.
The performance of the symphony in besieged Leningrad on 13 August by the Radio Orchestra under Karl Eliasberg was an event of the greatest significance. The Leningrad Philharmonic had been evacuated to Novosibirsk, and the Radio Orchestra was the only remaining ensemble in the city. A hungry and miserably cold winter under siege had reduced it to a mere fourteen players. Eliasberg summoned up all his energy to organize reinforcements; retired musicians were ferreted out, and soldiers with musical training were released from the army units defending Leningrad. Eliasberg himself, weak from hunger, fainted one day on the long walk home in the transportless city. To help restore his strength, the authorities provided the conductor with a bicycle, living quarters in the vicinity of the Philharmonic hall, a telephone and food supplies. Likewise, the orchestral musicians were issued with extra rations.
The creation of an enormous orchestra in these conditions seemed hardly credible. Their performance of the Seventh Symphony was a feat that fired the imagination of the outside world. The playwright Alexander Kron summed up the Leningraders’ reaction to the music: ‘People who no longer knew how to shed tears of sorrow and misery now cried from sheer joy.’9 Never before had music acquired such heroic force or become such an effective symbol of patriotism. Shostakovich’s fame was at its zenith.
On 16 October 1941 Shostakovich and his family left Moscow on the long journey to safety along with a large group of other composers, artists and writers. Karen Khachaturian, the young composer, who had come to see off his uncle Aram Khachaturian, was a witness to the chaotic scenes of departure:
I suddenly caught sight of Dmitri Dmitriyevich on the platform. He looked completely bereft. He was holding a sewing machine in one hand and a children’s potty in the other, while his wife Nina Vasilyevna stood beside the children and a mountain of stuff. I helped them load their things on to the train. Later, when I made my way home from the station, I was struck by the number of howling dogs roaming the snowy streets, having been abandoned by their owners.10
Amongst Shostakovich’s fellow passengers was Nikolai Sokolov, the artist from the collective ‘Kukryniksy’. Sokolov, like Shostakovich, chose to stay in Kuibyshev, the seat of government in evacuation. Various institutions like the Bolshoi Theatre and the editorial offices of Pravda and Krokodil were now based there, as well as the diplomatic corps. Nikolai Sokolov describes the train journey and the first days in Kuibyshev:
We arrived at ten o’clock in the morning at Kazan Station. It was chock-a-block with evacuees, and the square in front of it was also black with people. Inside the station writers, painters, musicians and artists from the Bolshoi and Vakhtangov Theatres were huddled beside their belongings, trying to make themselves comfortable. The loudspeakers continuously blared announcements. At last we were informed that the train was ready to board. People put on their rucksacks, picked up their bundles and suitcases, and made for the platform, which was enveloped in terrible darkness. Underfoot the snow was wet and squelchy. Everybody pushed and shoved at each other with their belongings. We had a single ticket for a whole group of artists, which got torn in half in the crush. We had been designated carriage no. 7; a queue had formed outside it. Somebody stood guarding the door, blocking the entrance, shouting, ‘This carriage is only for the Bolshoi Theatre.’ I recognized the tall silhouette loudly arguing with this man as Dmitri Kabalevsky: ‘Allow Shostakovich and his children to pass!’
At last Shostakovich was allowed through, and we pressed in behind his children, slowly squeezing our way into the bowels of the carriage. The whole carriage was bursting with people and their possessions. On my back I carried a rucksack with its emergency minimum: one change of underwear, a shirt, socks, a candle, some bread and tins of food. I also had a little sketch album and a pencil. In my coat pocket I closely guarded a slim album of V. Serov’s illustrations to Krylov’s Fables. I never parted company from it, even during the air alerts.
After forty minutes the train set off. It travelled very slowly. Near Ryazan it picked up speed; the town was being bombed by the Fascists. Some of us were on our feet throughout the night. As morning dawned we started to scrutinize each other in the light. Some people gave up their seats to those who had been standing. In other words, people started to soften and show kindness.
Members of the Bolshoi, ballerinas, composers and artists, were travelling in this carriage. Amongst the other composers travelling were Aram Khachaturian, Tikhon Khrennikov, Dmitri Kabalevsky and Vissarion Shebalin. Some of the lady ‘artistes’ were crying. Others were sighing over the possessions they had left behind.
It took seven days and nights to reach Kuibyshev. The train kept stopping, and would stand still for long stretches of time, often for hours on end. Trains filled with military units were travelling to Moscow. Lines of fuel trucks stretched along the tracks. On the station platforms, tanks and ammunition stood under tarpaulins. Whole factories were being evacuated from Moscow together with their machinery stock; the workers and their families all travelled in the goods wagons.
A wet snow, almost rain, was falling. By morning it had frozen. People got out of the train and wandered by the carriages. They looked to each other for reassurance. It was difficult to get any sleep, there was nowhere to rest. The women lay down at night, the men by day – and in rota at that.
I saw Shostakovich getting out at the stations to fetch boiling water; he washed his crockery with snow at the side of the carriage. He was travelling in an old worn suit, and his legs got soaked through. He desperately looked for his things and got very upset at not finding them. It turned out that his two suitcases with all his personal possessions and the children’s things had been left behind at the station in Moscow. I gave him some new socks.
‘Thank you! How noble of you,’ he said.
Somebody else gave him a shirt, and so on. He took these things very shyly and thanked everybody in a state of great agitation.
The further we got from Moscow, the more difficult it became to decide where to stop off. Sverdlovsk? Novosibirsk? Tashkent? Alma-Alta? Kazan? Kuibyshev?
We noisily argued as to which was the best destination.
I observed people telling Shostakovich what to do; some persuaded him to go to Kuibyshev, others to Tashkent, and a third group suggested some other destination.
‘Dmitri Dmitriyevich, why take the children to Kuibyshev? Everybody is going there. There will be problems with food supplies, and the accommodation situation will be worse still. Why not continue to Tashkent? Things will be better there, and the children will be happier. It’s not for nothing that people say, “Tashkent has bread in abundance!”’
‘Yes … yes …’ Shostakovich replied uncertainly.
‘No! Why drag the children on another eight days’ journey to Tashkent, when tomorrow he’ll already be in Kuibyshev itself?’ protested another adviser, a composer.
‘But in Tashkent he won’t go hungry; but what awaits him in Kuibyshev?’ the first persisted.
‘What d’you mean? Khrapchenko’s in Kuibyshev, and he’ll fix everything! Right? After all, he is the chairman of the Committee for Arts! It’s his duty!’
‘Possibly, possibly,’ Dmitri Dmitriyevich muttered finally.
‘And none the less, in your place I would go to Tashkent.’
‘But, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, how about …’
But poor Shostakovich had long stopped listening to the ‘how about’ suggestions, and picked his way back through packages and bundles to his children.
Nevertheless Shostakovich decided on Kuibyshev. When we arrived his family and I were given space on a classroom floor in one of the town schools. It was already full of artists from the Bolshoi Theatre who had arrived previously, and they were now joined by the new arrivals. The numbers kept swelling. Each classroom housed eighteen people with their goods and chattels. At the entrance one was confronted by thirty-six pairs of galoshes, which bore evidence of the profuse autumn mud from the market square just outside the school!
We slept on the floor, without any mattress, on whatever could be adapted for the purpose, all squeezed one against the other. In the morning we all crowded down the long corridor to the washrooms. Sturdy men whistling excerpts from operatic arias – People’s Artists, soloists, musicians – all kept coming out of the door which had pinned to it a notice, ‘Boys’. You never knew whom you might meet here!
Shostakovich and I were given access to the Bolshoi Theatre commissariat, where we were issued a daily ration of butter, sweets, bread and salami.
I remember that on the day of our arrival I met Shostakovich in the corridor carrying the rations he had just received. With quick steps he hurried off to the classroom, a bright smile lighting up his face.
In a week’s time the Shostakoviches were given a room to themselves, furnished and with beds. Dmitri Dmitriyevich was also provided with a grand piano.
Once I dropped in on him, and we started chatting about life.
‘You know, Nikolai Alexandrovich,’ Shostakovich addressed me, nervously drumming on the table with his beautiful fingers, ‘when I got into that dark carriage with the children in Moscow I felt that I was in paradise! But by the seventh day of the journey I felt that I was in hell. When we were settled in the classroom of the school, and what’s more given a carpet and surrounded by suitcases, I again felt myself to be in paradise; but after three days I was fed up; in these circumstances you can’t get undressed, being surrounded by a mass of strangers. I again perceived this as hell. And then we were allocated this room to ourselves, with decent conditions… . And what do you think? Shortly, I felt that I must have a piano. I was given a piano. Everything seemed just fine, and I thought to myself again, “This is paradise.” But now I notice how inconvenient it is to work in a single room; the children are rowdy and disturb me. Yet they have every right to be noisy, they are only children, but unfortunately I can’t work.’
Soon I attended a house-warming party; the Shostakoviches had been given a separate three-roomed flat, which even had its own bathroom.11
Knowing that I was living in a miserable room, Mitya (as he asked me to call him) suggested that I move into their flat, but I refused, thanking him for his concern.
Once I asked Mitya what stopped him from completing his Seventh Symphony. He replied: ‘You know, as soon as I got on that train, something snapped inside me … I can’t compose just now, knowing how many people are losing their lives.’
But as soon as the news came through that the Fascists had been smashed outside Moscow, he sat down to compose in a burst of energy and excitement. He finished the Symphony in something less than two weeks.
I wanted to do a drawing of Shostakovich but did not wish to disturb him while composing. I was against his posing specially for me, although he suggested it himself.
In the evenings, Shostakovich liked playing cards with the pianist Lev Oborin and others. He got so caught up in the game that he was oblivious to everything else. This was perfect for me, and I made several sketches in black wash and pencil, and I also made a series of caricatures. Mitya, by the way, liked caricatures and was never offended by them.12
The Shostakovich family soon settled down to a life of apparent normality in Kuibyshev, their home becoming a focal meeting point for the intelligentsia. As soon as the most basic working conditions were available, Shostakovich got back to composing. During the year and a half he was based in the city, the composer finished the Seventh Symphony, wrote forty-five minutes of music for his unfinished opera The Gamblers (based on Gogol’s play), composed the ‘Six Romances on Verses by English Poets’ Op. 62 (later the title was corrected to ‘British Poets’), and his Second Piano Sonata.
Perhaps the most difficult thing for Shostakovich to bear was lack of communication with his friends. He sorely missed his musical discussions with Shebalin and Sollertinsky. Where possible he exerted his influence to help any friend in need. The elder generation in particular found it hard to adapt to the tough conditions of evacuation. Shostakovich was greatly distressed to hear of the death from typhoid fever of his piano teacher Leonid Nikolayev in Tashkent on 11 October 1942. A month later he learnt that his friend and mentor, Boleslav Yavorsky, had died in Saratov. Shortly before, Shostakovich had tried to activate assistance when he heard of the appalling conditions Yavorsky was living in.
The works Shostakovich wrote at the time were very much bound up with the ideas and values of friendship. The Six Romances were conceived as personal messages for a close group of friends. The first Romance was composed on 7 May in Kuibyshev, perhaps in honour of Maxim’s forthcoming fourth birthday: it was a setting of the poem ‘From Sir Walter Raleigh To His Sonne’ (entitled ‘The Wood, The Weed, The Wag’) in Boris Pasternak’s translation. This difficult and complex poem is a warning of the treachery of the three elements of the title, which while harmless in themselves, can be put together to form a gallows. The song was dedicated to Atovmyan, who had recently suffered disgrace and exile in Turkmenistan; the final lines, a prayer that we may be spared this fateful combination, still had poignant relevance.
Three more songs of the cycle were composed in mid-October of 1942 in Moscow (where Marshak had provided Shostakovich with poems in his translations suitable for setting). The last two were written back in Kuibyshev on 24 and 25 October respectively.13 Shostakovich dedicated the second song of the cycle, the Robert Burns poem ‘O wert thou in the cauld blast’ to his wife Nina; here the poet (composer) offers protection to a poor girl out in the wild elements. He is glad to accept any suffering when alone with her.
A characteristic feature of the song cycle lies in the sparse textures, which serve to exalt the words. One could point for instance to the simplest of chordal accompaniments in the dignified setting of Shakespeare’s 66th Sonnet (dedicated to Sollertinsky), a poem that had gained enormous popularity in Pasternak’s translation. Its line ‘Art made tongue-tied by Authority’14 was entirely appropriate to the state of culture in Soviet Russia of the time. Musically perhaps the most interesting song is the setting of another Burns poem, ‘Macpherson before his execution’ (dedicated to I. D. Glikman), with its lines mocking death in the face of the gallows. It is thematically close to the grotesque opening theme of the first movement of the Fourth Symphony, and in future years later was to be cited in the Thirteenth Symphony.15
At the end of the year Shostakovich planned to write a work dedicated to the memory of Nikolayev and started sketching a piano sonata. He abandoned his initial idea, but in January 1943 he himself caught typhoid fever. Soon he wrote to Sollertinsky: ‘When the pains stopped, I started thinking of my piano sonata. I have now thought it out, and am starting to write it down bit by bit.’16 A month later, while still recovering, Shostakovich showed the completed first movement to Oborin. ‘Lyova [Lev Oborin] has approved it,’ he informed his correspondent, ‘and suggested that I scribble another page, which I have done. He is a brilliant musician and immediately noted and corrected the defects which were gnawing at my conscience.’17 Shostakovich recovered his health slowly and was able to start going out only on 22 February. In March he was sent to the Arkhangelskoye Sanatorium outside Moscow to recuperate. Working conditions there were good, and the composer completed the three-movement Sonata on 17 March and the day after finished orchestrating his Six Romances (Op. 62).
The Piano Sonata No. 2 is a far more serious work than any of his previous output for piano. Both in the music’s structure and in the use of material Shostakovich paid his respects to Nikolayev;18 the variation form for the finale, he said, was chosen since Nikolayev had recommended it as the perfect vessel for a young composer’s stylistic searchings.
The emotional kernel of the work lies in the second movement Largo, with its sparse intimacy of musing dialogue and its harmonic ambiguity (achieved through the fluctuating chromatic sequence). The Sonata was premiered at the Small Hall of the Conservatoire in Moscow by the composer on 6 June 1943. Critical response was cool, and with the exception of Mariya Yudina (herself a former Nikolayev pupil) pianists didn’t take up the work at the time.
Shostakovich was nursing the seeds of a more substantial work, but just now, as he confessed to the writer Marietta Shaginyan, he was feeling out of sorts, suffering a continual headache: ‘The Piano Sonata is a trifle, an impromptu. I really am in a period of pause […] Even if I admit this only to you […] you know, I actually feel revulsion for my own music.’19 The composer recovered his health and found inner peace of mind only when he got down to composing his Eighth Symphony in the early summer.
Shaginyan, who was at the time collecting material for a book on Shostakovich, asked the writer Mikhail Zoshchenko for a description of the composer’s personality. Zoshchenko’s reply showed remarkable insight:
You say that he is ‘frail, fragile, withdrawn, yet infinitely direct, pure as a child’. That is so; but if that was all, then one would never achieve great art. He is exactly as you say, plus something else – he is tough, ascerbic, extremely intelligent, strong, perhaps, and not altogether good-natured (although his mind is good-natured). […] Great contradictions are at play within him. One quality obliterates another. It is conflict of the highest degree […] almost to the point of catastrophe.20
The following two articles by Flora Litvinova and her sister-in-law Tatyana Litvinova describe Shostakovich’s life in evacuation in Kuibyshev. Flora Litvinova describes her youth in the 1930s as being infected with Shostakovich’s music, notably with that of ‘The Song of the Counterplan’, and later Lady Macbeth (Katerina Izmailova), which she attended many times as a schoolgirl. She met her future husband Mikhail (Misha) Litvinov and his sister Tatyana (Tanya) at the first Moscow performance of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. Flora and Misha were married in May 1939, and their son Pavel (Pavlik) was born the following summer.
Misha and Tanya were born in London, children of the Bolshevik and political refugee Maxim Maximovich Litvinov and the English writer Ivy Low. The Litvinovs soon returned to the newly formed Soviet Union, where Maxim became Commissar for Foreign Affairs, a position he held until May 1939, when he was dismissed in disgrace and replaced by Vyacheslav Molotov. When war with Germany broke out, Maxim Litvinov was called back into government service, and in November 1941 he was appointed Soviet ambassador in Washington.
Flora and Misha, both university students, dug trenches outside Smolensk in the summer of 1941. Then Misha was called up and sent on a course at the Aviation Academy in Sverdlovsk. In October 1941 Maxim Litvinov arranged for the evacuation of Flora, Pavlik and Tanya to Kuibyshev. Shortly after their arrival Tanya met and married the sculptor Ilya Lvovich Slonim.
It was in Kuibyshev that the Shostakovich family befriended the Litvinovs, and they saw each other regularly during this period. Flora was adopted by Nina Shostakovich as a youthful protégé and accepted into the family on equal terms. She was treated by Dmitri Shostakovich with fatherly concern. Here FLORA LITVINOVA describes the Shostakovich family during three months of evacuation in Kuibyshev:
One day the painter Pyotr Villiams’s wife Anusya, an amusing petite actress, informed us that Shostakovich had arrived in town from besieged Leningrad with his wife and two small children. She added that the Shostakoviches had arrived virtually without any luggage. Dmitri Dmitriyevich had been promised that his mother and sister would be flown out on the next plane; but they hadn’t come. In the meanwhile, the family was living in the Grand Hotel, formerly a merchants’ hotel, which now housed the elite of the evacuees. Their children lacked essential clothing. So I got out the suitcase specially prepared by my mother with clothing and footwear for my son ‘to grow into’. Timidly, I suggested that Anusya should pass this on to the Shostakoviches.
The next day Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s wife, Nina Vasilyevna, came to see us. I took to her immediately, with her high clear forehead, light brown eyes and bright even features. She was of medium height and well-proportioned in build. Without wasting words, she thanked me for my help. I was only too happy to have been able to do something for Shostakovich’s children.
‘You know, we’re going to be neighbours. We’ve been given the flat below yours on the first floor,’ she told me. And indeed, in a few days’ time a grand piano was brought to the building, then four very spartan iron bedsteads, several Viennese chairs, a desk and a dining table, and a crudely built cupboard. And once, when looking out of our bathroom window, which overlooked the courtyard, my heartbeat quickened as I saw Dmitri Dmitriyevich walking across it, holding by the hand a five-year-old girl with plaits and an even younger boy in a black fur coat. Nina Vasilyevna came to our door to ask to borrow a hammer. I offered to feed them.
‘Thank you, but we lunched for the last time at the Grand Hotel. However, maybe something for the children, as they ate very poorly.’
The next day Nina and I managed to buy some bowls, saucepans, cut crystal glasses and mugs in the department store. Soon such things were to disappear from the shops, and the department store became the distributing point for rationed goods and things sold to special order. Before long I was on Christian-name terms with Nina, but we used the formal ‘you’, and never changed to ‘thou’, even when we became very close friends. During the move, Nina introduced me to Dmitri Dmitriyevich. He also hastened to thank me in his refined St Petersburg manner.
They were given a two-room flat. They put the piano and desk in one room, and they all slept in the other one. I immediately became attached to Nina, sensing her sympathetic attitude towards me. My feelings for her were akin to the adulation one might develop for an elder school friend. Although it existed at a subconscious level, it undoubtedly sprang from my awareness that she was Shostakovich’s chosen one.
We often went out for walks with Galya and Maxim and my young son Pavlik in the public gardens that flanked the banks of the Volga. If Nina was busy I would take the children on my own.
My life was radically changed by the Shostakoviches’ arrival. I knew that Dmitri Dmitriyevich was finishing his Seventh Symphony. At that time I jotted down some notes: ‘Today (2 December) I heard the piano and some obviously Shostakovich-like sounds. I got terribly excited. I stood next to the radiator so that I could hear better, but soon this music stopped, and then I heard Galya and Maxim singing “Three soldiers in a tank, three jolly friends”. What a travesty – Shostakovich’s children singing that.’
Not long afterwards Nina invited me to a party one evening. I was all of a flurry. Pavlik obviously sensed my agitation as he stubbornly refused to go to sleep. Although I sang to him and told him stories, he only quietened down very late. I nearly wept hearing the cheerful voices and sounds of the piano from the flat below. At last Pavlik was asleep, and I rushed downstairs. The party was in full swing. Some friends had brought some sausages, and there was vodka and an improvised vinaigrette salad. People were chattering away noisily. Dmitri Dmitriyevich was sitting at the piano with the round-faced Lev Oborin, whom I had previously only seen on the concert platform. He was a wonderful musician and pianist. When I walked in they were playing a song from some operetta called Pupsik – ‘Being called Pupsik has never riled,/That was my name when I was a child.’ An atmosphere of gaiety reigned – people sang along, they drank and laughed. I felt embarrassed and overwhelmed by it all – that those fingers in this house should be playing such trash! Oborin approached me and we were introduced. We sat down at the table and he poured me some vodka, which I drank for the first time. I found it unpleasant to taste, but immediately a feeling of warmth spread inside me, and I got tipsy. I felt light-headed and gay, and my anxious fears evaporated, together with my sense of timid adulation. I realized that I was a pleasing young woman. Dmitri Dmitriyevich continued to play some funny songs, laughing and jesting. There in the small corridor people were dancing. I particularly remember Shostakovich singing some romance in a deliberate parody with an unnaturally low voice which he accompanied with heart-tugging chords: ‘The chrysanthemums have faded in the garden, but love still blossoms in my sick heart.’ He also sang ‘A Pair of Bays’21 with Oborin at the piano. Sometimes they stopped to drink and chat, eat something and have a coffee. (At that time you could still get coffee beans in Kuibyshev, despite the fact that by then all other produce had disappeared from the shops. Food was obtained through special passes and rationing cards.)
Every now and then I ran upstairs to check on Pavlik, but he slept through it all soundly. One time, as I came downstairs, I heard some infectiously jolly piece, obviously by Shostakovich. ‘It’s the Galop from The Bedbug22 – it turned out an excellent piece,’ Dmitri Dmitriyevich said, and repeated the phrase over and over. I observed with delight a Shostakovich new to me: not the tense, inhibited, nervous St Petersburg type, but a witty, gay and jocular young man (he was then thirty-six years old). He twirled Nina round in some sort of ‘pas’, then the ballerina Muda Petrova, a lovely girl whom the Shostakoviches were very fond of.
It was on that occasion that I realized that not only was Shostakovich the great composer, the satirist and tragedian, the creator of the Fifth Symphony and Lady Macbeth, but at heart he was carefree, gay, kind and homely – not at all the frightening figure I had imagined!
‘And, d’you know, today I finally finished my Seventh,’ Dmitri Dmitriyevich suddenly announced quietly. That evening was altogether extraordinary and incredible, and I felt how lucky I was to be an accomplice to something so wonderful. In my diary entry for 28 December I wrote: ‘How happy I am! I spent the whole evening at the Shostakoviches. Dmitri Dmitriyevich has finished his Seventh, and we will hear it soon. What a marvellous, merry evening it was.’
Soon afterwards Dmitri Dmitriyevich finished the piano score of the Seventh Symphony and invited the conductor Samosud and various friends to hear it. Nina asked me along as well. I was so excited that I cannot remember who was present on that occasion, except for Lev Oborin, the harpist Vera Dulova23 and the Villiams couple. So much has already been said about the Symphony; I can only add that I was overwhelmed by the impression made on me by the famous theme in the first movement. Initially just playful, primitive, if unserious, it is gradually transformed into something terrifying, acquiring a force capable of obliterating everything in its path. Mechanical and relentless, it possesses a seemingly unlimited and inexorable strength.
When Dmitri Dmitriyevich finished playing, everybody rushed up to him. He was exhausted and highly agitated. Everybody spoke at once, about this theme, Fascism, the war and victory. Someone immediately dubbed the theme ‘rat-like’. Samosud declared that the Symphony was destined to have a great success, and that it would be performed all the world over. I went to put Pavlik to bed, and then, very late, I looked in on the Shostakoviches when they were alone. We drank tea, and the talk again revolved naturally around the Symphony. Dmitri Dmitriyevich said pensively, ‘Of course – Fascism. But music, real music, can never be literally tied to a theme. National Socialism is not the only form of Fascism; this music is about all forms of terror, slavery, the bondage of the spirit.’ Later on, when Dmitri Dmitriyevich got used to me and started to trust me, he told me straight out that the Seventh Symphony, and for that matter the Fifth as well, were not just about Fascism, but about our system, or any form of totalitarian regime.
By February 1942 the rehearsals of the Symphony were in full swing. Samosud worked intensively with the orchestra, aware of the immense responsibility invested in him as its first performer. Everybody realized that a performance of the Symphony in the middle of the war would be an event of political significance. Its creator was refuting the axiom that ‘When cannons fire, the Muses remain silent.’ Nina took me to one of the last rehearsals. We sat in the choir-stalls. They were rehearsing the third movement, the Largo, with its palpable lyrical purity in the marvellous duet between flute and bassoon. Here were absent those tempestuous emotions which Shostakovich so disliked both in real life and in art. Samosud stopped the orchestra twice, and they repeated some sections. Dmitri Dmitriyevich made a remark to the flautist. Then they played right through the movement without stopping. After the rehearsal was over, the musicians noisily put their instruments away, wiping the sweat off their brows, while a flock of ballerinas in tricot came running out of a rehearsal room and fluttered through the hall.
On 5 March 1942, the day of the first performance, I dropped in at the Shostakoviches’ flat to get my ticket from Nina. Dmitri Dmitriyevich was in a state of feverish agitation and tension. He ran from one room to the other, mumbling a greeting in passing. He looked pale and was clenching his fists. I glanced at Nina. She seemed very calm and collected. When she saw me out of the door, she divulged: ‘He’s always like this on the day of a first performance. He gets terribly wrought up. He is frightened it’ll be a flop.’ Later I observed, and Dmitri Dmitriyevich himself acknowledged, that before a premiere of his work, he felt physically ill to the point of nausea.
There was an enormous gathering in the theatre where the concert was held. All sorts of famous people were there, as well as high-ranking officials and the diplomatic corps. I was there with my sister-in-law Tanya and her husband Slonim. Nina and Dmitri Dmitriyevich came up to me. ‘You know,’ Shostakovich said, ‘I signed programmes for each of the orchestral musicians. I think that maybe each one of them will try a little harder, and the performance will benefit as a result.’ Needless to say, the Symphony had a phenomenal success.
There were always a lot of people at the Shostakovich house – friends, acquaintances, and strangers who just dropped by casually. Basically our life centred round the Information Bureau in anticipation of news bulletins. In one sense we lived without a daily routine, yet our everyday lives were very difficult. People wandered around, calling on each other with and without good cause; they came if they were acquaintances, or merely the acquaintances of acquaintances.
Of those who were closest to Dmitri Dmitriyevich I remember Lev Oborin and the Villiams couple, the harpist Vera Dulova and her husband, the baritone Alexander Baturin, who had given the first performance of the Pushkin Romances.24 At various times Ilya Ehrenburg and his wife would appear, then the cinema director Trauberg, the young conductor Kirill Kondrashin, and some attractive young girls. A certain Soso25 attached himself to the family; he worked in provisions and used to hand out supplements to the Shostakoviches. It was more than likely that he was performing other functions as well. Suspecting that he worked as an informer, Nina somehow managed to get rid of him.
Their life in evacuation was very different from their former life in Leningrad, where they had a large flat and servants. Here they lived in very cramped style. In the kitchen there was a small stove which they heated only at lunchtime. In the mornings Dmitri Dmitriyevich ran across the courtyard with two kettles to fetch boiling water from a large urn. I myself rarely went out for this purpose, but once, going into the boiler room, I saw Dmitri Dmitriyevich standing next to a ballerina. She simpered, ‘You know, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, I saw in the papers that they are putting forward candidates for the Stalin Prize. But in our ballet world there is no one worthy of it, I would say …’ Shostakovich was a member of the Prize Selection Committee. He mumbled a reply, and when we went out into the courtyard, he said with a wry grimace ‘I, of course, should have replied, “What do you mean, no one worthy of the Prize? And you? Your incomparable performance of Dulcinea in Don Quixote?”’ For Shostakovich nothing was more hateful than vulgar banality.
I grew steadily closer to Nina. She told me about her background and her parents, her father Vasili Vasiliyevich Varzar, an old-world St Petersburg engineer, and her mother, Sofiya Mikhailovna, an astronomer. Nina had graduated from the Bestuzhev Courses, the first institution of women’s higher education in Russia. Nina liked to talk of her childhood. She was one of three sisters, all of them interesting and talented girls, and well known throughout St Petersburg. Nina had studied at a music school and played the piano well. Once when I was with her, she sat down at the piano and I saw that she was indeed a good pianist. ‘But now I don’t play at all, Mitya does not tolerate amateurs.’ She had also studied in ballet school, but by the time she was sixteen her figure had become robust and lost its gracefulness. So she gave up the ballet school and, as she had a bent for the sciences, enrolled as a student of physics and maths at Leningrad University. In those years the Leningrad School of Physics was at its zenith, and her co-students were Lev Landau, Georgi Gamov, Abraam Alikhanov and Artyom Alikhanyan, all of whom were to become world-class physicists. She told me proudly that even in such company she had proved to be one of the best students. After graduating from university she worked with success in a physics laboratory.
It was at that time that she met Shostakovich, and before long they married. ‘No sooner would I arrive at the laboratory and get started on an experiment than Mitya would ring up and ask when I would get home. He didn’t like me being away from home, and he still doesn’t. Even when he goes out himself, he likes to know that we’re all at home, so that he returns to find his wife and children waiting for him.’ She also told me how they had quarrelled and got divorced, officially at that. However, they soon realized that they couldn’t live without one another, and they got married again. This time she changed her name to Shostakovich, and soon, in 1936, she gave birth to Galya, and two years later to Maxim. Nina was very ready to talk, but she never overstepped those bounds of friendship to recount sordid gossip, their private quarrels or flirtations; nor did she feel the need to prove herself right. She was a very strong, self-confident woman, and I don’t believe that she ever required such a relationship with a friend. As we lived at such close quarters, we saw each other daily, and their family life was open for me to see; Nina was its stay and support.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich by nature was completely incapable of saying ‘No’ to anybody. He did indeed help a lot of people, but he also fell victim to many unscrupulous and brazen types. He himself used to say, ‘When somebody starts pestering me, I have only one thought in mind – get rid of him as quickly as possible, and to achieve that I am prepared to sign anything!’ That autumn a well-known playwright, who also dabbled in operatic librettos, made his appearance at their house. He importuned Shostakovich to write the music to his new operetta libretto: ‘With my text, the relevance of its themes, and your music, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, our total success is assured – the operetta will be put on all round the Soviet Union.’ Dmitri Dmitriyevich politely kept the libretto saying, ‘I will read it and better acquaint myself with it.’ But he had no intention of writing an operetta. The writer kept coming to the house to exercise his powers of persuasion. At last Nina said to Dmitri Dmitriyevich when he was off to Moscow for a few days, ‘Mitya, don’t worry, I’ll deal with him.’ Nina laughingly showed me the note that Shostakovich had left, listing chores for her to do in his absence; it included, ‘Tell the librettist to f— off.’ Nina got rid of him, even if she didn’t have to use those very words. He didn’t come to the house again, although he left his masterpiece behind. In fact it came in very useful since there was a shortage of toilet paper at that time.
The affronted author, and others who were similarly insulted by Nina, did not like her. When Shostakovich turned down somebody’s request it was attributed to her influence, and it was said that she controlled his affairs. Sometimes Nina had to fend people off in no uncertain terms; then her face became impenetrable, and I was amazed at the cruelty of her words and her unswerving will. I think that in this Nina was only fulfilling Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s wishes, as he himself was incapable of such behaviour. To those close to the family Nina was welcoming and showed her concern without gushing words or excess of sentiment. This is how she behaved towards our family.
And I myself was in love with the whole Shostakovich family. My attitude to Shostakovich was imbued by my perception of his genius. I was full of delighted admiration for Nina, her exceptional and independent mind, her decisive yet calm character, and I was much influenced by her. Without my husband and my university friends, I felt unsure of myself, as if I had lost my bearings.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich got used to me and was welcoming towards me, although we spoke little, and then more or less casually. He worked incessantly, and additionally he was busy with business matters and had to attend many official meetings. Probably the first time that he paid much attention to me was when, on a certain occasion, Mahler was mentioned in the conversation. I told him that my father-in-law Maxim Litvinov had brought us the record of The Song of the Earth at Misha’s request. Mahler’s music was not performed in the Soviet Union then, as it was dubbed as ‘formalist’. Moscow musicians came specially to our home to listen to this recording. Suddenly Dmitri Dmitriyevich asked me, ‘How many movements does it have?’
‘Five. But you knew that anyway,’ I replied, offended that he was checking on me. ‘I have the record here, you can listen to it if you like.’
‘You’ve brought your records? I’ll take a look at what you’ve got,’ he said, and we went upstairs to our flat. Dmitri Dmitriyevich selected Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony from my records and put it on the wind-up gramophone. We listened to it sitting on Pavlik’s small mattress.
From that time on he was much more attentive towards me, and became a sort of mentor to me. I was the youngest of their friends. He did not like me to be flirtatious. Once, seeing me sitting too close to a man on the sofa (which also served as a bed), Dmitri Dmitriyevich called me over: ‘Flora, what kind of behaviour is that? He will have every reason to believe that you are provoking him. Surely, that’s not what you have in mind?’ But I was young, slightly tipsy, and I had no idea what I wanted or didn’t want.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich also tried to encourage me to study and to better myself. Soon after we had listened to the Jupiter Symphony, I told him that it was one of Misha’s and my favourite pieces. ‘Yes, yes, it is an amazing symphony – it has that absolute crystal clarity, whereby you hear the most complex polyphony, and all the themes weaving in and out in the last movement.’ And he started to recall it minutely, using many technical terms.
I listened, but did not understand much of what he was saying. ‘Dmitri Dmitriyevich, you know, I never studied music theory, so I simply listen because I like it. Sometimes I do try to follow the music with attention, but I lose the thread, and then I just go into a dream …’
‘My goodness, Flora, you’re just lazy and have no curiosity. You know all this can and should be studied and understood. Get hold of a textbook and study. Although it requires effort, it is an attainable objective for you. You can have no idea how much I got from Professor Steinberg at the Conservatoire. He was very severe, and made great demands on me. We analysed all the classics of musical literature. Many students didn’t like his classes, saying that he was dry and pedantic, and that he analysed the harmony to death. But I myself liked to analyse works thoroughly even before I went to the Conservatoire, to find out how things are written. It in no way hinders one’s pleasure in listening; on the contrary, it enhances it. Now they listen to recorded music at Conservatoire classes, and that too is very important, as a way of getting to know the interpretation of great conductors and soloists. But nevertheless it cannot be compared to playing through these same symphonies on the piano, and studying scores with one’s eyes. Music made with your own hands, and heard in your own head and heart is incomparably the best.’
I should add that once Dmitri Dmitriyevich said that no single performance of his works sounded as perfectly as it did in his own head.
Shostakovich adored Gogol and Chekhov; he knew these authors incredibly well. He read unbelievably fast. Once, seeing him quickly leafing through page after page of a book he held in his hands, I asked him, ‘Are you just glancing through it?’
‘No, Flora. You see I am used to reading scores, and I therefore also read very fast.’
He obviously possessed that rare gift of being able to read a whole page in a glance.
Chekhov he not only admired as a writer, but as a personality. ‘His father was a chandler, but Chekhov educated himself by reading, by hard work, and a constant struggle with himself.’ And he also said: ‘And after all, he didn’t like women, he saw straight through them, and hated all that was vulgar in them.’ He recalled the stories ‘The Wife’, ‘Ariadne’ and ‘The Grasshopper’. He had no good words for Olga Knipper-Chekhov, although he spoke about this later, when her correspondence with Chekhov had been published:
‘Can you imagine what Chekhov’s reaction would have been had he known that his wife would expose him in front of honest people? She should be ashamed of herself, publishing all the intimate details of their life together. Chekhov was right in nicknaming her the Aktrissulya.26 What these actresses won’t do to please the public! And the public doesn’t want to be fed on bread alone, they want to know whether the goings on in famous people’s bedrooms are the same as in everybody else’s, or whether they get up to something more inventive …’
But in the long run it was Gogol whom Dmitri Dmitriyevich loved better than all other Russian writers. In my opinion it is Gogol who is closest to Shostakovich by nature of his talent and his personality. His penetrating insight, his qualities of sarcasm, anger and the grotesque were combined with an infinite and aching compassion for people. On my rough bookshelf were the few books I had brought with me: six volumes of Pushkin, War and Peace, some Tyutchev poems, Pasternak’s translations, Burns’s poems translated by Marshak, Gogol’s stories and two volumes of Chekhov.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich borrowed them all. Once, while reading Gogol’s ‘The Portrait’ out loud, he said, ‘When I was writing my opera The Nose, I kept thinking that I must write something on ‘The Portrait’, on the theme of the artist who sells himself.’
I then said that I had never heard The Nose.
‘In that case, let’s go,’ he said, and we went downstairs, and Dmitri Dmitriyevich sat at the piano and sang long extracts from his opera.
I well remember the police officer’s aria, and Kovalyov’s conversation with the Nose set against the background of the Liturgy. Nina and the children also listened and laughed in delight.
‘So you see what kind of music I produced, it turned out really funny? It’s great stuff, don’t you think?’ Dmitri Dmitriyevich, usually busy, immersed in work and full of cares, was now calm and happy.
And this happened so rarely. It’s true that he got merry on a glass of vodka, but then he would usually soon go and sleep it off. But now we enjoyed a long, calm and wonderful evening. (My diary entry for that January day reads: ‘Today Dmitri Dmitriyevich played The Nose for us. How lucky I am! What good fortune!’)
Shostakovich’s amazing memory is much talked about. He knew all of classical music by heart, and much contemporary music as well. It was enough for him to look at a score or to listen to a work once for him to remember it. One day the conversation touched on his pupil, X. I had somehow heard an aria from X’s opera before the war, and I mentioned that I felt this piece was ‘pseudo-pathétique’. Dmitri Dmitriyevich ran to the piano and instantly reproduced the aria, singing, ‘Oh, mother!’ His musical memory was a delight to us all, but on the other hand it didn’t surprise me, because it seemed like a natural extension of his genius. But I was flabbergasted by the way he knew and remembered literature.
Once I was lamenting the fact that I didn’t bring Gogol’s Dead Souls with me; Dmitri Dmitriyevich immediately started quoting long extracts from it, about the carriage, the speculation as to whether the wheel would arrive in Moscow. Laughing, he recited the piece about Chichikov dressing for the evening party:
‘“He ordered that the washing utensils be brought up to him, and for an excessively long time he scrubbed both his cheeks with soap, inflating them from inside his mouth with his tongue; then taking the towel from the shoulders of the inn servant, he dried his fleshy face on all sides, starting from behind his ears, snorting first a couple of times in the servant’s face.” Can you imagine this scene? Here I would use a bassoon, trumpet and drum. Then when he puts on his shirt-front, “having plucked two hairs from his nose”, I’d use the piccolo – “and naturally found himself wearing a dress-coat the colour of whortle-berries shot with shiny lights”.’
Then, when Gogol goes on to describe the Governor’s party, Dmitri Dmitriyevich gave each personage a musical characterization.
In general one might say that sounds of any kind played an important role in Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s musical memory. An example of this is the story of how he was travelling by train with a companion. They were drinking vodka, and outside their compartment they noticed a legless war invalid on a wooden platform with wheels, singing some smutty limerick. The man rolled up to them and Dmitri Dmitriyevich poured him out a glass of vodka. They clinked glasses: ‘And do you know, because there was a different amount of vodka in each glass, our clinking produced a triad.’
Towards the spring of 1942, Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s mother, Sofiya Vasilyevna, arrived in Kuibyshev from Leningrad, together with his sister Mariya Dmitriyevna and her son Mitya.27 Shostakovich had been terribly worried and nervous about their fate. While getting ready to go and meet them, he kept repeating, ‘How will they be, I wonder what state they’ll be in?’ They arrived extremely emaciated after living through several months of the siege.
‘You know, once we ate a cat,’ Mariya Dmitriyevna told us. ‘Of course, I didn’t tell Mother or little Mitya.’
Dmitri Dmitriyevich was churned up by their stories of the cold and the hunger, the deaths of their friends and near and dear ones. He nervously drummed his fingers against the table. Soon Nina’s parents also arrived, and the nanny who had looked after her and then looked after Galya and Maxim; she was to stay with the family until her death.28
Sofiya Vasilyevna was very sociable and had many friends and acquaintances. Outwardly Dmitri Dmitriyevich was very like his mother. They were drawn together by a great friendship and love. But one was aware of the undercurrents in the relationship between Nina and Sofiya Vasilyevna. The latter always spoke well of Nina, but she did so in such a way as to make her praise sound like a reproach. And despite the fact that Dmitri Dmitriyevich was always a respectful and loving son, their relationship was complex.
In spring 1942 the Shostakoviches moved to a larger flat. There was now space to work and for the children. We saw less of each other. Dmitri Dmitriyevich went away to Moscow and other towns, and Nina often went with him. In the autumn of 1942 I first heard from Nina that they had decided to move to Moscow. They loved Leningrad, the city where they had spent their childhood, youth and first years of family life. But so many of their friends had perished, some in the war, while others had been arrested. It had been a difficult decision for them, but they realized that they would find it easier to live and work in Moscow.
To begin with the Shostakoviches stayed at the ‘Moscow’ Hotel, where they had a two-room suite with a grand piano in it. When I managed to make a short visit to Moscow in 1943, I went to see them there. In answer to my question, what was Dmitri Dmitriyevich working on now, Nina just gesticulated: ‘Just music for the cinema. Of course he does it easily enough, but it’s a shame that he wastes his time on it.’ We went for a meal in the restaurant, where we were fed quite decently. Dmitri Dmitriyevich was very silent, gloomy and preoccupied by something. After lunch, he said to me, ‘Why have you put on such bright lipstick? It doesn’t suit you at all.’
In the spring of 1943 my father-in-law Maxim Litvinov was called back from Washington to Moscow. Molotov had been to the USA on a visit a few months earlier, and the mutual antagonism of the two men had deepened. Maxim Maximovich understood that he was now to be retired. He was allotted a large flat for all the family in the large, grey, inhospitable block overlooking the Moscow River, the ‘House on the Embankment’.29 We arrived there from Kuibyshev in the autumn of 1943.
In the spring the Shostakoviches had been allocated their first Moscow home, a dark apartment on Kirov Street that looked out on the courtyard.30 But they were delighted with it, as it meant that at last they could establish a normal family life in their own home. I remember the house-warming party. They had moved in a grand piano, a table, some boxes. There were no plates or cutlery. Everybody was very tired but happy. Some tins of food were opened and a bottle of vodka. We drank out of mugs or cut-crystal glasses, and ate directly out of the tins, breaking the bread in our hands. The Shostakoviches stayed in that flat until 1947.31,32
Tatyana (Tanya) Litvinova and her husband Ilya Slonim shared their Kuibyshev apartment with their sister-in-law Flora. But they tended to keep their lives apart from hers, and established very different relationships than hers with their neighbours, the Shostakoviches. Tanya and Ilya enjoyed a kind of ‘man-to-man’ contact with Dmitri Dmitriyevich and were not close to the rest of the family. Here TATYANA LITVINOVA describes their life as Shostakovich’s neighbours:
The Shostakovich family had been allotted an apartment in the same building where we had settled a month or so prior to their arrival. To accommodate us, the apartments had been vacated by the local functionaries who had lived there.
We introduced ourselves right away, and more or less the next day my husband began to sculpt a bust of Shostakovich – it had been his dream for years to make one.
Shostakovich was just completing his Seventh Symphony and was at the zenith of his fame. At the same time he was very distraught. At the Leningrad airfield they had promised to put his mother Sofiya Vasilyevna on the next plane out, but they hadn’t. Now he was obsessed with the idea of chartering a plane to go and fetch her. After a month or so he succeeded in prevailing upon the authorities to bring her to Kuibyshev. When she arrived she was amazed to see so many dogs roaming the streets freely. In Leningrad all the dogs had been eaten.
The thing that struck one most about Shostakovich was his nervousness, which went together with a Leningrader’s reserve and a eunuch’s youthfulness. Nobody who saw him taking his bows on the platform after his music had been performed could forget his crooked figure, his grimace of misery and the fingers that never stopped drumming on his cheek. It was torture just to watch him! He minced his steps and bowed like a circus pony. There was something robot-like in his movements.33
The next thing that impressed one was his perfect mind, just like his perfect pitch, and his amazing knowledge of Russian literature from Pushkin and Lermontov to Babel and Zoshchenko. Once, during a sitting, he noticed that I was reading Dostoevsky’s A Raw Youth. He began to recite the book from memory, paragraph by paragraph. His favourite place was the following dialogue:
‘Prince Dolgoruky?’
‘No, simply Dolgoruky.’
At that time he was writing his opera, The Gamblers. His aim was not to omit a single word from Gogol’s play. He regretted the absence of a female part. We jokingly suggested that he should write a part for ‘Adelaida Ivanovna’ (as the gamblers referred to the pack of marked cards). He was also very fond of Chekhov and wanted to write music to ‘Gusev’, which he considered the most musical prose in all Russian literature. He could also recite from memory whole pages of Zoshchenko. I remember him telling us many years later of his futile attempts to drag some writers holidaying near Leningrad to Zoshchenko’s pauper’s funeral.
My husband and I were in love with Shostakovich. Between his daily sittings we talked only about him. We decided that he was the ‘closest approximation to genius’ that we had ever encountered.
He came for his sittings at eleven o’clock in the morning. He was always very punctual and always warned us in advance if he couldn’t make it. He always concluded the sessions with the same formula: ‘It’s thirteen hundred hours. Don’t you think …?’ That meant it was time to drink some beer.
We also met apart from the sittings. Whenever either of us got hold of some vodka or pure spirit we signalled to the others by tapping on the central heating pipes. Shostakovich didn’t need much to get drunk. After his second glass he would start looking for an unoccupied bed. Once I saw him very drunk. He was trying to repair with a hammer an alarm clock on top of the piano.
His humour was deadpan and cruel. He excelled in parodying the bureaucratic lingo. Despite all that, to us more expansive Muscovites he appeared somewhat dry, and to begin with we did not have a sense of real friendship. So the following incident was all the more surprising to us.
After the third or fourth sitting, my husband said to Shostakovich, ‘I think I’ll be seeing you for the last time tomorrow. I’ve been summoned to the recruiting office.’ My husband was thirty-five, the same age as Shostakovich. He wasn’t fit for front-line service and he hadn’t been trained. But during the first months of the war he had served in the army; his unit was based in Oryol. When the Germans had taken the town, his unit was dispersed, and my husband managed to escape through the surrounding German lines and found his way to Kuibyshev.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich didn’t seem to react to my husband’s announcement in any way. But an hour later he came back and asked, ‘Ilya Lvovich, do you need any money?’ We were touched. But what followed was totally unexpected. It turned out that, directly upon leaving us, Shostakovich had gone to the State Committee for the Arts. There he announced that the sculptor Slonim was working on his bust, and it was therefore desirable that he should be exempted from army service. The Shostakovich of the moment was a Big Noise. To appreciate what he had done, one must realize how squeamishly humble he was, how he detested any contact with the powers that be. My husband was accordingly exempted and enlisted in the so-called ‘golden heritage of the creative intelligentsia’.
Shostakovich’s bust is Slonim’s best work. However the then chairman of the Committee for the Arts wasn’t pleased with it. ‘What we need is an optimistic Shostakovich.’ Shostakovich was fond of repeating this phrase.34
ILYA SLONIM gave the following description of Shostakovich’s behaviour during these sittings in Kuibyshev:
For the first five minutes he sat bolt upright, then he would practise five-finger exercises on his cheek, then he hung his head between his knees and covered his whole head with his hands. We tried to distract him and put music on the wind-up gramophone, which helped things along greatly … He couldn’t stand generalized conversation. When he spoke of music, he would rush to the piano to illustrate his point, just as, when talking about books, he would quote whole passages verbatim. I remember him playing nearly all of Boris Godunov when the conversation touched on Mussorgsky, and nearly all of Petrushka when we talked of Stravinsky.35
ISAAK GLIKMAN confirms Tanya Litvinova’s impressions of Shostakovich’s diffidence over asking for anything for himself. While visiting the composer in Kuibyshev in April 1942, he noted that Shostakovich insisted on walking rather than ask the authorities to provide him with transport:
Of course, had Shostakovich put in a request to the local powers that be, undoubtedly he would have been given a car, but he would agonize before ever making even the most trivial request … Thus when I left Kuibyshev, we set off on foot at night for the station, even though I was carrying a heavy rucksack (all the heavier for the provisions that Nina Vasilyevna had given me, knowing that food products were essential to survival in hungry Tashkent).36
Similarly, I remember how worried Dmitri Dmitriyevich was before setting off to see the administrator of the affairs of the Soviet of People’s Commissars, to ask permission for me to feed with him and his family in the restaurant of the National Hotel in Kuibyshev. I was deeply touched when he returned, clutching in his hands the treasured pass; his face shone with delight … But until the moment he actually held the pass in his hands, he doubted whether his request would be granted. Even after the historic performances of the Seventh Symphony, Shostakovich was completely unaware of the power of his authority and reputation. Although he often interceded on behalf of others, he never asked for anything for himself. It was so much against his nature that he was actually incapable of doing so.37
David Rabinovich, Shostakovich’s biographer, wrote that Shostakovich started work on The Gamblers the day after he finished the Seventh Symphony. However, the composer’s own references to this work point to its mostly being written in May and June 1942. In his correspondence with Vissarion Shebalin, Shostakovich first mentions The Gamblers on 10 June. By November he was complaining:
I am still composing the unrealistic opera The Gamblers. I call it unrealistic for reasons of its unreality: I’ve composed thirty minutes of music already, and this is only about one-seventh of the whole work. It’s too long. Nevertheless it is not without pleasure and satisfaction that I work on it.38
Soon after Shostakovich abandoned the work. After the war he gave the manuscript to his pupil and friend Galina Ustvolskaya. In 1974 he asked her to return it; significantly an excerpt from The Gamblers is quoted in the composer’s swan song, the Viola Sonata.
The opera director Boris Pokrovsky recalled that at this time Shostakovich contacted the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow to ask for precise timings of the best-known Russian operas (Ruslan and Lyudmilla, The Queen of Spades, and so on.) It is Pokrovsky’s opinion that Shostakovich should have ignored the question of length and have gone on to finish this potential masterpiece.39
In September 1941 ISAAK GLIKMAN was evacuated with the Leningrad Conservatoire to Tashkent. The first performance of the Seventh Symphony from Kuibyshev was transmitted on the National Radio. On hearing this broadcast, Pavel Serebryakov, the director of the Leningrad Conservatoire, supported by the enthusiastic Glikman, decided that the symphony must be performed in Tashkent by the Conservatoire Orchestra.40 At the express wish of Shostakovich, Glikman was entrusted the mission of going to Kuibyshev to collect the score. The journey by train took ten days, and Glikman arrived in Kuibyshev on 15 April 1942. He stayed in the composer’s home until the middle of May:
During my stay in Kuibyshev, Dmitri Dmitriyevich more than once played through much of Verdi’s Otello; I remember his performance of Iago’s ‘Credo’ monologue, Desdemona’s ‘Willow Song’ and ‘Prayer’, and Otello’s final scene. Back in the 1930s, Dmitri Dmitriyevich had told me that Otello was one of his favourite operas and he had an enduring love for this work. While listening to these fragments I wondered if Dmitri Dmitriyevich didn’t have some plan to write something on a Shakespearean theme. He had indeed conceived the idea of a new opera, but its subject was not Shakespearean; he was going to set to music Gogol’s play, The Gamblers.
‘Yes, after a gap of fourteen years I have decided to return to Gogol. But The Gamblers will not be like The Nose; it will be composed on a completely different basis. In The Nose I allowed myself to treat Gogol’s text very freely, but I wish to reproduce the complete Gogol text of The Gamblers, setting every word, in the same way as Dargomyzhsky did in The Stone Guest. So Gogol himself will be the librettist. It’s probably a bad thing that there are no female roles here; it seems they exist in every opera written so far. On the other hand, what an extraordinary comedy Gogol wrote. You remember of course that it includes a comedy within a comedy, the latter belonging to the hero of the story, Stepan Ivanovich Uteshitelny. What an original idea!’
I rejoined, ‘Don’t you think that this new work of yours could become the third in a wonderful operatic trilogy based on the theme of cards: Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, Prokofiev’s The Gambler, and your new opera; after all this theme retains its perpetual interest.’
‘Well, in my youth I enjoyed playing cards and always lost. So maybe I can put my limited experience to use in your dreamt-up trilogy!’
I was surprised and delighted as the concept of The Gamblers meant a return to opera, to which it had appeared that Dmitri Dmitriyevich had finally bidden farewell after the miserable affair of Lady Macbeth. In addition, it was a return to his beloved Gogol, notwithstanding the unhappy fate that had befallen The Nose. And thirdly, it proved his desire to write a comedy after the tragic and epic Seventh Symphony. Ahead lay the creation of his most tragic work – the Eighth Symphony. The Gamblers would thereby fulfil the function of a comic interlude as in the satirical dramas of the Greek tragedists.
It is common knowledge what fate overtook this opera. Dmitri Dmitriyevich was afraid that without drastic cutting, Gogol’s one-act play would grow out of hand and be unsuitable for operatic treatment. He therefore ceased to work on it after composing forty minutes of first-rate music, bubbling over with brilliant wit and humour.41
If the Seventh Symphony was hailed as the ultimate example of Patriotic Art, Shostakovich’s following two symphonies aroused very different reactions. Shostakovich is reputed to have considered the Eighth Symphony his Requiem, and its tragic canvas is arguably one of his greatest compositional achievements. It was written incredibly quickly between 2 July and 9 September 1943 at Ivanovo. The Eighth Symphony was a truly challenging work, both for the interpreter and for the performer. Mravinsky required a rehearsal period that almost equalled in duration the actual time it took to compose the work.42 Shostakovich closely observed the rehearsal process, and noted the conductor’s initial diffidence. But after a week or so, Mravinsky was obviously totally immersed in the spirit and matter of the work. Shostakovich, gladdened by this psychological breakthrough, decided to write his dedication to Mravinsky into the score, a gesture of approval for the conductor’s growing authority of interpretation. He conducted the first performance on 4 November at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire. By this time, the tide of the war was changing, and the Soviets had started to repulse the Germans. ‘Optimistic’ celebration rather than ‘pessimistic’ tragedy was the order of the day. Hence the official reception of the Eighth Symphony was subdued, if not positively icy.
More surprisingly, few musicians at the time appreciated the significance of this great music. Sollertinsky wrote to his wife in Novosibirsk the day after the Symphony’s premiere: ‘The work made an enormous impression. It is far more difficult and acerbic than the Seventh or Fifth Symphonies, and therefore it’s unlikely to become popular. Its success will depend more on Shostakovich’s own name and popularity than on the work itself. It has already earned ferocious enemies, headed by Yuri Shaporin.’43 Two notable young musicians attended the first performance, and immediately perceived the Symphony’s significance. Sviatoslav Richter, who some thirty years later wrote about the importance of Shostakovich’s music, observed that ‘for me the decisive work in his output was the Eighth Symphony’. And Mstislav Rostropovich, then a seventeen-year-old student of both cello and composition, was so deeply impressed that he rushed home after the performance and there and then started to compose a new symphony himself. By the cold light of morning he realized that he was only writing a pale imitation of Shostakovich’s Eighth, and gave up his effort. But his admiration for Shostakovich was now firmly entrenched.44 Sollertinsky, on the eve of his death, introduced Mravinsky’s performance of the Symphony in Novosibirsk on 6 February 1944. He stated that Shostakovich, the tragic poet of music, had an artist’s right to tragedy as ‘the fruit of maturity, courage and moral freedom’. Shostakovich himself was fully aware that the Eighth Symphony was not to be accorded the triumphant reception of the Seventh. In a letter dated 8 December 1943, he wrote to Isaak Glikman:
A discussion of my Symphony was to be held at the Union of Soviet Composers but it was postponed because of my illness. Soon this discussion will take place, and I don’t doubt that many valuable critical observations will be made then, which will inspire me to future creativity, and which will make me review all my previous works, and accordingly, instead of one step backwards, I will make one step forwards.45
By now, Shostakovich, along with many of the intelligentsia, realized that victory over the Germans would give Stalin opportunities to abuse his immense power and newly acquired international prestige. In particular he feared a return to the pre-war policies of lawlessness and terror. In his New Year greeting to Glikman, written on 31 December 1943, Shostakovich uses an unmistakable irony:
1944 is around the corner. A year of happiness, joy, and victory. This year will bring us much joy. The freedom-loving Peoples will at long last throw off the yoke of Hitlerism, and peace will reign throughout the world under the sunny rays of Stalin’s Constitution. I am convinced of this, and therefore experience the greatest joy. Now we are apart; how I miss you; would that together we could rejoice at the victories of the Red Army led by its Great Commander, comrade Stalin.46
Events in the cultural world already showed that Shostakovich’s fears were justified. At a Composers’ Plenum at the end of March 1944, the Eighth Symphony was subjected to heated discussion and criticism. Its unequivocal supporters were few: the musicologists D. Rabinovich and L. Maazel, and the composer Gavriil Popov. Prokofiev criticized the work’s length and ‘lack of clear melodic line’, and made a practical suggestion to reduce the Symphony to three movements (the first, third and fifth), thereby making it more accessible.47 Only at a slightly later date did some cautious approval appear in print, when Ivan Martynov in his 1946 biography of the composer wrote that the Eighth deserved prolonged study: ‘It is a wonderful document which recounts of hard, difficult times. Its tragic theme is revealed in depth and with truthful sincerity.’48 After the Moscow and Novosibirsk performances, Mravinsky conducted the Symphony in his liberated home town of Leningrad. After this the work was unofficially but effectively banned from further performance. Although put forward for a Stalin Prize, the Eighth Symphony was bypassed by the prize commission, despite the great actor Solomon Mikhoels’s plea for understanding: ‘I am deeply convinced that Shostakovich’s music belongs to a nearby future,’ he insisted. ‘[…] As constructors of this future, we should be attentive to artists who know how to perceive the future, who are ahead of their time. Shostakovich is just such an artist.’49 In the rest of the world, although eagerly awaited, the Eighth Symphony initially fared little better.
While the Eighth Symphony can be seen as a complement to and continuation of the epic Seventh, the Ninth Symphony, written after victory in 1945, was an about-turn typical of Shostakovich’s paradoxical nature. Initially the composer had declared his intentions to write a grand-scale Victory work to cap a trilogy of war symphonies. From spring of 1944 the press published periodic reports on Shostakovich’s work in progress on a choral symphony. The composer himself fed these rumours, and it appeared that they were not without substance when in January 1945 he demonstrated to his students the exposition of a new orchestral work. But in a letter to Glikman dated 2 January 1945 Shostakovich voiced his private thoughts:
My plans for 1945 are not clear. I am not composing anything, since I live in such appalling conditions. From 6.00 to 18.00 I am deprived of two basic forms of convenience: water and light. It’s particularly difficult without these conveniences between 15.00 and 18.00 – it’s already dark by then. Kerosine lamps give little light and my eyesight is bad. My nerves go to pieces because of this darkness. […] then at 18.00 they turn on the light, but by that joyful moment my nerves are so tautly wound up that I cannot pull myself together.
His first attempts at his new symphony were discarded. In July 1945, Shostakovich got down to work in earnest, completing his Ninth Symphony on 30 August 1945. He performed it in a four-hand piano version with Sviatoslav Richter at a demonstration for Ministry of Culture and Composers’ Union officials. Predictably, here and at its first performance, the Symphony caused consternation for failing to be a grandiose hymn extolling Soviet victory over the Germans. Its light-hearted parodying tone was open to misinterpretation in official circles. Mravinsky, who conducted the Ninth Symphony’s first performance in Leningrad on 3 November, found it expedient to explain that the music expressed the opposite of what it seemed. Later he wrote down his arguments that the composer had set out to expose ‘bourgeois conventionality’; the light-hearted jesting of the first movement and the ‘unjustified merriment’ of the finale, therefore, were insincere, and really expressed only sentiments of indifferent, self-satisfied philistinism.50 Gavriil Popov (like Khachaturian a consistent and loyal admirer), had a different opinion. His diary entry for 21 September reads:
Mitya just came to see me [at midday]. He played [from the score] his Ninth Symphony. […] Transparent, lots of light and air. Wonderful tuttis, clear themes (the first subject of the first movment is pure Mozart). Really literally it’s Mozart. […] It’s all full of emotion. A wonderful finale, with such joie de vivre, brilliance and sharp wit. Well done Mitya!51
Shostakovich himself foresaw that the Symphony would not be well received: ‘Yes, musicians will enjoy playing it, but the critics will tear it to shreds.’52 And when his friend Gavriil Yudin expressed his delight at being the third conductor of the work after Mravinsky and Gauk, Shostakovich commented ironically, ‘Well, you understand, my Eighth Symphony was pseudotragic. And the Ninth is pseudo-comic.’53 Abroad, the Ninth Symphony quickly established itself in many conductors’ repertoire. The US premiere was given by Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in July 1946. Koussevitzky had invited Shostakovich to attend, and asked if he wished to conduct the Symphony himself, or might prefer to perform his Piano Concerto in the same programme. Shostakovich’s personal wishes are not recorded, but in any case permission to travel to the USA was withheld.
At the time DANIIL ZHITOMIRSKY wrote ‘positive’ (if somewhat cautious) critical reviews of these two symphonies. Here he describes the background to their creation:
In the high-ranking Party officials’ attitude towards Shostakovich two motivating and conflicting factors were prevalent. The first was irritation provoked, on the one hand, by the composer’s courage and unpredictable behaviour, and, on the other, by their inability to control his work sufficiently. For his work had a formulative and ‘pernicious’ influence in the circles he moved in. The second factor was Shostakovich’s usefulness as a symbol of international prestige for his country, as a convenient mouthpiece to show his country in a favourable light, thereby disguising as far as possible what was really going on in our society. In the same way, Shostakovich had his uses for internal propaganda: ‘You see how we value our most distinguished artists, our intelligentsia.’ These two factors determined the incredible fate of the composer and the frenetic swings in attitudes towards him in the official evaluation of his status. First he was seen as a high-flying and powerful artist, then he fell from grace. This was also organized by the big Party bosses with the active help of subservient officials, a pack of small-minded and jealous cowards devoid of conscience and honour.
At the Moscow premiere of the Eighth Symphony in 1943, I was not only a listener but one of its reviewers. From the concert hall I went straight to the editorial office of Komsomolskaya Pravda. My article was read meticulously and cautiously corrected; all mention of my fresh impressions was ironed out. At the same time the chief editor made some phone calls to high-up places to obtain special authorization for its publication; this in the end never materialized. Here are some lines from my diary entries of the time:
‘The clock showed midnight, then one o’clock, two o’clock. Still there was no answer. But I realized from the editor’s expression that some serious trouble was brewing – some ‘bigwig’ had been outraged. After two o’clock in the morning I left for home. There was no transport and the curfew was on. Despite having to keep an anxious look-out for patrols I had time for reflection. All this seems strange and inexplicable. But no, in essence there’s nothing strange here. At the Front the tide has turned and we now can expect victory. The newspapers blare forth fan-fares, our evening skies are lit up by ever more extravagant displays of fireworks. But the Eighth Symphony described something completely different. Good God, who should dare hint that Shostakovich does not share the general delight in our victory over Hitler? His symphony does not reflect this triumphal, fanfare-like actuality, but its converse side. It has something of the retrospective in it, and also of the prophetic … such integrity in the face of monstrous evil, sorrow and anger. The Scherzo gave me goose-flesh. The Passacaglia portrays a soul in distress, seeking and questioning with imploring looks. The Finale achieves the greatest spiritual heights, an enlightened resignation. Should some vigilant observer notice something awry, he might whisper in the necessary quarters: “Take care, this music is not what you think it is at all, you will answer for this and pay due retribution.”’
The next morning my review was not to be found in the paper. Soon after the Eighth Symphony was relegated to the list of works ‘not recommended’ for performance.
In August 1945 I lived in the composers’ ‘House of Creativity’ at Ivanovo. I saw Shostakovich daily. In the small front garden of his shabby dwelling, several friends had concocted a sort of table for him, a board nailed down on top of poles driven into the ground. Every morning Dmitri Dmitriyevich worked here on his Ninth Symphony.54 Again I quote some lines from my diary:
‘For a few days nobody has been around at dinner. Dmitri Dmitriyevich and Nina Vasilyevna have left for Moscow. I met them at Ivanovo station. On the way back here, Dmitri Dmitriyevich first told me about the “uranium” bomb, of the inconceivable, terrible catastrophe of Hiroshima. Nina Vasilyevna explained with great authority about the significance of the splitting of the atom. Dmitri Dmitriyevich was gloomy and taciturn, yet at the same time he could not disguise his inner agitation. He spoke in short quick phrases; the husky, pinched tone of his voice, his absent gaze and pallid complexion all transmitted his distress. We then walked in silence to his little dacha. I thought in bewilderment about Hiroshima, of the complexities of this moment in time (even though the war had ended for us), and wondered what the near future had in store. I started to give voice to my despondency, but Dmitri Dmitriyevich, his eyes fixed on some point overhead, quickly cut short my lamentations: “Our job is to rejoice!”’
I have remembered this reply all my life. It conveyed a certain fatalism, but also a spark of protest. Shostakovich had developed a fatalistic attitude towards what was ‘demanded’ of him, which often had an oppressing effect on him. But actually, in his work on the Ninth Symphony he could no longer subjugate himself to this oppression. As far back as the spring of 1944 Shostakovich had said to a certain Moscow musicologist, ‘Yes, I am thinking of my next symphony, the Ninth. I would like to employ not only full orchestra but a choir and soloists, if I can find a suitable text; in any case I don’t want to be accused of drawing presumptuous analogies.’55
According to G. Orlov, ‘In the winter of 1944/45 it was common knowledge that Shostakovich had started work on his Ninth Symphony. Certain musicians had the opportunity to listen to the first pages of the new score – a triumphal heroic major which surged with energy. Very soon, literally a few days later, the exposition of the first movement was completed, and, after another week, the development. Then suddenly the composer interrupted his work. He gave no explanation, and in general avoided any mention of this subject. Subsequently, over a year later, he recounted that, after this first version, he had started on another which he also was unable to complete.’56 In the meantime in the summer of 1945 the papers carried a TASS bulletin reporting that Shostakovich’s new symphony ‘devoted to the Celebration of our Great Victory’ would soon be performed.
But in fact in August of that year, at his crude country table at Ivanovo, Shostakovich was creating something entirely different, indeed totally contrary to what these reports suggested. Instead of a lavish glorification, a modest chamber score emerged. In one of the more favourable reviews of the time it was called a ‘Symphony-Scherzo’. I remember how clearly I sensed the novelty of this symphony, its inherent relevance and manifold implications, which were by no means immediately obvious. Superficially there was much that was playful and carefree in the music, even at times a sort of festive swagger; but this then was transformed into something tragic and grotesque. It showed up the senseless vacuity and triteness of that everyday ‘rejoicing’ which so gratified our authorities.57
Shostakovich met Aram Khachaturian in 1934, while travelling by train to Baku. The composer described this meeting in a letter to Elena Konstantinovskaya dated 15 June 1934:
In Moscow the Armenian composer Khachaturian got on the train in the same carriage as me. He turned out to be an excellent travelling companion. We dined together in the restaurant car; I have to say that I liked Khachaturian considerably more than the dinner. In fact, I remained hungry after the meal! Khachaturian brought some wonderful salami and wouldn’t leave me in peace until I had eaten it.58
The two men were to develop a lifelong friendship based on deep mutal trust.
In July 1943 both composers took part in a national competition for a new national anthem. Previously the Internationale had served this purpose. The competition took place at the Bolshoi Theatre amidst much pomp and ceremony. The final judge was no less a person than Stalin, whom Shostakovich was to meet for the first time. In the event Alexander Alexandrov’s ‘Bolshevik Party Anthem’ was chosen, with a new text by Sergei Mikhailkov and G. El-Registan, which became obsolete after 1956 because of its fawning references to Stalin.59 Here ARAM KHACHATURIAN gives his account of the competition:
It was during the war that the decision was made to create a new national anthem of the USSR. A special competition to choose the new words and music was announced. First writers and poets, then composers were asked to submit their entries. Stalin entrusted the running of the competition to Voroshilov, Shcherbakov and Khrapchenko. Voroshilov himself used to sing and enjoyed listening to the Bolshevik Party Anthem, which was always performed by the Red Banner Ensemble of the Red Army.
Around 500 anthems were submitted to the competition. Many composers put forward several versions. The auditions took place at the Beethoven Hall of the Bolshoi Theatre. To begin with, anthems of other countries (the ‘Marseillaise’, ‘God Save the King’ and the ‘Internationale’) were played in Stalin’s presence. Khrapchenko, chairman of the Committee for Arts at that time, came out and announced, ‘Khachaturian and Shostakovich backstage please.’ We went to the green room. Standing in semi-profile at the door was Stalin’s chief of staff, General Vlasik. I summoned up courage and entered first. I saw Stalin standing alone on the right; on the left were all the members of the Politbureau. I stood nearest to the door with Shostakovich and Khrapchenko next to me. Stalin outlined the characteristics of a national anthem and defined how to make it ‘Soviet’.
The auditions began. The following rule was established: the stage curtains were drawn back, the choir sang the anthem alone, then Melik-Pashayev conducted the orchestral version, and lastly a joint performance by choir and orchestra was given.
Voroshilov suggested that Shostakovich and I wrote an anthem together. For two days we didn’t get anywhere with it. We composed separately, then corrected together. By the third day, something started taking shape. We used the words of the poet Mikhail Golodny. But then there was a small hitch: who should orchestrate it? Shostakovich said, ‘Let’s break a match. Whoever gets the head will do it.’ The ‘head’ fell to me, so I did the orchestration.60 My own anthem, our joint effort, and those of Alexandrov, Shostakovich and Iona Tuskiya were judged on the same day. Each was played in its three forms: a cappella choir, the orchestral version and then the version with choir and orchestra.
We were called again to see Stalin. He asked Melik-Pashayev, ‘Do you like their joint anthem?’
He answered, ‘I prefer the anthems that they wrote separately to the one they wrote together.’
Stalin rejoined, ‘And I like their joint effort better than their separate anthems.’
Many of the anthems (including Alexandrov’s) had been orchestrated by Victor Knushevitsky. Shostakovich praised Knushevitsky for his excellent orchestrations. Molotov asked, ‘And was your joint anthem also orchestrated by Knushevitsky?’
Shostakovich answered, ‘A composer should be able to orchestrate himself,’ and then repeated this phrase convulsively.
The question arose about an alteration in the refrain of our anthem. It meant having to rewrite all the music.
Stalin asked, ‘Will three months be enough time for you?’
Shostakovich answered, ‘Five days will do.’61
Soon after that Stalin left for Tehran to meet Roosevelt and Churchill. On his return he decided in favour of Alexandrov’s entry, the previous Bolshevik Party Anthem.62
This curious offshoot of the NKVD came into being during the war years under the patronage of Lavrenti Beriya.63 The Ensemble was made up from mobilized artists, released from military duty so as to provide entertainment for the troops at the various front lines, in the cities and also at official Kremlin receptions. The Ensemble boasted a symphony orchestra, a folk orchestra, a jazz orchestra, a choir and a dance company. Split up into smaller units, it travelled all over the country. In reality, the Ensemble constituted a collection of the country’s artistic elite. Shostakovich wrote the music for some of the theatrical concert entertainments, known as patriotic stage spectacles. The first of his scores for the Ensemble was a suite entitled Native Leningrad Op. 63 (1942), followed by The Great Russian River Op. 66 (1944) and lastly Victorious Spring Op. 72 (1945).
The theatre director YURI PETROVICH LYUBIMOV started his career as an actor, and by the time he met Shostakovich he was well known for his work in the theatre and cinema. Lyubimov later went on to found the famous TAGANKA Theatre in Moscow in 1963:
I first met Shostakovich at a dismal institution called ‘The Ensemble of Song and Dance of the NKVD’ which was presided over by Beriya. I was a soldier then and was ordered to join the Ensemble. Shostakovich had been asked to collaborate. Too scared to refuse, he wrote songs like ‘Burn, Burn, Burn’ (otherwise known as ‘The Torches’).64 The song described the torches used during the night-time blackouts, which were necessitated so that the enemy should not see us. The song became incredibly popular and everybody hummed it. As our boss used to say, ‘We need a song to set the People singing. Both words and tune should easily sink into their ears.’
Once our boss, a secret police officer, expressed a wish for a dance depicting football. Suddenly Shostakovich piped up, ‘May I compose the music for “Football”,65 if you have nothing against it?’ I don’t know why he was so keen on writing football music. He was a funny man; I believe he was a football fan… .
I remember how he came begging for jam. There were tremendous food shortages, and he had his family and two children to feed. He hung around for several days with his empty can as he didn’t have the nerve to ask for anything himself. I witnessed the scene. The librarian of the Ensemble, Karen Khachaturian,66 his pupil, put in a good word for the composer with his boss, who then ordered half a can of jam to be issued to Shostakovich. We took Shostakovich’s can and went to see the storeman. He kindly gave Shostakovich more than half a can.
The Ensemble ceased to exist after the war, before 1948. It was a remarkable organization. Apart from Shostakovich, among its members were Asaf Messerer, the actor Ruben Simonov, the director Sergei Yutkevich and Kasyan Galizovsky who had produced Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at the Bolshoi in the late 1920s and had been duly berated for his ideological oversight. Tarkhanov was in charge of the artistes. The playwright Robert Erdman wrote the scripts. I did the compèring. We gave concerts at the Front, in Leningrad during the siege, and during the destruction of our volunteer divisions near Moscow. We were caught up in all that. We also took part in concerts to entertain the Kremlin dignitaries, including one given at a Moscow Underground station. Shostakovich didn’t go to the Front with us, he just wrote the music for the songs.
For all his withrawal from ‘real life’, Shostakovich knew it as well as Zoshchenko did. Everybody had to face ‘real life’ during the war years. Even Prokofiev had to sell foreign clothes in the Alma-Alta market in order to buy food. He was reputedly quite good at it. I think that Stalin’s Terror had an especially painful effect on Shostakovich, more than on the rest of us. Prokofiev was less affected by it; his European upbringing protected him.
After 1948 Shostakovich was dismissed from teaching posts in two conservatoires, in Moscow and in Leningrad. His pupils were forced to repent of having studied under a formalist. Undoubtedly, despite his wit and irony, Shostakovich was deeply hurt. He realized it was in the nature of the time for children to denounce their parents, let alone pupils their teacher; but all the same he was hurt.
People close to him told me that he used to carry a briefcase with a change of underwear and a toothbrush in constant expectation of arrest. Many people did that. It is also recounted how he waited for his arrest at night out on the landing by the lift, so that at least his family wouldn’t be disturbed if they came to get him. Many people went into hiding and survived, but Shostakovich never got over the trauma of those days.
For all his nervousness and defencelessness, Shostakovich was a caustic man. His table talk was full of sarcasm. He liked his drink and, when in his cups, revealed his wit and irony. His mind was similar to Zoshchenko’s. It’s not for nothing that he counted Zoshchenko, Sollertinsky and Erdman amongst his friends. His letters were written with ‘English humour’, but in the style of ‘a Soviet communal apartment’.
Later on his nervousness assumed the character of panic, a kind of conditioned reflex. He used to say: ‘I’d sign anything even if they hand it to me upside down. All I want is to be left alone.’ I think he was only pretending he didn’t care. He knew what it implied when he signed such letters and deep down he suffered. Perhaps he was afraid for his family, especially for his son whom he dearly loved. He was always ready to admit his ‘mistakes’ (‘Yes, yes, yes, I’ve been wrong. Of course, I’ll write an operetta which the People will easily understand.’), but I think that this was done cynically and in cold blood. Akhmatova took the same line when talking to foreigners. Zoshchenko, however, tried to justify himself: ‘On the one hand … but on the other …’ and he was punished for it. Because he sought rational explanations, he was not allowed to exist as an artist. On the other hand, Akhmatova was able to keep going after a fashion.
Shostakovich, however, was a man with exposed nerves and a keen perception. The fact that he was more vulnerable and receptive than other people was no doubt an important feature of his genius.67
In the autumn of 1942 Vissarion Shebalin was called to Moscow from evacuation in Sverdlovsk and offered the position of director of the Conservatoire. His widow recalled that:
he accepted it much against his will, as he was uncertain that he was ready to assume this important responsibility. He had to start his directorship during the difficult war years. One of his first new appointments was made in 1943 when he invited Shostakovich to join the teaching staff of the composition faculty.68
Shostakovich accepted this professorship and held both composition classes and orchestration classes. He was now able to bring his family from Kuibyshev to settle in Moscow. When the war was over, Shostakovich decided against returning to Leningrad and, while retaining close contacts with his native city, he made Moscow his home for the rest of his life. But he returned to his teaching position at the Leningrad Conservatoire in 1947, keeping a small class of post-graduate composition students.
KAREN KHACHATURIAN first met Shostakovich before the war at the home of his uncle Aram Khachaturian. From 1943 he studied composition with Shostakovich and Shebalin at the Moscow Conservatoire:
After the war was over, I became a full-time composition student of Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s at the Moscow Conservatoire. He was a wonderful teacher, because he recognized and respected the individuality of each student. Everything he said was very much to the point, and his attention to detail was always of great relevance in the context of the whole. However, most of his comments concerned matters of form and instrumental texture.
As a rule, the class started with each of us playing some of our own music, which Shostakovich then analysed very thoroughly. He required that we showed him a large span of composition – either a whole movement or at least the whole exposition – even if all the details were not filled in. Shebalin, on the other hand, preferred to work on small sections, maybe only a theme. Then the class went on to play music in four-hand piano arrangements. Shostakovich himself played with each of us; he was of course an outstanding reader. We performed the classics, Haydn, Schubert, Brahms, and also learned a lot of new music this way. Thirdly, he would ask us to bring a piece of unfamiliar music to the lesson, so that we students could share our discoveries. To give an example, I might choose a piece like Hindemith’s Nobilissima Visione. This work would also be played and analysed in detail. I remember Dmitri Dmitriyevich getting hold of a copy of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, and he himself made a four-hand version for piano of this wonderful score, thereby allowing us to get to know it really well.
We students would also ask him to play his own compositions for us. Thus, we were the first to get to know such marvellous works as the First Violin Concerto, long before its public performance, and his unfinished opera The Gamblers. Naturally we attended every concert where Shostakovich’s music was performed, and we travelled to Leningrad specially to attend the premieres of his works.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich was the soul of kindness to his students. We attended parties at his home to celebrate birthdays and the New Year. On these occasions we were welcomed as part of his extended family. Shostakovich’s favourite New Year toast reflected his philosophical irony: ‘Let’s drink to this – that things don’t get any better!’69 After all, it was constantly being drummed into us that things would improve in our society; whereas we knew perfectly well that in reality things only ever got worse!70
Mstislav (Slava) Rostropovich studied cello and piano from an early age with his father Leopold. At the beginning of the War, the Rostropovich family was evacuated to Orienburg, where Leopold Rostropovich died. As for Shostakovich in 1922, the loss of his father was a tremendous blow for the fifteen-year-old boy. In Rostropovich’s own words, ‘When my father died I became a man; therefore I see the period I spent in Orienburg as the epicentre of my life.’71 And, like Shostakovich before him, he took on responsibility for his family, left without any means of support. In Orienburg Rostropovich continued his composition studies with Mikhail Chulaki.
When the family returned to Moscow in 1943, MSTISLAV ROSTROPOVICH entered the Moscow Conservatoire as a student of cello and composition and attended Shostakovich’s orchestration classes. Shostakovich was always more than just a teacher to him and actively supported him in his career as a cellist:
I got to know Shostakovich in the autumn of 1943 when I enrolled at the Moscow Conservatoire. My composition teacher was the director of the Conservatoire, Vissarion Shebalin. I naturally very much wanted to study with Shostakovich, but I did not want to transfer completely from my own professor, Shebalin. So I asked Dmitri Dmitriyevich to accept me in his orchestration class. At that time Shostakovich was tremendously popular, in the wake of the success of the Seventh Symphony and his recent arrival in Moscow. So his class was literally overflowing with students.
My professor of cello, Semyon Kozolupov (incidentally also my uncle), talked to Shostakovich on my behalf. He said, ‘My nephew is a talented cellist and composer. He would very much like to study with you. I realize that your class is full to bursting, but perhaps you could spare the time to meet him and listen to him?’
Shostakovich gave me an appointment to come to see him at the Conservatoire. His classes were held in classroom 35 on the fourth storey of the main building of the Conservatoire. I arrived at the appointed hour with my piano concerto, written while we lived in evacuation in Orienburg. I was extremely shy, because the concerto showed the obvious influence of Rachmaninov and Skryabin. In a state of great confusion, and furiously blushing, I handed the score to Shostakovich. Then I played the concerto through on the piano, while Dmitri Dmitriyevich leafed through the pages of the score. Then he showered me with a mass of compliments, which I of course did not for a moment take seriously. An absolute mass of compliments, he almost choked on them, such was his delight! Then finally he said, ‘Of course I would consider it a great honour, so to speak, to take you on in my class, a great honour.’
From that moment I started attending his classes on Thursdays. These classes were preceded by some terrible hours, as I had to stay up virtually the whole night writing out the scores. I never had enough time to prepare for the lessons, and Shostakovich was merciless in his demands, always setting me an enormous amount of work. I had to orchestrate all of Chopin’s Piano Studies and Preludes, for instance, Schumann’s Carnaval, and so on.
On Thursdays I also had my cello lessons with Professor Kozolupov. I would be the first to arrive at nine o’clock in the morning so as to get my lesson over with as soon as possible. Then I went up to Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s class, my cello in tow. Often I was the first to arrive there too. If there were no other students in the class, Dmitri Dmitriyevich would make me take out my cello and play something for him. For instance, he might check with me if a certain passage lay comfortably on the instrument.
Then the other students began to arrive, and the class was brimful of people. We would then play through scores on the piano in four hands. We played through many of Stravinsky’s scores on the piano, and also a lot of Mahler, whom Dmitri Dmitriyevich adored. I never ceased to be amazed by Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s memory and his capacity for total recall when it came to details of scoring and orchestration. He might look at one of our scores and say: ‘You know, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to add trumpets, and to give them an accent on this note. You remember for instance that in such and such a symphony at such and such a place Beethoven used this device.’ Or for instance he would tell us that the alto flute lacked a lower G, but Tchaikovsky had once used it in his Second Symphony. Of course all of us in the class felt overwhelmed by Shostakovich’s erudition. But with his incredible sensitivity, he took pains never to offend anyone.
On one occasion, however, I experienced his real displeasure. The night before that particular Thursday class I had been at a student party. After it was over I stayed up all night doing my set task in orchestration. I probably only finished at five minutes to nine. And then I dashed off with my cello to the Conservatoire for my lesson with Kozolupov. From there I went on to Shostakovich. I opened the score I had prepared for him, and, together with him, I started to look slowly and attentively at what I had done. I immediately blushed red as a lobster because I was ashamed of what I had produced. Then Dmitri Dmitriyevich started questioning me: ‘Well, here, do you see, is this an oboe playing? This melody here, have you given it to the oboe?’
I replied sheepishly, ‘I understand that it doesn’t work, but yes, in this instance I’ve given it to the oboe.’
And then Dmitri Dmitriyevich lost his temper with me. It was the only occasion that I remember him ever being angry with me. He said: ‘You see, Slava, you are a person of genius, of complete genius, and with such a talent in life, with such a talent …’
Here I thought to myself, ‘What is he babbling on about?’
Then he said, ‘You understand that for the next lesson you’re to do it again, orchestrate this score again, and you’re to make sure that it doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to what you have brought for me today.’
Contrary to what is written in Solomon Volkov’s Testimony, Dmitri Dmitriyevich worshipped Stravinsky, and considered the Symphony of Psalms to be one of the most brilliant works in existence.
I have to say that I consider that Volkov’s book is not a balanced account. It is like a series of anecdotes; or rather, as basically everything that is stated there is true, one might say a series of ‘interesting little stories’. Shostakovich was a man who, for the sake of a good story, could go so far as to invent a tale. For instance, to this day I don’t give much credence to some of his stories. Two of them he used to tell me regularly, maybe twice a year. One was about how, when a young boy, he met the chess-player Alyokhin at the cinema. There was nobody around, and Dmitri Dmitriyevich, who didn’t recognize Alyokhin, approached him and asked him for a game. I don’t believe this story, particularly as I then had occasion to recount it to Boris Spassky. Spassky said that Shostakovich would have had to be very young indeed as Alyokhin left Russia in 1919 or 1920.
The second story Dmitri Dmitriyevich was fond of telling went as follows:
‘I was an eye-witness, you know, an eye-witness to this event. After the siege of Leningrad I saw a funeral procession in the streets … The coffin was being loaded onto an open lorry. Just imagine, an open coffin on the back of the lorry, which is bumping and shaking, together with a band of musicians playing Chopin’s Funeral March. All of a sudden the corpse gets up from his coffin, and all the relatives and friends fall into a faint. Can you imagine, it wasn’t a corpse they were going to bury, but somebody who was in a state of lethargic sleep. Only the musicians kept their wits about them, and seeing that the man was all right they stopped halfway through a bar of the Funeral March and started playing the “Internationale”. Yes, I saw this with my very own eyes …’
Shostakovich claimed he had witnessed this happening – and he told me this story many times.
Before I joined Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s orchestration class, he had never heard me play the cello. I think that the first time Shostakovich heard me play in concert was when I participated in the All-Union competition of instruments in 1945. Before that I had won the Conservatoire competition for the best performance of a Soviet work, when I played the Myaskovsky Cello Concerto, a work I dearly love to this day. But I don’t believe that he heard me then.
But at the All-Union competition Shostakovich was the chairman of the jury. There was a great conflict as to who should win, a conflict behind closed doors, of course. It was largely to do with my personal biography, as I considered myself my father’s pupil. But my uncle, Semyon Kozolupov, had all his life dreamed of teaching me. He used to put pressure on my mother, his wife’s sister. But my father wanted to teach me himself. Kozolupov let it be known through his wife that he considered that my father didn’t know how to teach, and that Slavka would be much better off with him, and only with him. On account of this a great family scandal erupted. Of course he was accused of tempting me away by virtue of the fact that he occupied the position of professor at the Moscow Conservatoire, where he had effectively barred the way against my father. So we were in a dire situation. If it wasn’t for a letter that my father wrote and left under his pillow when he knew that he was dying, I would never have agreed to study with Kozolupov. But one of the points that my father made in this letter was that I should complete my education with Kozolupov. This gives you the background to our strained relationship.
So it was that when I participated in the All-Union Competition, Kozolupov wanted the first prize to be awarded to another of his pupils, Luzanov. He didn’t mince his words, and once told my mother outright, ‘Slavka is very young and has lots of time ahead. But this is Luzanov’s last chance of playing in a competition. Slavka will have plenty of time to achieve lots of things in life. And I consider it early to give him a first prize.’ When he used these arguments at the competition, Shostakovich intervened. He apparently said to the jury, ‘You know, not only do I consider that Rostropovich should be given the first prize, but I consider that, as he has set such a gap in the standard, we should not award a second prize. All the others are way behind Rostropovich.’ And that is how the final decisions worked out. I was given first prize, and in the piano competition the first prize was shared by Sviatoslav Richter and Victor Merzhanov. No second prizes were awarded. Luzanov was given third prize for cello. In the violinists’ category, neither first nor second prize was awarded and the third prize was given to Julian Sitkovetsky. This was the competition which opened all doors for me.72
Shostakovich had a profound effect on Soviet musical life because he was so approachable, and was always willing to listen and give advice to composers and performers. Both Moisei Weinberg and Venyamin Basner were regarded by many to be Shostakovich pupils, although officially neither of them ever studied with him. Many other composers, such as MIKHAIL MEYEROVICH, enjoyed the occasional contacts with Shostakovich. Here Meyerovich recounts how he benefited from the master’s wisdom and tactful advice:
I learned a lot from Shostakovich. Being in his company meant always learning something. He radiated a kind of charm I can’t describe. He was exaggeratedly polite, and made an effort never to hurt people’s feelings. He was always the first to greet you. His conversation was very mundane, even intentionally so. He was not like a great thinker pronouncing on every subject. But in that mundane conversation, there was always something new from which you could learn. We once played through Mahler’s Fourth Symphony on the piano in a four-hand arrangement. Suddenly Dmitri Dmitriyevich stopped and said, ‘What a marvellous passage this is.’ He showed me why it was wonderful, and we played it over again. Without him I might never have noticed that passage.
It is said that Isaac Babel, the great writer, once met Shostakovich when he was a youth. Babel didn’t know who Shostakovich was, but he had an intuitive understanding of people. Apparently he wrote that he had just met a young man who had a hypnotic effect on people. I also experienced this quality in Shostakovich as a positive influence. Once I came to see him. I was depressed for some reason, everything had been going wrong for me. I left him a different person. I suddenly saw what I should do to improve my affairs. Shostakovich had this effect on many people. His presence was calming; it was enough to boost your self-confidence.
Shostakovich never scolded his pupils in class, although he sometimes made fun of them. He had pupils of all kinds, including ones that were ignorant or without talent. He treated them with a gentle irony, but he never said a harsh word to them. Somehow he was able to affect them in such a way that even the most hopeless of them began to soar a little. They didn’t fly high, but they produced music to the best of their ability.
All Shostakovich’s pupils imitated him, even in his mannerisms. You could tell a Shostakovich pupil a mile off; they all wore glasses, both those who needed them and those who didn’t. They imitated his jerky movements and stuttering manner of speech. They all seemed to look like him. I didn’t see Shostakovich regularly. I didn’t like the flock of satellites who surrounded him. They were sycophants who picked up his cigarette butts, so to speak, pretending to be his dearest friends and asking him for favours. He had a lot of enemies, private and official, so he was profoundly affected by any token of friendship, even if disingenuous.
Once, during a concert at the Hall of Columns, I witnessed behaviour untypical of Shostakovich. The music was very vulgar with clashing cymbals. In a pause I heard hysterical laughter behind me. I turned round to see Shostakovich accompanied by his pupils Georgi Sviridov and Kara Karayev in paroxysms of laughter. In the interval I asked Sviridov, ‘What’s going on?’ He told me that, after having had a few drinks, they became somewhat boisterous, and that an usher had tried to chase them out of the Hall. Here I must mention the fact that Shostakovich never wore his medals in public, while his two pupils were wearing their Stalin prize-winner’s badges. When the usher got close enough to see Sviridov’s medal, he started apologizing for having threatened to throw them out, and said, ‘I didn’t mean you, I meant that one,’ pointing at Shostakovich. It wasn’t typical of Shostakovich to play the fool in public, but the usher’s reaction shows how self-effacing Shostakovich was.
Shostakovich was our whole life and our school. Even composers of totally different styles, like Edison Denisov, had a lot of support and encouragement from him. In general, Shostakovich showered praise on every composition that was shown to him. In order to learn from him, one had to be able to see through this praise. I too used to show Shostakovich my newly finished works. Once I composed a Gypsy Rhapsody. I couldn’t cope with one passage to my satisfaction, and, impatient to finish the piece, I made a fair copy and took it to Shostakovich. I played it to him. He praised it to the skies. Then he said, ‘I have one unimportant criticism.’ With amazing delicacy, he shoved my nose right into the very place that I knew wasn’t good enough. He said that the variations were too formal, and suggested that I give my fantasy free play there. He sketched a few chords as a possible idea. I went back home and re-wrote the whole thing. I now saw my way to improving it. You couldn’t learn from him if you expected wrath and upbraiding; you had to listen carefully to his self-effacing remarks.
In 1948, when the ‘historical’ Zhdanov Decree was published, he was working on his Violin Concerto. When the concerto was finished he played it on the piano for me and some other composers. I asked him: ‘At which point were you exactly in the score when the Decree was published?’ He showed me the exact spot. The violin played semiquavers before and after it. There was no change evident in the music.73,74
In 1939, the Organizational Committee of the Union of Composers was set up with Rheingold Glière as chairman, Isaac Dunayevsky vice-chairman, and Aram Khachaturian first deputy chairman. Under the Committee’s jurisdiction the Composers’ Retreats, known as ‘Houses of Rest and Creativity’, were authorized in 1943. The first such Retreat was set up near the town of Ivanovo, housed in what had been a nobleman’s country estate in pre-revolutionary times. The composers and their families were each given a room in the main building, fed in the communal dining room and additionally provided with working ‘studios’ on the grounds. For wartime, the conditions were unique – composers enjoyed on the one hand the benefits of a kind of health farm, on the other an ideal haven to work in, plus the stimulus of the company of colleagues.
Shostakovich spent the first of several summers at the Ivanovo Retreat in 1943, where during August he wrote most of his Eighth Symphony. In the following two summers he achieved some of his best composition there: the Second Piano Trio, the Second String Quartet and the Ninth Symphony.
Later in life ARAM KHACHATURIAN remembered Ivanovo with nostalgia:
The musicians lived there, enjoying great freedom, without any limitations as to how long they stayed, coming and going as they pleased. Huts were rented and barns repaired for us to work in. I worked in a little log cabin, and Shostakovich in a poultry barn. And how we worked! The history of music has yet to evaluate what was achieved at Ivanovo. Many Soviet classics were produced there in a stimulating, heady atmosphere conducive to creative invention. As we worked, we played our compositions for each other, sought advice and exchanged opinions. It is a remarkable fact, but while we were at Ivanovo our work seemed to progress without any hitches. Were we influenced by nature and our surroundings? Or was it the feeling of victory round the corner? Or simply that we were getting properly fed? The war drew us together in an atmosphere of unity.75
MSTISLAV ROSTROPOVICH spent a winter vacation at Ivanovo in company with the Shostakovich family:
I got to know the whole Shostakovich family very closely after winning the All-Union competition. In January 1946, as a result of my first prize, I was given the opportunity to go to the Ivanovo ‘House of Creativity and Rest’. Avery interesting group of people gathered there at the time, including Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Khachaturian. Shostakovich’s young son Maxim used to run up and down the corridors shouting and screaming, and I think that Prokofiev was longing to box his ears. He used to slink out of his room and hiss, ‘Can’t you be a bit quieter?’ I played charades with Maxim, which made us very happy. We went skiing. And on one occasion I got soaked through to the skin. It was there that Dmitri Dmitriyevich subsidized my first concert dress, a dinner jacket which we bought in a second-hand commission shop in the town of Ivanovo. He gave me a thousand roubles towards this purchase. The Ivanovo Retreat lay outside the town, and we were taken into town by horse-drawn sleigh. After we had acquired the dinner jacket, Dmitri Dmitriyevich decided we must celebrate and we went to the booths in a small market where Dmitri Dmitriyevich selected some ‘moonshine’ liquor to wash down our purchase. The bottle had a piece of paper stuck down its neck serving as a stopper. On our return we went downstairs to the dining room where there was always some pickled cabbage available. Dmitri Dmitriyevich opened the bottle of moonshine. I was only eighteen at the time, and not too experienced. We immediately threw back a glass of the stuff. I have to say that in all my life I have never tasted anything so terrible. I nearly fainted. And Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s face went into complete convulsions. He said, ‘You understand, Slava, the woman, the woman who sold us this bottle, but she had a face with such a noble aspect! That’s why I bought it from her, she had such a noble face. And to think she could sell us such a thing. How dishonourable!’76
The musicologist ALEXEI IKONNIKOV only had a passing acquaintance with Shostakovich. However, he kept a diary record of his meetings with him at the Ivanovo Retreat. These form the basis of an article of reminiscences which give a valuable account of Shostakovich’s routine.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich arrived at Ivanovo on 27 February 1946 with his wife Nina Vasilyevna and his children Galina (Galisha as they called her) and Maxim to get away from the hurly-burly of Moscow life in mid-winter. This happened only after ‘a lot of pressure from Nina Vasilyevna’, Dmitri Dmitriyevich told me subsequently …
During this visit Dmitri Dmitriyevich was not working – at least not at his desk… . From my conversations with Nina Vasilyevna, Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s wife, and from some of his own remarks, I understood that usually he did not compose during the winter. He liked best to compose in spring, summer and the early autumn. A new composition was conceived and carried in his mind in full detail from beginning to end. Only then was it committed to paper. The writing process was therefore very quick, and as a rule he made no corrections in his manuscripts; they were then only modifications in the details of the score. While Dmitri Dmitriyevich willingly listened to the advice of his friends, he never changed his music… .
Everyone is curious about the actual composition process, particularly when talking of a composer of Shostakovich’s stature. One can only assume that this process of inner composition rarely ceased in Shostakovich’s case. When he was alone, he immediately appeared to be completely disconnected from his surroundings; his look became unseeing and neutralized. He appeared to be a man of great inner tension, with his continually moving, ‘speaking’ hands, which were never at rest. Either they were squeezing his knees, or nervously brushing his forehead; at the same time his pose was natural and relaxed, almost floppy, but his hands continued to live their own life, especially the fingers, which were continually fidgeting and picking at something. Observing Dmitri Dmitriyevich at such moments, it seemed that he was absorbed in extremely concentrated thought, and one would never dream of disturbing his ‘rest’, as he called this state. If anybody did disturb him, then it was usually Maxim. Dmitri Dmitriyevich would then ‘switch off’ from his thoughts and open himself up to contact, never showing that he had been disturbed. In his dealings with people he displayed tact and refinement, whether it was a famous, important personage, or a waitress or some other member of the house staff.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich followed a regular routine: he got up quite early, around eight o’clock. Before breakfast he would sometimes stay in his room or else come to the dining room – he was always the first to appear. And around eleven he would set off with the children cross-country skiing. Usually Slava Rostropovich went with them, as a more experienced skier, and the initiator of these excursions. Sometimes I also joined them; Dmitri Dmitriyevich never objected to my presence, although I felt uncertain about imposing myself on the family outing.
I should say that Dmitri Dmitriyevich hardly knew how to ski. This was partly due to his bad eyesight (his myopia was minus nine or ten diopters), and to the fact that he couldn’t bear the glare from the snow; he therefore wore dark glasses. On his head he wore a tall Romanian sheepskin hat.
Although he was insecure on his legs, he tried to copy Rostropovich, who was very agile on skis. The biggest hurdle for him was a rather tricky steep hill which led from the path to the stream, which never froze over due to the springs in it. (The women from the village came here to do their washing.) Although the stream was not deep, it was a potential danger as one accelerated on the run downhill; the slope finished some twenty metres before the water. Dmitri Dmitriyevich persisted in skiing down this hill so as to overcome this hurdle. He nearly always fell, and usually very clumsily: his skis would shoot out in different directions and his hat would fly off his head. It was very funny to watch. Slava Rostropovich and I tried our best not to laugh, but the village boys did not deprive themselves of this pleasure and would taunt the unfortunate skier. This of course embarrassed Shostakovich, but he stoically put up with their jibes and made his way up the hill again for another attempt.
On the other hand, when Maxim skied down the hill (usually much more skilfully than his father), Dmitri Dmitriyevich could not hide his agitation. He would cry out, ‘Maxim, throw yourself down, fall down!’ fearing that the boy would not be able to stop before reaching the stream, even though he was still a long way from the water.
The trouble was, Dmitri Dmitriyevich told us, that as he skied down the hill … he was possessed by a ‘mortal fear’… . When I asked him why he continued his attempts despite this ‘mortal fear’, Dmitri Dmitriyevich replied, ‘As an example, you see, an example, so that Maxim does not experience fear.’ During the family’s stay at Ivanovo, Dmitri Dmitriyevich didn’t miss a day of skiing outings with Maxim… .
Usually the later afternoon pastime was a walk, and after dinner the evenings were spent playing charades. The prime motivators of the game were Maxim and Galya (in particular the former), who long before the appointed hour of entertainment besieged Slava Rostropovich with the question, ‘What shall we do at charades tonight?’77
On 11 February 1944, Ivan Sollertinksky died suddenly in Novosibirsk at the age of 41. Shostakovich had spent much of November and December 1943 with him in Moscow; Sollertinsky had come to Moscow for the premiere of the Eighth Symphony, a work to which he lent his full support. Shostakovich was devastated by the news of his death, and he dedicated his Piano Trio Op. 67 to the memory of his dearest friend. The work, however, was conceived when Sollertinsky was still alive. Shostakovich had informed Isaak Glikman in his habitual laconic style in a letter dated 8 December 1943; ‘I am now writing a trio for violin, cello and piano.’78 The last three movements were written in Ivanovo, where Shostakovich spent his second summer. Undoubtedly Shostakovich would have read press reports about the discoveries of the atrocities committed in the Nazi concentration camps, and uncovered by the Soviet Armies as they moved west into the territory of Poland. None was more moving than Vassily Grossman’s disturbing account of the ruins of Treblinka Concentration Camp, which may have influenced Shostakovich’s choice of thematic material with Jewish intonation. And Grossman’s harrowing description of Jewish victims being forced to dance on the graves that they had just dug could well have been in the composer’s mind in his treatment of the material, with the build-up and grotesque transformation of these themes towards the finale’s culminating point.
Completed on 13 August, the work belongs to that peculiarly Russian genre of Piano Trio ‘In Memoriam’. (Tchaikovsky’s was dedicated to the memory of Nikolai Rubenstein, Arensky’s to the memory of Karl Davydov, and Rachmaninov’s Second Elegiac Trio was in turn dedicated to Tchaikovsky.) The four-movement work’s classical structure has strong links with the recent Eighth Symphony – the emotional core in both works lies in the slow movement Passacaglias, in each case preceded by a ferocious scherzo movement (although the Symphony’s third movement is totally relentless in its anger and grotesque expression). Ivan Sollertinsky’s sister claimed that the scherzo of the Trio (marked Allegro con brio) is a precise portrait of her brother’s brilliant and mercurial personality. Here Shostakovich had captured his manner of dialogue, his way of expounding his views con brio, leaving one subject for another, then returning and pursuing the original theme, elaborating and varying it.79. The Largo movement is a model of compact expression; the eight chords of the Passacaglia80 theme are repeated only six times, over which Shostakovich weaves the lament of the violin and cello as an intimate message of profound personal grief.
The use of Jewish themes, appearing for the first time in the Trio, became a regular feature of the composer’s work in the following years. Shostakovich, hyper-sensitive to all issues of human cruelty and injustice, saw the Jews as symbols of centuries-long persecution, as well as victims of repression at this time. Almost immediately after completing the Trio Shostakovich embarked on his Second String Quartet Op. 68, which he finished in under a month on 20 September. It was dedicated to Vissarion Shebalin in honour of twenty years of their friendship. Writing to Shebalin on 6 September, Shostakovich confessed:
I worry about the lightning speed with which I compose. Undoubtedly this is bad. One shouldn’t compose as quickly as I do. Composition is a serious process, and in the words of a ballerina friend of mine, ‘You can’t keep going at a gallop.’ I compose with diabolical speed and can’t stop myself… . It is exhausting, rather unpleasant, and at the end of the day you lack any confidence in the result. But I can’t rid myself of the bad habit.81
The Beethoven Quartet was entrusted with the Quartet’s premiere, and their first violinist Dmitri Tsyganov and cellist Sergei Shirinsky were joined by Shostakovich in the Piano Trio at the first performance of both works in Leningrad on 14 November. The Trio achieved instant success, and became one of Shostakovich’s most performed works. In 1946 it was awarded the Stalin Prize (second category), proving luckier in this than either the Eighth or Ninth Symphonies. The composer MIKHAIL MEYEROVICH describes his dismay at the apparent ease and speed with which Shostakovich composed these two works:
I met Shostakovich after I graduated from the Moscow Conservatoire in 1944. He was chairman of the Examination Committee, and he supported me warmly. So I graduated with good results and became a member of the Union of Composers. As such I was entitled to a spell at the Ivanovo House of Creativity. Ivanovo was very popular during the war as it had its own farm, and the food was good and plentiful. I spent a month there during August and September 1944.
When I arrived I saw Shostakovich, who was still a comparatively young man. Shostakovich was not too fond of the other composers of his own age, and he spent most of his time with me and my friend, his former pupil Yuri Levitin; we were the youngest composers there. He used to search us out and suggest we play some four-hand piano music. We took walks together. I had long been an admirer of Shostakovich and I quickly fell under his spell. I discovered him to be a very lively man who was always in motion and could not spend a minute without some occupation. Now he played billiards, now he played football. He insisted we join him in a game of football; he played with passion, throwing himself wholeheartedly into the game. Once I inadvertently knocked his glasses off his nose. I was embarrassed, but he said, ‘That’s all right. That’s what the game is about.’
It was a mystery to me how he managed to compose so much music at the same time. He had just finished his famous Piano Trio and was working on his Second String Quartet. I wondered when he did the actual composing. The Trio took him a month. The Quartet was written in under four weeks before my very eyes. But nobody saw him at the desk or at the piano. I was intrigued and began to observe him closely. He would play football and fool around with friends; then he would suddenly disappear. After forty minutes or so he would turn up again. ‘How are you doing? Let me kick the ball.’ Then we would have dinner and drink some wine and take a walk, and he would be the life and soul of the party. Every now and then he would disappear for a while and then join us again. Towards the end of my stay, he disappeared altogether. We didn’t see him for a week. Then he turned up, unshaven and looking exhausted. He said to me and Levitin, ‘Let’s go to an empty cottage with a piano in it.’
He played us the Second Quartet. He had only just completed it, as the score had that very day’s date on it. He played somewhat haltingly, as if sight-reading. My friend, who knew Shostakovich better than I did, surprised me. He was not famous for his tact, and on that occasion he suddenly piped up, ‘Dmitri Dmitriyevich, I have a criticism to make!’ That took my breath away. Every note written by Shostakovich was sacred to me, and he has a criticism to make! I was amazed.
‘You know, these chords here,’ my friend went on, ‘are not really necessary.’
Shostakovich replied politely, but slightly on the defensive: ‘What do you mean, not necessary?’
‘I mean that you could very well do without them.’
‘Well, I could very well do without the whole thing.’
The chords in question were very beautiful, and I especially liked them.
‘If I were you,’ my friend said, ‘I’d scrap those chords.’
Shostakovich said, ‘Yes, yes, I’ll think it over.’
Later I realized that he had agreed out of politeness. When I heard how the same musician, having listened to a Shostakovich symphony, said to the composer, ‘Dmitri Dmitriyevich, you know that place where a solo violin plays? In my opinion it would sound much better if the whole violin section played there.’
Shostakovich answered, ‘Don’t worry, that passage will flash past so quickly, nobody will notice anything.’82
1 A. Ostrovsky, ‘In the year of ordeals’, Reminiscences of the Leningrad Conservatoire (Leningrad, 1962), p. 392.
2 Arnshtam interview with Sofiya Khentova in Khentova, In Shostakovich’s World (Moscow, 1996), p. 234.
3 DDS, ‘In the Days of the Defence of Leningrad’, Sovietskoye Iskusstvo, 9 October 1941.
4 Bogdanov–Berezovsky, War Diary fragments (1941) In the Years of the Great Patriotic War: Reminiscences, Material (Leningrad, 1959), pp. 130–31.
5 From Our Father, Dmitri Shostakovich in the Reminiscences of his son Maxim and his daughter Galina), written down and edited by Mikhail Ardov (Moscow, Zakharov, 2003), pp. 10–11.
6 Idem, p. 11.
7 Sofiya Khentova, ‘Shostakovich and Khachaturian: They Were Drawn Together by 1948’, p. 10.
8 Isaak Glikman, Letters to a Friend: Dmitri Shostakovich to Isaak Glikman, p. 22.
9 Alexander Kron, ‘The Seventh, Leningrad Symphony’, Komsomolskaya Pravda, 9 August 1967.
10 Recorded interview with EW.
11 The Shostakoviches moved to 2a Vilonovskaya Street on 11 March 1942. Before that they were living in a two-room flat at 140 Frunze Street.
12 Nikolai Sokolov, Sketches from Memory, pp. 54–7.
13 The datings on the manuscript score that I examined at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basle are as follows: (1) ‘To His Sonne’, 7.v.42; (2) (originally without title), 18.x.42, Moscow; (3) 16.x.42, Moscow; (4) ‘Jenny’, 17.x.42, Moscow; (5) ‘Sonnet 66’, 24.x.42, Kuibyshev; (6) ‘The King’s Parade’, 25.x.42, Kuibyshev. The dedications were put in afterwards.
14 True they sound somewhat watered down in translation, which translated literally back into English read: ‘And remember that thoughts [ideas] will close up the mouth.’
15 See figures 45 and 51 in score of second movement, Humour, of Thirteenth Symphony.
16 Letter dated 12 January 1943 from DDS to Ivan Sollertinksy, in L. Mikheeva, The Life of D. Shostakovich (Moscow, Terra, 1997), p. 243.
17 Letter from DDS to Sollertinsky, ibid., p. 244. The date is unknown since the book’s editor – with a lamentable lack of precision – writes ‘About a month later’; the previous letter quoted is that of 12 January.
18 The thematic material makes references to his own First Symphony (in the second movement) and to two of Nikolaeyev’s piano compositions and his string quartet.
19 From Shaginian’s diary entry of 27 May. See Shaginian, ‘50 letters from Dmitri Shostakovich’, Novy Mir, 12, 1982.
20 Letter of 4 January 1941, ibid.
21 These were romances sung by his father.
22 Shostakovich enjoyed the rhyming phrase, while pronouncing these words with an added ‘soft’ sign: ‘Gallyop iz Klyopa’.
23 Vera Dulova remembered another occasion when Shostakovich played through the Symphony at their home in the presence of her husband Baturin, Lev Oborin and the conductor Melik-Pashayev, who, it was hoped, would perform the Symphony: ‘There were five of us gathered. Shostakovich started playing, and Oborin, following the score, filled in some of the upper voices. During the performance the telephone rang. Samosud, who lived in the flat underneath us, had heard the music and asked if he could join us. The Symphony made a shattering impression on him, and he immediately took the score away, announcing that he would start rehearsals the next day. Our chief conductor was firm and resolute. Shostakovich said that Samosud would guarantee him lots of rehearsals’ (Sofiya Khentova, Shostakovich: Life and Work, vol. II, p. 51).
24 At a concert on 8 December 1940 at the Moscow Polytechnic museum, where Shostakovich also performed his new Piano Quintet with the Beethoven Quartet. Then, in Kuibyshev, on 4 November, 1942, Baturin gave the first performance of Three Romances on Texts by Burns (from the Six Romances Op. 62. written during 1942).
25 In a letter to Isaak Glikman dated 4 January 1942, DDS writes: ‘My friend Soso Begiashvili considers that the fourth movement [of the Seventh Symphony] doesn’t manifest enough optimism … My friend Soso Begiashvili is a marvellous person, but he can’t boast of much intelligence, so one should regard his comments critically.’ When DDS referred to someone as ‘a marvellous person’ in a letter, the recipient knew that this meant the opposite, and in fact this coded information was a warning to steer clear of him. Soso Begiashvili had studied music at the Leningrad Conservatoire, but in the pre-war period made his career in administration (Glikman, Letters to a Friend, p. 35).
26 A disparaging diminutive for an actress.
27 Dmitri (Mitya) Frederiks.
28 In a letter to Vissarion Shebalin from Moscow dated 1 April 1942, Shostakovich wrote: ‘A few hours before I left for Moscow, my mother, my sister Marusya, and my nephew Mitya arrived. They were followed just after my departure by my parents-in-law. My father-in-law looks awful. Mama looks pretty bad too. The others are in a passable state. Now I have the task of feeding them and restoring them to health.’ (Alexei Nikolayev, ‘Letters to Shebalin’, p. 81.)
By early June the family of ten expanded to thirteen with the arrival in Kuibyshev of Nina’s sister with her husband and child.
29 This house became famous as the subject and title of Yuri Trifonov’s story (later staged as a play at the TAGANKA Theatre).
30 The flat was opposite the central post office. Galina Shostakovich recalled her father making the children repeat their new address and telephone number from memory in case they got lost: Kirov Street 21, apartment 48, telephone number K–5–98–72. From Our Father, Dmitri Shostakovich (reminisences of Maxim Shostakovich and Galina Shostakovich), written down and edited by Mikhail Ardov (Moscow, 2003), p. 22.
31 Shostakovich arrived in Moscow on 3 March 1943. Later that month he settled into flat no. 48 at 21 Kirov Street. He was soon joined by his family.
32 Flora Litvinova, article commissioned for this book.
33 Ilya Slonim wrote of Shostakovich’s extreme outward discomfort while acknowledging the audience’s enthusiastic ovations at the premiere of the Seventh Symphony: ‘The severe young man mounted the stage as if going to the scaffold’ (‘Shostakovich as a Model for a Portrait’, p. 94).
34 Tatyana Litvinova, article commissioned for this book. ‘Shostakovich in Kuibyshev’.
35 Slonim, ‘Model for a Portrait’, p. 94.
36 Shostakovich’s choice to stay in Kuibyshev proved to be a wise one, because, as the seat of government, it was better supplied than the other large centres of evacuation.
37 Glikman, Letters to a Friend, p. 27.
38 Letter dated 11 November 1942 (Nikolayev, ‘Letters to Shebalin’, p. 82).
39 Recorded interview with EW.
40 It was performed there in June 1942.
41 Glikman, Letters to a Friend, pp. 28, 29.
42 See Meyer, p. 258.
43 Mikheeva, I. I. Sollertinsky: Life and Legacy (Leningrad, 1988), p. 166.
44 In interview with EW, 2004.
45 Glikman, Letters to a Friend, p. 61.
46 Ibid., p. 62.
47 See Meyer, p. 259.
48 I. Martynov, Dmitri Shostakovich (Moscow, 1946), p. 105.
49 See K. Rudnitsky, S. M. Mikhoels: Articles, Conversations and Speeches (UM, 1960), p. 209.
50 Mravinsky, ‘Thirty Years with Shostakovich’s Music’, in Dmitri Shostakovich, compiled by Danilevich (Sovietsky Kompozitor, Moscow, 1967), pp. 106–7.
51 Z. A. Apetyan, Gavriil Popov. From the Literary Legacy (Leningrad, 1986), pp. 288–9.
52 S. Khentova, Shostakovich, vol. 2 (Sovietsky Kompozitor, Leningrad, 1986), p. 216.
53 G. Yudin, ‘In My Young Years’, Sovietskaya Muzyka, no. 9, 1986, p. 38.
54 Shostakovich started composing the Symphony in its final form in July 1945, when he worked out his ideas in detail in draft score. By 2 August he started writing the first movement in fair copy in Moscow, completing it three days later. The other four movements were written (first in draft then in fair copy) in Ivanovo and the whole work was completed on 30 August. See for detailed account M. Yakubov, ‘D. D. Shostakovich and the Ninth Symphony’, New Collected Works in 150 Volumes, vol. 9 (DSCH, Moscow, 2000), pp. 112–18.
55 David Rabinovich, Dmitri Shostakovich, Composer, p. 96. Shostakovich was obviously referring to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
56 Georgi Orlov, Shostakovich’s Symphonies, p. 221.
57 Daniil Zhitomirsky, ‘Dmitri Shostakovich: Reminiscences and Reflections’, unpublished article.
58 Sofiya Khentova, ‘Dmitri Shostakovich: We Live in a Time of Stormy Passions and Actions’, p. 12.
59 Despite everything, the music indeed has survived for over sixty years, and, with a totally new set of words, is still in service as the national anthem of the Russian Federation.
60 In the description of this episode in Solomon Volkov’s Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, p. 201, it was Shostakovich who had to do the orchestration.
61 According to the version in Testimony, Shostakovich said that five hours would have been sufficient time to make the corrections, p. 204.
62 Khentova, ‘Shostakovich and Khachaturian’, p. 11.
63 Lavrenti Beriya was the much-feared head of the NKVD from 1939 to 1953.
64 ‘The Torches’, also known as ‘Song of the Lantern’, from Victorious Spring Op. 72 (1945).
65 ‘Football’ is the second piece from The Great Russian River Op. 66 (1944).
66 Karen Khachaturian had a job in the commissioning department of the Ensemble and worked as a pianist.
67 Yuri Lyubimov: recorded interview with EW.
68 Recorded interview with EW.
69 An ironic comment on Stalin’s much repeated maxim: ‘Life is getting better; life is getting merrier.’
70 Karen Khachaturian: recorded interview with EW.
71 Recorded interview with EW.
72 Mstislav Rostropovich: recorded interview with EW.
73 Isaak Glikman recalls Shostakovich telling him: ‘In the evenings, after the convocations with their disgraceful, dismal debates, I returned home and wrote the third movement of the Violin Concerto. I finished it and it turned out well’ (Glikman, Letters to a Friend, p. 78).
74 Mikhail Meyerovich: recorded interview with EW.
75 Khentova, ‘Shostakovich and Khachaturian’, p. 11.
76 Mstislav Rostropovich: recorded interview with EW.
77 Alexei Ikonnikov, ‘Some Strokes for a Portrait of Shostakovich’, pp. 145–7.
78 Glikman, Letters to a Friend, p. 61.
79 Mikheeva, I. I. Sollertinsky: Life and Legacy (Leningrad, 1988), p. 175.
80 Rostropovich recalled earlier in 1944 that Shostakovich gave him as an exercise a strip of manuscript paper with an eight-bar series of chords: he was told to orchestrate them in various ways, for brass, for woodwind, and for mixed orchestral forces.
81 Nikolayev, ‘Letters to Shebalin’, p. 83.
82 Mikhail Meyerovich: recorded interview with EW.