The political background of the Thaw years
In the first months after Stalin’s death, the collective leadership formed from the dictator’s closest political associates acted with the appearance of apparent unanimity. But under the surface there started a jostling for power within the Party hierarchy. Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (KPSS), emerged as a political force to be reckoned with, initially in his alliance with Nikolai Bulganin. It took him until 1957 to remove all opposition to his leadership.
The open power struggle commenced with the removal of Lavrenti Beriya, the chief of the dreaded MVD (Ministry of the Interior) and a member of the initial triumvirate. With his arrest in July 1953 and subsequent execution the arbitrary power of the Secret Police was somewhat curtailed, signifying a gradual process of ‘de-Stalinization’ and the easing of political repression.
Khrushchev speeded up this process when he exposed the atrocities of Stalin’s regime in a secret speech to the delegates of the 20th Party Congress on 25 February 1956. It took five years before he was ready to denounce Stalin publicly, which he did at the 22nd Party Congress.
The revelations of Khrushchev’s secret speech (which soon were leaked in the Western press and spread faster than fire at home) turned the Soviet people’s way of thinking upside down; moreover they unleashed a series of strikes and revolutions in the Eastern European satellite countries. The Soviet authorities were prepared to resort to rude force to restore the damaged prestige of the Party and impose order both at home and in Eastern Europe. The suppression of the Hungarian uprising by Soviet troops in October 1956 was the culmination of a series of events triggered off by the 20th Party Congress unmasking of Stalin.
Another important consequence of the speech was the release and rehabilitation of large numbers of people from the camps and prisons (true, the process had been initiated after Stalin’s death). Inevitably a profound disenchantment with the Party and its methods took root among the populace at large, and slowly people found the courage to voice their protests. The ‘Thaw’,1 as this post-Stalin decade became known, oscillated between liberalization and repression. Ultimately it was a divisive period, confusing for both hardline supporters of Stalinist communism and reformers and liberals alike.
In the meantime, as the Soviet Union emerged from years of isolation, contacts were cautiously established with the outside world, including the Western powers (albeit the country’s ‘ideological enemies’). While Soviet citizens had their horizons widened, their society was also subject to external scrutiny. The Soviets upheld their international prestige by pouring money into the space and arms race, and also by exporting culture. A brilliant generation of Soviet musicians (Oistrakh, Richter, Rostropovich and Mravinsky, to name but a few) started to travel, taking the West by storm and proving the undiminished supremacy of the Soviet performing tradition. These artists championed new Soviet music, with Shostakovich’s music at the forefront of their repertoire. At home the ban on art, literature and music that had been previously labelled as ‘decadent and formalist’ was lifted (although by no means indiscriminately), allowing people to rediscover their own cultural heritage and giving them a glimpse of modernist developments in the West.
As Shostakovich was restored to grace after his years of disfavour, he soon realized that the rewards of official recognition were not always comfortable to live with. Khrushchev, with his policy of ‘peaceful co-existence’ and a sharp eye to Western reaction, wanted to be seen to have the support of the intellectual community. Having disastrously mismanaged the ‘Dr Zhivago’ affair, with the shameful ousting of Boris Pasternak from the Writers’ Union and the ensuing brouhaha over his Nobel Prize award in 1958, Khrushchev stepped up the pressure on prominent intellectuals to voice their support of the Party line. Shostakovich’s inability to resist this mounting coercion undoubtedly was a factor in his choice of theme for his two ‘revolutionary’ symphonies, and in his application for Party membership in 1960.
The last years of the Khrushchev era gave birth to two new concepts – at home the phenomenon of dissidence, and on the international front the policy of detente. The long-term consequences of the repercussions of the ‘Thaw’ years were far-reaching indeed. Despite the intervening years of Brezhnevian ‘stagnation’ they reached their ultimate conclusion with the disbanding of the whole communist system itself.
FLORA LITVINOVA describes Shostakovich’s immediate reaction to the death of Stalin:
With Stalin’s death in March 1953, I noticed Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s sense of relief. Although the enormous pressure that weighed on him throughout life was somewhat eased, he felt no sense of euphoria. We were left with the feeling that the regime was indestructible under the ruling triumvirate of Molotov, Malenkov and Beriya. The latter still cast a heavy shadow on the country, although rumours started to gain ground that it was actually Beriya who would bring order into the KGB, establish justice and release the prisoners from the camps. We had this information from the wife of Maisky, the ex-ambassador to London, who had been arrested and sent to the camps. I came to see the Shostakoviches to tell them this news. Suddenly Dmitri Dmitriyevich pounced on me:
‘How can you believe such deliberate lies, lies that have been put into circulation by that department! Beriya, who personally cut up corpses and flushed them down the toilet, now wants people to believe that he has grown wings. And you are inclined to believe it!2
The Tenth Symphony
Immediately following Stalin’s death, Shostakovich’s main preoccupation was to release the works that he had been forced to hold back from performance. In the last two months of 1953, three substantial works were given their premieres: the Fourth Quartet (13 November), the Fifth Quartet (3 December) and the Tenth Symphony (17 December).
In 1955, another two important works, the Violin Concerto and the song cycle From Jewish Poetry, received their long overdue public premiere. That same year Shostakovich’s thoughts returned to his cherished opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and as a first step to rehabilitating the work he asked Isaak Glikman to modify the libretto.
Hitherto it has always been accepted that the Tenth Symphony, a work widely regarded as Shostakovich’s central masterpiece, was largely created in the summer months of 1953 at the Komarovo dacha outside Leningrad. The date of completion is given as 25 October, by which time the composer was back in Moscow.
But according to Tatyana Nikolayeva, one of Shostakovich’s closest musical friends of the period, the Symphony was composed, at least in part, during 1951, parallel to the creation of the Preludes and Fugues. Whereas Nikolayeva was emphatic about the dating of the first movement – early in 1951 – she indicated that the other movements were finished within that year, without being precise about the dating.3
It is possible that having started the Symphony in 1951, Shostakovich either completed it or substantially rewrote it in the summer of 1953. In his letters written between June and October 1953 to various correspondents the composer refers unequivocally to the creation of his Tenth Symphony, movement by movement. It would seem far-fetched for him consciously to wish to create the fiction of writing a work two years after its actual completion. Yet there is other evidence which supports Nikolayeva’s claim. Manashir Yakubov, the curator of the Shostakovich archive, has pointed to the existence of sketches of a movement of an unfinished violin sonata dating from 1946, where the first theme bears a marked resemblance to that of the Tenth Symphony’s first movement, and the second subject themes are identical. This implies that Shostakovich had been mulling over this musical material for many years before it eventually got written down in finished form as the Tenth Symphony.4
Certainly, if Shostakovich did deliberately withhold and ‘mis-date’ the Symphony, then one must assume that he was motivated by the fear that it would be subjected to the same kind of attacks inflicted on its two predecessors. The recent debates at the Union of Composers on the Preludes and Fugues and From Jewish Poetry will have done little to alleviate such apprehensions. It took an event as momentous as Stalin’s death to shift the prevailing wind of cultural repression.
In the stifling atmosphere of the post-1948 climate, Shostakovich had dedicated most of his serious effort to writing chamber works. The Tenth Symphony without doubt represented an urgent need to return to large symphonic form. In this sense it picks up a link with the Violin Concerto of 1947/48, rather than with the previous Ninth Symphony.
It was in late October 1953 that Shostakovich (together with Moisei Weinberg) played a two-piano version of the score to Mravinsky in Leningrad, and afterwards to a gathering of Moscow musicians and composers. Mravinsky, sufficiently impressed, set aside all other tasks to learn the work and presented it in public only six weeks afterwards.
The Tenth Symphony can be regarded as a landmark in the composer’s output, and its perfection of form has been consistently praised. The tragic canvas and epic proportions of the first movement (lasting nearly twenty minutes) are in contrast to the turbulent second movement ‘Allegro’, a grotesque and relentless whirlwind scherzo, whose sustained force of intensity belies its four minutes’ duration. While the first movement uses laconic and simple thematic material, in the scherzo the melodic design of the main theme bears a notable resemblance to the Introduction to Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. (Interestingly enough, Shostakovich re-uses this theme in a transformed context in the Second Cello Concerto.5) In its structural function within the symphonic cycle, the third movement ‘Allegretto’ replaces a slow movement. As if to compensate, the last movement’s ‘Andante’ introduction bears the weight of sorrow, with its lamenting woodwind calls presaging the thematic material of the following ‘Allegro’. This main fast section, with its mood of virtuosic rumbustiousness, rounds off the cycle in an emphatically positive mood.
A few months after its first performance Shostakovich wrote an apology for the work which verges on the ridiculous; indeed its absurdity is so patent that on this occasion the composer must have penned it himself, dispensing with the services of a ghost-writer. Shostakovich explains that he had written the symphony in too much of a hurry; then, the first movement isn’t a proper sonata allegro, the second movement is a bit too short in relation to the other movements which are too long, and the third movement suffers from being drawn out in places and cut down too much in others. As for the Finale, the introduction is long-winded, although it fulfils its compositional function.
This extraordinary exercise in ‘healthy self-criticism’ served to deflect anyone pursuing the trail of interpretative explanation. Having thus denied the existence of any programme, the composer signs off with a passing comment: ‘In this work I wished to portray human feelings and passions.’6 But this seemingly innocent remark reveals more than one might think.
In the third movement Shostakovich dwells insistently on his ‘autobiographical’ musical signature – the four notes DSCH (D, E flat, C, B). This motif had already been hinted at in some previous compositions, for instance in the Second Piano Sonata, where in the finale’s variation theme,7 the four-note monogram can be found with a C sharp substituting the required C natural, and then also at the start of the second movement ‘Scherzo’ of the Violin Concerto. It’s difficult to say at what point it started to evolve unambiguously as a musical signature, but by the time Shostakovich was writing the Pushkin Monologues and the Fifth Quartet, the DSCH motif or its anagram appears to be a conscious autobiographical reference.
In the Tenth Symphony the DSCH monogram is used as thematic material, notably in the third movement, where its significance is all the greater since it is linked to another musical signature – that of a woman’s name, Elmira.8 The person behind the inspiration was the Azerbaijani pianist and composer Elmira Nazirova,9 who had studied with Shostakovich in the year prior to his dismissal from the Moscow Conservatoire. During the summer months of 1953 Shostakovich carried on an intense (and probably largely one-sided) correspondence with her. Although Nazirova undoubtedly served as his muse during the period of composition, it seems that it was a temporary obsession with her image that sustained Shostakovich’s inspiration, rather than a need to fuel a concrete physical relationship.10
Elmira’s musical name (E–A[la]–E[mi]–R[re]–A) is spelt out by a five-note call on the French horn, which is heard no fewer than twelve times, sounding initially on the solo first horn as an imperative call, almost a distraction from the obsessive repetitions of the DSCH monogram. Later the EAERA motif (played by the whole horn group) stridently interrupts the insistent, menacing build up of the DSCH monogram at its culminative point, after which it recedes to the background, leaving the DSCH motif to fade away to a self-deprecating whimper at the close of the movement.
The ‘Elmira’ musical signature bears a striking and self-conscious resemblance to the horn motif in the first song of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. The composer recounted to Nazirova that he had heard Mahler’s theme in a dream in the night of 10 August. The significance of the dream was apparent when some twenty days later Shostakovich wrote again to tell her that he had transcribed the theme to use the musical letters of her name in the symphony’s third movement.11 Subsequently he informed Nazirova of the specific associations that Mahler attributed to this horn motif, namely the shriek of a giant monkey calling from the cemetery, instilling fear in the town’s inhabitants.12 In Chinese tradition the monkey’s voice is identified as the harbinger of death, cruel fate, and misfortune. The horn call in Shostakovich’s Tenth is thus not merely the spelling of his muse’s name, but can be interpreted as a message of fate, signalling the composer’s identification with his tragic destiny. It is used in marked contrast to the development of the principal themes (made up from the DSCH monogram), which show many-faceted moods, ranging from the wistful to the defiant. In its final soundings in the coda the composer’s musical signature achieves ‘a balance between indifference and reconciliation’ (to use David Fanning’s words).13
The Tenth Symphony is often read as the composer’s commentary on the recent Stalinist era. But as so often in Shostakovich’s art, the exposition of external events is counter-opposed to the private world of his innermost feelings. Shostakovich’s contemporaries will have been able to identify with his philosophical stance in the first movement (his stoicism in the face of tragedy), and with the inherent moral condemnation of gratuitous violence in the second.14 The private nature of the enigmatic third movement’s message was in notable contrast to the ‘public’, life-affirming force of the last movement. Specifically the finale’s ‘optimism’ fulfilled the demands of socialist-realist ideology on the one hand, while also celebrating personal victory, as the DSCH monogram (finally assuming a specific harmonic function as a dominant pedal) brings the symphony to a triumphant conclusion.
With hindsight it is easy to say that the music of the Tenth Symphony transcends the narrow associations with the time and place of its creation. While remaining a ‘child of its time’ the work’s continuing fascination also lies in the interpretative ambiguities derived from what Fanning describes as ‘Mahlerian poles of utopia and catastrophe, of idealism and nihilism’.15 Mravinsky and the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra gave the world premiere of the work on 17 December 1953. Both the Leningrad and subsequent Moscow performances enjoyed a huge public success, and the work was praised in reviews by such musical luminaries as Aram Khachaturian and David Oistrakh. However its reception among Party and Union officials was hardly enthusiastic. At a conference called by the Union of Composers in spring of 1954 to discuss the work, the music was condemned for not meeting with the requirements of current Soviet ideology, with its emphasis on the ‘optimistic, bright future of Soviet Man’.16 Pavel Apostolov accused Shostakovich of the sin of ‘modernism’ and ‘a gloomy, introverted psychological outlook’.17 Another of Shostakovich’s erstwhile detractors, Boris Yarustovsky, objected to the lack of ‘an active struggle for the good’, and questioned, ‘Where are the positive ideas in this symphony?’18
The head of the Composers’ Union, Khrennikov, played it safe by pointing to Shostakovich’s own Song of the Forests as a suitable model for composition.
These carping criticisms by petty bureaucrats and Union officials were issued along the same ‘ideological’ lines as those levelled at Shostakovich during the Union’s assessment of the Preludes and Fugues in 1951. But the political climate had defrosted sufficiently to protect Shostakovich and his new work from repressive measures.
The Symphony was immediately taken up and widely performed within the Soviet Union and abroad. After five years of disgrace in the aftermath of the 1948 Decree, Shostakovich emerged with his reputation enhanced, the quality of his composition attesting to his moral and artistic integrity.
The Festive Overture
This work was written for the thirty-seventh anniversary of the October Revolution, and received its premiere on 6 November 1954, with Melik-Pashayev conducting the Bolshoi Theatre orchestra. LEV NIKOLAYEVICH LEBEDINSKY recalls how the piece came into being:
Shostakovich composed the Festive Overture before my very eyes. It was commissioned by Vasili Nebol’sin, a conductor at the Bolshoi Theatre, who was a master of producing works for every conceivable public holiday or ceremonial occasion. Beforehand there would be a lot of commotion. Meetings were called at the Bolshoi and at the Ministry of Culture, where, in heated discussions and pompous arguments it was decided what particular work Stalin (or his successors) should listen to and which composer should be commissioned to write the necessary piece. These commissions incidentally were much sought after as they were very well paid, and composers fell over themselves to get one. Shostakovich was the only one never to get one. The other composers wrote terrible shit.
On this occasion for some reason nothing suitable was ready for the celebration of the October Revolution. Nebol’sin was in trouble. Very little time remained, rehearsals had been called, there were no parts ready, and what’s more there wasn’t even a piece written! In desperation Nebol’sin came to see Shostakovich at his flat. I happened to be there at the time.
‘You see, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, we are in a tight spot. We’ve got nothing to open the concert with.’
‘All right,’ said Shostakovich.
Nebol’sin said that he would send a courier round to collect the score as soon as it was ready and get the copyists lined up, and with that he left.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich, with his strange, unpredictable, almost schizophrenic character, had the notion that I brought him good fortune, although to my knowledge I never brought him any particular luck. He said, ‘Lev Nikolayevich, sit down here beside me and I’ll write the overture in no time at all.’
Then he started composing. The speed with which he wrote was truly astounding. Moreover, when he wrote light music he was able to talk, make jokes and compose simultaneously, like the legendary Mozart. He laughed and chuckled, and in the meanwhile work was under way and the music was being written down. About an hour or so later Nebol’sin started telephoning:
‘Have you got anything ready for the copyist? Should we send a courier?’
A short pause and then Dmitri Dmitriyevich answered, ‘Send him.’
What happened next was like the scene with the hundred thousand couriers out of Gogol’s Government Inspector. Dmitri Dmitriyevich sat there scribbling away and the couriers came in turn to take away the pages while the ink was still wet – first one, then a second, a third, and so on. Nebol’sin was waiting at the Bolshoi Theatre and kept the copyists supplied.
Two days later the dress rehearsal took place. I hurried down to the Theatre and I heard this brilliant effervescent work, with its vivacious energy spilling over like uncorked champagne.19
Nina’s death – and a second marriage
Shostakovich’s personal happiness was shattered when his wife Nina Vasilyevna Varzar died suddenly in Armenia on 4 December 1954. Despite its open nature, their marriage had been harmonious, and family life had been its mainstay. Moreover, Nina had always protected her husband from the outside world and seen to the smooth running of the household. Nina’s close working and emotional relationship with the physicist Artem Alikhanyan, as well as Shostakovich’s involvement with his Leningrad pupil Galina Ustvolskaya, were open secrets.
Now, without Nina, Shostakovich found he had to deal with mundane practicalities himself, and to steer his children through the difficult period of adolescence. His daughter Galina soon was to enrol at the Biology faculty of Moscow University, while his son Maxim was studying at the Central Music School, and at the time wished to become a pianist. Shostakovich wrote two works to encourage him: the Concertino for Two Pianos (1954) and the Second Piano Concerto (1957).
Shostakovich complained to Edison Denisov shortly after Nina’s death: ‘If only you knew how hard my life is now.’20
And in the summer of 1955 he wrote to Denisov from Komarovo: ‘Everything here reminds me of Nina Vasilyevna. She loved this place and put much energy into making our home here. The summer is passing by sadly without my producing anything. Mama is ill. Nina’s father can hardly move. It’s very hard to witness all this continually.’21
Soon Shostakovich suffered a second blow with the death of his mother on 9 November of that year. In her he lost the person who had done most to develop and fulfil his genius.
Hoping to ease his loneliness, Shostakovich sought for companionship in marriage, but finding a suitable companion to help him run his household was not such an easy matter.
When Shostakovich married in July 1956, his friends were bewildered by his unexpected decision; he not only acted in haste, but his choice seemed eminently unsuitable.
He had met his new bride, Margarita Kainova, the previous month at a composers’ competition at the World Festival of Youth in Moscow, where Shostakovich headed the jury. Kainova worked for the Communist Youth Organization (Komsomol) and had no love or understanding of music. Khentova claims that the poet Evgeni Dalmatovsky effected the introduction. 22 Galina Vishnevskaya assumed that Kainova’s main attraction was a certain physical resemblance to Nina.23 The composer’s friends’ fears were vindicated, as the marriage proved a disaster from which Shostakovich disentangled himself three years later.
After Nina’s death Shostakovich underwent a rare compositional crisis. On 11 March 1956 he wrote to his former pupil, Kara Karayev:
I have very little news. And even less good news. The saddest thing is that after the Tenth Symphony I have hardly composed anything. If this continues I’ll soon be like Rossini, who, as is well known, wrote his last work at the age of forty. He then went on to live till seventy without writing another note. This is small comfort to me.24
Shostakovich would periodically complain that he had burnt himself out, and could no longer write music, something he regarded as a personal tragedy. Even during the years of his disgrace, he had managed to continue composing. But now, despite the more relaxed political climate, he felt that he had written himself out, measuring himself by the previous standards of his own extraordinary ‘tempo’ of serious composition. Nevertheless, by August 1956 he had composed his Sixth String Quartet, while the massive Eleventh Symphony, written the following year, showed that his grasp of large symphonic form was as secure as ever.
FLORA LITVINOVA describes the effect of Nina’s unexpected death on Shostakovich’s life:
After a long interval without working, Nina returned to her scientific research. She worked in the laboratory of their friend, the Academician Alikhanyan, who was head of an Institute of Physics in Armenia. Every summer Nina went to a station high up in the mountains of Armenia, almost on the summit of Alagez, where research was carried out into cosmic radiation.
Once, shortly before she left for an expedition, I suddenly noticed that Nina was wearing glasses.
‘Are you sad?’ she asked. ‘Soon we’ll be old and playing blind man’s buff.’
We were walking down the street and a cold wind was blowing. I realized that Nina didn’t look as well or as youthful as usual. Her face was pale and her complexion grey. ‘Well,’ I thought to myself, ‘she’s not so young after all.’ That was in the summer of 1954. Nina was only forty-three years old.25
On 3 December of that year I was at home, having stayed away from work to look after my little girl, Nina. The telephone rang. It was Dmitri Dmitriyevich. ‘Flora, Nina has a blockage of the intestine. She has been taken down to Yerevan from the mountains, and they are going to operate. I am taking the next plane to Yerevan. Can you come with me? I think that it will be psychologically easier for Nina to have a woman friend with her at such a time.’
I was at a loss: ‘You see, Dmitri Dimtriyevich, my little girl is ill, and Mama is unwell, so there is no one for me to leave her with. I am sure that the operation will be successful; after all Nina is so healthy and positive.’
The next day Nina died. Her intestine was infested by a cancerous tumour. Her body was brought back to Moscow. I remember little of the funeral. I only remember that when I walked into the flat, I saw Nina lying in the open coffin on the table; she looked tranquil, beautiful, and appeared to be only asleep. Dmitri Dmitriyevich stood next to her. We kissed and both burst into tears. I could not forgive myself that despite everything I had not flown down to be with her. I was incapable of imagining such a terrible outcome, as Nina was the personification of life itself. Next to Dmitri Dmitriyevich stood Galya, a young woman now, and the adolescent Maxim. How Nina watched over them, and solicitously looked after their upbringing.
After Nina’s death, we spent less time at the Shostakoviches’. Once, when I came over on Nina’s name day, 27 January, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, who had had a bit to drink, suddenly announced that he found it difficult to live on his own. And it was hard dealing with the children.
‘You know, by nature, I am incapable of frivolous liaisons with a woman. I need a wife, a woman to live with me and be at my side.’
Some time later I received a letter from Dmitri Dmitriyevich, where he informed me, as Nina’s friend, that he intended to marry Margarita Kainova: ‘She is a kind woman, and I hope that she will be a good wife to me, and a good mother to my children. I hope that you will remain, as before, a dear friend of our household.’
Anusya Villiams passed on to me some frightening rumours about Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s intended: that she worked for the Central Committee of the Komsomol, was a Party member, that she was unattractive and uncharming, and knew nothing about art. Misha and I were invited to meet her. We felt ill at ease, and I remember little about that visit. But I wrote down in detail everything about our following visit to Dmitri Dmitriyevich.
On 24 October 1956 we went to hear a concert of new compositions. Dmitri Dmitryevich’s Sixth Quartet was premiered, a Trio by Boris Tchaikovsky and a String Quartet by Revol Bunin were also performed. We were breathtaken by Shostakovich’s music. Dmitri Dmitriyevich himself had aged a lot, and looked grey. He bowed nervously in acknowledgement of the applause, flapping his hands absurdly at the performers. It was agreed that we would go to see him the coming Saturday. Here is my diary entry for 27 October 1956:
‘Yesterday we went to see Shostakovich. Since Nina’s death, we had only been around a few times. There is always an unpleasant feeling, a loss for words, a sense of awkwardness. Besides the absence of Nina and my own sadness at the loss of a genuine friend, I also miss that simplicity in my relations with Dmitri Dmitriyevich. When she was alive, he used just to come into the room and be with us as long as he felt like it, and talked only if he felt like it. He would then go off to work in his study. Then he would appear and say, “Shall we have a cup of tea? I do love having breaks. And do you know, it’s a rule with me that I never work on holidays or days off, only on weekdays.” If we lunched or dined together, he liked to have a glass of cognac, and then he would get animated and recount something interesting. Often it would be a malicious, sarcastic or funny story about some mutual friend.
‘But on this occasion, Misha and I were just paying a visit. And there was no Nina, but an alien and unattractive woman, who, thank God, left the room after greeting us. We sat in Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s study. He quickly put some questions to Misha: “Have you heard any news on the BBC? What’s happening in Budapest? And Poland? The empire is falling apart at the seams. It always happens – the fist must be tightly clenched – it’s enough for it to relax just a little for the empire to crack. And only Stalin was capable of that.”
‘We talked of his songs written to texts of Dolmatovsky.26 I said that I didn’t like them much (in reality I didn’t like them one little bit), and the words were terrible. “Why did you write music to those texts?” I asked.
‘Shostakovich replied, “Yes, the songs are bad, very bad. They are simply extremely bad.”
‘And I piped up again, “But why did you write them?”
‘He answered, “One day I will write my autobiography, and there I will explain everything, and why I had to compose all this.” He spoke with some discomfiture, and a feeling of awkwardness arose between us.
‘“But did you like the quartet?” he said, wishing to change the subject.
‘But I kept on, “But why do you allow these songs to be performed if you don’t like them?”
‘“But this is an opus of mine. It has been published. Anyone who wants to has the right to include this work in their programme; I cannot refuse them.”
‘His embarrassment was painfully obvious. I know what it was that drove me on. Knowing his views, I could not bear to hear that he intended to join the Party. I was sure that, had Nina been alive, none of this would have occurred. We had been told how pressure had been exerted on him from certain quarters, but we did not know if this was so for sure, and we hardly dared to ask him outright.
‘Misha, seeing that I was behaving tactlessly, changed the subject by saying how much he had enjoyed Boris Tchaikovsky’s Trio.
‘Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s face lit up: “Yes, his Trio is wonderful, excellent. Boris is very talented, and works hard. And that’s important, because in music professionalism means so much. Many things can be studied and learned, so it should be possible for anybody to compose music. But professionalism combined with talent, as in Boris’s case, gives rise to wonderful music. And that is true of Bunin as well.”
‘I then asked about his other pupils and friends. “Is Weinberg composing, and Levitin?”
‘Dmitri Dmitriyevich answered disapprovingly, “Only theatre and film music.”
‘“And Sviridov, is he still drinking?”
‘“No, Sviridov has stopped drinking, and is composing. His songs on Esenin poems are very good. And, d’you know, I’ve also stopped drinking? I don’t drink at all. Today I wanted to drink something, but discovered that Maxim and his friends had drunk a whole bottle of cognac.”
‘We were most surprised; I still thought of Maxim as a young boy. Dmitri Dmitriyevich said that they had had a serious talk, and he thought that Maxim would stop. Maxim appeared at dinner time. A real popinjay, a handsome and twitchy youth. He was preparing to go hunting. We heard him boorishly abuse the chauffeur on the phone for not providing him with a tyre.
‘Dmitri Dmitriyevich spoke of the brief period of “Thaw”, saying that it should be enjoyed while the going was good. “The novel is bad, but Ehrenburg found the right word – the Thaw. We must relish it while it lasts, as experience shows that frosts will follow, and hard ones at that.”
‘Misha and I spoke of a film, where Picasso was shown painting a picture before our very eyes. Shostakovich said that he understood nothing about visual art. We were full of our impressions of the Picasso exhibition in Moscow. People had reacted excitedly to it, both young and old, and it provoked much argument and waving of hands. The majority of people were seeing such art for the first time.
‘Suddenly Dmitri Dmitriyevich burst out, “Don’t speak to me of him, he’s a bastard.”
‘We were stunned.
‘“Yes, Picasso, that bastard, hails Soviet power and our communist system at a time when his followers here are persecuted, hounded, and not allowed to work.”
‘I interjected, “But your followers are also hounded and persecuted.”
‘“Well, yes, I too am a bastard, coward and so on, but I’m living in a prison. You can understand that I’m living in a prison, and that I am frightened for my children and for myself. But he’s living in freedom, he doesn’t have to tell lies. I am now being invited by all countries of the world to travel, but I’m not accepting, and I don’t intend to travel anywhere until I can speak the truth, until I can answer the question as to what I really think about the Central Committee’s ‘historic’ Decree. And Picasso, who’s forced him to speak out? All those Hewlett Johnsons, Picassos, and Joliet-Curie, they’re all vermin. They live in a world which no doubt has its problems, but they are free to speak the truth and to work, and they can do what their conscience dictates. And Picasso’s revolting dove of peace! How I hate it! I despise the slavery of ideas as much as I despise physical slavery.”
‘Misha and I tried to explain that Picasso probably didn’t know what was going on in our country, and that he and others like him no doubt thought that our artists enjoyed being “socialist-realists”, painting like Gerasimov. We pointed out that Picasso probably backed the idea of communism in general, as indeed did we. “And you, too, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, “are for the ideas of communism.”
‘He answered, “No, communism is impossible. But let Picasso be, I don’t want to talk about him any more.”
‘At supper time, Madame came to sit at table. She is terribly uninteresting, and there is something horse-like about her. She tries terribly hard to please everybody, from the guests to the children, and to adopt the right tone. But, goodness, how vapid and unpleasant she is – particularly after Nina, and altogether …!’27
LEV LEBEDINSKY describes Nina’s open nature and sense of humour, and how later he helped effect the introduction of Margarita Kainova to Shostakovich:
I knew all of Shostakovich’s wives. Nina Vasilyevna (or Nita) was an energetic, vivacious woman, who, for all the complexities of their marriage, provided Shostakovich with a family and protected him somewhat from the outside world. She had a great sense of humour. I remember Nita’s infectious and unconstrained laughter when she told me the details of the famous telephone conversation with Stalin, which she had listened in to on the other receiver.
A few weeks after this conversation with Stalin, the Party Organization decided it was time to do something about Shostakovich. So they appointed a ‘sociologist’ from the Conservatoire to instruct him. This man was an incredible fool, thick-headed to a degree. He was invested with the responsibility for guiding Shostakovich’s thoughts, for ‘powdering his brains’, and explaining the meaning of ‘political economy’ in terms of Marxist terminology. The instruction took place at Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s flat. Poor Shostakovich simply had to grin and bear it, and somehow disguise his boredom. Even so, he managed to find some humour in the situation.
One day the instructor said to Shostakovich, ‘Is it true, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, that Iosif Vissarionovich rang you up in person?’
‘Yes it is true.’
‘What a truly great man Stalin is! With all the cares of state, with all he has to deal with, he knows about some Shostakovich. He rules half the world and he has time for you.’
Dmitri Dmitriyevich was happy to play him along, and said, ‘Yes, yes, it is truly amazing.’
‘I know you are a well-known composer,’ continued the instructor, ‘but who are you in comparison with our great Leader?’
Dmitri Dmitriyevich was not lost for a reply. Thinking of Dargomyzhsky’s famous romance with its text, ‘I am a worm in comparison to His Excellency,’ he immediately interjected, ‘I am a worm.’
‘Yes, that’s just it, you are indeed a worm,’ this idiot said, ‘and it’s a good thing that you possess a healthy sense of self-criticism.’
Dmitri Dmitriyevich knew how to act a role; he hung his head and repeated, ‘Yes, I’m a worm, a mere worm.’
Nita, who had been present during this ‘instruction’, laughed until the tears streamed down her cheeks.
Nita’s early death in 1954 was a tragic blow to Shostakovich, and he was never able to fill the void she left in his life.
Once a few years later, Dmitri Dmitriyevich approached me with a strange request: to help him make the acquaintance of a young lady who had caught his attention.
‘So who is this lady?’ I asked.
‘She works for the VLKSM, the Komsomol.’
‘Well, where on earth did you see her?’
‘At a competition run by the Komsomol for the “Best Massed Song”. I was there and she was constantly hovering around me.’
‘So, what do you know about her?’
‘Nothing much, only I know that she’s called Margarita Kainova.’
‘Why didn’t you get yourself introduced while you were there?’
‘Well, you know what those meetings are like. How could I approach her and introduce myself in those surroundings?’
‘So, what’s your plan?’ I asked.
‘It’s very simple, very simple. I’ve worked it all out. Tomorrow we’ll go to the opera. I have already got two tickets. I want to ask you as a favour to deliver one of them to her.’
I agreed to help. I experienced certain difficulties in my mission, as I didn’t know her address, but eventually I discovered where she lived and delivered the ticket. Dmitri Dmitriyevich was as happy as a child and clapped his hands with joy.
I met him the day after. ‘How did it go?’ I asked.
He looked a bit confused. It turned out that when Dmitri Dmitriyevich got to the theatre, sitting on the seat next to him – the one destined for Kainova – was a young man. He bore a certain resemblance to her.
‘Probably her brother!’ I said.
‘Yes, no doubt, the scoundrel.’
‘And then what happened?’
It transpired that he and the young man sat through the whole opera without exchanging so much as a word.
Not long afterwards I was urgently called to his home. I was to meet and ‘inspect’ Margarita Kainova. She made no impression on me. We sat down to drink tea, and it was a fairly tedious occasion. After she had left, Dmitri Dmitriyevich told me, although it was the first time that she had come to his house, he had proposed to her.
‘Why on earth did you do that?’
‘Well, that’s what has happened and I can’t get out of it now.’
‘Excuse me, but have you got to “know” her in the biblical sense? Are you in love with her?’
Of course the answer was a mumbled ‘No’. He was so shy, that he didn’t know how else to find a contact with her. ‘And now I’ve promised her.’
‘The devil take it,’ I remonstrated, ‘what if she’s totally unsuited to you?’
Two or three days later he told me that he was off to Leningrad, to Komarovo, and that he was taking Margarita with him as his wife. My hair stood on end. Then a few days later I got a postcard from him saying that their marriage had been formalized. I phoned him and voiced the necessary polite phrases; but I knew from his tone of voice that Dmitri Dmitriyevich was embarrassed and felt far from happy. He brushed me off, ‘Yes, yes, thank you, thank you.’
One day in the summer of 1959, Maxim informed me that Dmitri Dmitriyevich asked me to go up to Komarovo as soon as possible. I found him with his sister Mariya Dmitriyevna. She came out to meet me with these words: ‘Lev Nikolayevich, Dmitri Dmitriyevich and Margarita are separating; please don’t make any objections or exert any pressure on Dmitri Dmitriyevich.’ I found this very strange.
‘Mariya Dmitrievna, surely you don’t think that I want to keep them together? I was always against such a hasty match.’
When we were all in the house and started talking, Dmitri Dmitriyevich started giving me somewhat guilty, sidelong glances. It then dawned on me that he had decided to cast the blame on me, and had accused me of being the instigator of this unsuccessful match. His children had always been against the marriage, and Margarita had been continuously critical of the children. Dmitri Dmitriyevich had told me previously that they weren’t getting on too well, and that their disagreements centred around Margarita’s inability to understand the children. One day, when she was complaining, he said to her with a completely straight face, ‘Why don’t we kill the children, then we can live happily ever after.’ She didn’t understand that this remark was typical of his quirky, paradoxical sense of humour.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich stayed in Komarovo until divorce proceedings were under way, leaving Maxim to get Margarita out of their Moscow flat.28
The premiere of the First Violin Concerto
MARINA SABININA describes the long-awaited premiere of Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto:
In the autumn of 1955, the premiere of the First Violin Concerto was to take place in Leningrad. Its author had withheld this work from the world for many years. In addition all his preceding substantial works (the Preludes and Fugues, the Tenth Symphony) had aroused malicious attacks from the champions of ‘Socialist Realism’ and had caused Shostakovich no small amount of injury and bitterness.
The conductor, Mravinsky, had called as many orchestral rehearsals for the new concerto as for a monumental symphony. The soloist, David Oistrakh, was extremely concerned for the fate of this concerto and how it would be received by the press and the public; he had been working at the piece for a very long time, getting ‘right inside’ the music, until he was incurably enamoured of this brilliant concerto. In a word, the composer, conductor and soloist were all in a state of extreme agitation. A whole group of their friends and admirers were set to go to Leningrad for the premiere, and they were themselves no less nervous.
The magazine Sovietskaya Muzyka had commissioned me to attend the premiere to review it. Before that I had studied the score, and had listened to a rehearsal at Shostakovich’s flat, when Oistrakh, accompanied by Victor Yampolsky, first played the Concerto through to the composer. On that occasion, Oistrakh advised Dmitri Dmitriyevich to give the main theme in the opening of the Finale to a resonant brass instrument, and to save the timbre of the violin for later. Dmitri Dmitriyevich immediately agreed.
On the evening of 29 October, the Grand Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic was overflowing, and there was an atmosphere of jubilation and exhilaration. After the performance ended there was a storm of delirious applause, ovations, expressions of delight, and the composer, soloist and conductor were called out an endless number of times. Returning to the ‘European’ Hotel I bumped into a group of four people by the lift, the Glikmans, Galina Ustvolskaya and Dmitri Dmitriyevich, who cordially invited me to come up to his room ‘to celebrate, you understand, to celebrate this event’.
‘Thank you, of course I’d be delighted to come, thank you.’
In fact I then had to sort out an awkward situation as previously Oistrakh had invited me to supper with him; I ran up to his room and left a message explaining the matter. Of course it would make sense to drop a delicate hint to Dmitri Dmitriyevich that it would be a good idea to combine this improvised festivity. And when Dmitri Dmitriyevich started to talk of ‘how brilliantly, extraordinarily, and marvellously’ the soloist had played that evening, I made a tentative suggestion to that effect which was greeted very enthusiastically. Shostakovich rang Oistrakh’s room, but alas, he had not returned – no doubt he had been delayed changing his soaked-through concert clothes in the artists’ room.
In the meantime Dmitri Dmitriyevich had prepared a ‘feast’ in his room: he produced out of some paper bags some stale pies, which he had bought on the street and were as hard as stones, and some equally rock-like and inedible green apples. This was the accompaniment to the vodka. However there were no receptacles to pour it in, so we made use of a glass decanter stopper turned upside down, and some plastic cups found in the bathroom. Dmitri Dmitriyevich, with his ‘glass’ in hand, paced up and down the room with quick steps, muttering, ‘I am so glad, so glad, I’m so happy. I’m utterly, utterly happy.’ We clinked glasses and drank, and our host touchingly thanked ‘everybody, everybody, absolutely everybody’, toasted the ladies, resumed his pacing up and down, occasionally tripping up on the carpet. He took a bite from the rock-like pie, but was defeated by it and let it drop on the table. Then suddenly he fell silent and collapsed on the bed in the alcove. In a childishly helpless, plaintive voice he said, ‘And now all of you please go away, I am terribly tired, I want to sleep, to sleep …’ We naturally hurried to bid our farewells, to which he did not respond.
When I told Oistrakh about this curious ‘feast’, he was most alarmed. ‘But, my goodness, Dmitri Dmitriyevich must be absolutely ravenous, he didn’t eat anything all day long, I must drag him up to my room, look at all these marvellous dishes here!’ He rang, and to my surprise Dmitri Dmitriyevich picked up the receiver, but declined the invitation. ‘I’m already in bed, I’m completely drained of strength, completely without strength.’ The nervous tension that he had endured that day had been too much for him.29
The Shostakovich households
After Nina’s death, Shostakovich ran his household with the help of various servants, who were treated like members of an extended family. He continued to support them after their retirement. The children’s nurse, Pasha Demidova (who had also looked after Nina when she was a child), was allocated a room in their old flat on Kirov Street. Fedosya Kozhunova (Fenya) retired to look after the dacha in Bolshevo, while her niece Mariya looked after the family in the town flat. Additionally, Shostakovich employed a personal secretary, Zinaida Gayamova (also known by her maiden name, Merzhanova), and a chauffeur, Alexander Limonadov.
The soprano GALINA VISHNEVSKAYA got to know Shostakovich after her marriage to the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich in 1955. She writes of her impressions of the Shostakovich family’s somewhat chaotic household and modest and unpretentious way of life:
In those years Dmitri Dmitriyevich was living on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. When I first entered the apartment I was amazed by the disorder that reigned within – the lack of comfort, despite the fact that two women lived there: the maid, Mariya Dmitriyevna, and the old nanny, Fenya. Everything bore the stamp of neglect. Dmitri Dmitriyevich was only forty-eight when, on 4 December 1954, his wife Nina Vasilyevna suddenly died, leaving him to raise the two children: a daughter, Galina, seventeen years old, and a son, Maxim, who was fourteen.30 Dmitri Dmitriyevich transferred all his love for his wife to his children, and was a dedicated family man. I never heard him raise his voice to either of them, although their upbringing had been turned over to the maid, and they were growing up spoiled and undisciplined. He loved them with a kind of abnormal, morbid love, and lived in constant fear that some misfortune would befall them.
[…]
Dmitri Dmitriyevich liked to invite his close friends to his place and seat them at his table. Russians drink vodka rather than wine with their meals, and he was no exception. He didn’t use small vodka glasses, and preferred to do the pouring. He would start by pouring himself half a tumbler and drinking it off right away. Then he would pour himself another half, and begin to eat – that was his ‘quota’. He got tipsy rather quickly, especially in his last years; and when he did he would quietly disappear into his room for the night.
In those days he was hard-pressed for money, and there would be only sausage, cheese, bread and a bottle of vodka on the table. But he never seemed to notice what he was eating. He had few friends (life itself had made the selection for him), and his guests were usually the same people – those whose loyalty had been proven by time. But even then he rarely visited unless it was to celebrate birthdays. (He always remembered those birthdays, and never failed to send a telegram of congratulations.)
Most often he would sit at these affairs in silence, not taking part in the general conversation. He never sat long. After drinking his ‘quota’ he would stand up suddenly and say (using almost always the same words): ‘Well, we’ve drunk and we’ve eaten. It’s time to go home. Time to go home.’ And he would leave.31
Shostakovich’s son-in-law, EVGENI CHUKOVSKY, comes from a well-known literary family – he was the grandson of Kornei Chukovsky. His uncle Nikolai was a well-known novelist and his aunt Lydia was a close friend of Akhmatova and a supporter of fringe and dissident writers. His own father, Boris, a biologist, died in active service during World War II, and consequently he was brought up partially in his grandparents’ home, thereby acquiring an awareness of the pre-Stalinist Russian cultural background, something that had been lost by many of the young generation growing up in the 1950s.
Here Chukovsky writes of his first impressions of the Shostakovich family. He had met Maxim Shostakovich, a student like himself at the time, at a rowdy Moscow party to see in the New Year of 1957. In the early hours of the morning, well fortified by their hostess’s lethal punch, the merry-makers decided that it was time to listen to some music:
Maxim announced that if we wanted to hear music then we were to come to his home without a moment’s delay. We rushed into the street in a crowd and bundled ourselves into a large taxi and set off for the Mozhaiskoye Highway. But on the way most people realized that they had had enough and it was time to go home. Soon, only Maxim and I were left in the car, and as I lived out of town and had nowhere to go at that hour it didn’t matter to me where I went.
At the Moscow end of the Mozhaiskoye Highway, only 800 metres from the large road sign ‘Moscow’, indicating the boundary of the big city, stood block number 37/45 where Shostakovich lived. It was situated between two neon signs: ‘Cinema – Prizyv – Cinema’ and ‘Cinema – Pioneer – Cinema’. The block belonged to the Foreign Ministry and it was inhabited by ambassadors extraordinary and plenipotentiary, counsellors and other staff. But some flats had been delegated by the Powers Above to ‘workers in the arts’: actors, artists and composers. Shostakovich occupied two flats, numbers 86 and 87, which had been converted into one. The door of number 86 had been nailed up, and it was evident that it was never used. Maxim rang the bell of number 87 and we were let in.
What an extraordinary phenomenon the events of that New Year’s night were. Normally I would be flabbergasted at the idea of arriving at somebody’s home after three in the morning, but on that night it didn’t seem odd at all.
Maxim had an excellent ‘professional’ tape recorder in a corner of his room. Soon the tape was running and the saccharine voice of some American singer was being reproduced so purely that you could hear her breathing. But I didn’t listen. I was transfixed by the sight of a large festive cake on the piano, and thought to myself, ‘My goodness, he’s only a boy, and he has his own cake!’
The door opened and Dmitri Dmitriyevich entered. I was a bit scared, it was after all very late, but he only greeted us politely and asked Maxim if he had had a good time. Having received an affirmative answer, he made off to his own room.
I got friendly with Maxim and spent a lot of time in their apartment. I liked the Shostakovich home and involuntarily compared it to ours. It seemed that despite the differences there were many similarities. For instance, instead of having the postbox on the outside of the door as was common, there was a slit in the door covered on the outside by a metal flap, inscribed with the word ‘Post’. On the inside of the door there was no box, and the letters, newspapers and magazines fell higgledy-piggledy on to the floor.
And, as in our home, it was the custom to address one’s elders only by their names, without using the customary ‘Auntie’ or ‘Uncle’ which I found incredibly irritating.
And again, as we did at home, they called the Fathers of Communism ‘Karlo-Marlo’. I also heard repeated a rhyme dating from 1914 that Grandfather was fond of:
‘Hail Russia, my fatherland.
And Hail her plucky Allies!’
Although I spent a lot of time in Maxim’s company, I didn’t enter the other rooms in the flat, as there was never any reason to do so. But one day Maxim said, ‘My father wants to meet you. He’s in the dining room.’
I felt very diffident, but I had no choice but to go. I opened the door and stood on the threshold. Dmitri Dmitriyevich sat facing me at the table with his back to the window. He was eating meat with potatoes. The two-tiered redwood sideboard was the same as one we had in our dining room, and the table too looked very much like ours. The walls were cream-coloured with crudely painted golden flowers and leaves. Golden? Painted in a revolting bronze paint!
‘It can’t be true,’ I thought.
Such a thing was impossible in the home of Shostakovich. But there it was, and my attention was so caught up by this that I hardly heard the question my host was asking. It was simple enough: who was I? I replied as best I could, and was given permission to withdraw. As I was going out, I noticed the telephone by the door. A piece of paper was stuck behind the wire to it. The following list was typed on it:
All newspapers
All magazines
Radio
Television
TASS
Dolgopolov32
I was quite familiar with such lists. It indicated the organizations to which Shostakovich was not at home should they wish to speak to him on the phone. To this day I wonder what were the possible sins of Mr Dolgopolov, the only private individual on the list.33
Shostakovich’s material position improved considerably as a result of his agreement to travel as a Soviet delegate to the Congress for World Peace in New York in March 1949. As Shostakovich’s daughter Galina recalled, certain privileges were then restored to the family, such as access to the Kremlin hospital medical facilities. The whole family was asked to fill in forms, provide photographs and appear for a complete medical control at the ‘Kremlyovka’.34 During the previous year Shostakovich had been reduced to borrowing from the savings account of their housekeeper, Fedosya (Fenya) Fyodorovna Kozhunova, to feed the family.35 As a supporter of a large household (including family members in Leningrad) the composer was continuously short of money. But after the spring of 1949 Shostakovich’s finances gradually sorted themselves out, even if his main source of income still lay in writing cinema music. Fenya was sent to live in the dacha at Bolshevo, where the family set about making repairs to the house.
Here EVGENI CHUKOVSKY describes his impressions of the Bolshevo dacha:
The Shostakoviches made an attempt to settle there, but they were baulked by the absence of conveniences. A well was dug but it soon filled with sand. They sunk an artesian well, but the steel pipes burst somewhere deep in the bowels of the earth. They laid a pipeline, but the pipes burst with the first frost. Besides, the place was very difficult to get to and the family didn’t have much time at their disposal. Nina Vasilyevna, Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s wife, was busy with work, the children were at school, and they spent the summers near Leningrad. They only paid occasional short visits to the house.
It’s no joke to live without water. A number of experts were called in to solve the problem. The experts floated around in shoals like herring, and each one had some project which proved to be impractical or highly dubious. One of them, a mad inventor known locally as ‘the Kettle’, came up with the idea of converting sewage into pure drinking water. He was willing to do this at his own expense.
‘Doesn’t it smell somewhat?’ enquired Shostakovich squeamishly.
‘Not at all,’ the ‘Kettle’ assured him. ‘Well, maybe in the spring thaws you get the odd whiff. Otherwise there’s no smell at all.’
In the meantime the solution was to use the old methods prevalent in Central Asia. Kuzma, the water carrier from the village, a quiet, subdued man, and somewhat of an invalid, took a bucket and walked the half kilometre to the spring. Every day, come rain, come snow, he filled up a large barrel with bucket-loads of water.
Maxim used to complain because his father insisted on him going to their dacha in Bolshevo. He found it unbearably boring there, there was absolutely nothing to do, and it was incomparably nicer to stay in town. So one day he suggested that I should go with him to keep him company and cheer him up. Limonadov was to take us there.
Limonadov, or simply Lemonade, was the chauffeur’s name. However his family acquired this strange surname is a mystery. It certainly produced a startling effect on people, as when a traffic inspector, scrutinizing his driving licence and unable to believe his eyes, told him, ‘Giddy up then, Lemonade – syrup!’
Alexander L’vovich Lemonade was a nice fellow, and everybody called him just Sasha; that is everybody except Dmitri Dmitriyevich, who always addressed people, irrespective of who they were, with the formal name and patronymic. Only once towards the end of his life did he forget himself so far as to use the ‘thou’ form when speaking to me, something I can only be proud of.
Lemonade appeared and we set off, first to the garage where he deposited his master’s car and got out his own. For Lemonade lived in Bolshevo and was travelling home.
It was a rarity in those days for a chauffeur to own a car. And it turned out that the car had been Shostakovich’s, who, when he had bought a new car, sold off his old one for peanuts. He was completely disinterested in the fact that on the black market you could sell a second-hand car for double the price of a new one in the shops.
And here we were in Bolshevo. Along the roadside factory buildings loomed, with piles of trash lying scattered around nearby, the usual accompaniment to such buildings in Russia. The highway was intersected by untidy railway crossings; out of some turning came a string of six carts loaded with wooden barrels, each dragged by a tired old jade slithering on the snow. The unsavoury smell explained everything – sewage disposal in progress. My goodness, what a place! What kind of dacha could there be here?
The house stood somewhat apart from the highway, and in winter it was impossible to drive up to its gates because the snow was never cleared. Limonadov deposited us on the road and drove off in haste. We walked down a path made where the deep snow had been trodden down and found ourselves in front of a gate, part of a continuous wooden board fence. A knot in one of these boards fell out to reveal a hole. Maxim pushed his finger in the hole and we heard a bell ring somewhere.
‘It’s disguised so the local boys don’t fool about with it!’ Maxim explained.
We heard footsteps and a squeaky woman’s voice from behind the fence asked, ‘Who’s there?’
‘It’s friends, Fenya,’ said Maxim, and the gate opened.
The old babka Fenya lived permanently at the dacha as its guardian. She was monstrously ugly. Her nose looked like a large potato on which new little potatoes had sprouted. Her thin legs carried a triangular body which lacked shoulders, so that her long jointy arms appeared to grow right from the neck. In addition, she was constantly muttering in a squeaky voice. In this muttering there was no real malice; indeed her eyes shone with such love for people that her old wrinkled face beamed.
She had started her service in the Shostakovich household in Leningrad before the war. She considered herself downgraded in this position, as in the old times she had been the servant of a rich merchant. In the interval between the merchant and Shostakovich she had seen some pretty difficult times, and had barely survived the famine on the Volga. Since then she had developed a nearly religious respect for bread and never threw out a crumb. She converted stale bread into rusks which she stored in a cardboard box. Once the box was full, she filled up another, then another, and many more. Fenya’s room was stacked with these boxes, and mice abounded. They made plenty of noise, eating their way through the rusks from inside the cartons, and they roamed freely around the house. Life became unbearable. An attempt was made to persuade Fenya to part with her treasure; it was proposed to take her to the shops so that she could see with her own eyes that there was plenty of bread to be had, as well as other good food. But nothing helped. So they resorted to more drastic measures. When Fenya was out of the house the boxes were removed. She returned to discover the theft, and sat down and cried quietly. Then she started all over again.
Fenya lived all year round at the Shostakovich dacha, and, although nothing was asked of her, from habit she continued to work. She cultivated a vegetable garden and grew carrots, parsley, onions and tomatoes; she made jam, salted cucumbers, marinated cabbages and looked after the hens. All this produce was then sent with Limonadov to the family in town, and Limonadov brought back tea, coffee, soap, sausage and, to use Chekhov’s words, other ‘colonial produce’. For herself the old babka Fenya kept only the rusks with which she barricaded her room.
EVGENI CHUKOVSKY goes on to describe the Shostakovich household at Komarovo:
At the end of May 1959 Maxim suddenly announced that the whole family were shortly to depart for Komarovo. In a characteristically peremptory manner he dismissed as fools anyone who spent the summer elsewhere.
I knew of no ‘Komarovo’, so I asked him what was so special about it. In reply came the single word ‘dacha’, and Maxim’s eyes lit up, as in a burst of fiery oratory he described the charms of the place and the heroic exploits that he and his buddies got up to (which, in retrospect, I now see as nothing short of malicious hooliganism). I set my heart on going to that remarkable place, Komarovo.
Maxim quickly left the room but returned immediately – ‘Papa’s calling you.’
Shostakovich was sitting in the dining room under a lampshade made from paraffin waxed paper. Such lampshades had just become all the rage; they were produced by bereft widows with no other means of support.
‘Hello, Dmitri Dmitriyevich,’ I said.
‘Hello,’ he replied. ‘Do come and stay with us at our dacha in Komarovo.’
I wanted to say something, but Maxim literally pushed me out of the room as an indication that the audience was over.
EVGENI CHUKOVSKY took up the invitation which Maxim had arranged. He was instructed to take the suburban train from Leningrad to Komarovo. Once there he was to ask for Korablestroitelei Street.36 The Shostakovich dacha (at number 20) was one of a small group of houses on the outskirts of the settlement. Chukovsky was met by Shostakovich whom he saw emerging from a clump of young pine trees which marked the beginning of their street:
Before my eyes was a strange edifice, surrounded by a paling which looked as if it had come from the set of Little-Russian opera. In the distance, screened by this paling, stood something between a house, a log cabin and a dacha. It resembled more than anything else a Spanish galleon with broken masts which had been dragged out of the sea for repairs after a terrible gale. It didn’t seem much like a dacha to me. And to add to my astonishment a dirty green electric train thundered past just above the level of the roof. The property was situated in a ravine just under the high railway embankment.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich informed me that Maxim and Galya had gone to Tallinn and were expected back any time now. He handed me over to the care of some old women, who had suddenly appeared in a throng from goodness knows where. I found myself in a room with an old upright piano. It was decorated with cheap wallpaper, and the flimsy window frame held three pieces of glass instead of one. There was a round stove in the corner, clad with corrugated iron. It all seemed very rickety and shoddy, with only an inadequate lick of white paint on the doors and windows. In such a house one could only expect the food to be bad; but the ‘cultivated poverty’ actually stopped short here and the old women fed me very well.
I went out on to the road to wait for Galya and Maxim. I sat on the warm sand by the roadside, dumped there for the purpose of repairs. After some time a ‘Pobeda’ car with a Moscow number-plate appeared in the distance. Maxim and Galya were sitting inside and at the wheel was the chauffeur Limonadov with his teeth bared in a poisonous smile.
We then all supped together on the veranda, eating fish caught that evening by the local fisherman and drinking extraordinarily delicious milk. Then, in the outlandish dusk of the White Nights, I was dragged off to the gulf, which they called the sea, even though it hardly had enough water to merit the name.
*
Shostakovich wrote on the veranda of the first floor, which he called with a noticeably wry smile his ‘creative laboratory’ or his ‘tvorilka’. Tracery window casements took up three of its four walls, and against one of these stood a heavy oak desk. On it stood a set of coloured glass inkwells, white, yellow and red, which had as an appendage a glass beacon crowned by a sharply pointed lightning conductor. Every time I approached that desk I shuddered as I imagined that it might pierce the eyes of the composer as he bent down to write.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich used these inkwells as he liked to work with an ordinary dip-pen. It was easy to write notes with it: you pressed and it left a blob, then you steered it up – it left a line. A Parker or other fountain-pen would have been much worse for this purpose, and it took Shostakovich a long time to get used to writing with a ball-point pen. He preferred to dip the old-fashioned steel-nibbed pen in the violet ink of the inkwell.
He composed in his mind. I suspected that he went on doing so round the clock. In any case I failed to establish any specific time when he composed, because he never approached the old upright piano on the ground floor. Once he said, although in jest, that all instruments should be taken away from composers, as they should have no need for them.
To observe him writing down what he heard was like a miracle. Placing a large sheet of manuscript paper in front of him, with hardly an interruption and practically no corrections or rough copies, Shostakovich created his new scores. They were created in entirety and instantaneously. It looked as though he wasn’t composing, but just copying down sounds heard in his innermost self. And then, when the score was ready, he wrote out the orchestral parts himself.
Maxim once asked him, ‘Papa, why are you writing out the parts when the score is there? Anyone who knows how to read and write music could do it for you.’
Dmitri Dmitriyevich replied, ‘Everyone should do his own work from beginning to end.’37
The Rehabilitation of Lady Macbeth
As Shostakovich released the last of his suppressed works from the 1948–53 period, he cherished high hopes that his opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, would be revived after nearly twenty years of ignominious silence. (True, the opera had occasional performances outside the Soviet Union, as at the Venice Biennale Contemporary Music Festival in 1947.) In March 1955 the composer played the opera, with certain revisions, for the Leningrad Maly Opera Theatre (MALEGOT), who wished to stage the work in the forthcoming season. According to Isaak Glikman, Shostakovich had already composed the two entr’actes that constitute one of the significant changes in the 1961 version of the opera, re-named Katerina Izmailova.
The following month Shostakovich asked Glikman to review the libretto, and gave him permission to make changes to the text (to fit the existing music) at his discretion. Shostakovich’s chief concern was to eradicate some of the cruder vulgarities of the original.
Isaak Glikman noted that on 20 March Shostakovich (on the eve of his departure from Leningrad) went to pains to explain to him that changes to the libretto were dictated from his inner conviction rather than external pressures. As Glikman comments,
The truth is that when the opera was originally performed […] the inappropriate reaction of some audience members to the rumbustious, vulgar and iconoclastic remarks made by Sergei […] upset Shostakovich. For the most part they were perfectly in character, but there were times when they came at the most dramatic moments and were often greeted by laughter, painful to the composer’s ears.
The following day the composer wrote to Glikman from Bolshevo suggesting specific changes because ‘audiences of puritanical disposition don’t like such crude naturalism’. In regard to Katerina’s character he wished to ‘play down the idea of the insatiable female’.38
Before being able to programme the opera, MALEGOT needed to have the go-ahead from the authorities. Here Glikman describes how, in the spring of 1956, despite the musical and textual changes, Lady Macbeth was rejected by the State-appointed commission. This bitter humiliation must have reinforced Shostakovich’s fears that fundamentally the Party had no intention of changing its policies towards the arts. Over the next few years Shostakovich nevertheless made several tentative efforts to have the new version of the opera re-staged. But it was only in 1961 that it received approbation by the Union of Composers, thereby allowing it to be staged in Moscow at the Nemirovich-Danchenko Theatre the following year.
The published score of Op. 114 (as the composer catalogued the new version of Katerina Izmailova) does not credit Glikman (or anybody else) with the textual changes to the libretto. Certain voices have claimed that Irina Antonovna Shostakovich, the composer’s third wife, was responsible for the rewritings, in her capacity as literary editor of the published score.39 As yet there is no concrete evidence to cast doubts upon Glikman’s claim to their authorship.
ISAAK GLIKMAN recalls the humiliating experience for Shostakovich of having Lady Macbeth re-auditioned – and rejected:
I return to the unhappy fate of the opera Lady Macbeth. I remember that in March 1955 Shostakovich asked me to look at the whole libretto of the opera with a critical eye, and to make any corrections and changes that I thought fitting. Within a month I had put words to many pages of the piano score, attempting always to preserve the spirit of each phrase, but investing them with different verbal forms.
On 19 April 1955 I showed this version of my vocal text to Dmitri Dmitriyevich, and it was approved by him. Soon I received a letter from Dmitri Dmitriyevich sent from Moscow dated 21 April 1955, which included the following lines: ‘Dear Isaak Davydovich, Many thanks for your hard work. I am now adjusting it in my piano score; my only regret is that you have only completed this task now and not twenty-two years ago.’
In the winter of the following year I received another letter from Shostakovich: ‘I fulfilled Zagursky’s request and had a talk with Molotov, who repeated his instructions about an audition of Lady Macbeth by a competent Committee.
‘Yesterday I saw Comrades Mikhailov, Kaftanov, Kemenov, and other leading functionaries of the Ministry of Culture, and while engaging in pleasant chat, they made no reference to the matter of Lady Macbeth. I feel it’s awkward for me to raise the matter myself. Kabalevsky is unwell at the moment, and evidently they are waiting for his recovery, before appointing the relevant Committee. I think that it would be better if Zagursky, rather than I, pressed the urgency of the matter. I am not going to apply for an audition of Lady Macbeth. It seems to me that as it is I have done more than enough.
‘If the Committee is called to audition Lady Macbeth, then I earnestly ask you to be present. Not to defend the opera, but simply as a friendly face and moral support.’
This letter requires some clarification. The director of the Leningrad Maly Opera Theatre, Zagursky, was trying to get the necessary permission to stage Lady Macbeth (Katerina Izmailova) – without this the disgraced opera could not be put on. With this aim in mind, he had urged Shostakovich to apply in person to the First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, Vyacheslav Molotov.
Gritting his teeth, Dmitri Dmitriyevich carried out this request – he absolutely hated promoting his own interests and petitioning on his own behalf, and in particular having any dealings with high-up officials. As a result of his meeting with Molotov a Committee was set up to review the second version of Lady Macbeth. Kabalevsky, a member of the Collegium of the USSR Ministry of Culture, was appointed to preside over it, and the other members elected were the composer Chulaki, the musicologist Khubov, and the conductor Tselikovsky, head of the Department of Music Theatres attached to the USSR Ministry of Culture. Zagursky, Doniyakh, the chief conductor of the MALEGOT, and myself (as author of the corrected texts) were invited from Leningrad to attend the Committee’s sessions.
The audition of Lady Macbeth eventually took place on 11 and 12 March 1956. It took the Ministry of Culture roughly three months to organize it; their lack of haste was evidently no accident. It seemed to me that they had already decided on a negative outcome.
Probably it was Kabalevsky’s suggestion that the Committee should meet at Shostakovich’s flat on the Mozhaiskoye Highway rather than at either the Ministry of Culture or the Union of Composers. It would be seen as a gesture of respect to the famous composer.
At the appointed hour the Committee members had appeared in Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s study. They greeted the master of the house cheerfully. Nothing seemed to augur the collapse of the whole enterprise. Shostakovich, immensely agitated, distributed the typed-out copies of the new edition of the libretto. Then he sat down at the piano and performed the opera marvellously.
There followed a short interval, during which time the members of the Committee became aloof and severe; then the discussion started. The opera was subjected to the harshest criticism in the spirit of the notorious article ‘Muddle Instead of Music’.
Zagursky and Doniyakh, shaken by this turn of events, maintained the silence of the grave. Shostakovich sat alone on a large sofa listening to the speakers. He leant against its wide back as if seeking support. His eyes were closed; he probably couldn’t bear to see his colleagues outshining themselves in abuse. From time to time a sickly grimace distorted his face.
To the great displeasure of the Committee I spoke out twice, talking with agitation about the urgent necessity to produce this great opera, whose music had been declared to be a ‘muddle’ twenty years ago. Khubov kept rudely interrupting me, shrieking and shouting. His attempts to distract me were unsuccessful. Ultimately my words were no more than a single voice crying out in the wilderness. The Committee were unanimous in their recommendation that Lady Macbeth should not be staged in consideration of its enormous ideological and artistic defects.
I returned home from Moscow on 14 March, still reeling from this second execution of Lady Macbeth, this time carried out by enlightened musicians. While these memorable events were still fresh in my mind I wrote down a short account of them, which I will now quote:
‘The discussion of Lady Macbeth can only be described as a disgrace. Khubov, Kabalevsky and Chulaki all kept referring to “Muddle Instead of Music”. In particular Khubov and Kabalevsky surpassed themselves. They compared certain parts of the music with the worst invective from the article. They pointedly repeated that the article had not been “withdrawn” and that it still retained its force and relevance. (After all it states that “the music creaks, groans, and pants …”)
‘Kabalevsky complimented certain things in the opera, and this was doubly unpleasant to hear. In his capacity as chairman of the Committee he concluded that the opera would be impossible to stage as it made an apology for a murderess and seductress – his sense of morals was highly offended … I spoke with plenty of conviction, but all my arguments were demolished by the article, which Kabalevsky and Khubov waved about in the air like a truncheon.
‘Finally Kabalevsky asked Shostakovich to put forth his point of view, addressing him with friendly familiarity as “Mitya”, but Dmitri Dmitriyevich refused to speak, and with remarkable self-possession thanked him “for the criticisms”.’40
On this occasion Shostakovich’s son Maxim turned pages for his father when he sang and played through the whole opera. He recalls:
I can still hear clearly the fawning voice of the composer Dmitri Kabalevsky. Simulating goodwill, he addressed my father, ‘But Mitya, what’s the hurry? The time has not yet come for your opera.’ Shostakovich sat on the sofa, with a cigarette in his shaking hand, and seemingly did not even hear Kabalevsky. […]
I looked round at these disgusting people, and regretted not having my catapult, with which in Komarovo some years back I had shot at my father’s oppressors.’41
‘On the Correction of Errors’
After Khrushchev’s unmasking of Stalin at the 20th Party Congress, it was logical that all the policies of Stalin’s last paranoid years (including the infamous ‘Zhdanov’ Decrees) should be reviewed. Discussions about the implications of these reassessments took place behind closed ministerial doors. Undoubtedly there was conflict within Party circles as to how much and how quickly changes in cultural policy should be implemented. According to Marina Sabinina, almost immediately after the Congress, proposals were put forward to re-evaluate the 1948 Decree on ‘formalism in music’. Another two years passed before the Party Central Committee issued a new Decree to supersede it (on 28 May 1958).
Clumsily titled ‘On the Correction of Errors in the Evaluation of The Great Friendship, Bogdan Khmelnitsky and From All My Heart’, this document signalled full official rehabilitation of all leading composers who had suffered criticism, although it did not actually rescind the notorious Decree on formalism. Nevertheless, it served to lift the official ban on art that had been labelled decadent (whether Western or ‘formalist’ Soviet) and acted as a green light for composers to follow new and experimental paths.
In the opinion of Galina Vishnevskaya,42 the Decree was passed as a concession to international opinion, since Shostakovich had been much in the public eye in his capacity as chairman of the Tchaikovsky International Competition, which had taken place in April of that year. To maintain Soviet cultural prestige, the Party decided to remove the slur on Shostakovich’s name. Vishnevskaya recalls a private celebration at the composer’s home, where Shostakovich proposed a toast to ‘the great historical Decree “On Abrogating the Great Historical Decree”’, while singing Zhdanov’s instructions, ‘There must be refined music. There must be beautiful music’ to the tune of Stalin’s favourite Lezginka (a national Georgian folk dance). Significantly this was no less than a quote from his lampoon Rayok.
MARINA SABININA gives an account of Shostakovich’s frustration and anger at the inadequate measures proposed to clear the names of the composers criticized in 1948:
One day during February or March of 1956 I had to go and see Shostakovich about some matter concerning the magazine Sovietskaya Muzyka. He was a member of its editing committee. And so I found myself in his flat on Kutuzovsky Prospect in his spacious study with two grand pianos. On the wall hung a painting by Pyotr Villiams: a blindingly pink, virtually nude figure of ‘Nana’. On his desk a game of patience was laid out, which I had interrupted with my arrival. Patience was one of his favourite occupations, his way of overcoming stress.
I found Dmitri Dmitriyevich in poor spirits and more agitated than usual. He was hurtling round the room from one corner to the other with his short, hurried footsteps. He greeted me curtly, asked me to sit down, and started speaking, first in broken phrases, abrupt exclamations, then, as he became more heated, in whole, feverishly blustering paragraphs. It would appear that he was conversing with himself, as he only occasionally stopped to address me and obviously expected no response from me.
‘I was called up to see a certain “high-up official”. They, you see, are now interested, as to how they can somehow “correct” the Central Committee’s famous Decree of 1948. Correct it!! Correct the very thing that carried off Myaskovsky to his grave, broke Prokofiev, and poisoned the lives of many young, talented musicians, and opened up careers for all kinds of filthy trash … Do you know that I visited Nikolai Yakovlevich Myaskovsky literally on the eve of his death, about two days before he died. He lay in bed, terribly emaciated, pale and weak, and suddenly he gasped in a barely audible whisper: “As I lie here, I keep thinking, could it possibly be that everything I did and taught was ‘against the People’? Perhaps there is some bitter truth in it after all, and we were indeed on the wrong path.” You understand, this most noble, modest of men lay there dying, tortured by these thoughts, torn apart by doubts, seriously looking for a grain of truth in that illiterate, revolting document!
‘I answered this high-up official, saying, “No, nothing should be corrected, the only thing is to revoke the Decree, revoke it.” And to revoke it categorically, like that inhuman, shameful law which forbids abortion, which has cost the lives of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of women. They have been reduced to poking knitting needles up themselves, they have maimed themselves and died, because in these hard and hungry times they didn’t want to bring into the world children who would be neglected and starving.’
For a while Dmitri Dmitriyevich broke off his monologue.
‘Then in 1948, we “formalists” were ordered to make speeches of self-criticism at the Union of Composers’ Congress. I shouldn’t have gone. Prokofiev was more intelligent than me, he sent a letter excusing himself – a rather dry, cold letter in which he, as it were, agreed that he was guilty of certain errors; the authorities, of course, were not satisfied by his letter. Myaskovsky had already taken to his bed and didn’t appear at this meeting. And I went along. My name was called, and I got up without any idea as to what I was going to say, only knowing that I had to repent. I thought, “Well, I’ll muddle through somehow.” As I walked towards the speakers’ tribune from the hall – you know there are those steps and railings on the right – a certain person43 caught me by the sleeve and shoved this bit of paper in front of me. “Take this please,” he said. At first I didn’t understand what he wanted, then he whispered in a sort of condescending and cloying voice, “It’s all written down here, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, just read it out.”44
‘And I got up on the tribune, and started to read out aloud this idiotic, disgusting nonsense concocted by some nobody. Yes, I humiliated myself, I read out what was taken to be “my own” speech. I read like the most paltry wretch, a parasite, a puppet, a cut-out paper doll on a string!!’
This last phrase he shrieked out like a frenzied maniac, and then kept repeating it. I sat there completely dazed. Involuntarily a scene from this meeting which I too had attended came to mind, a small episode during Shostakovich’s speech which had cut like a knife at my heart.
Reading this humiliating self-accusation, after the words ‘music against the people’ Dmitri Dmitriyevich suddenly tore himself away from the text for a minute, lifted his head and said in a sad and helpless voice, with his short-sighted eyes fixed on the auditorium, ‘It always seems to me that when I write sincerely and as I truly feel, then my music cannot be “against” the People, that after all, I myself am a representative … in some small way … of the People.’
I recalled everything that he recounted that day very clearly, when, in the mid 1960s, I was trying to get to the bottom of the idea of the second subject theme of the Allegretto in the Tenth Symphony, with its DSCH motif. This motif sounds strange and mechanical, lifeless but persistent, just as if the composer had, with terror and revulsion, seen himself as a puppet, a ‘doll on a string’, which is being arbitrarily manipulated in the merciless hands of the Puppeteer … And here the analogy with Stravinsky’s Petrushka automatically springs to mind.
I happened on the antecedent to this image in a work by a certain I. Ermakov, Sketches for an Analysis of Gogol’s work, a work published in the 1920s and soon to be condemned as Freudian. There Ermakov refers to Gogol’s pathological tendencies, and in particular to his habit of long and continuous self-contemplation in front of a mirror, when, completely self-absorbed, he would repeatedly call out his own name with a sense of alienation and revulsion. I introduced a quotation from this book into my chapter on the Tenth Symphony,45 but it was ruthlessly cut out by the editors; our famous helmsman of ‘socialist realism’, Boris Yarustovsky, refuted my ‘subversive idea’, explaining that ‘a great Soviet composer is unable to experience such absurd and morbid emotions’!46
Rayok
Rumours that Shostakovich had written a work ‘in secret’ satirizing the ‘Zhdanov’ Decree had been in circulation for some time after the composer’s death. The existence of the satirical cantata Rayok (variously translated as The Peep-Show, The Gods, and A Learner’s Manual) was finally confirmed when it received a first public performance in Washington in January 1989 by Mstislav Rostropovich. He used a copy made available to him by the musicologist Lev Lebedinsky.
The Rayok was a popular entertainment at travelling fairs, where a booth housing a box which has specially made peepholes allowing viewing of a series of pictures turned on a revolving drum. The booth was manned by a ‘Rayoshnik’ whose running commentary was made in doggerel verse, using many invented and ridiculous diminutives. When young, Shostakovich had been fascinated by the Rayok and its language, as he informed his friend Oborin in a letter dated 26 September 1925. ‘How are your delishki [diminutive of “delà”, meaning “affairs, things”] […], how go things with Shebalishki [Shebalin] and Mishki [Misha Kvadri]? Forgive the last two phrases – I have recently begun to study rayoshni language.’47
This typically Russian form of musical satire has its roots in the centuries-old Skomorokhi lampoons. Shostakovich also knew and loved the satirical songs of the nineteenth-century classics (such as Dargomyzhky’s ‘The Worm’ and Mussorgsky’s ‘The Seminarist’ and ‘The Flea’). In Soviet times the most popular form of musical-political satire could be found in the ‘shastushki’, a kind of limerick usually peppered with indecent puns and allusions, and also the kapustnik, a kind of home-bred ‘review’.
Shostakovich’s Rayok nevertheless has a direct antecedent in Mussorgsky’s work of the same name. Whereas Mussorgsky created a caricature of the enemies of the ‘New Russian School’ (more commonly known as ‘The Mighty Handful’), Shostakovich lampoons the cultural activists who launched the ‘struggle with formalism’.
Shortly after the Washington performance, Shostakovich’s widow produced from the family archive the original manuscript(s) together with some preliminary sketches. They are written in the characteristic purple ink Shostakovich used until the early 1960s, and none of them are dated. The work was performed in the Soviet Union a few months after the Washington premiere in a slightly different version. Later that year an additional excerpt was found, constituting an extended concluding scene (which Venyamin Basner remembers Shostakovich playing to him around 1967).
There is also disagreement about the time of Rayok’s creation. The curator of the Shostakovich archive, Manashir Yakubov, who was responsible for finding all the rough sketches and various manuscript versions of Rayok48 in the archive, claims that the work was conceived and partly written already in 1948, and that it was completed in two further stages, in 1957, then the late 1960s. This version of events is supported by Isaak Glikman. He alone of Shostakovich’s surviving friends claims that the composer played Rayok for him in the summer of 1948 from a rough sketch written on a single sheet of paper.49 Vissarion Shebalin’s widow remembers Shostakovich playing Rayok at their Moscow flat ‘sometime in the 1950s’, in any case after Shebalin fell ill. Shebalin’s advice to Shostakovich was to destroy all trace of the work as ‘you could be shot for such things’.50
Lebedinsky dates Rayok to the time of the 2nd Union of Composers’ Congress, which took place between 28 March and 5 April 1957. Dmitri Shepilov, a secretary of the Central Committee responsible for the arts, in a speech worthy of Zhdanov, exhorted composers to write in the style of their classical forebears. Evidently a ‘howler’ in this speech was the stimulus for the creation of the lampoon, which merits interest less for its musical quality than as a social document. Rayok (and particularly Shostakovich’s parodying ‘pseudo-literary’ introduction) reflects Shostakovich’s intolerance of the ignorance and pomposity of the petty functionaries and political big-shots who ruled his life for so many years.
Lebedinsky’s dating is supported by others of Shostakovich’s friends (including Mikhail Druskin) and the composer’s daughter Galina, who remembers the fun and games that accompanied the ‘creation’ of Rayok. Indeed, Maxim and Evgeni Chukovsky were inspired to start writing a libretto along similar lines, which Shostakovich promised to set to music the moment it was finished. Like so many ideas born of the heat of the moment, this one came to nothing.
Shostakovich’s satirical frame of mind is confirmed by his letters of 1957. On 31 March of that year he wrote to Isaak Glikman of his attendance at the Composers’ Conference: ‘I particularly like Comrade Lukin’s speech. He reminded us of Zhdanov’s inspired directives that music should be melodic and graceful.’51 In a letter to Edison Denisov dated 22 July, written while he was busy composing his Eleventh Symphony, Shostakovich refers scathingly to the musicologist Pavel Apostolov, one of the ‘heroes’ of Rayok: ‘From the village of Stepanichkov Foma Fomich Opiskin52 has come to settle in Moscow under the pseudonym of P.A…. He makes statements in the press. Particularly effective is his latest newspaper article, where he throws himself into the struggle for music to be melodic and graceful.’53
In the opinion of many friends and family, Shostakovich would never have dared write such blatant satire in 1948, when he feared for the lives of himself and his family. Rayok belongs to a genre that is usually created in the privacy of the home in the company of friends to the accompaniment of a few glasses. Therefore the view that Shostakovich gave vent to his rancour by composing a satire on the top political leaders in strict secrecy does not necessarily hold water. Perhaps ABRAAM GOZENPUD, the distinguished literary critic and theatre expert, sums up the argument best:
I find the current view that Rayok was created as a spontaneous reaction to the Decree very difficult to accept. It could hardly have been so; a satire on your executioners is not created under the shadow of the guillotine. I do not think that Shostakovich’s civic courage is in any way diminished if we move the date of Rayok’s composition forward by a few years. We should remember that Anna Akhmatova did not entrust her Requiem to paper in those times. The important fact is that Shostakovich created a scathing lampoon on the ignorant assassins of culture headed by Zhdanov. By being able to laugh at them, he claimed victory over them.54
Lev Lebedinsky claims the authorship of the sung libretto of Rayok, where much of the material is derived from the speeches of Zhdanov, Stalin, Zakharov, Dmitri Shepilov and others. He credits the satirical pseudo-literary ‘publisher’s foreword’ to the composer. The Shostakovich Archive, and Irina Antonovna Shostakovich, strongly refute the suggestion that Lebedinsky had any hand in the writing of the libretto, attributing the whole work to Shostakovich alone.55
Here LEV LEBEDINSKY gives his version of the creation of Rayok.
Rayok was conceived during the 2nd Congress of Composers of the USSR, which was as insignificant and boring as all such occasions. In the name of the Central Committee of the CPSU, we were instructed by the Party Secretary, Shepilov, on questions of ideology. Wishing to flaunt his ‘scholarship’, his speech groaned with a mountain of weighty names. In one phrase he pointed to our great Russian classics – Glinka, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. Shepilov’s illiterate howler, misplacing the accent on the a of the middle syllable of the composer of Scheherazade galvanized Shostakovich to life. He had been languishing from boredom, but he suddenly perked up and started to laugh out loud at this example of ‘scholarship’. He came over to sit next to me and whispered to me that as soon as the session was over, we were to go out to his dacha at Bolshevo. During the journey there, he spoke of nothing but Shepilov’s speech: ‘No doubt, the text of this speech was written by some Yasrustovsky, Sryulin or Opostylov,’56 Shostakovich chuckled. ‘And why didn’t he pronounce Borodin, or Serov, or Tanyeev, instead of Tanyeev?’57 He simply couldn’t forget Korsakov, and kept returning to Shepilov’s linguistic discovery. Thus in an almost arbitrary manner, he formulated a poetic strophe in the dactylic metre:
Glinka, Tchai-/kovsky,
Rimsky-Kor-/sakov.
We arrived at his dacha and had supper.
‘You’re going to write the text of Rayok this very day,’ Shostakovich told me in complete seriousness.
‘But I don’t know how to write poetry.’
My refusal was not heeded.
‘We don’t need poems,’ Dmitri Dmitriyevich retorted. ‘All we need is a good laugh. Here’s a pencil and paper. Write.’
‘But it’s night-time already,’ I protested in an attempt to evade the authorship of the libretto.
‘I’ll drop by every now and then to make sure you haven’t fallen asleep.’ And with these words Dmitri Dmitriyevich went to his own room.
An hour later he came in with some strong tea, and gave me a severe look. At this stage I could only outline my plan; I called the libretto A Free Discussion. I also read out the list of dramatis personae. I assumed that the poverty of my suggestion would make him drop the idea. But the opposite happened: he accepted my plan, waxed the merrier, and suggested that we should camouflage the names of the characters. Stalin became Edinitsyn, Zhdanov Dvoikin, Shepilov Troikin.58
We met a couple more times in Moscow to finish Rayok. The following day at my flat on Lesnaya Street, I gave Dmitri Dmitriyevich my final version of Stalin/Edinitsyn’s speech. Dmitri Dmitriyevich was extremely satisfied and chuckled away. The next day we gave Rayok the final polish, and had lots of fun. Dmitri Dmitriyevich played it only for his family and chosen friends. He then gave me the manuscript for safekeeping. After his marriage, his wife Irina Antonovna asked me for it back. I returned it to Dmitri Dmitriyevich, but naturally I kept my own copy. Before he left the Soviet Union, Solomon Volkov came to see me to try and get hold of my copy.59
Shostakovich perceived by the younger generation
In the post-Stalinist years, a new generation of composers formed their perceptions on life and music as the cultural barriers of Soviet isolationist policies broke down. Many of these young composers started looking westwards for information and models. Composers such as Sofiya Gubaidulina, Edison Denisov, Alfred Schnittke and Nikolai Karetnikov started to compose in the ‘Shostakovich’ tradition, which was seen by the more enlightened Conservatoire teachers as the ‘positive’ side of socialist realism. By the late 1950s, they were experimenting in compositional techniques that Shostakovich had for the most part rejected. Although Shostakovich’s presence remained the greatest single influence in Soviet music, the composer gradually appeared to lose his relevance and, up to a point, his moral authority for these composers.
EDISON DENISOV comes from Tomsk, Siberia, where he studied mathematics at university, while simultaneously attending musical high school. He decided to approach Shostakovich – as the highest authority – to seek advice as to whether he should devote himself to composition. The Master responded with firm support and encouragement, and opened the way for Denisov to become a composer:
In 1949 I sent all my compositions to Shostakovich in Moscow without even knowing his address. He replied with a very kind, long letter giving a detailed analysis of my naive student works. Although these works had no real musical quality, he confirmed that, in his opinion, I should definitely become a composer. I was eventually accepted as a student at the Moscow Conservatoire in 1951, and it was during my student years that I became very friendly with Shostakovich.
Despite his complex personality, Dmitri Dmitriyevich was fundamentally a good and warm-hearted man. Certainly, he showed great kindness to me. I always took my compositions to show him and greatly valued his opinion. At the same time I adored my own professor, Shebalin, to whom I owe so much in life. But Shostakovich was of all importance to me.
Shostakovich and Shebalin had a deep love for each other. Shostakovich always enquired after ‘Ronya’ after I had been for a lesson. We studied many of Shostakovich’s works in class, and Shebalin always gave us judicious advice. He didn’t point to Shostakovich’s melodic language, as he felt that this was one of the weaker aspect of ‘Mitya’s’ composition, and indeed, he told us that writing melodies was an agonizing effort for him. Nor did he approve of the mechanical rhythmic features, or the Hindemith-like polyphony in Shostakovich’s works. He taught us to admire Shostakovich’s wonderful ability to construct large forms, and his unique skills of orchestration, and urged us to learn from these particular qualities. I am very grateful that Shebalin encouraged us to be discerning, and stopped us from idolizing a composer blindly, whoever it might be. He considered it important to identify a composer’s less successful features as well as his best qualities.
Each visit to Shostakovich’s home was a celebration for me. I hardly ever saw Nina Vasilyevna, Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s beloved wife, because she was mostly away on working trips. Therefore I spent most of the time alone with Dmitri Dmitriyevich. I would ask him lots of questions and our conversation ranged over many topics. I kept a record of those meetings.
While I was a student, I used to coach Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s son Maxim in maths at home. He was then a pupil at the Central Music School and had trouble with his school subjects. Later, when he entered the Conservatoire, Maxim studied score-reading with me, and was a very poor student. But, rather than fail him at his exams, the compositional faculty decided to give him the best marks. We did this only for Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s sake. I always had the feeling that Maxim didn’t really want to study at the Conservatoire. Dmitri Dmitriyevich knew this and once said to me that it had been a mistake to send him to music school, and that his real talent was for engineering.
I never missed a premiere of Shostakovich’s works. For instance, I travelled to Leningrad for the premiere of the Tenth Symphony.
After graduating from the Conservatoire I continued to see Dmitri Dmitriyevich frequently. I not only visited him at his town flat, but also at his dacha at Bolshevo. I remember when I arrived there he would bury a bottle of vodka in a snowdrift. When it was chilled we would drink it together, and talk long into the night. Often I would stay over at his place.
I see Shostakovich’s importance on many levels, and this includes all the oblique contradictions which in fact make up the true essence of his nature and evolution. Shostakovich was full of paradox. He was very nervous by nature; he never sat still, and while speaking he usually paced up and down. When he was silent, he might sit in a comfortable chair, but then he was always fiddling with something – his hands were always in motion.
Once I came to see him and found him sitting at a table writing furiously. He asked me to wait till he had finished. Soon he completed the score he was writing. Then he took it and tore it up into tiny shreds and threw them into the waste-paper basket.
I was dumbfounded: ‘But Dmitri Dmitriyevich, that was your score …’
He answered, ‘Well, I’m finding it hard to compose, it just won’t come to me, and I’m not used to sitting about without working, so I’ve decided to orchestrate all Rimsky-Korsakov’s Romances. I’ve got the complete volume of his songs and I orchestrate them one by one. As soon as I’ve finished doing one, I tear it up and throw it into the waste-bin.’
Dmitri Dmitriyevich manifested an inner nervous agitation, whereby the work process always functioned whether or not he was able to compose music. This was a feature of his highly strung personality.
Shostakovich was very attached to his pupils and suffered when they behaved tactlessly towards a colleague, or betrayed the principles in which he believed. Georgi Sviridov was a particularly sore point for him. He found it hard to take Sviridov’s aggressive attitude towards him, and his obsession to prove himself a greater composer than his teacher. Shostakovich, knowing his own worth, never felt threatened by Sviridov’s wish to surpass him. But this betrayal by his favourite pupil distressed him. Shostakovich had had great faith in Sviridov’s talent, and he could not bear to see him work for the licensed officials. He repeated to me several times one and the same phrase: ‘Yura has passed through the trials of fire and water, but the brass trumpets have destroyed him.’ And he added that Sviridov was a real person and a real composer in those days when he had nothing to eat or to sober up on, when he used to run from door to door to beg a rouble. Now he was unrecognizable both as a human being and as a composer. Shostakovich used to say, ‘I don’t understand Yura. If I wrote The Song of the Forests and The Song of the Torch that was because I was forced to. But who has forced him to write The Pathétique Oratorio? Why did he do it?’
Of course Sviridov wasn’t alone in this. But Shostakovich didn’t take people like Karen Khachaturian or Yuri Levitin seriously, regarding them as composers of limited talent. In general, he was very attached to all his pupils, even to those who were not particularly good composers, like Venyamin Basner. He treated them with understanding and took a lot of trouble for them. In his last years he was devoted to Boris Tishchenko. He would write letters to the Ministry asking for material support on their behalf and also requesting publication and performances of their works. On the other hand, he usually didn’t help composers who had not been his pupils.
Shostakovich suffered personally for what went on around him. He felt for the people, and was distressed by many things that went on in our country. When I first arrived in Moscow fresh from Siberia, I was a naive and foolish young man. Although I never wrote a cantata about Stalin, like most of my generation I very much idealized our politicians. Once I said something nice about Voroshilov; for some reason I felt particular sympathy for him. Dmitri Dmitriyevich said to me, ‘Edik, if Budyonny is up to his knees in blood, then Voroshilov is up to his balls in blood.’
‘And Kaganovich?’
‘Kaganovich is up to his neck in blood.’
I remember his exact words. Such things upset him greatly. When Gagarin went up into space, he reacted by saying, ‘Why throw away money like that? Think of the villages where old women have to walk a kilometre to fetch water from freezing wells and lug it all the way home. The State wastes money on its space programme, on propaganda and political contest with the Americans – none of us need it.’
Another of Shostakovich’s bugbears was Boris Asafiev.60 When I was a student I read Asafiev’s books, and every time I mentioned Asafiev’s name Dmitri Dmitriyevich bristled. He would repeat: ‘I have met many good people and many bad people in my life, but never anybody more rotten than Asafiev.’ He would refer to him as ‘the Great-Russian chauvinist’. Shostakovich crossed out his original dedication to Asafiev in Lady Macbeth. He told me that Asafiev had written him a letter which, if it were ever to be published, would demolish his good name for ever. However, Asafiev’s wife, who was a kind-hearted soul, came round to see Shostakovich and begged him to give her the letter.
‘She got down on her knees in front of me, weeping, and implored me to return it. I didn’t have the heart to refuse her, so against my better judgement, I let her have the letter. Then in front of my very eyes she set a match to it and burnt it.’
I never found out what the letter contained.
Asafiev was an unprincipled bastard and caused extensive harm to Soviet music. Even in the late 1920s he manifested his complete lack of principles, declaring that Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin was unfit to be staged in the Soviet Union. And in 1948 he denounced the music of Britten and Messiaen from the tribune, saying it was ‘a mixture of formalism, obscurantism and depravity; comrades – this is the bottom of the pit.’61 And all the comrades clapped and applauded, thinking what a clever man Asafiev was to have come up with these extraordinary observations. It was not for nothing that Asafiev was made an academician, like Lysenko. I would say that he is the musical equivalent of Lysenko and his intellect as a musician is comparable to that of Lysenko’s as a scientist. Up till now there has been no re-evaluation in our musical thinking, and Asafiev is still considered an authority, and his books are still read today.
I once talked to Shostakovich about Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.62 I had just read the book and it had a shattering effect on me, and not only psychologically, but for its artistic merit as well. Shostakovich said, ‘Edik, it’s reality varnished over, it’s reality varnished over. The truth was ten times worse than that.’
Once we were at the Composers’ Plenary session in Sverdlovsk.63 It was one of the few times that I attended such an occasion. One evening Shostakovich wasn’t feeling well, and therefore didn’t go to the concert. He asked me to come to his room, and we stayed up talking till midnight. He recalled his past and kept returning to the same phrase: ‘When I think about my life, I realize that I have been a coward. Unfortunately I have been a coward.’ He then added that if I had seen the things that he had, then I too would have become a coward. For instance, he told how during the period of the purges he would go to visit a friend, only to discover that this friend had disappeared without trace, and nobody knew what had happened to him. His possessions had been bundled up and thrown out on to the street, and strangers were occupying his flat.
Another reason for his cowardice was his profound and obsessive love for his children. Many of the bad things he did in life were done on behalf of his children. His position and authority, all his honours and medals and his excellent material position allowed him to make comfortable provision for them during his lifetime, accommodating them in large flats and giving them cars. He devoted a lot of effort in helping Maxim, despite his limited talents as a musician. Eventually, Maxim became a successful conductor, but he had his father to thank for his position as chief conductor of the Moscow Radio Orchestra.64
The composer SOFIYA GUBAIDULINA was, like Denisov, brought up far away from the metropolis, Moscow. She came to Moscow in 1952 to study composition at the Conservatoire. At her graduation Shostakovich sat on the examination committee and, duly impressed by her talent, saw to it that she was awarded the highest grade. Having rejected ‘socialist realism’ and developed her own highly individual compositional style, Gubaidulina’s career was effectively blocked by the Union of Composers, and she encountered enormous difficulties in getting her music performed and published:
Shostakovich is of utmost importance to people of my generation, not only because of the influence he exerted as a composer, but also as a person. We grew up at a time when everything around us became one unending question. We were obsessed with asking questions, because at the time there was a complete absence of information about everything from politics to art. The crude attacks on literature and music that appeared in our press were utterly bewildering. One day you’re in love with a story by Zoshchenko or a poem by Akhmatova; then suddenly they’re proclaimed ‘bad’ and ‘terrible’, and their works are aggressively attacked in all the major newspapers.
It’s now difficult for people to imagine what a young person felt in such a situation. Suppose that you are fourteen or fifteen years old, you discover with delight a particular work by Shostakovich, and suddenly it turns out that this work is suspect, even dangerous. You are left with an urgent question, and there is no answer to be had anywhere.
The questions arose when our fathers were being arrested. We knew for certain that they were remarkable and honest men, yet they were being arrested. Maybe the man who was the first to be picked up by the Black Maria was the most respected, the purest person we knew. We had no doubts whatsoever as to his honesty; but also there was no doubt that he had been arrested. We all knew that what was going on was horrible, but nobody could understand why it was going on. What was the purpose of all this?
It’s only now, possessing such a huge amount of information, that we know the whys and wherefores. At the time our life was a nightmare, and many people went mad. I also went mad at the time – clinically mad. So did the composers Roman Ledenyov and Hermann Galynin. Russia underwent a kind of psychological catastrophe, which particularly affected the young.
My personal acquaintance with Dmitri Dmitriyevich could never be close because of our age difference. My own teacher, Nikolai Peiko, had been Shostakovich’s assistant at the Moscow Conservatoire, and they retained a close friendship after Shostakovich was dismissed from his professorship. Peiko introduced me to the circles in which he moved. I used to visit Shebalin, and we played four-hand music on the piano. I met Dmitri Dmitriyevich on several occasions and I hung on his every word. When I was in my fifth year at the Conservatoire, Peiko took me to see Shostakovich so that I could show him a youthful symphony that I was working on. He listened to it, and made some remarks, generally praising the music. But what struck me most was his parting phrase: ‘Be yourself. Don’t be afraid of being yourself. My wish for you is that you should continue on your own, incorrect way.’
One phrase said to a young person at the right moment can affect the rest of his or her life. I am infinitely grateful to Shostakovich for those words. I needed them at that moment, and felt fortified by them to such an extent that I feared nothing, any failure or criticism just ran off my back, and I was indeed able to pursue my own path.
Shostakovich’s sensitivity to a musical phenomenon which lay outside his own sphere stemmed from his own vulnerability and experience. In this instance it allowed him to sense my pain. Despite his outward irony, and his manner of expressing himself in paradoxes, he felt and understood the suffering that Russians are doomed to endure, and the manner in which it defines their behaviour and relationships. In this way Shostakovich belongs to the Russian humanitarian tradition.
Shostakovich, with his youthful vulnerability, experienced things in the same way as we did. His influence was all-important to us, and it formulated our attitude to life. He was the person from whom young people hoped to receive the answers. When he failed to provide them, we felt tremendously let down, and again a terrible question raised its ugly head.
When Shostakovich joined the Party in 1960, our disappointment knew no bounds. That such a man could be broken, that our system was capable of crushing a genius, was something I could not get over. We were left wondering why, just at the time when the political situation had relaxed somewhat, when at last it seemed possible to preserve one’s integrity, Shostakovich fell victim to official flattery. What forced him into this action? It made me realize that a man may be able to endure hunger and withstand political crushing, yet be unable to overcome the temptation of a ‘carrot’. Shostakovich was defeated by a ‘carrot’!
I now realize that the circumstances he lived under were unbearably cruel, more than anyone should have to endure. He had overcome the most important trials, but when he allowed himself to relax, he succumbed to weakness. But I accept him, for I see him as pain personified, the epitome of the tragedy and terror of our times.
Indeed, I believe that Shostakovich’s music reaches such a wide audience because he was able to transform the pain that he so keenly experienced into something exalted and full of light, which transcends all worldly suffering. He was able to transfigure the material into a spiritual entity, whereas Prokofiev’s music lacks the contrast between terrible darkness and an ever-expanding light. We listened to Shostakovich’s new works in a kind of exaltation. His concerts were events not only of musical but of political significance.
However, the next generation of musicians had a different attitude to Shostakovich’s music and personality. They had different landmarks, and found their own answers. What was pain to us was history to them.65
FLORA LITVINOVA’S perceptions changed in the years of the Thaw, and her attitude to Shostakovich became more critical. Like many of the Russian intelligentsia, she found it hard to accept Shostakovich’s apparent cynicism in outwardly conforming to the demands of the establishment. Perhaps it is hardly surprising that increasingly she and her husband felt less at ease with Shostakovich. Whereas the Shostakovich children grew up spoilt and protected, the Litvinovs’ son Pavel questioned the regime, and soon fell out with it, becoming a leader of the dissidents. In 1968 Pavel staged a protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in Red Square. He was imprisoned and deported to Siberia, and eventually forcibly exiled from the Soviet Union:
I want to try and explain why Shostakovich entered the Party, made so many ill-fated ‘correct Party-line’ speeches, and why eventually he signed the letter against Sakharov.
Shostakovich was quite simply afraid. He feared for his children, his family, himself and his neighbour. Where this fear sprung from originally I don’t know. Once he spoke about the despair he experienced after his father’s death, when he suddenly found himself alone in a hostile world. A frail boy, he had to shoulder the responsibility of caring for his mother and sisters. Then perhaps it was the terror of seeing so many people disappear, the mass of people who were arrested and perished in the camps. Besides, Dmitri Dmitriyevich was incapable of resisting any form of force and boorishness. When pressure was exerted on him, he was ready to compromise himself, read out or sign anything, so long as he would be left alone.
But at the same time, he showed courage and nobility. Despite his fear, I know how many people he helped, and how often he interceded for people.66
In September 2001 I participated at a seminar during a Shostakovich Festival in Rotterdam, where Maxim Shostakovich also spoke. I had already written in my key article for the occasion about Shostakovich’s ambivalent attitude towards the State and his understanding of the necessity for certain forms of compromise from the late 1920s onwards, ‘paying tribute to Caesar (or rather to Lenin and the worker’s state) on the one hand, while retaining his highly individual profile as a composer on the other’. During the seminar Maxim Shostakovich, in answer to a question about his father’s religious belief, recounted that Shostakovich kept by his bedside table a crucifix and a postcard of a painting by Titian of the moneylenders being routed from the temple. Maxim concluded that Shostakovich regarded the words ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s’ as his motto and a pragmatic solution to survival. The composer is known on occasion to have referred to certain teachings of the Bible (the Ten Commandments in particular), pointing to their importance in instilling a sense of moral judgement in the young.
NIKOLAI KARETNIKOV was one of the ‘alternative’ Soviet composers who started their careers in the mid 1950s. In this short passage he describes a dialogue with Shostakovich, showing his keen preoccupation with moral issues even in life’s most mundane moments:
After a conversation about music, Dmitri Dmitriyevich suddenly turned to me and asked:
‘And now tell me, Nikolai Nikolayevich, have you, so to speak, seen that film, that film, so to speak, that everyone is talking about?’
‘What film, Dmitri Dmitriyevich?’
‘So to speak, Your Contemporary, you know, Your Contemporary.’
‘Yes, I’ve seen it, Dmitri Dmitriyevich.’
‘I’m most interested, what do you say about it, what do you say, most interesting …’
‘Well, I don’t know, Dmitri Dmitriyevich; I think you would be bored by it …’
‘And why, so to speak, and why?’
‘Well, you see, the principal hero of the film is a certain gas called “Kaetan”, and the moral truths propounded in the film do not transcend the boundaries of what our mothers taught us in childhood: Don’t steal, don’t lie, respect your elders …’
‘But that’s wonderful! That’s wonderful! Indeed now, so to speak, now has come the time, the time when, so to speak, such things are so necessary, these things should be constantly repeated. It must be a wonderful, so to speak, wonderful film. I’ll definitely go, so to speak, I’ll definitely go to see it.’67
Honouring Prokofiev
OLEG PROKOFIEV explains the background to Plate 22.
This photograph was taken on 11 February 1958. I am not particularly proud of it. Yet it is an extraordinary document. It was taken at the unveiling of the commemorative plaque to my father on the house where he lived in Moscow between 1936 and 1941. Khrennikov is making the main solemn speech. I am standing between Shostakovich and my mother, who had returned from concentration camp a year and a half before, and looks sad and beautiful. I am caught at a rather embarrassing moment, as I am trying to make some ironic or witty remark to Shostakovich; perhaps something about what Khrennikov had said.
I do not remember what I was saying, but obviously it was ill-timed. Shostakovich hardly pays me any attention and does not seem to be particularly excited either by me or Khrennikov. Possibly he did not even hear me. Was he thinking of the past, because it was almost ten years to the day since the Zhdanov Decree was published? Or about the future, imagining the same speaker spouting the same clichés and ideological platitudes at his funeral?
Seventeen years later Khrennikov certainly did just that.68
MARINA SABININA describes Shostakovich’s participation at the ceremony to unveil the second of two memorial plaques to Prokofiev:
On 5 March 1958, on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of Prokofiev’s death, there was to be the ceremonious unveiling of memorial plaques on the walls of the houses where he had lived in Moscow. At 14/16 Chkalov Street (which Prokofiev had left in the early spring of 1941 to go and live with Mira Alexandrovna Mendelssohn, who became his second wife) the gathering was headed by Tikhon Khrennikov, a personal friend of his first wife Lina Ivanovna. And at the other house at MKhAT69 Passage Shostakovich was in charge. This was the house where Mira’s parents had their flat and where Prokofiev died.
It was a bright and sunny day, about minus 12–15°C, with an icy wind blowing. I arrived exactly on time at three o’clock in the afternoon, naturally to the second venue. Alas, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, for some reason much too lightly dressed, and with his overdeveloped sense of punctuality, had arrived well in advance, and no doubt had already been striding up and down for some time in the frost. He looked miserable and chilled to the bone, his face was a greyish-blue colour. There weren’t many people at the gathering; Dmitri Dmitriyevich hurriedly whispered to me, ‘Mariya Dmitriyevna, as soon as I’ve done with the speech, let’s slip off upstairs to Mira’s flat. She’s prepared some eats and drinks. And I’m frozen to the marrow, cold as a dog.’
And that is what happened. As soon as he had made his short introductory speech, Dmitri Dmitriyevich withdrew to the side and gave me a discreet nod. We rushed upstairs. The door of the flat was open in hospitable expectation, the tables were laid with delicious food. Dmitri Dmitriyevich immediately sat down and poured himself a vodka, mumbling, ‘Come on, come on, we absolutely must warm ourselves up.’
He downed his glass and seemed somewhat revived; nevertheless his expression was still gloomy, and he appeared to be out of sorts. Trying to cheer him up, I asked, ‘Are you upset?’
‘Yes, yes, that’s exactly it, I’m most upset. You know, it’s horrible, it’s disgusting – I’ve just been called up by some high officials.’ (His tone of voice was venomously sarcastic, he gestured with his hand to the ceiling.) ‘They wanted advice over a declaration made by Prokofiev’s first wife, Lina Ivanovna. She’s for ever writing to them and to all the bigwigs. She states that, as it were, Mira’s relationship with Prokofiev was only an illicit connection, and that she, Lina, was the only lawful and rightful wife and heir; and here she is fussing to prove all this with wonderful, new, convincing and shattering arguments. First of all she can apparently prove that from 1935/36 Sergei Sergeyevich was completely impotent and therefore his marriage with Mira cannot have been consummated. “Go and ask the doctor whom Prokofiev went and consulted,” she says. “He’ll confirm it.”
‘And secondly, when they re-emigrated to the USSR, certain formalities, some legal niceties, were not observed, so now she says that Prokofiev was not a legal Soviet citizen and therefore any marriage made here must be invalid. There you are – the famous Soviet composer Prokofiev! In general women are disgusting, most terribly disgusting!’
Hoping to calm him down, I remonstrated, ‘But Dmitri Dmitriyevich, after all, I’m also a woman …’
He apologized: ‘Excuse me, I didn’t have you in mind,’ and then gulped down another glass.
After a short silence he pronounced, at first somewhat grumpily, then waxing more and more indignant, ‘Well, if it comes to it, I suppose I too am an impotent, or something of the kind. Then when I die all my former wives will come and desecrate my grave and pour filth on my name. No, no, an artist should never marry, definitely should never marry!’70
The Leningrad Philharmonic
When composing Shostakovich usually had in mind the qualities of a particular performer, or, in his symphonic works, the hard brilliance and precision of the Leningrad Philharmonic. This orchestra’s association with Shostakovich went back to the First Symphony; effectively they were given the right to premiere all his symphonies, which, from the Fifth Symphony onwards, were conducted by Evgeni Mravinsky. This held true except under special circumstances, as during the period of evacuation from Leningrad, when the Seventh Symphony was first performed by the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra and Samosud in Kuibyshev. The Eleventh Symphony was also premiered outside Leningrad under Nathan Rakhlin as part of the State celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the Revolution in Moscow.
This special relationship later went sour when Mravinsky pulled out of the first performance of the Thirteenth Symphony.
The violinist YAKOV MILKIS joined the Leningrad Philharmonic in 1957, where he worked until he emigrated in 1974. Here he describes the working atmosphere in the orchestra, as well as his personal impressions of Shostakovich:
During my eighteen years at the Leningrad Philharmonic Shostakovich’s symphonies were a part of the staple repertoire. The only symphonies which were not performed in that period were the Second and Third. I participated in the premieres of the Eleventh and Twelfth Symphonies, and also of the First Cello Concerto with Rostropovich and the Second Violin Concerto with Oistrakh. Mravinsky always conducted.
These premieres were great events, particularly for us musicians, who were the first to have contact with the new score. Usually we had a week’s rehearsal on a new work, which meant five full rehearsals and then the dress rehearsal. Dmitri Dmitriyevich sat in on all of them with a score and pencil. During the breaks he would come up to Mravinsky to make his comments about balance and sound. Sometimes they discussed some possible minor corrections or retouchings. Basically Shostakovich never changed anything in his scores, which he always prepared meticulously.
I do remember one exception, when we were rehearsing the Eighth Symphony for a forthcoming performance in the concert season. Dmitri Dmitriyevich had come up to Leningrad as usual for the rehearsal. In the break Mravinsky turned round to us and said, ‘Do you know, I have the impression that here in this place Dmitri Dmitriyevich has omitted something; there’s a discrepancy between the harmonies of these chords as they appear here and where they occur elsewhere. I’ve always wanted to ask Dmitri Dmitriyevich about this point, but somehow I have never got round to it.’
Just at this moment, Dmitri Dmitriyevich himself came up to Mravinsky, who put the question to him without further ado. Dmitri Dmitriyevich glanced at the score: ‘Oh dear, what a terrible omission, what an error I have committed. But you know what, let’s leave it as it is, just let things stay as they are.’ We then understood that this ‘error’ was deliberate.
In fact, Shostakovich never made errors in his scores. During rehearsals, he might make a correction in terms of orchestral balance – one group may have been playing too loudly, or an instrument that should have come to the fore was smothered. But these mistakes did not emanate from his score; they were acoustical misjudgements which were set right during the process of rehearsal.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich used metronome markings to indicate tempi in his scores. He had many preliminary meetings with Mravinsky where every point, including the tempi, was agreed before orchestral rehearsals began. However, as a general rule the metronome markings in the scores were always faster than the tempi taken during performance.
The inconsistency in these markings can be found in Shostakovich’s chamber works as well as in the symphonies. For instance, take the case of the Second Piano Trio. There the metronome marking of the Scherzo is so fast as to render it virtually unperformable. Once, while I was studying this Trio, I happened to be in Komarovo when Dmitri Dmitriyevich was also staying there. I plucked up courage to ask him about the markings, not only the fast speed of the Scherzo, but the very slow speed indicated for the third movement.
He answered, ‘You know, take no notice. I use this rickety old metronome, and I know I should have thrown it out years ago, as it’s completely unreliable, but I have got so attached to it that I keep it. But you, as a musician, should just play as you feel the music and take no notice of those markings, take no notice.’
When I first saw Dmitri Dmitriyevich, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he was in his prime. I often heard him perform his own works, and I particularly remember his concerts with the Beethoven Quartet. He was a wonderful pianist, and when performing he was completely absorbed in his own world. His playing conveyed an ideal sense of form and structure, but more than that it was an expression of his innermost world, one that cost him sweat, blood and tears. He played with a special touch and colour, and often quite intentionally treated the piano as a percussion instrument. It is rare that a composer uses the upper register of the piano like a xylophone, making a sharp, percussive sound. This is how he played the Scherzo from the Piano Quintet, for instance. I still have the particular sound of his sarcastic, dry staccato in my ears today. It completely suited the style of the music.
I don’t remember a time when Dmitri Dmitriyevich failed to come up to Leningrad for a performance of his own music and at least some of the preceding rehearsals, irrespective of whether it was a premiere or not. He always sat alone at rehearsals, preferring some inconspicuous spot in the stalls. He avoided any kind of demonstrativeness, and seemed to retire into himself, melting into his surroundings, so as to be left undisturbed while listening and working. This incredible modesty was apparent also when he was in a gathering of people. Here too he appeared to fade into the background, doing his best not to attract attention to himself.
Certain chosen friends would come along to the final rehearsals: Nikolai Semyonovich Rabinovich, the conductor – a wonderful musician; the composers Venyamin Basner and Boris Tishchenko. Isaak Glikman always attended the premieres, and sometimes also came to the dress rehearsals, as did his brother, the sculptor Gavriil Glikman.
Shostakovich’s music was very close to us musicians of the Leningrad Philharmonic. We sensed its message as something of particular and great importance. I know of no other instance where a composer consistently takes a patriotic moral stand in his music. This feature of his work was evident right from the start, in the youthful First Symphony, where you already sense profound tragedy and a personal foreboding. I regard the First Symphony as the first chapter of a book where you know that a great drama will unfold. Your interest has been captured, and you remain in suspense awaiting the terror that lies ahead. Shostakovich’s whole musical output is logical and consistent in its expression. Through it Dmitri Dmitriyevich found a way of registering a protest and of mocking the Soviet regime. However, the irony and sarcasm in the music are outweighed by a sense of profound tragedy.
Although we were all aware of the message in his works, Mravinsky never spoke in associative images during rehearsals when Dmitri Dmitriyevich was present. But if he wasn’t there, Mravinsky did allow himself certain remarks that made it clear what he saw in the music. For instance, during a rehearsal of the Fifth Symphony, in the third movement, in the episode where the oboe has a long solo over the tremolos of the 1st and then the 2nd violins, Mravinsky turned round to the violin sections and said, ‘You’re playing this tremolo with the wrong colour, you haven’t got the necessary intensity. Have you forgotten what this music is about and when it was born? Your tremolo sounds too self-satisfied.’ I remember another occasion when he was rehearsing the Finale of the Ninth Symphony. He objected to the character of the sound in the cellos and double basses when they play in unison with the trombones. ‘You have the wrong sound. I need the sound of the trampling of steel-shod boots.’ (We knew that he wasn’t referring to ordinary soldiers, but to the KGB forces.)
I rarely had occasion to speak to Dmitri Dmitriyevich myself on such themes. But there was a small episode which gave me a glimpse of what he himself experienced in his music. In 1960 the orchestra had a big European tour, and we gave the British premiere of the Eighth Symphony under Mravinsky at the Royal Festival Hall. Dmitri Dmitriyevich was there of course, and amongst those who attended were Benjamin Britten, Yehudi Menuhin and Nathan Milstein. The Symphony made a shattering impression on the London audience, and was also received very enthusiastically by the critics.
The next day we went to France, and when making the Channel crossing by ferry, I found myself standing on deck next to Dmitri Dmitriyevich. I told him what a great impression yesterday’s concert had made on me. I explained that for me one of the most remarkable things in the work is the transition to the Finale: two clarinets play a long modulating passage, as if fumbling in the dark, and then at long last, before the bassoon solo, the music resolves into C major like a ray of sunlight. I said to Dmitri Dmitriyevich, ‘You know, I always wait for this C major resolution, and even though I know that it will happen, yet every time I greet it as a long-awaited event.’ Dmitri Dmitriyevich looked at me, and I will never forget the expression of his eyes. ‘My dear friend, if you only knew how much blood that C major cost me.’ He then fell silent, and I was left with the feeling that I had touched on something very sacred and private. However many times I have played that transition passage, I am always shaken by it.71
The Eleventh Symphony
On 25 September 1956 Shostakovich’s fiftieth birthday was celebrated with official pomp at a concert in Moscow whose programme included a performance of his Violin Concerto and the Fifth Symphony.72 Amidst tediously long speeches and official congratulations, the composer was greeted by a surprise rendering of ‘Song of the Counterplan’ performed by a chorus of young, red-tied Pioneers. It was then announced to enthusiastic applause that Shostakovich had been awarded the Order of Lenin.
In the September issue of Sovietskaya Muzyka celebrating the event, Shostakovich wrote an article summing up his creative life. In conclusion he informed his readers that he was now planning his Eleventh Symphony, which he intended to dedicate to the 1905 Revolution (one of his favourite periods in Russian history), and hoped it would be completed by the New Year. In fact, he only started work on the Symphony after completing his Second Piano Concerto in February 1957. (This was the second work written for his son Maxim, who was showing great promise in his piano studies – the other was the Concertino for two pianos dating from 1953.) Maxim gave its first performance on his nineteenth birthday on 10 May 1957. The concerto’s accessible language and the bright humorous character of the outer movements with the intervening lyrical slow movement were perfectly suited to that particularly Soviet genre of ‘Concerto for Youth’, of which Kabalevsky was the considered expert. But Shostakovich dismissed the new work in a letter to Denisov, saying ironically that it lacked any ‘artistic–ideological’ merit (not that this prevented him from performing the concerto frequently himself in the next few years).
On 24 February Shostakovich wrote to Glikman informing him that he had completed the symphony’s first movement. A month later he was made to ‘waste time’ in attendance of the second All-Union Congress of Composers,73 (the first to take place for nine years after the ill-fated Congress devoted to the sins of formalism.)
In the meantime the startling news was announced that Shostakovich had agreed to compose an operetta, Moscow Cheryoomishki. All this delayed further progress on the Eleventh Symphony, and the composer was able to buckle down to serious composition only during the summer, when he benefited from the peaceful surroundings of his Komarovo dacha. On 22 July he wrote in caustic mood to Edison Denisov:
In Komarovo it’s very hot … Every day there are heavy thunderstorms, lightning flashes, severing the sky. Thunder rumbles, and I sit in my ‘creative laboratory’ composing my Symphony. I’ll soon finish, whereupon will ensue what the modernist and formalist (see Sovietskaya Kultura) Alexander Skryabin described in the Finale of his First Symphony, where he (in the Finale) takes up a realistic position, writing:
‘Why does this sweet moment reek of poison?
‘Tis the gaining of that far horizon.’
But at the moment I sit at my desk all day long composing.74
The massive Symphony was a departure from Shostakovich’s other symphonic and instrumental works in so far as it has a programme dedicated to the events of the ‘1905’ Revolution. (The four movements are entitled ‘Palace Square’, ‘The Ninth of January’, ‘Eternal Memory’, ‘Nabat’ [‘The Alarm Bell’].) The musical material is drawn from revolutionary and prison songs of that period.
The composer had first stated his intention of writing on the theme of the first Russian Revolution during the fiftieth anniversary celebrations in 1955. Two years later Shostakovich announced that he was composing the ‘1905’ Symphony to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Ostensibly the Symphony’s programme was absolutely orthodox, but ironically the very use of popular revolutionary songs (even in a purely instrumental form) imbued it with an ambiguous meaning. It is enough to recall some of the unvoiced texts, for instance, the first prison song ‘Listen’, used throughout the first movement, whose words pronounce, ‘The autumn night is as black as treason, black as the tyrant’s conscience. Blacker than that night a terrible vision rises from the fog – prison.’ And similarly, the words of the famous revolutionary song used in the last movement of the Symphony: ‘Rage, you tyrants – /Mock at us,/Threaten us with prison and chains./We are strong in spirit, if weak in body!/Shame, shame on you tyrants!’
The Symphony was given its premiere in Moscow on 30 October 1957 under Nathan Rakhlin, and a few days later Evgeni Mravinsky gave the first Leningrad performance. Public reaction was divided between those who felt disillusioned by Shostakovich’s apparent defection to the ranks of officialdom, and those who heard once more rage and despair in a biting exposure of violence and evil. At face value, the music was accepted as an important statement of Shostakovich’s allegiance to communism and the precepts of socialist realism.
LEV LEBEDINSKY explains the significance of the ‘sub-text’ in the Eleventh Symphony:
The Eleventh Symphony was upheld as an example of how music can reflect ideology. True, Shostakovich gave it the title ‘1905’, but it was composed in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Hungary. What we heard in this music was not the police firing on the crowd in front of the Winter Palace in 1905, but the Soviet tanks roaring in the streets of Budapest. This was so clear to those ‘who had ears to listen’, that his son, with whom he wasn’t in the habit of sharing his deepest thoughts, whispered to Dmitri Dmitriyevich during the dress rehearsal, ‘Papa, what if they hang you for this?’
The officials wrote articles about the triumph of socialist realism, whereas the symphony in reality once again demonstrates Shostakovich’s use of Aesopean language. The texts of the revolutionary songs quoted refer unequivocally to the tyrant’s black conscience and the horrors of prison.
In The Gulag Archipelago Alexander Solzhenitsyn recounts how, while in prison, he heard the Zek75 Drozdov singing the song ‘Listen’ used by Shostakovich in the Symphony. He goes on to remark that Shostakovich badly needed to hear a rendering of this song here before writing his Eleventh Symphony. In that case he would never have touched it or else would have given it a contemporary rather than a dead meaning.
No doubt the writer was implying that Shostakovich had not seen with his own eyes Stalin’s death camps, or witnessed the Zeks’ yearning for freedom, or heard their songs.
But a genius does not need to experience a phenomenon or be a participant in a particular drama for him to understand its essence. Just as Dostoevsky didn’t have to kill an old woman to be able to describe in minutest detail not only the external facts of the murder, but Raskolnikov’s spiritual condition both during and after the crime.76 True, Shostakovich didn’t go to prison or to the camps, but he was able to transmit the atmosphere of reigning terror truthfully and with enormous force. And in addition all his conscious life Shostakovich lived in expectation of arrest, imprisonment and punishment. With his heightened sensitivity and keen artistic intuition he was constantly imagining and recreating the atmosphere of these prison camps, commiserating with the condition of their inmates, and fuelling his undying hatred for the executioners of our age.
The Eleventh Symphony is a truly contemporary work, camouflaged by necessity with a historic programme. Many did not hear what Solzhenitsyn calls its ‘contemporary meaning’. But Shostakovich knew that time would prove him right, and that he had been able to expose in his music what Solzhenitsyn was to describe eighteen years later in his Gulag Archipelago.77
Music
by Anna Akhmatova
(Dedicated to Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich)
It shines with a miraculous light
Revealing to the eye the cutting of facets.
It alone speaks to me
When others are too scared to come near.
When the last friend turned his back
It was with me in my grave
As if a thunderstorm sang
Or all the flowers spoke.78
ZOYA TOMASHEVSKAYA comes from a literary Leningrad family. Her father, the distinguished Pushkin scholar Boris Viktorovich Tomashevsky, enjoyed a close friendship with many of the country’s most distinguished writers, notably with Anna Akhmatova. Here Tomashevskaya recalls Akhmatova’s and Zoshchenko’s relationships with Shostakovich:
On returning to Leningrad after the war, we went to almost all the concerts of Shostakovich’s music. I think we never missed a premiere. And almost all the premieres took place in Leningrad, with the exception of the Thirteenth Symphony, which Mravinsky did not conduct. Dmitri Dmitriyevich unfailingly attended them all. His chamber works were performed in the Maly Hall, in the house which formerly belonged to Engelhardt, the symphonies in the Philharmonic, the former Nobleman’s Assembly.
These premieres were always events. Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova almost always came with us to those concerts. My parents and she were linked by a lifelong friendship. At the premiere of the Eleventh Symphony there was a lot of discontented muttering. The music-loving connoisseurs alleged that the Symphony was devoid of interest. All around one overheard such remarks as, ‘He has sold himself down the river. Nothing but quotations and revolutionary songs.’
Anna Andreyevna kept her silence. For some reason my father couldn’t attend the concert. When we came home afterwards he asked us, ‘Well, how was it?’ And Anna Andreyevna answered, ‘Those songs were like white birds flying against a terrible black sky.’
That was in 1957. The Hungarian Uprising was still very much in our minds. And here in this symphony one kept hearing ‘Freedom’ sing out. Later I was told by the choreographer, Igor Belsky, who produced a wonderful ballet on the music of the Eleventh Symphony, that, when he consulted Shostakovich, the composer said to him, as if in passing: ‘Don’t forget that I wrote that symphony in the aftermath of the Hungarian Uprising.’
In the postwar years I often had occasion to meet the writer Mikhail Zoshchenko. We lived in the same building, in the same staircase entrance. Our flat was on the fifth floor, his on the one below. On our landing there lived Marina Didorovna Bogratian-Mukhlavskaya. This wonderful woman was the person closest to him during those years that were so terrible for Zoshchenko. Her friendship literally kept him alive for twelve years. In the late evening, when he came home, we would meet on the staircase and hold long conversations on the window-sill.
Whenever I returned from a concert of Shostakovich’s music, Mikhail Mikhailovich invariably told me some story connected with their friendship. Zoshchenko loved Shostakovich dearly, although he denied that theirs was a true friendship, as their lives took them down such different paths. I found two of these stories particularly remarkable. When Mikhail Mikhailovich was called up to the Soviet Army, he was relegated to the militia, since he had suffered from gas poisoning during the First World War. Dmitri Dmitriyevich found this very amusing, as Mikhail Mikhailovich was the quietest and most refined person in the world. So he then composed for him the stridently bellicose ‘Militiaman’s March’.
And the second story: Dmitri Dmitriyevich would sometimes phone him up, and in his tragic, quick-voiced patter asked him to come immediately to see him: ‘I need to talk.’ Mikhail Mikhailovich would go. Dmitri Dmitriyevich would sit him down in an armchair, and then start to pace up and down the room in a frenzy. Gradually he would calm down, and finally, soothed and radiant, would say to Zoshchenko in a tired voice, ‘Thank you, thank you dear friend, I so much needed that talk with you.’79
This reminds me of another occasion, when, many years later, Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova told me about her visit to Shostakovich. Dmitri Dmitriyevich had invited her to go and see him at Repino. Anna Andreyevna went. She said of that visit, ‘We sat in silence for twenty minutes. It was wonderful.’ It was remarkable how the fate of these two people, so different and yet so similar, was interlinked.
It is also in keeping to recall the no less striking inscription to Shostakovich made by Boris Pasternak in 1948: ‘February 1948. In these days I consider it my duty to press your hand, and to say that we must be true to ourselves. May your great future be of help to you.’80
Pasternak could not have liked Shostakovich’s music. He was a disciple of Skryabin, a romantic, and he himself wrote music. But what a true understanding of each other these people had, and of all that was happening around them.81
The First Cello Concerto
As the window to the West opened, Soviet artists started to travel. Amongst them was MSTISLAV ROSTROPOVICH, who in the second half of the 1950s laid the foundations of his uniquely brilliant international career. At home, he dedicated much effort to the promotion of contemporary music, and was particularly proud of his association with Shostakovich, with whom he gave frequent concerts.
Shostakovich continued performing throughout the 1950s, and finally stopped playing in public only when illness restricted the use of his hands. He most enjoyed playing his chamber works in the company of his friends. However, he found public performances stressful, as he complained to his friend and pupil Kara Karayev: ‘I have been giving a lot of concerts, but with no pleasure. I still to this day can’t get used to the stage. The strain is of high cost to my nerves. As soon as I reach fifty (God willing), then I will immediately cease my concertizing.’82
It was Rostropovich’s superb artistry, as well as his musical partnership with his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, that inspired Shostakovich to write a series of important works for this couple. The first of them, the Cello Concerto Op. 107, was completed on 20 July 1959 (incidentally just after Shostakovich’s divorce from his second wife Kainova). Rostropovich had no inkling that the concerto was being written, and learnt of its existence from the newspapers.83 Here the cellist recalls his delight at the appearance of this work and how he learnt it in record time:
I often used to play Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata with the composer. We played it many times in concerts in Moscow and also toured the Baltic Republics with a programme devoted to his music in 1955. In these concerts, Dmitri Dmitriyevich usually played a couple of his Preludes and Fugues, then some songs from the cycle From Jewish Poetry, and we finished with the Cello Sonata. Once we participated in a ‘collective’ concert somewhere outside Moscow on the Istra River. I normally never played at such occasions, but Shostakovich, in his capacity as Deputy-Candidate to the Supreme Soviet, had been invited to attend some manifestation. In the course of the proceedings, Dmitri Dmitriyevich played some of his music and then, together, we performed a couple of movements from the Cello Sonata.
We also recorded the Cello Sonata.84 After making this recording with Shostakovich, I don’t intend ever to make another one. It took us a long time to complete it, as Dmitri Dmitriyevich was quite nervous – partly because he was in a hurry to get off to lunch with his sister, who lived out of town. In the Finale he kept missing the chords in the two bars before the triplet section in the cello part. The more agitated he got, the more he kept splashing them. I then made a tentative suggestion: ‘Dmitri Dmitriyevich, let me help you out here.’ So I sat down at the piano and played the left-hand chords with two hands, while he played the right-hand chords with two hands. That’s how we recorded them.
The First Cello Concerto was the first work that Shostakovich wrote specially for me. Interestingly enough, I never asked him to write anything. Once when we were out skiing in Ivanovo in 1946, I asked Nina Vasilyeva, Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s wife, whether she thought it possible to ask Shostakovich to write something for cello.
She answered, ‘Slava, if you want Dmitri Dmitriyevich to write something for you, the only recipe I can give you is this – never ask him or talk to him about it.’
So, with the greatest difficulty I managed to restrain myself. But although I never spoke about it, Dmitri Dmitriyevich knew that I constantly dreamt of his writing a piece for me.
I think that Shostakovich was speaking the truth when he remarked in an interview for Sovietskaya Kultura85 that he had been inspired by Prokofiev’s Symphony-Concertante for cello and orchestra when composing his First Cello Concerto. He loved this work passionately. He told me that he had played the record of Symphony-Concertante so many times that it was completely worn down and only emitted a kind of hiss when played on his gramophone.
There are a host of connections between Prokofiev’s work and Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto. Not only are many details of the Symphony-Concertante reflected in the First Concerto, but indeed, whole sections of the piece (admittedly much transformed) found their way into Shostakovich’s work.
When I played the Symphony-Concertante with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, the timpani player in the orchestra was a war veteran with only one leg. At the end of the Finale, the cello ascends the heights as if spiralling up to the very summit of a domed roof; on reaching the highest note it is silenced by one bang of the timpani which puts an end to this frenzied madness. This remarkable player stood on his one leg (he had no artificial limb to support him) and struck that note. After the concert, Dmitri Dmitriyevich joined us to celebrate. ‘Slavka, how that one-legged guy thumped his drum! He called a halt to everything with that final blow!’ At the end of his own Cello Concerto there are seven rhetorical bangs on the timpani; undoubtedly Shostakovich borrowed this idea from Prokofiev’s Symphony-Concertante. And there are other examples.
In his First Cello Concerto, Shostakovich alludes to Stalin’s favourite song, ‘Suliko’. These allusions are undoubtedly not accidental, but they are camouflaged so craftily that even I didn’t notice them to begin with. The first time Dmitri Dmitriyevich hummed this passage through to me, he laughed and said, ‘Slava, have you noticed?’
I hadn’t noticed anything.
‘“Where is my dear Suliko, Suliko? And where is my dear Suliko, Suliko?”’
I doubt if I would have detected this quote if Dmitri Dmitriyevich hadn’t pointed it out to me.86
When I learned that Shostakovich had finished the Cello Concerto, I immediately went up to Leningrad with the pianist Alexander Dedyukhin. I received the score on the evening of 2 August 1959, and I learnt the work in four days exactly. I practised for ten hours the first day, and had the score memorized within three days. It was the most wonderful pleasure for me.
Then on 6 August, Dedyukhin and I went to Shostakovich’s dacha in Komarovo outside Leningrad to play the Concerto through to him. Dmitri Dmitriyevich said, ‘Now just hang on a minute while I find a music stand for you …’
I had been waiting for this, and said, ‘Dmitri Dmitriyevich, but I don’t need a stand.’
He said, ‘What do you mean, you don’t need a stand, you don’t need one?’
‘You know, I’ll play from memory.’
‘Impossible, impossible …’
Shortly after my return to Moscow I received three letters from Shostakovich, which became my most treasured possessions. They were like love-letters, and became a kind of talisman for me. I kept them by my bedside table and read them constantly. The first letter started with these words, ‘Slava, I am completely intoxicated by what you have done to me, by the sheer delight you have given to me.’ I don’t wish to continue to quote Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s words, as they would sound completely implausible. Then one fine day I couldn’t find the letters. I asked our maid Rimma where they were. She had seen me hunting for them high and low for three days, but she was too frightened to tell me straight away that she had thrown these treasured letters into the rubbish bin.
I played the first performance of the Concerto in Leningrad with Mravinsky conducting. I cannot say that I ever loved Mravinsky as a musician. I knew him very well, and recognized him to be a great conductor, and more than that, a great psychological instructor. Undoubtedly, he understood music and was meticulous in everything he did. But it seems to me that too much aristocratic breeding deprives one of the possibility to enter fully into the music. In Mravinsky’s case, he was so full of his noble origins that he was never able to let go of a certain in-bred reserve. Despite this I played with him frequently until 1962, when we quarrelled – over Shostakovich, what is more.87
EVGENI CHUKOVSKY described how Rostropovich came to Leningrad to learn the new cello concerto and play it for Shostakovich at his Komarovo dacha.88
Shostakovich had completed his cello concerto. Rostropovich dashed up from Moscow and came to pick up the music. He and his pianist Alexander Alexandrovich Dedyukhin came for supper to Mariya Dmitriyevna’s [Shostakovich’s sister’s] home on Sofiya Perovskaya Street. Her flat had been severed off from a large apartment that had once been luxurious. Before the Revolution it belonged to a barrister. We climbed up the steep dark stairwell to the fifth floor, where a reinforced padded door protected the flat from would-be burglars. Inside there were two decent-sized rooms: a sitting-cum-dining room and a bedroom. There was no room for the bathtub so it stood in the kitchen. All the windows faced east, and the sun blazed on to them directly, turning the room into a furnace.
As Dmitri Dmitriyevich suffered from heat, the first thing he did was to draw the curtains. The room was plunged into gloom, cut by bright shafts of light which entered through the cracks. It looked like a set for a film about Mexico.
In the meantime, Shostakovich took some beautiful crystal glasses out of the cupboard and lit the candles in a bronze candleholder, and everyone sat down at the table. Everyone except for me, that is, as indeed I obviously could not contribute to the conversation. And besides Dmitri Dmitriyevich had asked me to refrain from drinking so that I could drive him back to Komarovo. Incidentally, Alexander Alexandrovich also did not participate in the table-talk, but that didn’t stop him from throwing back one glass after another.
The talk was predominantly about the concerto; Dmitri Dmitriyevich remembered that he hadn’t written the dedication into the score. The music was immediately produced and, dipping his pen into the inkwell which for some reason stood on the piano, Shostakovich inscribed it: ‘Dedicated to Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich.’ The dedicatee stood behind him watching him write. Then they leafed their way through the score, and one could tell from the expression on their faces that every page of it sounded for them. I heard Rostropovich suggest an improvement in some passage.
‘You’re a clever one,’ Dmitri Dmitriyevich said. ‘If I do it you’ll be the only one who can play it; but I write for everybody, you know!’
He closed the score and hurried to sit down at table. Everybody was tired by this time, and the tone of the conversation lightened. They started gossiping about matters at the Composers’ Union. At a certain point the name of Kholodilin cropped up.
And what, you might think, is so special about Kholodilin? But the name had a devastating effect on Alexander Alexandrovich. His eyes lit up and he started fidgeting on his seat, and poked his neck out of his collar like a goose. Obviously, for the first time all evening, he too had the desire to say something.
‘Nimi Nimich,’ (this was how Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s name came out when uttered by Alexander Alexandrovich) ‘do you know the etymology of the name Kholodilin?’ he asked.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich looked bewildered, thought it over, then said, ‘It must come from the word “kholodits” (to make cold).’
‘Goodness me no, Nimi Nimich,’ chirped Alexander Alexandrovich. ‘It comes from the word “kholodilo”, not “kholodits”.’ He paused, expecting a reaction, but none followed.
‘Don’t you know what “kholodilo” means?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘It means prick.’
‘But why?’ Shostakovich demanded in amazement.
Alexander Alexandrovich hurried to explain, ‘Because it makes ladies break out into a cold sweat.’
‘I don’t know about that, I don’t know. I should have thought rather a hot sweat, a hot sweat,’ Dmitri Dmitriyevich gabbled in reply. He felt embarrassed and was in a hurry to leave for home.
For four days the residents of the Evropeiskaya Hotel would have been suffering intolerably had it not been for the fact that luckily the hotel dated from the time when they knew how to build thick walls. Rostropovich was learning the concerto!
I went into the ‘tvorilka’, and while contemplating anew the horrifyingly spiked beacon, Shostakovich asked me to get hold of a tape-recorder somewhere in the village so he could record the first performance of the concerto here in his home at Komarovo.
Whatever next! Tape-recorders were a rarity in those days, and Leningraders who owned them didn’t take them to their holiday homes. Maxim and I sped around the settlement in the Pobeda car, but our search was in vain.
At midday the next day Rostropovich arrived, and entered the house carrying the womanly form of his cello. Behind him appeared Alexander Alexandrovich in a brown suit. Alexandrovich reproduced the orchestra on the piano.
And then, in this small room on the ground floor of the Komarovo ‘galleon’, Alexander Alexandrovich opened out the score on the piano desk, and Mariya Dmitriyevna, Shostakovich’s sister, took her place standing at his side to turn the pages.
The pianist glanced over at Rostropovich and they started. It is a thankless task to try to describe music through words. The people gathered in this small room yielded to a state of superficial numbness, although passions smouldered within each one of them. They were captives to the will of the composer, who sat there tensely listening to the music which previously he alone had heard.
And when the last sounds died away, before the silence had been broken and while everybody was still recovering from what they had just heard, I thought to myself, ‘Who, if not God, has given the author such power over people?’
As for the author, he said of this work, ‘I took a simple little theme and tried to develop it.’89
Official duties
The composer was not allowed to neglect his public duties, and was increasingly used by the Soviet regime as a figurehead to represent the ‘free’ intelligentsia. This accounts not only for his participation in peace conferences, plenary sessions and congresses of the Union of Composers, but also for the steady flow of public statements and articles on an increasingly wide variety of topics that appeared under his name in the press. Undoubtedly the majority of these publications were written by ‘ghost’ authors.
Shostakovich was re-elected as a Deputy to the Supreme Soviet in 1955. As his involvement with the administrative affairs of the Composers’ Union increased, he was appointed a secretary to the governing body of the All-Soviet Union in 1957, and in April 1960 was elected First Secretary of the RSFSR (Russian) Union of Composers, a post specially created for him.
DANIIL ZHITOMIRSKY describes an occasion when he acted as speech-writer to Shostakovich:
There are dozens of speeches and articles catalogued in D. D. Shostakovich: Musicological and Bibliographical Guide (Moscow, 1965) as having been published under his name, including a large number that were political and propagandist, such as ‘Moscow – the Hope of Humanity’ (1950), ‘On the Path Indicated by the Party’ (1957), ‘Let Us Be Worthy of the Glory of the Great Motherland’ (1959) and ‘The Party Inspired Us’ (1962). It was a secret to no one that these and such-like articles were written by professional journalists, and only signed by the supposed author. This was a regular, everyday technique employed for ‘speeches by famous people’. Even in the preparation of his articles about music, the participation of the author was a mere formality, and sometimes it was altogether lacking. I can judge this from my own experience as one of Shostakovich’s literary ‘collaborators’.
I remember, for instance, how his speech about Beethoven (to be delivered in Berlin on the occasion of the Beethoven celebrations in 1952) came to be composed. I went to see Shostakovich with a prepared typescript. Immediately after my arrival various extremely important functionaries from the Committee for the Arts appeared. I read out ‘Shostakovich’s speech’ distinctly and loudly. Then the Ministry officials expressed their profound thoughts. They gave one to understand that they were better and more thoroughly informed on all matters concerning Beethoven than ‘Shostakovich’ was in his written speech. They were particularly well informed about ‘Beethoven and Revolution’ and ‘The Love for Beethoven in the USSR’. They issued dozens of invaluable ‘directives’, which I diligently wrote down, while Dmitri Dmitriyevich sat in the darkest, furthest corner of the room in complete silence. What did he know about Beethoven!
This all happened in the late evening before his departure to East Germany early next morning.
I stayed on, correcting the speech in Shostakovich’s study until the early hours. At dawn he awoke me. For the sake of appearances he leafed through my finished text. ‘Thank you, thank you, it is excellent, many thanks!’ With a quick gesture he scratched the crown of his head and disappeared.
As I recall this incident I can’t help pondering on how I too was a participant in this falsification. I can gain little comfort from the fact that I tried to write as I imagined he would himself. And on more than one occasion I had reason to believe, as I still do today, that Dmitri Dmitriyevich was reconciled to these falsifications not through indolence, and obviously not through moral indifference. Rather I think that he abdicated any real responsibility for these publications for serious reasons. He regarded the official press (and indeed, there was no alternative press) with scepticism as a dismal establishment. His attitude seemed to be, ‘Let them write whatever they want. After all, I know its worth. Nobody cares in essence what I am and what I think. Moreover, it would be stupid and highly undesirable to let them see what I really am …’
I also remember Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s wonderful expressive manner of speech when conversing in private. He had his particular style, using short, almost aphoristic phrases, always direct and to the point. He couldn’t bear stereotyped phrases and superfluous words. He was impeccably considerate, but in uttering the standard words of greeting, thanks or good wishes he was extremely succinct, thereby sometimes appearing to emphasize the superficiality of such ritual phrases and gestures.
The idiosyncracy of Shostakovich’s speech consisted in the fact that humour and sarcasm loomed through an unperturbed seriousness of manner. One was always aware of his natural artistic gift in his use of pointed but restrained hints, allegory, imitation, in the way he acted out a whole theatrical scene or told the most vacuous anecdote (which he was not above telling). I remember him telling a joke in a small circle of friends with so much success that he immediately had to repeat it, of course with extra embellishments – he didn’t like literal repetitions in his speech any more than in his music.
However, Shostakovich was quite different when speaking from the tribune in an official capacity. I reproduce an entry from my diary from the 1950s:
‘I listened to Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s speech with growing irritation, but also with compassion and sympathy. How alien and artificial seemed the text he was pronouncing. Banal, journalistic phrases, textbook quotations, cumbersome and wordy statements. And the way he read this all out! In a quick patter, omitting all punctuation marks, and with an intonation that seemed intentionally lacking in sense. It was as if he was poking fun at himself in the role of official orator.’90
Shostakovich attended the 4th Plenum of the Executive of the Siberian Composers’ Organization in Novosibirsk in April 1961. On that occasion MARINA SABININA travelled as his official escort. Here she describes the experience:
Usually when Dmitri Dmitriyevich made his frequent trips around the country in his capacity of Chairman of the Union of Composers of the RSFSR he was accompanied by Ivan Ivanovich Martynov, who helped him to prepare the necessary texts of speeches, resolutions and reports. On this occasion Martynov was ill and therefore was unable to accompany Dmitri Dmitriyevich to Novosibirsk. I was told that it was Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s personal wish that I should take this role upon myself.
On the flight, sitting next to Dmitri Dmitriyevich, I asked him, ‘Dmitri Dmitriyevich, how are your children these days?’
‘Children, children! Small children don’t allow you to sleep, and older children don’t allow you to live! Maxim is now crazy about pop and jazz, and turns on the most rubbishy cheap music in his room at full volume. That makes it very hard for me to work, even to breathe, to exist …’
‘But Maxim intends to become a pianist?’
‘Yes, he intends to be a pianist, but I don’t know what will become of it all. He doesn’t like real, good music, he simply can’t stand it.’
In Novosibirsk times were cold and hungry. I didn’t have much success in my attempts to buy something for breakfast and supper – just some kefir and stale rolls. But we were often invited to people’s homes where we were given a very warm reception and fed with true Siberian hospitality in the merchant style of old – ‘pelmenye’ (Siberian dumplings), various kinds of pies, caviar and salmon.
We expressed our appreciation of the luxurious fare, and I could not contain my curiosity and asked where our hosts had managed to find it. The wife of a local composer proudly let us in on the secret: she had gone to the local Party Committee. ‘I told them, “You see, we have to entertain the great Shostakovich, winner of so many prizes and awards.” And they answered, “Right, we understand,” and gave us a pass just for this occasion to use the provision store of the local Party Committee, saying, “Take whatever you fancy.” The prices were cheap into the bargain!’
Dmitri Dmitriyevich ate with relish, praised the dumplings and our clever hostess. He obviously enjoyed these festivities. Somebody struck up a folk song, and he joined in with obbligatos and decorations. He even inveigled me into singing along. And for a long time we sang one song after another, improvising God only knows how. Our singing was out of tune, with bags of wrong notes, and I thought, ‘Surely this must be agony for his refined hearing.’ But no, Dmitri Dmitriyevich was thoroughly entertained, and exuded an air of boyish mischief at all this sport.
Generally he was in a very cheerful frame of mind those days. In particular, he came to life at the rehearsals of the Siberian Folk Choir, which presented a very dull, ordinary repertoire and mediocre voices. But they made every effort to please their eminent guest. Shostakovich fidgeted and smiled and kept asking, ‘Don’t you think that blonde girl, third from the left, is awfully pretty? Do you think I should marry her, eh?’ And on the way back to Moscow he remembered that fresh young beauty: ‘What a lovely girl, and I am all on my own, all on my own, there’s nobody to sew on a button for me …!’ (In fact one of the buttons on his coat had fallen off, and I sewed it back on for him one free evening.)
We also visited the grave of Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinsky at the Novosibirsk cemetery. The grave was well tended, although it looked somewhat unloved and official. I wondered if it had been specially tidied up for his visit, or if it was always so well cared for. Dmitri Dmitriyevich stood motionless, locked in silence. It seemed to me that he was inhibited by the presence of so many strangers, and that this semblance of an official ceremony jarred. No doubt this enforced remoteness clashed with the loving images and intimate memories of that most brilliant man, the bosom friend of his youthful years.91
Victim of oppression or faithful Party member?
Universally recognized at home and overseas, recipient of a host of awards from within the Soviet Union and abroad,92 by the late 1950s Shostakovich found himself to all intents and purposes regarded as an establishment figure.
Nevertheless, his sudden application in September 1960 to join the Communist Party came as a surprise to his colleagues and a bitter disappointment to his friends.
It was evident that Shostakovich was uninterested in any privilege or gain to be had as a Party member, having resisted membership throughout the Stalinist decades. However, in the wake of the 20th Party Congress, the Party’s position had changed. Stalin’s old faithfuls, Lazar Kaganovich, Vyacheslav Molotov and Georgi Malenkov were removed from high office, although saved from punishment, but rather ‘put out to pasture’ in isolated retirement. With an eye to public opinion (particularly in the West), Khrushchev felt the need to raise the credit of the Party and introduce fresh blood into its ranks. Therefore he now looked for support from the leading lights of the intelligentsia. Like many in his situation, Shostakovich must have found it increasingly difficult to resist mounting pressure to join a party which had disassociated itself from some of the worst atrocities of the regime, laying the blame firmly at Stalin’s door.
Furthermore, to fill the void left by Stalin’s dethronement, the cult of Lenin was intensified. This meant that by 1961 Shostakovich, now a Party member, was forced to stand by his long-standing declarations to write a large-scale work dedicated to Lenin. Hence his decision to tackle the sacred cow of Soviet ideology and to dedicate the programme of the Twelfth Symphony to Lenin.
But the element of paradox that was always present in the sequence of Shostakovich’s compositions provides an insight into the composer’s inner conflict and continuing ‘double life’ of this period. The Eleventh Symphony was written shortly after Rayok, and the light-weight operetta Moscow-Cheryomushki (whose ‘topical’ subject deals with the new housing cooperatives being raised in the cities at this time) before the First Cello Concerto with its parodying references to Stalin’s favourite song. In 1960, the year of his application to join the Party, Shostakovich created two of his most highly personal works, the Seventh Quartet (dedicated to his late wife, and written to commemorate her fiftieth birthday), and his tragic autobiographical masterpiece, the Eighth Quartet. Wedged between these two works was the vocal cycle Satires on words by Sasha Chyorny, a parody on the evils of society (disguised with the apt subtitle ‘Pictures from the Past’).
Perhaps most surprising for fans and critics alike was the delayed premiere of the Fourth Symphony, following hard on the heels of the Twelfth Symphony in December 1961. The overwhelming vitality of this work, dating from 1936, testified to Shostakovich’s amazing creative resilience, and served as a reminder of the quality of his early music, which had been largely neglected and unperformed over the last two decades.
ABRAAM GOZENPUD describes Shostakovich’s attitude towards worldly fame:
It is true that Shostakovich was not indifferent to worldly recognition, to honours and awards; but he regarded them with a certain scepticism and irony. Once, when awarded yet another Honorary Diploma from a Foreign Music Society, he said, ‘I am frightened that I will choke in an ocean of awards.’ And another time, after attending Eugene Onegin at the Bolshoi Theatre, he remarked that all the performers wore their prestigious award medals, leaving only two people in the company without decorations denoting rank and position: Pushkin and Tchaikovsky!93
LEV LEBEDINSKY probably attracted Shostakovich’s friendship because he was so different from him – warm, earthy and forthright. He shared with Shostakovich a sense of humour and a hatred of Stalinism and communism. Shostakovich was able to accept Lebedinsky’s political background and his former allegiance to proletarian ideology, no doubt because Lebedinsky, disillusioned with the communist system early on, was the first to admit that these ideas had been erroneous.
Undoubtedly, Lebedinsky was a controversial figure, and his role as a founder and ideological spokesman of RAPM rankled with many. After 1932 Lebedinsky fell into disgrace, and spent some time in Bashkiriya studying and collecting folklore. From 1955 he was allowed to work in Moscow again, at the Folklore Department of the Muzgiz publishing house, where he soon became Head of the Folklore Commission. For Sovietsky Kompozitor publishing house he edited various Shostakovich scores, including the orchestration of Boris Godunov and the second version of Katerina Izmailova. However, by the 1950s (the time when Lebedinsky became very close to Shostakovich), his status in official circles had declined to ‘oldest Bolshevik member of the Composers’ Union’. On the other hand Lebedinsky’s work in the field of folklore was highly regarded.
Evidently there was an element of casual informality and a natural simplicity in the relationship between the two men – something that Shostakovich rarely encountered. Even his close friends felt inhibited by Shostakovich’s genius, as testified by the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya: ‘All those of his circle were especially deferential towards him, and would be transformed by his presence. We all tried not to talk too much, to be more reserved – and often we ended up acting entirely unlike ourselves.’94 Lebedinsky lived within walking distance of Shostakovich’s Moscow flat, and Shostakovich often asked him to drop by on the spur of the moment.
Here LEV LEBEDINSKY recalls the events surrounding Shostakovich’s application for Party membership:
Shostakovich not only was a great composer but a remarkable person. His extraordinarily heightened sensitivity forced him to live with exposed nerves. Already traumatized by life from early childhood, in his adult years his painful perception of reality was aggravated by persecution from a totalitarian regime. As a true democrat, he deeply detested the communist system, which continuously threatened his very life. In his first major work, his First Symphony, he already challenges the forces of evil. I was the first to note that the timpani in the last movement sound like a depiction of an execution on a scaffold. When I remarked to Dmitri Dmitriyevich, ‘You were the first to declare war against Stalin,’ he did not deny it. Already, from his early years, Shostakovich understood what was going on in our country and what was to come.
Shostakovich’s parents educated their children in the great humanitarian traditions of Russia. Before the Revolution, they used to hide refugees in their house without discriminating between people of varying political views. According to family legend, once when Shostakovich’s uncle, Maxim Kostrykin, was hidden in their apartment along with some Kadets or Oktyabristi,95 tremendous quarrels broke out between them. ‘We’ll kill you first when we get into power,’ they shouted at each other.
This uncle was a fervent bolshevik, and reputedly took the young Shostakovich to the Finland Station to see Lenin’s arrival.
‘What did you go to the Finland Station for?’ I asked Shostakovich.
‘I wanted to hear Lenin’s speech,’ he said. ‘I knew a dictator was arriving.’
Shostakovich was the only Soviet composer who expressed his hatred of the totalitarian regime in his music. Despite the fear that he might be physically destroyed for his views, as many of his colleagues were, he continued his struggle, following the footsteps of the great humanists of the past. Often he was compelled for the purpose of self-defence to disguise his music and his views. As a result he was often misunderstood even by those who shared his attitudes. Their lack of understanding and unjust accusations caused him considerable pain.
His autobiographical Eighth Quartet contains quotations from his most important works, and uses the popular dirge ‘Tormented by Grievous Bondage’.96 It was hard to misunderstand, but the critics did misunderstand it and wrote, ‘In the Fourth Movement the composer quotes Lenin’s favourite song.’
Time-serving was alien to Shostakovich’s nature. But, over the years, he assumed a mask, and played the role of an obedient Party member. Nevertheless, he often lost his orientation in the complex labyrinths of political behaviour. His writings often contradicted what he said, and, even worse, his actions contradicted what he had written.97
The most tragic example of his neurotic behaviour was his joining the Communist Party in 1960, which he hated and despised. It’s hard to tell what made him join, although he had been under much official pressure for some time. He didn’t tell his friends and family that he had made the application for membership; we only found out when we received the official Party circular in the post.
It was only then that it dawned on me what had happened. Shostakovich had never heeded my warnings that certain invitations issued by certain friends brought him into the society of licensed officials, and were nothing short of a trap. On one such occasion some bureaucratic trickster put a prepared text in front of him. No doubt Dmitri Dmitriyevich had been plied with drink, and was under its influence when he signed the ‘request’ to be admitted to the Party.
As the date of the meeting where Shostakovich was to be ‘admitted to the Party ranks’ drew near, Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s life became a torment. He went up to Leningrad, where he hid in his sister’s flat, as if escaping from his own conscience. I followed him there. The meeting was to take place the next morning in Moscow. Shostakovich was a tangle of nerves; he was so conditioned by fear that no logical argument or reasoning could reach him. In the end I literally physically restrained him from going to the station to take the night train, and forced him to send a telegram saying that he was ill.
Hence the widely publicized Party meeting was a flop because of the absence of … Shostakovich himself! The authorities had to resort to a deception, announcing that Shostakovich had been taken ill so suddenly that there was no time to notify all the invited Party members. Since an unprecedented number of people had gathered to witness Shostakovich’s ultimate humiliation, in their eyes the cancellation of the Party meeting acquired the proportions of a major public scandal. They all formed the impression that Shostakovich was being pushed into the Party by force.
I will never forget some of the things he said that night, sobbing hysterically: ‘I am scared to death of them.’ ‘You don’t know the whole truth.’ ‘From childhood I have been doing things that I wanted not to do.’ ‘I’m a wretched alcoholic.’ ‘I’ve been a whore, I am and always will be a whore.’ (He often lashed at himself in strong words.)
The tragi-comedy of admitting Shostakovich to the Party was played out a few months later.98 He became an exemplary and obedient Party member. Without fail he attended every possible ridiculous meeting of the Supreme Soviet, every plenary session, every political gathering, and even took part in the agitprop car rally. In other words, he eagerly took part in events which he himself described as ‘torture by boredom’. He sat there like a puppet, his thoughts wandering far away, applauding when the others applauded. Once I remember him clapping eagerly after Khrennikov had made a speech in which he had made some offensive remarks about Shostakovich. ‘Why did you clap when you were being criticized?’ I asked. He hadn’t even noticed!
What moved him was not lack of principles, but a deep-rooted contradiction of character. Take his attack on Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov. It is well known that Shostakovich sympathized with both of them. He kept re-reading Solzhenitsyn’s short stories and intended to write an opera called Matryona’s House right after the story had been published in Novy Mir magazine in the January 1963 issue. Unfortunately, he could not find a writer to whom he could entrust the writing of a libretto for the opera; once he even turned to me, although I hardly took his proposal seriously.
God only knows what possessed him to put his signature to that filthy official slander against Solzhenitsyn. Nobody forced him to do it. He was ill at the time, and it would have been very easy for him not to admit the petty official of the secretariat of the Composers’ Union who had come with a ‘request’ to sign the letter. However, he did sign the shameful calumny. Afterwards he cursed himself, saying that he’d never forgive himself for having done it.99
ISAAK GLIKMAN gives a harrowing account of Shostakovich’s condition in June 1960, brought on by his enforced recruitment into the detested Communist Party:
In the last ten days of June 1960, Shostakovich came to Leningrad and, instead of booking into the Evropeiskaya Hotel as was his wont, went to stay with his sister.
On 28 June I paid Dmitri Dmitriyevich a short visit. He informed me that he had recently written Five Satires on Verses by Sasha Chyorny, and he hoped to familiarize me with this opus. But early on the following morning, Dmitri Dmitriyevich rang and asked me to come and see him immediately.
When I glanced at him, I was struck by his suffering aspect, his troubled and confused expression. He hurriedly led me into the small room where he slept and limply sank on to his bed and started crying, weeping out loud. In horror, I wondered if something dreadful had happened to a member of his family. In response to my questions, he mumbled indistinctly through his tears: ‘They have been hounding me, they have been pursuing me.’
I had never seen Dmitri Dmitriyevich in such a state. He was quite hysterical. I gave him a glass of cold water, which he drank with his teeth chattering, and he gradually calmed down. About an hour later, he took hold of himself sufficiently to tell me what had happened to him a short while ago in Moscow.
On Khrushchev’s initiative, it had been decided to make him Chairman of the RSFSR Composers’ Union, and Party membership was a required criterion for this position. P. N. Pospelov, a member of the Central Committee bureau of the RSFSR, had been entrusted with the mission of enlisting Shostakovich.
These are Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s actual words to me that June morning, at the height of ‘the Thaw’:
‘Pospelov tried to persuade me by every means to join the Party, where one breathes so easily and freely under Nikita Sergeyevich’s leadership. Pospelov greatly admired Khrushchev, his youthful vigour, his grandiose plans, and said it was essential that I should enrol in the ranks of a Party headed not by Stalin, but by Khrushchev.
‘Completely dumbfounded, I did my best to refuse this honour. I clutched at any straw, saying that I had never managed to master Marxism, that they should wait until I did. Then I pleaded my religion. Then I said that it would be possible to be Chairman without Party membership, citing as examples Konstantin Fedin and Leonid Sobelyov, who both occupied leading positions in the Writers’ Union without being Party members. Pospelov rejected all my arguments, and several times alluded to Khrushchev, who was anxious for the fate of musical matters, saying that I must respond to his calls for help. I was utterly exhausted by this conversation. At a second meeting, Pospelov once again cornered me. My nerves cracked up, I gave in to him.
[… ] ‘In the Composers’ Union, they shortly discovered the outcome of my negotiations with Pospelov, and soon somebody had concocted a statement which I was to parrot at a meeting. I want you to know I have decided not to appear at the meeting. I’ve come to Leningrad in secret to stay with my sister, and to hide from my tormentors. It still seemed to me that they would come to their senses and leave me in peace. And then, if all else fails, I’d lock myself in up here. But yesterday evening telegrams arrived demanding my immediate arrival. But I’m not going. They can only take me to Moscow by force, only by force.’100
The Circumstances behind the creation of the Eighth Quartet
Shostakovich wrote his Eighth Quartet during a visit to East Germany in July 1960. Ostensibly it was conceived under the impression of the horrific scale of destruction wrought on Dresden, the subject of Arnshtam’s film Five Days and Five Nights, for which Shostakovich was to write the music. However, this theme served, at most, as a superficial stimulus.
While in Germany the composer stayed at the beautiful resort of Gohrisch, near Königstein some forty kilometres outside Dresden. It was there that, instead of working on the film, he composed his five-movement Eighth Quartet, which he ironically described in a letter to his friend Isaak Glikman as ‘ideologically flawed and of no use to anybody’.
Shostakovich went on to explain to Glikman that:
When I die, it’s hardly likely that someone will write a quartet dedicated to my memory. So I decided to write it myself. One could write on the frontispiece, ‘Dedicated to the author of this quartet’. The main theme is the monogram D, Es, C, H, that is – my initials. The quartet makes use of themes from my works and the revolutionary song ‘Tormented by Grievous Bondage’. My own themes are the following: from the First Symphony, the Eighth Symphony, the Piano Trio, the [First] Cello Concerto and Lady Macbeth. There are also some allusions to Wagner’s Funeral March from Götterdämmerung and the second subject of the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony. And I forgot – there’s also a theme from my Tenth Symphony. Quite something – this little miscellany!
The pseudo-tragedy of the quartet is so great that, while composing it, my tears flowed as abundantly as urine after downing half a dozen beers. On arrival home, I have tried playing it twice, and have shed tears again. This time not because of the pseudo-tragedy, but because of my own wonder at the marvellous unity of form … that’s all that happened while I was in ‘Saxon Switzerland’.101
LEV LEBEDINSKY recalls how Shostakovich played him the Eighth Quartet on his return from Dresden:
The failure of his first attempt to join the Party throws light on the Eighth Quartet written during that period. The composer dedicated the Quartet to the victims of fascism to disguise his intentions, although, as he considered himself a victim of a fascist regime, the dedication was apt. In fact he intended it as a summation of everything he had written before. It was his farewell to life. He associated joining the Party with a moral, as well as physical, death. On the day of his return from a trip to Dresden, where he had completed the Quartet and purchased a large number of sleeping pills, he played the Quartet to me on the piano and told me with tears in his eyes that it was his last work. He hinted at his intention to commit suicide. Perhaps subconsciously he hoped that I would save him. I managed to remove the pills from his jacket pocket and gave them to his son Maxim, explaining to him the true meaning of the Quartet. I pleaded with him never to let his father out of his sight. During the next few days I spent as much time as possible with Shostakovich until I felt that the danger of suicide had passed.102
Galina Shostakovich distinctly remembers how one day in the summer of 1960, her father announced, ‘I have just finished a work dedicated in memory of myself.’
At the same period, as Maxim recalled, their father summoned him and Galina to his room and informed them: ‘I have been coerced into joining the Party’, at which he burst into tears. It was the second time they saw him in tears, the first after the death of their mother.103
The Satires
By 1960 the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, the Bolshoi Theatre’s leading soprano, enjoyed an enormous reputation as an opera singer both at home and abroad. She was also renowned for her sensitive performances of Russian romances with her husband Mstislav Rostropovich.
The vocal cycle Satires was the first of three works that Shostakovich dedicated to her (they were followed by his orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death in 1962 and the ‘Seven Romances on Poems by Alexander Blok’ in 1967). In addition the composer had her voice in mind when writing his Fourteenth Symphony.
In 1960 Shostakovich received as a gift a recently published book of Sasha Chyorny’s verse from his son-in-law, Evgeni Chukovsky, which no doubt served as a stimulus to write the song cycle. But Shostakovich evidently knew Chyorny’s work from much earlier, as Flora Litvinova can testify: ‘Way back in Kuibyshev, I remember Dmitri Dmitriyevich reading the Satires to us, especially,
Our forebears crawled into cells,
And often reminded themselves in an evil hour:
‘It’s tough, friends, but probably
Our kids will be freer than us.’104
The Satires, composed in June 1960, was wedged between his two memorial quartets, the Seventh and Eighth. As such it was a work that not only demonstrated stylistic contrast, but provided distraction from the composer’s mood of gloom and doom, as he was bitterly repenting his recruitment to the Party. Here GALINA VISHNEVSKAYA recalls how the cycle came into being, and how composer and performers overcame the problem of making ‘dubious’ texts acceptable to the authorities:
In the summer of 1960, during the time I was working on the Mussorgsky [Songs and Dances of Death], Shostakovich called us to his place and asked us to listen to his new work, a song cycle called Satires, based on the verse of Sasha Chyorny, for soprano with piano accompaniment. Dmitri Dmitriyevich himself played and sang, while Slava and I remained rooted to our chairs, overwhelmed by the unimpeded flow of sarcasm and black humour.
‘Do you like it, Galya?’
I could only whisper, ‘Dmitri Dmitriyevich, it’s phenomenal!’
‘I wrote it for you in the hope that you wouldn’t decline to sing it.’
‘Decline?’ I was hoarse with excitement.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich got up from the piano, took the music, and before handing it to me, said, ‘If you don’t object, I’d like to dedicate this work to you.’ He wrote in the manuscript: ‘Dedicated to Galina Pavlovna Vishnevskaya,’ and made me a gift of it.
Slava and I hurried home toting the precious gift – we were crazy with happiness. How had Dmitri Dmitriyevich, who knew me only as an opera singer, surmised my past career as a music-hall singer? His cycle had been written for none other than a music-hall singer with an operatic voice!
A few days later we performed the new work for Dmitri Dmitriyevich.
‘Remarkable! Simply remarkable! There’s just one thing: I’m afraid that they won’t let it be performed.’
And he was right. One of the poems was ‘Our Posterity’. Though written in 1910, it had recently been published in the Soviet Union. Yet with the music of Shostakovich it took on an entirely different meaning – it became an indictment of the current Soviet regime and its insane ideology.
Our forebears crawled into cells,
And often whispered there:
‘It’s tough, friends, but probably
Our kids will be freer than us.’
The kids grew up, and they too
Crawled into cells in time of danger,
And whispered: ‘Our kids
Will greet the Sun after us.’
And now, as for all time,
There is but one consolation:
‘Our kids will be in Mecca
If we are not fated to be.’
They have even predicted the times:
Some say two centuries, others say five.
Meanwhile, lie in sadness
And babble like an idiot.
Obscene gestures are in disguise,
The world is scrubbed, combed, nice.
In two centuries! To hell with that!
Am I Methuselah?
And I’m like an eagle-owl among the ruins
Of broken gods.
I have neither friends or enemies
Among descendants not yet born.
I want a little light
For myself, while I’m still alive.
Everyone from the tailor to the poet
Understands my call.
And our posterity? Let our posterity
Fulfilling their fate
And cursing their posterity
Beat their heads against a wall!
It was clear that the authorities would not allow such verse to be sung on stage. The words refer to today, and could not be said better. I had an idea. ‘Dmitri Dmitriyevich, instead of calling the cycle Satires call it Pictures of the Past. Throw them that bone and they might sanction it. Yesterday is part of the past, too; the public will see it that way.’
He was satisfied, and snickered at the irony of it. ‘Beautifully thought out, Galya! Beautifully thought out. Under Satires we’ll put ‘Pictures of the Past’ in parentheses, like a kind of fig leaf. We’ll cover up the embarrassing parts for them.’
In that way the cycle got its name. But we were never sure, right up until the time of the concert, that they wouldn’t take it off the programme. The authorization came only at the last minute.
On the evening of 22 February 1961, the concert hall was jammed with people. All of Moscow waited impatiently for Shostakovich’s new work with the seditious verses. Slava accompanied me. For the first part of the programme, I sang Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death. For the second part, I sang a number of works by Shostakovich, including ‘Pictures of the Past’. As I began ‘Our Posterity’, I could see that the audience was taut with the tension. Stalin’s and Beriya’s crimes were being exposed, the verses were hitting the bull’s-eye:
And I’m like an eagle-owl among the ruins
Of broken gods.
Some of Russia’s gods had been overthrown, but others had arrived in their place.
When I finished, the audience did not so much shout as roar. They demanded an encore, and we repeated the whole cycle for them, but they still refused to let us go; we performed the entire work yet another time.105
Despite the fact that a concert performance of the Satires had been sanctioned, Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich were unable to record the work for television because ‘Our Posterity’ was deemed ideologically unsuitable. Naturally the artists refused to perform the cycle without this song, as was suggested by the television producers.
Two symphonic premieres
As far back as 1924, Shostakovich had announced that he wished to dedicate a symphonic work to the memory of Lenin. While in Paris in May 1958 he first mentioned plans for a new Twelfth Symphony, and the following year he reported in Sovietskaya Kultura,106 ‘I am more and more drawn to the idea of composing a work dedicated to the immortal image of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.’ Soon he announced that he had completed two out of the symphony’s four movements, and went on to disclose their programme.107 The first was to be a musical narrative of Lenin’s arrival in Russia in April 1917; the second was dedicated to the events of October 1917; the third to the civil war; and the Finale was to depict the triumph of the Great October Revolution. Sofiya Khentova108 speaks of the existence of the 1960 sketches of the symphony in the family archive. Surprisingly, amongst them appears a substantial chunk with a parodying waltz based on material from the fourth song, ‘Misunderstanding’, of the vocal cycle Satires. The waltz motif coincides with the song’s text, ‘he did not understand the new poetry’. It is an intriguing thought that Shostakovich might have intended to include this material as hidden satire in the symphony.
In February 1960 various newspapers carried reports that the symphony was completed. But in fact Shostakovich hadn’t even started on the final movement, and what he had written no longer followed his announced scheme. By the autumn of 1960 Shostakovich had reduced the programme to represent the events of 1917, rather than a portrayal of Lenin’s activities. He renamed the first three movements Revolutionary Petrograd, Rasliv (Gulf), and Avrora (the name of the battleship that steamed down the Neva and fired at the Winter Palace; the movement includes a rousing depiction of the gun-shots). However he still remained without a solution for the finale. A performance scheduled at the Prague Spring Festival in May 1961 and other concerts where the symphony had been scheduled went by the board.
It was only in the summer of 1961 that Shostakovich sat down and with enormous speed wrote the finale, completing the Twelfth Symphony on 22 August. Possibly it was then that Shostakovich also decided to rewrite the other movements substantially. It seemed that he still had not finalized the titles when he wrote to Lebedinsky on 26 August, ‘When I see you, I’ll show you the symphony and we can confer, if you find it possible. I’ll then tell you the programme […]’ His letter concluded by saying he had had enough of writing symphonies and would in future stick to writing ‘easy little pieces for winds’.109
With the finale’s new title, Dawn of Humanity (sounding like the latest slogan of the day), decided, the symphony was fortuitously ready in time for the opening of the XXIInd Party Congress. Shostakovich announced that he was ‘delighted to have succeeded in completing it for this historic date in the history of the motherland’,110, and as if to emphasize his total loyalty to the regime, he applied for full membership of the Communist Party on 29 August. (Hitherto he had been only a candidate member.)
The Twelfth Symphony (subtitled The Year 1917) received simultaneous premieres on 1 October 1961 in Leningrad (with Mravinsky conducting) and in Kuibyshev (directed by Abram Stasevich), and, as promised, formed part of the festivities for the opening of the Party Congress. The Moscow premieres on 14, 15 and 16 October (conducted by Konstantin Ivanov) coincided with its solemn closing ceremonies.
The Symphony met with a cool response from the public. Shostakovich’s reputation had never sunk so low in musical circles. The enlightened Soviet listener, always with a sharp ear for the ‘sub-text’, could identify with the sombre music of the Eleventh Symphony, hearing in it not only the crushing of the recent Hungarian Revolt, but all the atrocities committed in the name of Revolution in their own country. The Twelfth Symphony seemed to speak at face value, without lending itself to a secondary level of meaning.
Manashir Yabukov has put forward the hypothesis111 that the Twelfth Symphony is connected with Sibelius (Shostakovich visited his grave in 1958, a year after his death). In the opening of the Twelfth Symphony, Shostakovich quotes a theme from Sibelius’s tone poem, the ‘Legend of Lemminkäinen in Tuonela’, a representation of this national hero’s tragic end, when his body is brutally cut to pieces. Shostakovich also refers to this theme in the other movements, but most extensively in the second, ‘Rasliv’ (‘the Gulf’, referring to the Gulf of Finland, Lenin’s hiding place in the summer months of 1917). Thus Yakubov suggests that the symphony can be seen as an allegory for the Finnish Campaign of 1939, when the Soviet Union invaded Finland and brutally dismembered the country. (In fact, it is ironic that Finland had gained its freedom after the October Revolution, something for which Lenin was responsible).112
Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, who conducted the Western premieres of both the Fourth and Twelfth Symphonies at the 1962 Edinburgh Festival, noted that at rehearsal Shostakovich was as serious in the attention he gave to the Twelfth as to the Fourth:
Only many years later after I had conducted the Twelfth and recorded it on LP, did I understand that it was not worse than the Fourth […] – it is just different from it. It is not a portrait of Lenin and the revolutionary events connected with him; rather it is a portrait of ‘Lenin propaganda’ or ‘the Lenin-God’, the monstrous idol created at Stalin’s command. This is why the style of writing is ‘propaganda-placard’-like, and hence the parodying titles of the movements. What alone is worth The Dawn of Humanity!113
Maxim Shostakovich114 has spoken of the universal rather than the specific nature of the music’s message, where the violence, the struggling crowds and chaos of revolution can be seen as a constant feature of world history. The composer’s widow, Irina Shostakovich,115 puts forward the view that the composer wished to describe a vision of the ideal ruler inspired by Pushkin’s verses addressed to Nicholas I (‘In Hope of All the Good and Glory’ [1826]). In this case, the triumphant major apotheosis of the Finale can perhaps be interpreted as the victory of a much-hoped-for utopia. Shostakovich no doubt was referring to the Twelfth Symphony when late in life he told Edison Denisov, ‘How I wish I could reduce the number of my symphonies.’116
With complete disregard for any of these arguments, the officials pronounced the Symphony a triumph for socialist realism.
Lev Lebedinsky has asserted that Shostakovich had originally wished to compose a symphony parodying, rather than glorifying, Lenin. For this reason, then, the composer had to re-write the work at short notice, as he feared that the subversive nature of the music was dangerously transparent. As of today there exists little evidence to support this claim, but there are also no grounds to refute it. The story becomes plausible if we date the rewriting to August 1961, before Shostakovich prepared the piano and orchestral scores for performance. Here is Lev Lebedinsky’s account of the matter:
In 1961 Shostakovich made another attempt to express his true attitude to what was going on in his country. He decided that his Twelfth Symphony was to be a satire of Lenin. When he told me this I tried to talk him out of it. It was too dangerous and nobody would understand anyway. He brushed off my advice with, ‘He who has ears will hear’ (a favourite Shostakovich expression). Then he went to Leningrad to attend the first performance. One evening he rang me up in a panic. ‘Lev Nikolayevich, tomorrow my symphony will be played for the first time. Can you come up to Leningrad?’
‘What, right now?’ I asked.
‘Yes, please come.’
I immediately went to the station, and tipped the guard so as to get on the night train. I arrived early in the morning. He was waiting for me at his hotel. He was as pale as death. He looked awful. In the lobby he said to me, ‘I’ve written a terrible symphony. It’s a failure. But I managed to change it.’
‘Change what?’
‘The whole symphony. But we can’t talk any more. My room is full of journalists and all sorts of strange people.’
When we entered his room, I had a feeling that we had stumbled into a lunatic asylum. There were representatives of hundreds of organizations there. They put some questions to him and he answered somehow. The conversation was being recorded, and the cameras were whirring, filming this historic occasion for the cinema news. After all, Shostakovich had written a symphony about Lenin! Finally, the ordeal was over and everybody left.
Shostakovich then explained: ‘I wrote the symphony, and then I realized that you had been right. They’d crucify me for it because my conception was an obvious caricature of Lenin. Therefore I sat down and wrote another one in three or four days. And it’s terrible!’ With his insane technique he could do anything. He could have written an opera in three days.
We went to the rehearsal. He pleaded, ‘Sit next to me, don’t leave me on my own now.’ They started playing. The music was frightening in its helplessness. I experienced some terrible moments, and I thought I was about to go mad. Shostakovich was holding my hand, and he kept asking, ‘Is it really awful?’
I knew that if I said it was awful he would go mad too. I restrained myself and said, ‘No, it’s perfectly all right.’
‘What do you mean, all right? It’s terrible.’
‘Stop it,’ I said, ‘don’t be so nervous. It’s perfectly passable.’
My only thought was to prevent him from losing his reason.
‘No one must know what I told you about this symphony’s history,’ he said.
‘God forbid!’ I reassured him.
Afterwards people like Isaak Glikman and others accused me of having forced Shostakovich to write about Lenin. They also implied that I made him join the Party – as if my suggesting a symphony about Lenin wasn’t enough! I never condemned the Symphony because I could not betray a friend, even when he was wrong.117
Only a few months after the Twelfth Symphony was first performed Muscovites were able to hear the long-delayed premiere of the Fourth Symphony, given under Kondrashin on 30 December 1961. Many of the composer’s friends assumed that Shostakovich had bargained the right to resuscitate his favourite ‘lost child’ by producing the Twelfth Symphony as a placatory offering to the authorities. Here KIRILL KONDRASHIN recounts how he came to conduct the first performance of Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony:
In 1961 the artistic director of the Moscow Philharmonic, M. Grinberg, a very intelligent man, advised me to have a look at Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, which was written in 1936 and had still never been performed.
The performance of the Fourth Symphony had been cancelled in the wake of the attacks on Shostakovich’s opera, Lady Macbeth. During the war, the score had been lost. In Leningrad just about everything got burnt for heating during the gruelling winters of the siege. It was only later that one of Shostakovich’s close friends, Levon Atovmyan, found the surviving orchestral parts of the Symphony in Leningrad. Using them as his basis, he was able to reconstruct the score. He also made a reduction of the Symphony for two pianos, and it was this version that I first saw. It was very carelessly done, with few dynamic markings and tempo instructions. Nevertheless, it was immediately clear to me that this was an outstanding work.
I told Grinberg that I would be delighted to perform the Symphony. Shostakovich didn’t know about our plan at the time, as Grinberg had decided to tell him only when he was certain that I would agree to the performance.
I went to see Shostakovich. He said, ‘Here on the piano is the version of the score that you have seen. As the full score was lost I’ve forgotten much of it.118 I need to look at it again to see whether the Symphony is worth performing, and whether it requires any changes.’
The next day he rang me. ‘Kirill Petrovich, I’d be very happy for you to perform the Symphony. No changes need to be made. The piece is very dear to me as it is.’
Soon after that, the Fourth Symphony received its first performance.119
Gennadi Rozhdestvensky was one of the first conductors after Kondrashin to tackle the score of the Fourth Symphony, when he suggested including it in his programme in the 1962 Edinburgh Festival. The authorities had demanded that he programme the Twelfth Symphony, and the conductor suggested that the Fourth would balance out the programme well.
When I unfolded my idea to the director of GosConcert, V. A. Boni, his silence was full of insinuating significance. Then he said, ‘Well, why not? I’ll “air” this question […]’, and pointed with his finger upstairs. The airing went in my favour. And the “upstairs” evidently decided that it would be a good idea to show Shostakovich in his different aspects – you see, we have complete creative freedom! so to speak. I was very happy – but not for long.
Rozhdestvensky at this point decided it was important to arrange a broadcast performance or a studio recording with the Radio Orchestra (of which he was currently chief conductor). This would enable him to absorb this difficult score. But there were many obstacles in his path. First his plan had to be submitted to the main musical editor, ‘a certain N. P. Chaplygin, a typical party functionary and a former RAPM composer’. Chaplygin refused permission on the ground that a radio audience ‘constituted an auditorium of many million people. And I cannot allow its transmission.’ Nevertheless Rozhdestvensky received support from the orchestral musicians, who wrote a letter asking if the symphony could be rehearsed and played without a broadcast. Permission was still withheld. At this stage the conductor went to see Shostakovich and asked him if he could use his influence and ring Chaplygin:
‘He cannot refuse if you ask him.’ There followed a very long weary pause. Dmitri Dmitriyevich took a pack of his favourite Kazbek papirosy out of his pocket and lit one up. In a very quiet voice, he said, ‘Dear Gennadi Nikolayevich, I have never in my life lifted so much as a finger to facilitate the performance of one of my works. My Fourth Symphony waited twenty-five years for its first performance […] as you see its turn arrived. And let it now wait as much as is necessary for a performance on radio. Excuse me, but I will not ring Chaplygin.’
As a result Rozhdestvensky first rehearsed and performed the Fourth Symphony in Great Britain.120
The following is an extract from FLORA LITVINOVA’S diary:
31 December 1961. Yesterday we went to hear the Fourth Symphony, we had been invited by Dmitri Dmitriyevich. It was the first time we heard it, and it made a shattering impression on us. Why do Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s later works lack those qualities of impetuosity, dynamic drive, contrasts of rhythm and colour, tenderness and spikiness? One involuntarily thinks what a different path he would have taken, how different his life would have been, if it were not for the ‘historic’ Decree which warped the living spirit in him.
Now the Symphony enjoyed an enormous success. Dmitri Dmitriyevich said that he had not corrected one note in it. Its exceptional maturity and finished perfection shone through from the first to the last note. Lady Macbeth and the Fourth Symphony surely marked the apogee of Shostakovich’s creative career.’121
1 Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel The Thaw was published in 1954, and this title became synonymous with the ‘liberal’ politics of the 1950s.
2 Flora Litvinova: article commissioned for this book.
3 Tatyana Nikolayeva: in a recorded telephone interview with EW, 1993.
4 Manashir Yakubov in conversation with EW, 1993.
5 K. Meyer, Shostakovich: Life, Work and Times, p. 319.
6 Sovietskaya Muzyka, no. 6, 1954.
7 See bars 3 and 4 of the finale, and similarly all thematic repetitions in the variations. In bars 15 and 16 the four notes of the motif are cited in different order with a C natural.
8 Tenth Symphony, third movement, figure 114:
The notes, written of course at transposed pitch a fifth higher, of the signature E L(a) Mi R(e) A, derived from using both the French and German systems of notation.
9 Nazirova was born in Baku in 1928. After a year studying in Moscow she returned to Baku late in 1948. She met Shostakovich again in Baku in 1952, and their correspondence started around April 1953, lasting through until 1956. She emigrated to Israel in 1990.
10 Nelly Kravets, ‘A New Insight into the Tenth Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich’, a paper delivered at the conference ‘Shostakovich: The Man and His Age’, University of Michigan, 28 January 1994. Published in Rosamund Bartlett (ed.), Shostakovich in Context (OUP, 2000), pp. 159–74.
11 Letter dated 29 August 1953, quoted in Nelly Kravets, ‘New Insight into the Tenth Symphony’, in Rosamund Bartlett (ed.), Shostakovich in Context (OUP, 2000), p. 163.
12 Letter dated 17 September 1953, ibid.
13 See David Fanning’s brilliant study of the Tenth Symphony which has yet to be bettered. Fanning, The Breath of the Symphonist (RMA monograph, London, 1988), pp. 47–57.
14 A hinted allusion to the Dies Irae by the bassoons starting at the second bar of figure 82 gives further credence to this reading.
15 David Fanning, The Breath of the Symphonist (RMA monograph, London, 1988), p. 76.
16 Sovietskaya Muzyka, no. 5, 1954 (also in Khentova, vol. 2, pp. 300–302).
17 Sovietskaya Muzyka, no. 3, 1954 (also in Khentova, vol. 2, p. 302).
18 Yarustovsky, ‘About the Tenth Symphony‘, Sovietskaya Muzyka, no. 4, 1954, pp. 8–24 (also Khentova, vol. 2, p. 301).
19 Lev Lebedinsky: recorded interview with EW.
20 Edison Denisov, unpublished diary.
21 Letter dated 31 July 1955.
22 Sofiya Khentova, ‘Women in Shostakovich’s Life’, p. 264.
23 Galina: A Russian Story, p. 227.
24 L.-V. Karagieva (ed.), Kara Karayev: Articles, Letters and Opinions, p. 54.
25 Nina Varzar was born in 1909. Hence at the time that Litvinova was writing about, she would have been at least forty-four years of age.
26 Litvinova is probably referring to the recent Five Romances on Verses of Dolmatovsky Op. 98 (1955) which were published early in 1956 and had received several performances by the bass, Boris Gmyrya.
27 Flora Litvinova, article commissioned for this book.
28 Lev Lebedinsky: recorded interview with EW.
29 Marina Sabinina, ‘I Am Utterly Utterly Happy’, short story written for this book.
30 In fact Galina was eighteen years old and Maxim sixteen.
31 Vishnevskaya, Galina: A Russian Story, pp. 223, 224.
32 Mikhail Dolgopolov was an editor and reviewer in the arts section of the newspaper Pravda.
33 Evgeni Chukovsky, novella commissioned for this book.
34 Our Father, Dmitri Shostakovich, Ardov (Moscow, 2003), p. 64.
35 Interview with M. D. Kozhunova in S. Khentova, In Shostakovich’s World (Moscow, 1996), p. 91.
36 Today the street is renamed Chetvyorty Kurortny Pereulok (Fourth Resort Street).
37 Evgeni Chukovsky, novella commissioned for this book.
38 Glikman, Letters to a Friend, p. 109.
39 These include Lev Lebedinsky, who wrote the introduction to the 1963 edition of the piano score of Op. 114, Mstislav Rostropovich and Maxim Shostakovich (in each case, in conversation with EW).
40 Isaak Glikman, Letters to a Friend, pp. 119–21.
41 Our Father, Dmitri Shostakovich, Ardov (Moscow, Zakharov, 2003), pp. 104–5.
42 Galina: A Russian Story, pp. 242–4.
43 The ‘certain person’ was Vasili Kukharsky, a Party official who in those years was making a rapid career for himself. He became Minister of Culture in the 1960s. Reputedly Shostakovich was frightened of him, yet found it difficult to remember his name.
44 According to some other accounts, Leo Arnshtam wrote Shostakovich’s speech.
45 Marina Sabinina is referring to her book Shostakovich’s Symphonism (Sovietsky Kompozitor, Moscow, 1965).
46 Marina Sabinina, ‘During the Days of “the Thaw”’, short story written for this book.
47 Manashir Yakubov, ‘Shostakovich’s Antiformalist Rayok’ in Rosamund Bartlett (ed.), Shostakovich in Context (OUP, 2000), p. 150.
48 It would appear that Shostakovich never dated any of these sketches or versions, which makes it impossible to pin down any precise dating. That there was an evolvement in the musical concept of the piece is evident from the fact that originally no chorus was scored, and there was only one soloist, rather than four (an option that remains feasible even in the extended version, and was natural to home performance).
49 Manashir Yakubov, ‘Shostakovich’s Antiformalist Rayok’ in Rosamund Bartlett (ed.), Shostakovich in Context (OUP, 2000), p. 137.
50 Alisa Shebalina: recorded interview with EW.
51 Glikman, Letters to a Friend, p. 125.
52 This name could mean either ‘Scribbler’ or ‘Pisser’.
53 D. D. Shostakovich, ‘Letters to Edison Denisov’.
54 Abraam Gozenpud, ‘Encounters with Shostakovich’, article commissioned for this book.
55 Levon Hakobian, who discounts any artistic merit in the work, suggests that Shostakovich’s reputation would be saved if it turned out that Lebedinsky had also written the music of Rayok. Hakobian, D. Shostakovich: An Essay in the Phenomenology of his Work (St Petersburg, 2004), p. 335.
56 These are distortions of the names of Yarustovsky, Ryumin and Apostolov, all Party functionaries, who had over the years hounded Shostakovich, and had been active in the campaign against ‘formalism’. These changes immediately give the names vulgar connotations, i.e. Yasrustovsky could be conveyed as ‘I-shit-ovsky’.
57 The change of accents in these composer’s names render them ridiculous. The etymology of Borodin now is based on beard, etc.
58 Edinitsyn, Dvoikin and Troikin have more than one connotation. On the one hand, they imply Number One, Number Two, and Number Three; on the other hand, these numbers are associated with school grades. A Three is the lowest pass mark, Two is already failure to pass, whereas One means abysmal failure.
59 Lev Lebedinsky, compiled from recorded interviews with EW and unpublished articles.
60 In an autobiographical article published in Sovietskaya Muzyka in September 1956, DDS stated that ‘Under Asafiev’s influence I wrote the opera The Nose and the piano pieces Aphorisms. Later our ways parted. I have frequently been made aware of the untenability of his views on art – but I have always respected him as a music scholar.’ This is a good example of Shostakovich’s ability to be subtly subversive. The two works he claims to have composed under Asafiev’s influence were still labelled as ‘decadent’ in 1956, and had not been performed for over twenty-five years. His friends would have known what a back-handed compliment Shostakovich dealt when referring to his ‘respect’ for Asafiev as a ‘music scholar’.
61 Accounts of speeches at this meeting were given in Sovietskaya Muzyka, no. 2, 1948.
62 Solzhenitsyn’s novel, published in 1962 in Novy Mir literary journal, describes one day in the life of an inmate of the Stalinist camps.
63 Shostakovich attended the plenary session of the Urals Branch of the Union of Composers in October 1957.
64 Maxim Shostakovich was appointed principal conductor of the All-Union Radio and Television Orchestra in 1971. Edison Denisov: recorded interview with EW.
65 Sofiya Gubaidulina: recorded interview with EW.
66 Flora Litvinova: article commissioned for this book.
67 Nikolai Karetnikov, ‘Your Contemporary’, unpublished article.
68 Oleg Prokofiev, ‘On My Few Contacts with Shostakovich’, article commissioned for this book.
69 Moscow Arts Theatre.
70 Marina Sabinina, ‘An Artist Should Never Marry’, short story written for this book.
71 Yakov Milkis: recorded interview with EW.
72 Two days later the composer organized his own private celebration for friends and family at the Aragvy restaurant.
73 See letter to Glikman. The Congress took place between 28 March and 4 April.
74 Letter dated 12 February 1957 (DDS, ‘Letters to Edison Denisov’).
75 Russian term for a labour camp detainee.
76 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment.
77 Lev Lebedinsky, ‘Shostakovich’s Handling of Folk/Popular Song in His Own Works and Those of Other Composers’, unpublished article.
78 Translated by Grigori Gerenstein.
79 Mstislav Rostropovich also recounts how on several occasions he was urgently called to Shostakovich’s house. On arrival he would sit in silence with the composer for half an hour or so before being thanked, after which they said their goodbyes. (In conversation with EW.)
80 Olga Ivinskaya noted in her A Captive of Time, p. 130–1, that Pasternak wrote that inscription before Shostakovich recanted publicly at the 1st Congress of Composers, which was convened two months later. Pasternak’s response was resigned: ‘Oh Lord, if they only knew how to maintain their silence!’
81 Zoya Tomashevskaya, ‘Reminiscences of Shostakovich’, article commissioned for this book.
82 Letter from Bolshevo dated 4 October 1955 (L.-V. Karagieva [ed.], Kara Karayev: Articles, Letters and Opinions, p. 53).
83 In the article ‘Creative Plans of Dmitri Shostakovich’, Sovietskaya Kultura, 6 June 1959.
84 This recording was originally issued by Melodiya in 1957.
85 In the article ‘Creative Plans of Dmitri Shostakovich’, Sovietskaya Kultura, 6 June 1959.
86 ‘Suliko’ is quoted in Rayok and sung to a ridiculous text. The melody appears in the appendix on pp. 538–40, together with the passage Rostropovich referred to in the Cello Concerto.
87 Mstislav Rostropovich: recorded interview with EW.
88 Rostropovich recently drew my attention to the fact that Chukovsky had muddled his account of the inscription into the score of Shostakovich’s dedication, placing its timing after he had first played the concerto through to Shostakovich. In fact this happened just before he started learning it. As I have trust in Rostropovich’s phenomenal memory (and furthermore in his private St Petersburg archive there exists his written diary accounting for these days), I have permitted myself to re-order Chukovsky’s material to take this into account.
89 Evgeni Chukovsky, ‘Komarovo’, novella commissioned for this book.
90 Daniil Zhitomirsky, ‘Dmitri Shostakovich: Reminiscences and Reflections’, unpublished article.
91 Marina Sabinina, ‘About Children and Other Things’, short story written for this book.
92 In 1958 alone Shostakovich received a large number of important awards from various foreign institutions: On 12 May he was made an honorary member of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome. Later that same month the composer was invested Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in Paris. In June 1958 Shostakovich received a Doctorate (Honoris Causa) at Oxford University (in company with Francis Poulenc). In the same month he was also made an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music in London. In October Shostakovich received the Sibelius Prize in Helsinki, the third composer to do so after Stravinsky (in 1953) and Hindemith (in 1955).
93 Gozenpud, ‘Encounters with Shostakovich’.
94 Vishnevskaya, Galina: A Russian Story, p. 225.
95 The Constitutional Democrats, known as the Kadet Party, promulgated the idea of a constitutional monarchy somewhat along British lines. The Oktyabristi took their name from the October Manifesto of 1905, where Tsar Nicholas granted an elected body, the Duma, and guaranteed civil rights of citizens.
96 Variously translated as ‘He Died in Hard Slavery’ or ‘Tormented by Lack of Freedom’.
97 It is also worth remembering that Shostakovich was amongst the signatories of a letter to the Central Committee demanding that Solzhenitsyn be allowed a normal way of life and proper working conditions. (The other signatories included the writers Kornei Chukovsky, Konstantin Paustovsky and the physicist Pyotr Kapitsa).
98 Shostakovich was accepted as a candidate member of the Party on 14 September 1960.
99 Lev Lebedinsky: compiled from recorded interviews with EW and unpublished articles.
100 Glikman, Letters to a Friend, pp. 160, 161.
101 Letter dated 19 July 1960 (ibid., p. 159).
102 Lev Lebedinsky: compiled from recorded interviews with EW and unpublished articles.
103 Our Father, Dmitri Shostakovich, Ardov (Moscow, 2003), p. 154.
104 Flora Litvinova, article commissioned for this book.
105 Vishnevskaya, Galina: A Russian Story, pp. 267–70.
106 Dated 6 June 1959.
107 See Muzykalnaya Zhisn’, no. 21, 1960.
108 Khentova, Shostakovich, vol. II, p. 363.
109 In Muzykalnaya Zhisn’, nos. 23–4, 1993, p.13.
110 In a radio interview entitled ‘115 minutes and 1 second’.
111 Yakubov’s article ‘D. Shostakovich and J. Sibelius’, Muzykalnaya Zhisn’, no. 8. 2002, pp. 27–30.
112 Maybe it was no coincidence that in the autumn of 1939, Shostakovich was commissioned to write adaptations of Finnish folk songs. The resulting ‘Suite on Finnish Themes’ for two solo voices and chamber orchestra was completed on the eve of the Soviet invasion of Finland.
113 Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, Treugol’niki Triptikh (Triangles and Triptych) (SLOVO, Moscow, 2001), p. 257.
114 In private interview with EW.
115 In private interview with EW.
116 Denisov in Le Monde de la Musique, 1989, no. 1.
117 Lev Lebedinsky: recorded interview with EW.
118 It is said that the conductor Alexander Gauk had the manuscript scores of the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies in his keeping, but lost them during the Second World War. There is perhaps still hope that they may turn up somewhere, perhaps even in Gauk’s own family archive. Gennadi Rozhdestvensky has another explanation: ‘They say that there was a dedication to Marshal Tukhachevsky (with whom Shostakovich was on friendly terms) on the title page. Not wishing to destroy the original, he ordered a copy of the score to be made – without the title page – by a copyist, and hid the original in a safe place – to this day nobody knows where.’ Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, Treugol’niki Triptikh (Triangles and Triptych) (SLOVO, Moscow, 2001), pp. 254–5.
119 Kirill Kondrashin: recorded reminiscences.
120 Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, Treugol’niki Triptikh (Triangles and Triptych) (SLOVO, Moskva, 2001), p. 255.
121 Article commissioned for this book.