While orchestrating Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death in 1962, Shostakovich became fascinated by the idea of writing a similar cycle and extending it into a vocal symphony. The composer identified not only with the musical idiom of Mussorgsky’s overwhelmingly original work but with its angry protest against man’s mere temporal existence. Its theme provided initial inspiration for a new symphonic work which he started sketching on 21 January 1969.
On 1 February 1969 Shostakovich wrote to Glikman from his hospital bed that he was composing an oratorio for two vocal soloists and chamber orchestra; before long (on 17 February) he reported:
Yesterday I finished the piano score of my new work. I am not going to call it an oratorio – one can’t, as an oratorio calls for a choir. My work doesn’t include a choir; just two solo singers – soprano and bass…. One probably shouldn’t call it a symphony either. For the first time in my life, I remain perplexed as to what name to give a composition of mine.1
The new work was orchestrated by 2 March, and received the title of Symphony No. 14 Op. 135. It was written during a six-week-long stay at the Moscow Kremlin hospital, when Shostakovich was having further treatment for his legs. As a result of an outbreak of influenza, the hospital had imposed quarantine, and no visitors (even close family) were allowed in. Forced to observe a strict invalid regime, the composer gave himself over to reading. Shostakovich chose his texts from a disparate selection of poetry in translation (Federico Lorca, Guillaume Apollinaire and Rainer Maria Rilke),2 adding only one original Russian poem by Pushkin’s lycée companion, the Decembrist Wilhelm Küchelbecker, addressed to their common friend Anton Delvig. In consultation with his wife, Irina, Shostakovich worked on the poems, adapting and shortening them to his needs.
Writing again to Glikman, Shostakovich summed up what lay behind the choice of texts:
It occurred to me that there exist eternal themes and eternal problems, amongst which are those of love and death. I had already turned my attention to themes of love, at least in the ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ on Sasha Chyorny’s verses. I had not touched upon the theme of death. Just before entering hospital, I listened to Mussorgsky’s ‘Songs and Dances of Death’, and the idea of tackling death came to fruition.
I would not say that I am reconciled to the phenomenon. I started selecting the verse. My choice of poems is probably quite random. But it seems to me that they are given unity through the music. I composed very fast; I was continually afraid that while writing the Fourteenth Symphony, something would happen to me – that my right hand would cease to function, that I would suddenly go blind, etc. These thoughts gave me no peace.3
Later in the letter Shostakovich confessed that he regarded the symphony as a landmark in his output: ‘Everything that I have written until now over these long years has merely served as a preparation for this work.’4
It is remarkable that Shostakovich should have made this confession, and indeed the Fourteenth Symphony must be seen as a unique event in his output. For the first time the composer abandoned traditional models and dispensed with the need to use the symphony as a vehicle to voice public concerns. It is arguable that Shostakovich had not composed with such freedom since his youth, during that brief period of the 1920s when he uninhibitedly embraced avant-garde experiment. Nevertheless recent works such as the pithily constructed Twelfth Quartet and the elegiacally eloquent Blok cycle had served as stepping-stones towards the new work in their masterly and idiosyncratic use of serial techniques and in distilling his expressive means.
Shostakovich acknowledged that in preparation for his new symphony he had read extensively, and also listened to a great variety of music. Whereas Mussorgsky gave him the original stimulus, he was also influenced by Mahler and Britten in his choice of theme, and quite probably he was aware of contemporary works such as Lutoslawski’s Paroles Tissées (where the orchestra is likewise made up of solo strings and percussion) and Penderecki’s Dies Irae (dating from 1967).5
The Fourteenth Symphony, with its eleven short movements, is scored for solo soprano and bass, nineteen solo strings and percussion. The singers act as solo narrators or alternate in dialogue, and sing together only in the final epilogue. In the orchestral writing Shostakovich achieves an infinite variety of effective combinations: for example, he dispenses with cellos and percussion in the first movement, with violins and percussion in the ninth; much of the fourth movement is scored for an intimate dialogue of soprano with solo cello, whereas the percussion is given a primary role in the fifth movement, and so on. The thematic material (both primary and secondary) includes frequent use of twelve-tone rows, and atonality often serves as a device to lower the emotional temperature.
As in the Thirteenth Symphony, the composer makes use of vivid musical imagery. In the third movement, for instance, the galloping rhythms of the three knights accompanying Lorelei to a nunnery are depicted by wood block and strings; this material is repeated as she ascends the cliff over the Rhine for the last time. And in the ‘Adagio’ section that follows, the Wagnerian reference is unmistakable (a borrowing of the E flat opening of Rheingold) as a background to Lorelei’s final greeting of the river before hurling herself into its waters to embrace her own reflection.
In the following movement, the horrific image of the lily’s roots lacerating the corpse’s mouth is illustrated with three bars of screaming crescendo in the clustered ascent of high strings, cut off by the stroke of a bell. And in the seventh movement, Shostakovich conveys the sensation of being ‘buried alive’ through the chilling and eerie effect of strings struck by wood (the back of the bow) and simultaneously plucked (col legno/pizzicato) in a section of canonic imitation of the twelve-tone row. (In this instance atonality represents impersonal and unfeeling abstraction.)
It is perhaps not a coincidence that the poets to whom Shostakovich turned were for the most part writing about the carnage of the First World War. This of course was a feature in common with the function of Wilfred Owen’s poems in Britten’s War Requiem. Shostakovich’s choice and ordering of the texts is made under the unifying banner of its theme: the tyranny of death in the first place, but also the tyranny of temporal despotic rule. These themes are treated in their widest aspects, whether as an appeal to remembrance or in the virulent hatred of a curse (‘thou rotten cancer born in thy mother’s filth, thou evil butcher covered in sores and ulcers’6). In no other work does Shostakovich reveal such total pessimism, untinged by the light of redemption or the comfort of reminiscence. Metaphors abound; in the outer movements death is presented as the ‘Reaper’, ready to seize his harvest at every hour of life. In the other movements these metaphors are extended to the loss of spiritual belief, emotional sterility, the deadly mechanism of war as a game, and equally to a ‘living death’, a poignant symbol for the unjust incarceration of a whole generation of Shostakovich’s contemporaries.
Finally in the tenth movement, ‘The Death of the Poet’, Shostakovich speaks of the destruction of knowledge and art, a concept that caused him considerable personal anguish.7 Yet in the previous movement, ‘Delvig’, one poet (or composer) addresses another asking, ‘What matters persecution?’ Juvenal’s satire, he says, makes tyrants tremble, and ‘inspired deeds and sweet song are alike immortal’. (Here the warm glow of a quartet of cellos and viola and the expressive harmonies serve to illustrate the concept of redemption through art.)
Specifically for people of Shostakovich’s generation the metaphor can be extended to the betrayal of the promised earthly paradise of communism. Instead this utopian dream entailed the curse of unconditional submission to the rule of tyranny, with the subsequent loss of spiritual freedom, civic rights and collective memory. The Russian Symbolists’ premonition of catastrophe, or Mahler’s Weltschmerz, had been overtaken by the vision of a culture under threat of extinction.
These were issues that were not addressed openly during Shostakovich’s lifetime. But nevertheless it was the inclusion of texts, rather than the music’s experimental idiom, that raised the suspicion of the authorities. It was decided to vet the work at a closed concert on 21 June 1969. During this performance, one of Shostakovich’s former persecutors, Pavel Apostolov, had a heart attack and died. Many Russians held the superstitious belief that his death represented a vindication of the sufferings inflicted on the composer over the years; indeed Apostolov’s funeral was virtually boycotted by his colleagues.
The official premieres of the Symphony took place in Leningrad on 29 September and 1 October.
RUDOLF BARSHAI had first come into contact with Shostakovich in the 1940s in his viola playing days, when, as a member of first the Quartet of the Moscow Philharmonic (later known as the Borodin Quartet), and then, from 1953, the Tchaikovsky Quartet, he performed Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet with the composer.
In 1956 Barshai founded the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, and was its chief conductor until he left the Soviet Union.
Here Barshai recalls how Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony came into being:
It all started early in the year of 1969, when Shostakovich sent me a telegram asking me to phone him at home. At the time I had no telephone, although I had made many requests for one to be installed. These requests were ignored initially, but eventually an answer was sent to the Moscow Philharmonic, where I was registered as ‘an employee’, saying: ‘The District Union of the Workers of Such and Such a District has established that Comrade Barshai has no need of a telephone.’
I went out to a call box and rang Shostakovich at once. He put various questions to me. The first question regarded the exact formation and numbers of the Moscow Chamber Orchestra. We only used one double bass.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich asked, ‘Would it be possible to have two players?’
‘Of course.’
‘And how many percussionists?’
‘As many as you need.’
‘Thank you very much, thank you very much. That was important for me. Goodbye and thanks.’
And not another word. It did make me suspect something was brewing, of course.
Two weeks later I got a second telegram from Shostakovich asking me to phone him urgently.
Again I rang him immediately.
‘Rudolf Borisovich, what are you doing at this very moment?’
‘I’m free now.’
‘Then come around at once to see me.’
I rushed over to his place. Dmitri Dmitriyevich then played through his Fourteenth Symphony on the piano – he had only just completed it. He showed me the score and asked me various questions in regard to orchestration, concerning the divisi and similar details. We spoke for two hours. He then said, ‘If you don’t have any objection, let’s invite Vishnevskaya to sing the soprano part.’
‘Of course I have no objection. What about the bass?’
‘Well, let’s wait a little and think about it. And when will you start rehearsals?’ he added.
I said I was willing to start as soon as the soloists were ready and knew their parts.
After this we met frequently; Dmitri Dmitriyevich made some minor corrections to details in the score. Each time he made a change he showed it to me. It is interesting how jealously he regarded even the smallest change. In general he never wanted to correct anything, and considered that corrections were an unnecessary evil.
But in this case, things were a little different. For instance I had a small point to make (I would never have gone so far as to offer Shostakovich advice). There is the moment in the last bars of the Symphony when the whole orchestra is not required to play, although the music finishes loudly. I know of course that in some of Mahler’s symphonies the music finishes softly and the number of players in the orchestra decreases accordingly. But in this case the Symphony finishes loudly and not all the players participate in the last bars – only strings, no percussion. I suggested utilizing some percussion. Shostakovich said that this was a valid point and he tried to write additional percussion parts for the ending.
After the first ‘unofficial’ performance in Moscow in June 1969, he wrote to me while I was on holiday with some suggestions for the additional percussion parts. He pencilled in the staves on the letter and notated these parts. But in the end he decided against using them.
One day Dmitri Dmitriyevich informed me that Vishnevskaya was having to delay learning her part as she had a busy schedule and was touring abroad. Therefore she could not make any promises as to when she would be ready.
I said, ‘Never mind, we’ll wait for her.’
But Dmitri Dmitriyevich answered, ‘No, no, I don’t want to wait, I’m afraid I’ll die soon, and I want to hear my work. I was afraid that I wouldn’t live to finish the Symphony, but I managed in time, I managed in time. If you have no objections, I’d like to propose another singer, Margarita Miroshnikova, who sings my music. Let’s go and hear her.’
So we went to the Bolshoi Theatre to hear her sing, and I liked her voice. He said, ‘Let’s ask her to learn the part.’
We then chose Evgeni Vladimirov as the bass. The two singers started to learn their parts, and as they were getting on very well we started the orchestral rehearsals. I rehearsed separately with the singers. What was really remarkable was that Shostakovich came to every single rehearsal from the very first orchestral read-through to the individual piano rehearsals with the singers. He didn’t miss a single one. He sat and listened, completely absorbed in his own music, excited and thrilled by its sound.
Once we were rehearsing in the large rehearsal room of the Piatnitsky Choir at the Philharmonia. As usual he was sitting behind me with Irina Antonovna. We were playing the second movement, Malaguena – that passionate smouldering Spanish music – when suddenly I felt a painful blow on my shoulder. It quite frightened me! I turned around to see Shostakovich at my side. He whispered in my ear, ‘Keep going, keep going. The devil take it, I never thought it would sound so good.’
We scheduled a great number of rehearsals, so as to try out the corrections. Shostakovich actively participated in this process of work. He usually didn’t make outright suggestions. For instance, when it came to the question of tempi, he tended to be rather sly. He would say, ‘Yes, the tempo that you are playing now is exactly right.’ But if I suggested, ‘Should it be a bit faster or slower?’ he would only answer, ‘No, just go on like that.’
One could sense Shostakovich’s real agitation during these rehearsals. I attribute this to the fact that he particularly valued this Symphony. I had known Shostakovich over thirty years, but I never saw him in such a state of excitement. He was like a small boy completely carried away by his passions.
We experienced many difficulties with the first performance. Initially we were not allowed to perform the Symphony. As often happened in the Soviet Union, nobody actually forbade the performance, but, by withholding a performance space, the officials succeeded in temporarily implementing a ban. Then some big-wig decided that it would be better if the first performance were not given in public. We were allocated the Small Hall of the Conservatoire for a ‘closed’ concert. Special invitation tickets were issued to a select audience.
This performance took place on 21 June. The orchestra and I were on stage, ready to start, when Shostakovich got up to address the audience. He talked about the nature of the Symphony. He stood below in the stalls; he didn’t want to come on stage at that point. Miroshnikova and Vladimirov sang the solo parts, and Galya Vishnevskaya sat in the front row of the audience.
It was during the performance that Pavel Apostolov8 died. While we were playing, I heard a noise. Well, I thought to myself, some noise in the hall, it’s something that happens during concerts. We went on playing. Afterwards I was told that somebody felt unwell and had been carried out. Apostolov died almost at once. Afterwards, Shostakovich appeared backstage chewing his fingernails (he had the habit of biting his nails when he was nervous).
‘I didn’t want that to happen, I didn’t want that.’
He of course knew exactly who it was that had died. There was a terrible symbolic coincidence in the death of the man who, in effect, had been Shostakovich’s persecutor for years on end.
Solzhenitsyn was at that first ‘closed’ performance in Moscow. I was told afterwards that he had said that the Finale lacked ‘light’. But I don’t think that this was an issue between him and Shostakovich, as has been claimed. It is more a question of one’s own religious and aesthetic outlook. It is true that in Mahler’s symphonies, for instance, there is a lot of light in the Finales. But Mahler was deeply religious, whereas Shostakovich was not. Shostakovich portrayed reality in his work.
The official premieres of the Fourteenth Symphony took place a few months later, at the end of September, first in Leningrad and then in Moscow. During the summer vacation Shostakovich wrote to me saying that there was a wonderful opportunity to perform the Symphony at the Hall of the Leningrad Cappella.
At the end of August, when we were all back in Moscow after our holidays, Dmitri Dmitriyevich rang me up and asked if I would go to see him at once.
‘Rudolf Borisovich, I’m terribly agitated.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘Come at once – I’ll explain everything.’
I hurried to his home to find him in a ghastly state. He was a bundle of nerves. He implored me, ‘Rudolf Borisovich, release me from these terrible intrigues between the soprano soloists. They’re torturing me. They came to see me, one of them shrieking, the other weeping. They both want to perform the official premiere. Miroshnikova claims that she was the first to learn the part and has already given a performance. Well, that’s true of course. And as for Vishnevskaya, well, you understand the situation, you understand the situation.’
‘Why don’t we have two casts of singers, like in opera houses, so if one were to fall ill, the other would stand in,’ I suggested.
‘What a wonderful idea, a wonderful idea, that’s what we’ll do.’
So it was that both in Leningrad and in Moscow there were two premieres, one concert immediately following the other, with two sets of singers. Vishnevskaya and Mark Reshetin9 were the soloists in the first of the two concerts, Miroshnikova and Vladimirov in the second.
But the first recording was made with Miroshnikova singing, rather than Vishnevskaya. This happened because Shostakovich wanted a recording made as soon as possible. He was convinced that he did not have long to live, and he wanted to have the Symphony on record immediately. He himself rang the Melodiya record company to make the arrangements. Unfortunately Vishnevskaya was busy for the next six months, so the record was made with Miroshnikova as soprano soloist.10
The violinist MARK LUBOTSKY first met Shostakovich in 1955, but he never had more than a passing acquaintance with the composer. Like the majority of Soviet musicians, Lubotsky regarded every new work by Shostakovich as an event, and attended as many performances of his works as possible. Here he describes the ‘closed’ premiere of the Fourteenth Symphony:
‘Death is terrifying, there is nothing beyond it. I don’t believe in life beyond the grave.’
That’s what Shostakovich said before the first closed performance of his Fourteenth Symphony in the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire in June 1969. Rudolf Barshai conducted the Moscow Chamber Orchestra. The audience was made up largely of Moscow composers, and students and professors of the Conservatoire.
On my right sat a nice-looking middle-aged lady, an administrator at the Composers’ House, and next to her a shortish somewhat elderly gentleman.
Concluding his brief commentary on the new symphony, Shostakovich quoted from Nikolai Ostrovsky’s novel, How the Steel Was Tempered. The essence of the passage was that one should die with a clear conscience, ‘so that one need not be ashamed of oneself’.
And lastly, before the start of the performance, he asked the audience to remain as quiet as possible as the concert was being recorded. A hush fell on the hall. The sinister symphony of death was played in dead silence. During a passage of intensely quiet music in the fifth movement, ‘On Your Guard’, suddenly a chair seat closed abruptly with a loud bang. The elderly man sitting next to the lady at my side jumped to his feet and hurriedly rushed out of the hall, not so much as glancing round. She whispered to me, ‘What a bastard. He tried to destroy Shostakovich in 1948, but he failed. He still hasn’t given up, and he’s gone and wrecked the recording on purpose.’
‘Who is he?’ I enquired.
‘Apostolov,’ she whispered in reply. In 1948 Apostolov was a member of the music department of the Central Committee; he was a notorious persecutor of Shostakovich.
When the Symphony was over, the first people to come out of the audience saw ambulance men carrying a body out of the building on a stretcher. Apostolov had had a heart attack while the music was still being played. ‘Death is on his guard, think of your conscience,’ the Symphony had been warning us.
The next day I ran into Shostakovich near the entrance of the Union of Composers. I started to tell him what an enormous impression the Fourteenth Symphony had made on me, and I thanked him for it. But he kept repeating, ‘No, it is I who should thank you.’11
Sir Duncan Wilson, the British Ambassador to the Soviet Union at the time, and his wife were in close contact with Benjamin Britten at the time of the writing of the Fourteenth Symphony, often acting as a ‘postbox’ between the English composer and his Russian musician friends. Britten wrote to Wilson in June 1969, asking if the ‘rumours’ of the dedication to him of the Fourteenth Symphony were true. Interestingly enough at the closed performance on 21 June there had been no mention of the dedication, although it was already talked about in musical circles. Duncan Wilson wrote to Britten about the unofficial performance in June, and the ‘mystical’ events connected with it. He and his wife also confirmed the news of the dedication, which of course represented a ‘return of compliments’ after Britten’s dedication of his church parable ‘The Prodigal Son’ to Shostakovich.
Here is Duncan Wilson’s description of the ‘official’ Moscow premiere of the Fourteenth Symphony on 6 October 1969, taken from his letter to Britten dated 9 October (which was sent together with Wilson’s English summary translations of the poems):
It is a very spare, stark and powerful work, of which two sections in particular – the Apollinaire poem about the prisoner and the Russian Decembrist poet Küchelbecker’s lines about the artist unrewarded among knaves and fools – spoke unmistakably and particularly to the condition of Russia today. However I would not dare to say any more about one great composer’s work to another. You will be more interested in hearing something of the setting on this occasion. The big hall of the Conservatoire was packed out, and then some of the students started one of their notable charges on the main staircase. Even though the line of ‘specials’ at the bottom of it held, those who had got through generated enough pressure almost to rush the ticket-collecting ‘babushki’ (very formidable spherical women) at the top, and I was nearly thrown to the ground at their feet before discipline was restored. It is (once out of Lebensgefahr) wonderful to see such enthusiasm! The audience was [from] the real élite of the Moscow artistic world, and gave everyone a great ovation at the end, Barshai and his wonderful orchestra, Galya [Vishnevskaya] (who sang beautifully and acted a good deal, too) and the bass soloist, and of course most of all, Dmitri Shostakovich. He looks much too old for his years and moves stiffly, but came again and again on to the platform – finally by himself. I think we all felt that here was a man who had looked all his eleven aspects of death in the face, and many other mysteries as well, and it was intensely moving to think of the difficulties he has overcome to produce his great works and to feel how much this is appreciated by his countrymen.12
While the enormous public success of the symphony was undisputed, there remained the question of gaining the work ideological acceptance. Shostakovich himself gave very little away about the meaning of the symphony. His public statements served most of all to deflect attention from the themes he had tackled in the symphony. Duncan Wilson in a postscript to his above-quoted letter to Britten reported that:
The concert programme included quite a long analysis of the new work. The introductory part of this clearly anticipates official criticism of [the symphony’s] negative character and takes the line roughly that such a series of protests is proof of a very ‘positive’ attitude to life, all in accordance with the humanism that informs D.S.’s work throughout, and in contrast to the ‘passive Christian acceptance’ of death. I gather that this is the line taken on occasion by D.S. himself, and hope (without much faith) that it will succeed in getting the new symphony firmly into the Soviet repertoire.13
At the closed performance of 21 June Shostakovich had identified the moral behind the work as an injunction to the living to live in such a way as to die with a clear conscience. He polemicized with composers like Verdi and Britten who offered consolation through serenity and light.
To satisfy the honour of socialist realism, Shostakovich offered a ‘safe’ traditional interpretation of the symphony’s structure, pointing to a schematic division into four main parts, grouping the movements as follows: 1–4, 5–6, 7–8, and 9–11.14
Krzysztof Meyer proposes a five-part division, which is adopted (although with a different ordering) in Levon Hakobian’s tentative hypothesis that this neatly matches the structure of the liturgical Requiem Mass.15 The Russian musicologist Henry Orlov, writing immediately after Shostakovich’s death, identified the Fourteenth Symphony as an ‘Anti-Requiem’ which ‘speaks not so much of death itself but of the endless agonies of dying’.16
In all probability this came closer to Shostakovich’s perception of the prospect of his own inevitable slow physical death. He had concluded the spoken introduction at the closed performance of 21 June 1969 with these words: ‘Death awaits us all. I do not see anything good about such an end to our lives, and this is what I am trying to convey in my work.’17
Many members of the Russian intelligentsia took issue with the uncompromising bleakness of this view, and the complete rejection of religious consolation. In particular Rilke’s words in the final movement ‘Death is all-powerful’ caused great offence, and Shostakovich was accused of betraying the Russian’s mystic belief in eternal life in this Symphony bereft of light and hope.
Amongst those who allegedly disagreed with Shostakovich’s position was the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Irina Shostakovich remembers the writer expressing his outrage in a letter to Shostakovich over the composer’s inclusion of Apollinaire’s poem ‘In the Santé Jail’, where he pointed out that Apollinaire had spent only a few days in prison, and his sufferings were as nothing when compared to those of the millions who had languished in Soviet prisons and camps.18
Another point of view is postulated by Grigori Kozintsev, who believed that life-affirming forces shine through the most tragic and grotesque elements of Shostakovich’s music: ‘Even in the face of extreme horror, what one hears is not the victory of darkness and death, but the victory of creativity.’19
The conductor THOMAS SANDERLING was born in Leningrad, but returned with his family to East Germany in 1960 aged eighteen. There he completed his studies and started his career. In 1969 he was invited to conduct the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra in the Soviet Union. Shostakovich attended Sanderling’s concert in Moscow, and invited him to his home:
The first thing that struck me about Dmitri Dmitriyevich was the immense power which emanated from him. I remembered this quality from my childhood; it is something I have never encountered before or since. Anyone who came into contact with Shostakovich could not but be intensely aware of being in the presence of a person of great spiritual purity and moral fibre. Shostakovich had an almost hypnotic effect on people. I myself felt virtually paralysed during the first hour of my visit to his Moscow apartment. There was nothing imposing about his exterior, and no affectation in the way he was dressed. But a sort of magical stillness surrounded him.
What Shostakovich actually said during my visit had less importance than my awareness of his presence, which I experienced as a unique phenomenon. By then, he was already suffering from illness and spoke very little, and mainly about music. At the end of the visit he gave me the scores of his Thirteenth and Fourteenth Symphonies, both inscribed to me. At this point, Dmitri Dmitriyevich remained silent, and I felt some reaction was expected from me. I asked him tentatively if he would permit me to perform these works. He agreed, and, by giving his approval, he granted me the right to the first German language performances of these two vocal symphonies.
Shostakovich always insisted that vocal texts should be performed in the language of the audience. He used to say, ‘You understand, it is absolutely awful when you hear everybody at the concert turning their programme pages simultaneously.’ This detail was an additional reason for him to ensure that comprehension of words was direct and did not necessitate printed translations.
And so our working contact started. For instance, as one of the poems in the Fourteenth Symphony by Rilke was a Russian translation of the original German poem, Dmitri Dmitriyevich was very curious to know if the music would fit the original text. Because Russian, unlike German, has no articles, we found that we needed more notes for the amount of syllables. Shostakovich agreed to add the necessary extra notes for this original German text.
I approached the East German poetess, Waltraut Levine, who specialized in translating opera librettos. I started by providing her with a literal word for word working translation of the Russian verse, which she then polished. In the original Russian Shostakovich often added an accent to create a special effect, so as to emphasize a particular word or syllable. The musical effect, whether it is made through an accent, a tremolo, or orchestral colouring, loses its meaning if it is not retained in translation. So certain words had to remain on certain notes. We took a lot of trouble to get this right.
After my performance of the Fourteenth Symphony in East Berlin, I sent a tape from the concert to Dmitri Dmitriyevich. Shortly afterwards Shostakovich came to Berlin and rang me.20
‘Thomas, this is Shostakovich. Are you free now? It would be wonderful if you would come and visit us, or better still, we’ll come to visit you.’
And literally within the space of an hour he and his wife, Irina Antonovna, had arrived at our doorstep. He first of all asked my mother to show him around the flat. He was curious to know where the kitchen was.
‘Where’s the kitchen, where’s the kitchen? The kitchen must be comfortable, that’s important.’
There was something very touching about his attention to such details, a sign of his caring attitude towards people. I can therefore believe what is said about his answering every letter ever sent to him, however trivial. This punctiliousness was no mannerism, but the essence of his nature.
At the end of this visit to Berlin, it was arranged that I would give the first performance of the Thirteenth Symphony in East Germany. It must be remembered that, as East Germany completely depended on Moscow for ‘guidance’, it had not yet been possible to perform this symphony there. And indeed, the Thirteenth Symphony, after the Moscow premiere, was virtually banned from performance within the Soviet Union, and hence in all East European countries as well. Even Kurt Mazur, with his dynamic energy, had been unable to procure permission to play the Thirteenth Symphony with the Gewandhaus.
However, I knew a wonderful woman, Ruth Brennecke, from the East Berlin Radio, who was able to organize the performance. Knowing that Shostakovich was to return to Berlin for the opening night of the production of Katerina Izmailova at the Staatsoper,21 she planned the performance of the Thirteenth Symphony to take place immediately afterwards. The officials were delighted, as they had forgotten to check the status of the Symphony with Moscow, and assumed that this would be a great honour. In other words, they were bluffed into permitting an event of great musical importance, which could have carried ‘dangerous’ political overtones.22
Shostakovich’s last years were plagued by health problems, yet his indomitable urge to compose fuelled his tenacity to life. Shostakovich preferred composing at his own dacha at Zhukovka or in the comfortable and peaceful surroundings of the Composers’ Retreats at Repino outside Leningrad or at Dilizhan in Armenia. But he was able to write music under almost any circumstances, even while staying in clinics and hospitals.
Shostakovich had read about the remarkable story of Valery Brumel, a world-record high jumper and member of the Soviet Olympic team, who had injured his leg in an accident. Surgeons in Moscow performed fourteen operations, but were unable to help him. A form of treatment developed by the orthopaedic surgeon Gavriil Ilizarov, known as osteo-synthesis, produced amazing results, saving limbs, lengthening bones and straightening out deformations. In Ilizarov’s orthopaedic clinic in Kurgan, a small town east of the Urals, Brumel recovered (after three years spent on crutches) and was able to return to sport.
Shostakovich now placed all his hopes on the magical powers of Dr Ilizarov. He informed Isaak Glikman in early January 1969 that he hoped that Ilizarov would return the ‘working use of my right hand’.23 In a further letter dated 1 February 1969, he states that, unlike Brumel, he has no desire to jump: ‘But I want to be able to climb on to a bus or a tram. I want not to cringe with terror as I step on to an escalator in the metro (Underground). I want to be able to walk up and down stairs easily. My wishes are quite modest.’24
When his illness was diagnosed at the end of that year as poliomyelitis, Shostakovich wrote pessimistically to Glikman from his hospital bed that Ilizarov’s course of therapy could not be expected to help this condition.25 However, Dr Ilizarov decided that, on the contrary, the composer would profit from intensive treatment at his Kurgan orthopaedic clinic. Hence Shostakovich spent two long periods in 1970 in Kurgan under Ilizarov’s care, from 27 February to 9 June, and from 27 August to 27 October. He went back on a third, shorter visit for further treatment in June 1971.
The strenuous regime in the Kurgan orthopaedic clinic included massage and physiotherapy, gymnastic exercises and medication. Shostakovich was extremely impressed by the positive effect Ilizarov had on his patients, as much through his personality as his treatments. Maxim Shostakovich recalled some of his father’s stories about his stay at the Kurgan clinic: ‘With him in the hospital were many children with undeveloped or stunted limbs. [Father] saw these children playing ball. While they were playing they were absolutely happy, and forgot about their pain and handicap, they did not even feel them; all one heard was their laughter and joyful shouts.’26 A small boy, Serezha, befriended the composer, and on occasion would come into his ward and ask Shostakovich for a game of ball, to which he would willingly agree.27
By mid-April Shostakovich was already feeling the benefits of the cure. On 11 May 1970 he reported to Glikman, ‘My achievements are manifold: I can play the piano, walk up and down stairs, climb on to a bus (true, with difficulty)…. I can use my right hand to shave, do up my buttons. I don’t miss my mouth with my spoon.’28 Ilizarov had given him back not only physical strength in his limbs, but hopes for the recovery of his well-being.
During this period, despite great fatigue from the treatment, Shostakovich started work on the music for Kozintsev’s film King Lear and wrote Loyalty, settings of Dolmatovsky’s patriotic ballads for unaccompanied male choir. In between his two courses of treatment Shostakovich completed the music for King Lear and his Thirteenth Quartet.
Encouraged by the good results, the composer spoke about his renewed capacity for work, and even of the possibility of resuming his pianistic activity. However, this respite was relatively short-lived. Two months after completing his Fifteenth Symphony in July 1971, the composer suffered a second heart attack. It seemed that all that had been achieved under Ilizarov’s regime was wasted, and Shostakovich’s weak condition excluded resuming any of the physical exercises that made up an essential part of the treatment. From then onwards, it became increasingly difficult for Shostakovich to walk and write, and more and more he suffered the humiliation of his debilitating condition.
MSTISLAV ROSTROPOVICH introduced Shostakovich to Ilizarov, and lent his support to the building of an extension to the special orthopaedic clinic in Kurgan:
As Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s illness advanced he expressed a desire to have treatment from Doctor Ilizarov in his clinic in the Urals, in the town of Kurgan. Dr Ilizarov had achieved incredible things with patients suffering from a variety of bone complaints, and Dmitri Dmitriyevich said that in his belief this was the only doctor who could help him.
I was able to organize this contact for him, and then I helped gather money for the clinic. As a volunteer unpaid day worker (a ‘Leninist subbotnik’ or Saturday worker), I also helped to build the second storey of the new hospital that Ilizarov was building then. During the months that Dmitri Dmitriyevich was having treatment, I came to Kurgan to give some concerts with the Sverdlovsk Philharmonic. I made an appeal to the orchestra to join me in this enterprise, and so with this volunteer force we virtually finished building the second storey of the clinic in a day. I personally built the toilet on the second floor. I insisted that we were given 200 pairs of gloves with our bricks and cement, saying that if any harm was done to the musicians’ hands, the local party organization would be held responsible. We had an instructor with us, of course, otherwise the whole building would have collapsed. But we all worked hard, and for two days afterwards my back was completely rigid.
My purpose in organizing these concerts in Kurgan with the Sverdlovsk Orchestra was to perform Shostakovich’s music, so that people there would know who Shostakovich was. In the end, I played so many concerts in Kurgan that I bored everybody to tears. When people saw me carrying my cello on the street, they quickly crossed to the other side. But Dmitri Dmitriyevich knew what I was doing and appreciated my efforts on his behalf.29
GRIGORI KOZINTSEV started work on his film King Lear in the autumn of 1969. He invited Shostakovich to write the music, and met him early in the New Year of 1970 to discuss the project:
We were speaking in the study of Cottage number 20 in Repino, where in the past we had slaved over Hamlet. How much better the cottage looks now – new carpets and furniture, a sideboard with a tea set and crystal glasses edged in gold.
And how much worse Shostakovich looks. He limps, and can no longer play his music. He has been ill for a long time. His hand has shrivelled up, his bones are brittle … The surgeon from Kurgan has cured Brumel’s leg. Dmitri Dmitriyevich wants to go to him.
‘Do you know,’ said one of the world’s most famous people, ‘all over this country people are trying to get into his clinic. But, you know, fortunately I’ve found a sponsor: Dolmatovsky has arranged for me to go to him.’
We decided on the first musical piece. The theme is grief, misfortune. That’s how we’ll start our work on King Lear.30
*
[Repino, July 1970]
Dmitri Dmitriyevich walks, or rather advances slowly from his cottage to the car, as if all those months of treatment in Kurgan had never happened.
But at the recording of the music [for King Lear], he takes off his jacket, and, full of energy, in a different rhythm, runs up to the conductor with ease, as if he had forgotten about his illness. There’s no canteen, so from nine in the morning till six in the evening he doesn’t eat anything. What kind of strict regime is this?
Next morning he greets me with an exalted quotation, completely untypical of Shostakovich’s normal speech: ‘Music is my soul, as Glinka said, you know. Yesterday I forgot about everything, and, you know, I felt really well. One must be absorbed in one’s work.’
His work, naturally, he performs excellently. I was particularly struck by the introduction to the storm, Lear addressing the sky. The sounds grow, intensify, then recede, and it all starts again. One note, F, remains.
‘There may be few notes,’ says a satisfied Shostakovich, ‘but there’s lots of music.’
We both immediately rejected any form of illustration for the storm. The forces of evil break out into liberty, celebrating and exulting in victory.31
FLORA LITVINOVA recalls her last meeting with Shostakovich:
My last conversation with Dmitri Dmitriyevich took place at the House of Creativity at Ruza sometime in 1970–71.32 Dmitri Dmitriyevich had returned from having treatment at Dr Ilizarov’s clinic with the use of his right hand partially restored. He even tried to play the piano, but he would tire very easily. On that occasion Irina Antonovna had gone to the cinema. Although Dmitri Dmitriyevich did not like to complain, the conversation took a sombre turn. First Dmitri Dmitriyevich spoke of Maxim’s success as a conductor with great pride, how well he performed his symphonies, and what successes he had scored on his tours to the West. ‘But, of course, he doesn’t want to live there. And think how proud Nina would have been of him.’
Then we spoke of the Fourteenth Symphony, and how each of the authors of the texts had undergone personal tragedy.
‘But I myself am not ready to die. I still have a lot of music to write. I don’t like living here at Ruza, I prefer working at home, at the dacha at Zhukovka. But Irina Antonovna gets tired looking after me, and she too needs a rest. Here we are taken care of, and there is nothing to worry about. It’s true that I have to endure those interminable meetings with my colleagues where there is a lot too much talk.’
We remembered how we had seen in the New Year of 1948 here at Ruza.
‘Yes, those were desperate times. Things are a bit easier now; but, goodness, how they managed to contort us, to warp our lives! … You ask if I would have been different without ‘Party guidance’? Yes, almost certainly. No doubt the line that I was pursuing when I wrote the Fourth Symphony would have been stronger and sharper in my work. I would have displayed more brilliance, used more sarcasm, I could have revealed my ideas openly instead of having to resort to camouflage; I would have written more pure music.
‘But I am not ashamed of what I have written, I like all my compositions. “A child may be crippled and lame, but he’s dear to his parents all the same.” And besides that, think how much music I have written for the cinema. It’s not bad either. And it gave me and my family a chance of a reasonable living. But it used up so much of my energy and time … I wrote music to more than thirty films, some of it perfectly decent music. That was possible with directors like Kozintsev and Arnshtam, who understood that the function of music in films is not just accompaniment, but the means of revealing the essence and idea of the film.’33
The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia not only marked a turning point in the thinking of the liberal intelligentsia, but a low point in relations with the outside world. Western governments and press were united in condemning the Soviet use of force and interference in the affairs of another state.
In addition the Soviet leadership now had to contend with the combative spirit of the growing dissident movement, which was learning to fight back in the face of repression. The dissidents’ demands that the regime should at least observe the legitimacy of laws embodied in the Soviet constitution provided them with a powerful weapon. Infringements by the Soviet authorities of their own laws were now documented and publicized through such means as ‘The Chronicle of Current Events’ in samizdat, and later by the Helsinki Watch Groups.
As the Soviet human rights movement grew inexorably, its aim widened to include demands for religious and national freedom, as well as an end to political repression. Soon voices from the scientific community, notably those of Andrei Sakharov and Zhores Medvedyev, joined ranks with the dissenters in order to protest against continuing restraints on freedom of information and damaging authoritarian policies imposed from above.
The Soviet authorities used two basic methods to deal with dissidence. On the one hand they stepped up their campaigns against protestors, using harassment and intimidation, and arresting those who annoyed them on such pretexts as violation of public order or discrediting the Soviet system. In particular an intensified campaign was started against the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970.
At the same time the authorities sought to weaken the dissident movement by removing its most active members from the scene. Such significant figures as Pavel Litvinov, Iosif Brodsky and Vladimir Bukovsky were compelled to leave the country. When Alexander Solzhenitsyn was bundled on to a plane and forced into exile in February 1974, this had far-reaching repercussions. Only a few months later Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya, whose professional activity had been stifled in the wake of their support for the writer, applied for (and were granted) permission to leave the country for a two-year period. In 1978 they were stripped of Soviet citizenship, thereby being forced into exile. If not Solzhenitsyn, Shostakovich surely had his musician friends in mind when he set Michelangelo’s sonnet on Dante, ‘To the Exile’, in his great vocal cycle Op. 145, composed later that year.
A new policy permitting the emigration of Jews to Israel (a loophole through which Russians married to Jews could also leave the country) was implemented simultaneously with these events. Not that the right to emigrate was automatically granted – the authorities could choose to withhold an exit visa, thereby subjecting the would-be emigrants (soon dubbed ‘refuseniks’) to harassment and deprivation of civic rights. Pressure groups at home and in the West fought against the unjust persecution of protesters and refuseniks who languished in Soviet jails or psychiatric wards.
Musicians were amongst those who chose to emigrate (ostensibly to Israel) and seek a better life in the West. They included such diverse figures as the composer Andrei Volkonsky, the conductor Rudolf Barshai and the violinists Mark Lubotsky and Rostislav Dubinsky.
The repressive policies implemented by the Soviet authorities were ultimately counter-productive. Samizdat may have had a limited numerical readership nationwide, but its impact was enormous. On the other hand a large part of the population owned short-wave radio and had access to information through broadcasts of Russian language radio stations (notably the BBC Russian Service, the Voice of America and Svoboda (Freedom)) from the West. Hence, with every year that passed a mood of disenchantment and cynicism became increasingly prevalent at many levels of society.
The Brezhnev era, now dubbed as the period of ‘stagnation’, was marked by a growth of corruption and a consolidation of the Nomenklatura, the enormous class of Party apparatchiks who ruled the bureaucracy. For artists, scientists and all professional people who wished to avoid confrontation and yet to live an ‘honest’ life, these were difficult years. Their problems received less attention from the outside world, but were the cause of constant aggravation at home and at work. With so many of the country’s most eminent figures either forced to emigrate or deprived of the possibility of practising their professions, the rule of mediocrity, if not down-right incompetence, became the order of the day.
By his later years Shostakovich had achieved a position of undisputed fame, and the authorities did not dare touch him. But in his composition and his personal conduct he seemed to retreat more and more into his own inner world.
The argument first mooted in the West by Solomon Volkov34 that Shostakovich consciously took on the role of ‘Yurodivy’, or holy fool, has gained acceptance in certain quarters. The ‘holy fool’, who protests ‘in the name of humanity, and not in the name of political changes’,35 was long recognized in Russia as having the historical right to expose evil. His use of arcane symbols or simplistic parables to express the truth was later adapted to the conditions of Soviet Russia, where every statement could have more than one message. However, instead of aiming to create a meaningful paradox, the modern yurodivy revealed the truth at the level of the ‘sub-text’, making this apparent by deliberately communicating banalities on the surface level. This concept shaped Russian cultural consciousness during the years of totalitarian rule.
Shostakovich of course was a master of subtext and Aesopean language in his music. He was fully aware of any weaknesses in his ‘public’ behaviour, and he justified his inability to voice disagreement or protest to the authorities through the motto of ‘rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s’.36 This in turn led to periodic moods of self-castigation, when he upbraided himself for not having lived his life better.37 A clue to this can be found in his frank admission to his favourite pupil Boris Tishchenko that Chekhov’s description of the weak-willed Doctor Andrey Efimovich Ragin (in Ward Number Six) could apply to him: ‘Particularly in regard to [Ragin’s] reception of patients, his signing of blatantly falsified accounts, or when he “thinks” and much else besides.’38
Some years back Shostakovich had sharply rebuked Tishchenko, when he had complained about the ‘moralizing’ aspect in Evtushenko’s poetry:
You don’t like him breathing down your back and pontificating: ‘Don’t steal brass, don’t lie.’ I also know that one must not behave like this, and I try not to. But I don’t find it tedious to hear such instruction an extra time. [You say,] ‘Maybe Christ spoke about this better’ – indeed he probably spoke better than anybody else. But this does not deprive Pushkin, L. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Bach, Mahler and Mussorgksy and many others the right to raise the issue. Furthermore I think it is their duty to speak about this, as it is Evtushenko’s. […] Moral is the sister of conscience. And God be praised that Evtushenko writes about conscience. […] One cannot lose one’s conscience; to lose one’s conscience is to lose everything. And conscience must be instilled from early childhood.39
Shostakovich the composer had absolved his conscience in public through his music. But he was now getting worn down by the trials of illness and the constant pestering demands of Party functionaries for his support of official policies.
For a man of Shostakovich’s sensibilities, turning his back on the whole disgusting spectacle was the best way of avoiding conflict. But in choosing the path of least resistance, he distanced himself from the position of the liberal intelligentsia, who for their part were seeking to shoulder their civic responsibilities and make explicit their demands and challenges to the regime. And it was here, in his failure to lend open support to the human rights movement, that the composer laid himself open to criticism. In his late years, as a public figure, he allowed himself to be manipulated unscrupulously, adding his signature to official letters and making speeches expressing the Party line. Although he participated in these events with obvious cynicism, his reputation as a ‘signer’ became an issue with the liberal community.
Whether Shostakovich actually went as far as physically adding his signature to letters and articles released under his name in the Soviet press is beside the point; but he certainly didn’t bother to disown his signature or disassociate himself from published statements if they did indeed appear without his knowledge or permission. The controversy reached its height in 1973, when his name appeared as a signatory to a letter in Pravda40 denouncing Andrei Sakharov. That he regretted this act, there can be no doubt. He was called to task by Lydia Chukovskaya and given the cold shoulder by many colleagues.
One should remember that in the past Shostakovich had intervened privately on behalf of many, many people. In the mid-1960s he had petitioned the Leningrad authorities in person on behalf of Iosif Brodsky. Through Shostakovich’s efforts (together with those of S. Marshak, K. Chukovsky, V. Admoni and E. Edkind) the poet’s sentence was reduced from five years to eighteen months of exile.41 And in 1966 Shostakovich was a signatory (with the writers Kornei Chukovsky, Konstantin Paustovsky, and the academician Pyotr Kapitsa, amongst others) of a letter to the Central Committee demanding that Solzhenitsyn should be given proper living conditions so that he could continue his literary activity.
On the other hand, two years later, when Solzhenitsyn wished to round up signatories for a condemnation of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, he initially thought of calling on various eminent personalities, including Shostakovich and Kapitsa. But he soon changed his mind, realizing that, despite the fact that these men sought social contact with him, they would never bring themselves to sign such an uncompromising denunciation. Their outlook on life had been formed under different circumstances: ‘The shackled genius Shostakovich would thrash about like a wounded thing, clasp himself with tightly folded arms so that his fingers could not hold a pen.’42
Shostakovich had an uneasy relationship with those who had chosen the road of open protest, thereby risking if not imprisonment at least harassment at work for themselves and their families. When Solzhenitsyn moved into Rostropovich’s little guest house at Zhukovka, the two great men became neighbours, but did not form a friendship. Irina Shostakovich remembers how Solzhenitsyn paid a visit to their home to express his anger over a statement demanding the release from prison of the Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis that had appeared in the press with Shostakovich’s signature. Allegedly the writer felt outraged that the composer had never remonstrated in public against the illegal detention of thousands of prisoners within his own country – by comparison Theodorakis’s case hardly merited attention. Apparently in this instance Shostakovich was not guilty: he was in hospital, and therefore would have been unable to add his signature to this published statement.43
Irina Shostakovich also recalls how, in order to escape the imminent arrival of a pestering official, she and Dmitri Dmitriyevich spent the whole day away from home, visiting the cinema, seeing one old film after another. But their efforts were in vain; shortly after their return home late at night, the door-bell rang and the unwelcome official appeared with the document ready for signature.44 Shostakovich was not one to argue, and in such cases conceded quickly to the request.
GALINA VISHNEVSKAYA gives her view on the political position adopted by Shostakovich:
Although Shostakovich knew he was considered a leader among musicians, he could not fail to see that he was being reproached by those who felt he had declined the political struggle. He saw that people expected him to speak out openly, to fight for his soul and creative freedom as Solzhenitsyn had done.
[ …]
He often told us when we erupted over yet another injustice, ‘Don’t waste your efforts. Work, play. You’re living here, in this country, and you must see everything as it really is. Don’t create illusions. There’s no other life. There can’t be any. Just be thankful that you’re still allowed to breathe!’ He felt that we were all participants in the farce. And having agreed to be a clown, one might as well play that role to the final curtain.
Once he had made his decision, Shostakovich unabashedly followed the rules of the game. He made statements in the press and at meetings; he signed ‘letters of protest’ that, as he himself said, he never read. He didn’t worry about what people would say of him, because he knew the time would come when the verbiage would fade away, when only his music would remain. And his music would speak more vividly than any words. His only real life was his art, and into it he admitted no one. It was his temple: when he entered it, he threw off his mask and was what he was.45
SERGEI SLONIMSKY recalls an embarrassing blunder in a press article signed by Shostakovich:
Shostakovich hardly ever wrote the texts of his articles and speeches.46 Once, in the middle of the 1960s, one of his ‘editors’ carelessly made an ass of him with a real howler. An article signed by Shostakovich appeared in Pravda. It was directed against the musical avant-garde, and came out with the memorable statement: ‘I am unable to distinguish Boulez’s music from that of Stuckenschmidt, they sound so similar.’ But Stuckenschmidt was a musicologist. The anonymous ghost-writer had evidently muddled him with Stockhausen.
At a meeting of the Composers’ Union, V. Ferré started quoting this article in exalted tones. Shostakovich’s face darkened, and he got up and left the Presidium for the wings of the stage. Stuckenschmidt himself reacted with astonishment in the West German press: ‘I did indeed write music in my youth, but never showed it to anybody. How did Mr Shostakovich discover it?’ This provoked a rare occurrence – Pravda admitted its mistake. In one of the next issues the error was corrected with this clumsy phrase: ‘the music promoted by the musicologist Stuckenschmidt in his articles …’
Another, even more preposterous mistake appeared in Pravda in 1971 through my fault. Reviewing Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Quartet, I wrote saying that it was dedicated ‘to the memory of the viola player, V. Borisovsky’. But Vadim Borisovsky was alive and in good health; simply, he had retired and no longer played in the Beethoven Quartet. I was at the time in a state of great depression; I had just discovered that my father had cancer and was near to death. I was also influenced by Isaak Glikman’s emotional exclamations on the gloomy nature of the music: ‘It’s a requiem!’
When I recovered my presence of mind, I rushed about sending telegrams and letters of apology to the newspaper, to Shostakovich and to Borisovsky in person. I swore never to write another review, a promise I have kept to this day. In reply I received from Dmitri Dmitriyevich a wonderfully kind and tactful letter, in which he advised me not to pay too much attention ‘to the slip of the pen’, and reminded me with characteristic humour of Mark Twain and his announcement that ‘the rumours of my death are exaggerated …’ He was able to reassure me in respect of Borisovsky’s feelings.
In the next issue of Pravda, as a sort of ‘refutation’ of this error, a short communication signed by Borisovsky himself was published which stated that he vigorously objected to the machinations of the Zionists in Palestine. This ridiculous statement was the newspaper’s way of informing its readers that Borisovsky was indeed alive.47
EDISON DENISOV claims that Shostakovich’s cynicism allowed him to sign press articles and Party statements, even while disassociating himself from these actions. He also saw how the composer was subjected to humiliating public censure as a result:
Shostakovich signed many letters mostly without so much as reading them through. There were certain things in life that he regarded very cynically. In particular, he never so much as glanced at the articles that were published in Pravda and Sovietskaya Muzyka under his name. I once asked him how he could have signed a certain article that appeared in Pravda. I knew the person who had written it and it stated: ‘I cannot distinguish between the music of Boulez, Henze and Stuckenschmidt.’
Shostakovich replied, ‘Edik, at twelve thirty at night the door bell rang. I had already gone to bed and was asleep. They had brought this article from Pravda which was to be printed in the morning edition. I was meant to read it and sign it there and then. All I wanted was to sleep. I had had enough of all this ages ago, so I just signed the thing there and then and went back to sleep.’
All these articles that people attribute to him of course were not written by him. I once asked him why he did not write his memoirs, and he said, ‘Edik, I am not a writer, I am not a writer.’ He didn’t like writing. True, in his youth he did write some articles, but I don’t believe he ever wrote anything after 1936.
The worst instance was his letter against Sakharov. I felt that he had every right to refuse to write or sign such a letter, in fact he was duty bound not to do so. Why he did so is incomprehensible to me.
This gave rise to certain scenes which I found very painful to witness. For instance, when my La Vie en Rouge48 was performed at the Composers’ Union, Dmitri Dmitriyevich came and sat at the end of a row in the middle of the hall. Everybody had to pass by him to get to their seats. When Yuri Lyubimov went by, Dmitri Dmitriyevich got up to greet him. It was difficult for him to get up; he could hardly walk and then only with the aid of a stick. Struggling to his feet he approached Lyubimov with hand outstretched. But Lyubimov looked him in the eye and, turning away, demonstratively sat down on his own. Shostakovich went white.
I asked Lyubimov, ‘Why did you do such a thing?’
He answered: ‘After Shostakovich signed that letter against Sakharov I can’t shake his hand.’
There were many others who felt the same way.
Incidentally, this was the last time that Shostakovich attended a performance of a work of mine. I was very touched when he rang me the next morning: ‘Edik, I congratulate you on a remarkable work born in your house.’
I remember the last time we met at the Composers’ House in Ruza about five years before his death. Dmitri Dmitriyevich always returned to one and the same theme: ‘In my youth we were brought up on the Ten Commandments: “Don’t kill; Don’t steal; Don’t commit adultery.” But nowadays there exists only one commandment: “Don’t sully the purity of Marxist–Leninist teaching.”’
In general, during the last years I found the people who flocked around Shostakovich extremely unpleasant. They took advantage of his kindness. It resembled the situation during the last years of Lev Tolstoy’s life, when a pack of jackals panted around the great man, waiting to divide up the remains after his death. This was one of the reasons I didn’t see much of Dmitri Dmitriyevich in those last years.
However, in 1974 he rang me up to invite me to the premiere of The Nose at the Moscow Chamber Opera. He said, ‘Edik, I very much want you to attend the premiere. But don’t judge me harshly – these are the sins of my youth, the sins of my youth!’ I said that I would gladly go and pick up the tickets, but he interrupted me, ‘Don’t worry about that. Irina Antonovna has already left to deliver them to you. She’ll be at your place in five minutes.’ And indeed five minutes later the doorbell rang and Irina Antonovna was there with two tickets. In this respect, Dmitri Dmitriyevich was impeccably attentive towards people; his punctiliousness was remarkable.
When all is said and done, I value Shostakovich first and foremost as an outstanding musical personality. He of course was more than just a remarkable composer; he possessed a unique and deeply impressive personality. He never struck poses and was always himself. It is true that our ways drifted apart and I became increasingly indifferent to his music. But Shostakovich is very dear to me, and I continue to love the man and admire his music, despite the passage of time.49
Yuri Lyubimov founded the Taganka Theatre in 1963. With its small intimate space, the theatre soon became a focus for artistic experiment and lively intellectual argument. Lyubimov’s provocative productions were barely tolerated by the officials. But the public responded to his direct theatrical style, urgently communicated by a school of powerful actors, and the Taganka immediately acquired enormous popularity. Its principal actor, poet and song-writer, Vladimir Vysotsky, acquired a cult status amongst Soviet youth and later became the Theatre’s chief attraction. Here YURI LYUBIMOV recalls Shostakovich’s connection with his theatre.
Shostakovich used to come to my Taganka Theatre. I asked him to write music for my production of The Fallen and the Alive, which was based on poetry by Pasternak and Tvardovsky and also on that of poets who had lost their lives during the War – Kogan, Kulchitsky. He didn’t have time to write a special score, but very generously he said, ‘Use any music of mine you like.’ He must have trusted me because he never objected to the way I used his music.
When I put on Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo I asked Dmitri Dmitriyevich for permission to use the music he had written for the Vakhtangov Theatre production of Hamlet. I wanted to use the theme of the Royal Hunt in a different context. It seemed to me to express very well Galileo’s hope for change. He made no objections. I don’t think it was mere politeness on his part, he could see that the music worked well in the new context. I always urged him to tell me if he disagreed with my use of his music. But he never complained, which never ceased to amaze me.
Shostakovich often came to see my productions with his wife Irina. He was always very nervous, and in later years he was too ill to climb the stairs to my office. He would wait downstairs and ask me to take him to his seat before the audience arrived. He couldn’t stand the crush and didn’t like talking to strangers. He always thanked me after the show: ‘Very good, very good. Very interesting.’
He came to see my production of Tartuffe, where I used music from his Thirteenth Symphony (from the second movement, ‘Humour’) played considerably speeded-up. I was afraid it would make him angry. But he said, ‘Splendid, splendid. Very original.’
Once the Minister of Culture, Ekaterina Furtseva, commissioned me and Shostakovich to organize a gala concert at the Kremlin Palace of Congresses for an anniversary of Lenin’s birthday. I suggested that we start with Wagner’s ‘Twilight of the Gods’. Dmitri Dmitriyevich got very excited. I went to see him at his dacha and we went for a walk in the woods. He said: ‘It’s a fantastic idea to start with “The Twilight of the Gods”…. You go ahead and do it, but I’ll have to excuse myself. I just can’t take part in all of this.’ He simply couldn’t overcome his disgust on such occasions. He said to me, ‘You must do it, otherwise they’ll take your theatre away from you.’ It all goes to show how painful all this activity was to him and what scars and traumas it left on him.
Once he signed a letter against Sakharov. I was very upset. One night at the theatre, just after this letter appeared in the press, they told me that Shostakovich was waiting downstairs. I refused to go down and see him as usual. However, later I felt guilty and decided to show him to his seat. I thought he must be miserable enough without my censorious demonstrations. But he sensed my disapproval.50
Shostakovich started sketching the Fifteenth Symphony in April 1971. According to Isaak Glikman, the first movement was written in Kurgan during June of that year.51 Shostakovich spent the whole of July in Repino, where he completed the full score of the symphony on 29 July 1971.
The Fifteenth Symphony represents a summing-up, a sort of retrospective glance over a musical lifetime, extending into the realm of memory through the numerous quotations (not to mention self-quotation) from composers as diverse as Rossini and Wagner. In this final symphony Shostakovich returned to a purely instrumental work in traditional four-movement form, which picked up threads with the Ninth and Tenth Symphonies. In another sense the composer had come back full circle to his First Symphony.
It is an enigmatic work full of stylistic paradox, starting with the disproportionate contrast between the youthful vigour and the deceptive light-heartedness of the shorter first and third movements and the tragic power of the much longer second and fourth movements. The philosophical centrepiece of the work undoubtedly lies in the second movement, a tragic and introspective ‘Adagio’ which casts a long shadow on the rest of the work. The duality of tonal and atonal harmonical functions in the music is achieved without conflict, and an overall sense of equilibrium of structural material is preserved throughout.
In the integrity of the musical intent, the Fifteenth Symphony seemingly avoids deliberately coded messages, and the quotations, raided from a bewildering diversity of sources, serve rather as associative signals devoid of parody. Yet all the extraneous material is so naturally assimilated and woven into the fabric of Shostakovich’s music that even the most recognizable of quotations (such as Rossini’s William Tell Overture in the first movement, or his own Seventh Symphony’s ‘Invasion’ theme in the finale) seem stylistically his own. The opening of the finale is such a case in point: after an introduction based on the Wagnerian ‘Fate’ leitmotiv, the yearning ‘Tristan’ motif in the violins52 dissolves effortlessly into a nostalgic melody borrowed from a Glinka song. A haunting effect is produced by the two eerie discords which together form a vertical eleven-note tone-row (with a twelfth repeated note). First heard in the second movement, they return in the finale like phantoms from another world. The symphony has the air of a valedictory statement, where Shostakovich appears to transcend his inner experience, distilling it into musical substance of unique transparency.
Shostakovich afforded few clues as to the symphony’s meaning during his lifetime. His descriptions of the first movement as a toyshop, a picture of a childhood with unclouded skies,53 or as a protest against death54 all serve more to confuse than clarify. In fact there is as much of the enfant terrible as the innocent child in the music, particularly when one remembers how certain elements, like the inventive use of percussion, were borrowed from the composer’s early works (The Nose and the repressed Fourth Symphony), which for decades had been the object of official disapproval.
VENYAMIN BASNER talks about Shostakovich’s composition process with particular reference to the Fifteenth Symphony:
Very often, just before reaching the end of a work Shostakovich would get stuck. But suddenly, the right solution would come to him, and he would then complete the work very quickly. On these occasions, he was as happy as a child. I think the moments just after completing a composition were the best of his life.
A case in question is the Fifteenth Symphony. Dmitri Dmitriyevich had already written three movements when he came to stay at the Composers’ Union Retreat in Repino. I also have a dacha at Repino and so we were neighbours. While we lived in Repino we religiously observed a little ritual. We both spent the mornings working. Then I would go to his cottage at one o’clock, and we went for a short walk before lunching together. We would buy a measure of vodka, and enjoyed a small drink with our lunch. We also used to listen to the BBC Russian Service. These programmes were transmitted on the radio at 1.45 p.m. Dmitri Dmitriyevich only let it be known to his most intimate circle of friends that he listened to the BBC. I was always struck by a detail, typical of his punctiliousness: after listening, he was always careful to tune the radio back to the bandwave of Radio Moscow – just in case anybody bothered to check!
When he was writing the Finale of the Fifteenth Symphony, he complained that his work was moving very slowly and nothing came to him. Then one day he said, ‘I think, if you don’t mind, we won’t meet today.’ And again the next day he asked me not to come.
I once asked Dmitri Dmitriyevich what time of day he worked best. He answered, ‘When things are going well, then I am driven by the music, as if it were some outside force, and I write all day, at any time of day, morning, noon or night.’ During those days when our meetings were suspended he finished the Finale of the Symphony, locked inside the house, writing day and night. I nevertheless phoned him daily to see if all was well. One morning he answered, ‘Yes, Venya, I think we can go for our walk today.’
I arrived at one o’clock as usual. But Dmitri Dmitriyevich hadn’t quite assessed his time properly. He asked if I wouldn’t mind waiting a few moments. I sat down quietly and watched Dmitri Dmitriyevich write the last few bars of the score and date it.
I must say that it was most instructive to watch Shostakovich compose. Most composers write their scores horizontally, having ruled the bar lines on the manuscript paper. But Dmitri Dmitriyevich never ruled any lines beforehand. He just wrote down a bar at a time, but in vertical order, starting with the piccolo and flute, followed by the oboe and working his way down to the strings at the bottom of the score. Then he got his ruler out and drew in the bar line. I said to him once, ‘Dmitri Dmitriyevich, that’s not a very convenient way of writing, surely it’s easier to write out the parts horizontally with the bar lines ruled in?’
He replied, ‘You know, I also used to do it that way. But once I had written a cadenza passage full of black notes in the clarinet part, and it didn’t fit in to the bar, so I had to rub out everything and write out the whole page again. Since then, I decided to write my scores this way.’
As it was no problem for him to hold the whole of a symphony in his head, he just wrote out his music directly in full score. He never bothered with a piano score and usually didn’t make any preliminary sketches. As far as he made a skeleton outline of a work, it would fit on to one or two lines of manuscript paper. This would be the plan of a whole composition.55
Shostakovich had always enjoyed travelling, a passion shared by his wife, Irina. They spent summer holidays in various locations in the Soviet Union, from the Belovezh forest in Byelorussia (now Belarus) to Irkutsk and Lake Baikal, from Armenia to the Baltic coastal resorts in Latvia and Estonia. However, they did not travel abroad for a period of six years (between 1965 and 1972) because of the enormous stress involved, and no doubt because the composer’s fragile health required him to be within reach of his own doctors.
But from the spring of 1972, notwithstanding a considerable deterioration of his physical condition, Shostakovich (always accompanied by his wife) undertook several trips abroad to attend performances of his works, and to receive honours. The first such visit was made to East Berlin for the first German performance of the Fifteenth Symphony in May 1972, which was followed by a stay in the beautiful Gohrisch sanatorium, where the Eight Quartet had been composed. The following month the Shostakovich couple travelled to Dublin where the composer was awarded an honorary doctorate from Trinity College. On the way back they stopped in London and made what was to be the composer’s only visit to Britten’s home in Aldeburgh. The English composer showed his guest work in progress, the still-uncompleted opera, Death in Venice, which made a strong impression on Shostakovich.
In November 1972 the Shostakoviches returned to London to attend the British premiere of the Fifteenth Symphony conducted by the composer’s son.56 The concert was an intensely moving occasion, with a superb performance of the First Violin Concerto given by Oistrakh in the first half, followed by an inspired rendering of the Fifteenth Symphony by Maxim Shostakovich and the New Philharmonia Orchestra in the second. I well remember the whole audience rising to its feet to greet the visibly frail and anguished composer as he appeared in the royal box at the start of the concert.
Some days earlier, the Shostakoviches had travelled to York to hear the Fitzwilliam Quartet perform the Thirteenth Quartet. The quartet’s viola player ALAN GEORGE recalled that performing this harrowing music was
an irresistibly involving experience: highly charged, fearsomely tense […] I have never witnessed applause of such intensity as when the composer rose uncertainly from his seat and moved ever so slowly towards us. His physical condition was indeed parlous, and the exaggerated trembling of his face and hands were evidence enough that he was completely overcome. When we played some of his earlier quartets to him next morning he was significantly more relaxed, and the sense of direct and private communication with him in that hotel room57 was perhaps even more deeply affecting and influential than the concert itself.58
The Shostakoviches also spent a day in Cambridge at the invitation of Duncan Wilson (now Master of Corpus Christi College), and I was privileged to accompany them on that visit. It was arranged first of all for a car to drive round to the back entrance of King’s College Chapel, so that the ailing composer had only to walk the shortest possible distance to reach its doors. Here he was greeted by David Willcocks, the music director of the famous King’s College Choir. Unfortunately it was not possible to time his visit with a sung service, but a short concert of English vocal music was put on in Corpus Christi Chapel in Shostakovich’s honour. During the day topics of conversation ranged from Purcell to Britten, the chiming of clocks (Shostakovich liked complete synchronization of his time-pieces), and metronome markings and misprints. The composer complained that the New Philharmonia Orchestra’s brass section (and horns in particular) had been too restrained, and had not given their all in the loud sections of the Fifteenth Symphony. Such musicians were usually dubbed as ‘mezzo-fortisti’, a term of abuse invented by Shostakovich for uncommitted and tepid performers. On a free evening in London, we were told, Dmitri and Irina had been to see Jesus Christ Superstar. ‘It has very good music, very good music,’ Shostakovich commented immediately, before anybody had time so much as to raise an eyebrow.
In 1973 further visits abroad included attending a new production of Katerina Izmailova at the Staatsoper in East Berlin. Then during May and June 1973 the Shostakoviches made an extensive trip to the West, which started in Denmark. In Copenhagen the composer attended performances of the Fifteenth Symphony and Katerina Izmailova. He was ceremoniously awarded the Sonning Prize – and once again the Soviet authorities ‘suggested’ that he donate the prize money of 60,000 kroner to a worthy cause (this time to the Soviet Peace Fund). After this Dmitri and Irina set out for New York, crossing the Atlantic on the Soviet liner Mikhail Lermontov. The purpose of the visit was ostensibly to receive an honorary doctorate from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. But another important reason for undertaking this difficult and tiring trip was to gain a second opinion from American doctors on Shostakovich’s condition. It was arranged for him to spend two days under examination at the National Institute of Health at Bethesda, Maryland. The Shostakoviches’ hopes were dealt a severe blow when the specialists delivered their verdict; their diagnosis only confirmed the findings of Soviet doctors, namely that the composer’s illnesses were incurable.
Shostakovich showed remarkable stoicism in the face of what amounted to a death sentence. He lived now to compose, sustained by family and a few loyal friends. Until the end, Shostakovich insisted on writing out his own scores, despite the severe pain he suffered when using his withered and virtually incapacitated right hand.
The string quartets form the most remarkable output of Shostakovich’s last years, where the composer left a legacy comparable in originality and depth of expression to that of Beethoven’s late period. Shostakovich did not live to write twenty-four quartets, one in every key, as he had planned. But it was in this medium, more than any other, that he put his stylistic and philosophical ideas to the test.
The last three quartets are arguably the summit of his achievement, ranging from the dark, death-ridden intensity of the one-movement span of the Thirteenth, and the swings between tender passion and wistful serenity in the Fourteenth, to the distilled utterances of the six awesome elegiac Adagio movements of the Fifteenth.
The Thirteenth Quartet was written for Vadim Borisovsky, the original viola player of the Beethoven Quartet, who had recently retired. Although conceived in August 1969, it was composed a year later, after a period of intensive treatment in the Kurgan orthopaedic clinic. The quartet is connected to the music for Kozintsev’s film of King Lear, which was written at the same time, and it shares the mood of bleak despair in Shakespeare’s tragedy.
After completing the Fifteenth Symphony, Shostakovich underwent an extremely difficult period. His health was shattered by a second heart attack, and as a composer he felt ‘dried up’. Writing to Glikman with a light-hearted irony that barely disguises his real despair, Shostakovich warned:
Look after your health. It’s terrible to lose it. Heart attacks and the like creep up on you unawares. Should you feel that your first measures of vodka afford you no pleasure, that spells trouble. I noticed while in Repino that I got no pleasure from drinking vodka. And that meant a heart attack was on the approach.59
On 16 January 1973 Shostakovich wrote to Glikman in a state of great despondency: ‘I am almost helpless in all daily matters. I am unable to dress or wash myself independently. Some spring has broken within me. Since finishing the Fifteenth Symphony I haven’t composed a single note.’60
When Mravinsky visited him at Repino on 23 March 1973, Shostakovich complained bitterly that his life was a misery, he couldn’t compose and neither was he allowed to drink. Thereupon he suggested breaking the rules and having a vodka together.61 And as had happened on other occasions, the consumption of alcohol seemed to unlock some inhibiting factor that had been blocking the composer’s creative activity.62 The following day Shostakovich embarked on his Fourteenth Quartet, completing it on 23 April, and thereby ending an eighteen-month period of creative silence. The work was dedicated to Sergei Shirinsky, the cellist of the Beethoven Quartet, whom Shostakovich had known since 1926. Whereas in the Thirteenth Quartet the viola is pre-eminent, here the dominant role is given to the cello.
Like the Sixth Quartet, the Fifteenth bears no dedication. It was completed on 17 May 1974. Shostakovich’s last quartet develops ideas from the Thirteenth, rather than its direct predecessor. The Thirteenth Quartet concludes with an extended solo on the viola, a forlorn voice against the second violin’s dry percussive col legno taps.63 For many Russians this is associated with the last act of farewell, the sinister sound of the final nailing down of the coffin lid. In the last bars of the piece the viola is joined by two violins in the final ‘screaming’ high B flat crescendo, leaving the work uneasily suspended in the void.
In the Fifteenth Quartet the idea is taken up and elaborated in the second movement ‘Serenade’. Starting with the same B flat (an octave down), single thrusting crescendo notes are passed between the instruments, spelling out a mixture of Shostakovich’s and Bach’s musical monograms. The E flat minor of the work’s six movements seems relentlessly desolate, but the formal symbolism of a funeral march (the penultimate movement) acquires a mystic significance when it gives way to an epilogue, which, despite retrospective backward glances (the material of the whole quartet is reintroduced fleetingly) marks a transition to a different existentialist sphere.
The Beethoven Quartet started working on the Fifteenth Quartet in the autumn. But when Sergei Shirinsky died after a rehearsal on 18 October, it was decided to give the rights of first performance to the Tanyeev Quartet, who gave the world premiere in Leningrad on 15 November. Nevertheless the honour of the Moscow premiere of the Fifteenth Quartet went to the reformed Beethoven Quartet, who performed it in the Small Hall of the Conservatoire on 11 January 1975. By then Dmitri Tsyganov was the only original founding member left.
Here FYODOR DRUZHININ gives his memories of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Quartets:
For me the Thirteenth Quartet, dedicated to my teacher Borisovsky, occupies a special place in the cycle. Starting with the Ninth Quartet I played all the premieres of the quartets that followed. But the Thirteenth Quartet is a hymn to the viola, giving the viola player a special responsibility.
I wish to recount a small incident which preceded the writing of this quartet. We were recording the Twelfth Quartet (dedicated to Tsyganov) in the church where ‘Melodiya’ had its studio. I had arrived a little early to warm up. At the time I was learning Kodály’s transcription of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy, which has an enormous number of arpeggios of every kind in it. I was playing with some panache a diminished seventh chord that went up to a high B flat in the third octave, playing ff as marked with loads of vibrato.
Suddenly I heard the familiar grating voice behind me. ‘Fedya, that’s a B flat, a B flat,’ said Dmitri Dmitriyevich, who had unobtrusively crept up behind me.
I affirmed that it was indeed.
‘Well, try it once more if you don’t mind,’ Dmitri Dmitriyevich asked.
I whirled up the arpeggio again.
‘Yes, now sustain it with vibrato; it’s not a harmonic, is it? … Well, well, yes, yes, so that’s how,’ Dmitri Dmitriyevich murmured in response to some private thought. Then he asked if I could land straight on that note, without the preceding passage. I answered that it was possible, and indeed that it was more difficult to come down from it than to go up.
Sometime later we received the new score of the Thirteenth Quartet; we had had no inkling of its existence. I saw that the Quartet ends with a long viola solo in the high register (known jokingly as the heights of eternal resin), and that the last note is that same B flat which is then passed on to the first and second violins to give the effect of a snowballing crescendo. I would say that the performance of the Thirteenth Quartet brought me much closer to Shostakovich.
I felt his goodwill towards me many times. On one particular occasion we were playing through the Thirteenth Quartet at Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s home for some British guests: Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, who were accompanied by two charming ladies, Susan Phipps and the cellist Elizabeth Wilson. We played the Quartet through twice. We were showered with compliments, and Britten gave me a copy of his Lacrimae. Not knowing how to write my name in his inscription, he turned to Shostakovich. Dmitri Dmitriyevich first gave my full official name and patronymic, then he suddenly said with incredible tenderness, ‘Fedya Druzhinin, just Fedya.’ This was in 1971, after the premiere of the Fourteenth Symphony, which Shostakovich had dedicated to Britten. Britten, moved and shaken after hearing the Thirteenth Quartet, kissed Shostakovich’s hand. This proved to be their last meeting.
After every performance of this quartet, Dmitri Dmitriyevich shook hands with all the members, but he would give me a kiss. This was in recognition of the special difficulty of the viola part.
Despite his great tact and delicacy, if Dmitri Dmitriyevich was displeased by a performance, it was frightening even to look at him, let alone approach him. I remember his state when we gave the first performance of his Twelfth Quartet in Leningrad. In the first half of the concert the Blok cycle was performed, and we were to play in the second half. When we went into the artists’ room in the interval, we saw Shostakovich sitting on his own; there was nobody near him, and he was striking the ground with his stick and muttering words to the effect: ‘Unforgivable, disgraceful, inexcusable.’ Seeing us, he got up and said, ‘Well, my friends, it’s up to you; I am behind you like a stone wall.’
If one can consider artistic satisfaction as happiness, then there were occasions when Shostakovich was happy. He admitted as much to us, when one day we arrived at his home to acquaint ourselves with the newly written Fourteenth Quartet without our second violinist, Nikolai Zabavnikov, who was ill. Dmitri Dmitriyevich opened up the score at the piano and said that he would play the second violin part himself. So in this unusual formation we read through the whole quartet. When the rehearsal was over, Dmitri Dmitriyevich was visibly excited. He got up and addressed us with these words: ‘My dear friends, this has been for me one of the happiest moments of my life: first of all, because I think that the Quartet has turned out well, Sergei,’ (the Quartet was dedicated to the cellist, Sergei Shirinsky) ‘and secondly I have had the good fortune to play in the Beethoven Quartet, even if I only played with one finger! And how did you like my Italian bit?’ We immediately knew what he meant by this last remark, as in the second movement and in the Finale’s coda there is a short but wonderfully beautiful and sensual melody. It evokes a nagging but unquenchable ache of the heart, perhaps because this vocal phrase verges on banality.
Shostakovich not only trusted the musicians he loved, but he also heard their way of playing when he composed. Tsyganov once said while working on the Second Quartet that it seemed that the recitative in the ‘Romance’ had been specially written for him.
‘Yes, indeed it was, Mitya. I wrote it for you,’ replied Shostakovich.
He was extremely precise in the indications written in his scores, but the final tempo markings and some other directions were only added after several rehearsals with the Quartet.
All the more reason for me to feel proud that after we read through the Fourteenth Quartet, he suddenly came up to me and said, ‘I’ll now take my pen and write down exactly what you did when you played the “Chaconne”.’ This is how he called the solo episode for viola in the first movement.
I protested, ‘But Dmitri Dmitriyevich, I’m not played into this music yet, perhaps it’s too early – I’ll play it better later on.’
‘No, no it should be played just like that,’ and he wrote in the nuances of the recitative as I played it then.
When the performance of a quartet had ‘ripened’, Dmitri Dmitriyevich started to invite some guests to the rehearsals. To start with it would be his closest friends and members of our families, but this circle widened, and on the eve of the premieres he would gather together at his home the cream of Moscow and Leningrad musicians. Looking back now to these home ‘concert-rehearsals’, I think that they were our very best performances. We played with great élan, freely and uninhibitedly, and our daily meetings with the composer gave us confidence and inspiration.
According to Tsyganov, the Beethoven Quartet had two equal musical patrons – Beethoven and Shostakovich. After the death of Vasili Shirinsky, Nikolai Zabavnikov, a pupil of Tsyganov’s, became the second violinist. In order for me and Zabavnikov to become full and equal members of the Quartet, it was decided to play the two cycles at the Moscow Conservatoire – all the Beethoven and all the Shostakovich quartets. Dmitri Dmitriyevich expressed his wish to work on his quartets with us. This active contact with Dmitri Dmitriyevich was the most serious and wonderful schooling in the art of performance that can be imagined.
Shostakovich’s quartet writing is in direct continuation of the traditions of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven; however, Shostakovich uses the individual qualities and timbre of each instrument, extending their range, especially that of the cello and viola, to unheard-of possibilities. It can also be said that the quartets are Shostakovich’s most profound and intimate works.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich as it were relived his life in the process of working with us. He tirelessly sat through almost all our rehearsals. He was interested in everything from the technical aspects of bowings and fingerings to the more refined details of interpretation.
For instance, he liked a full-sounding rich pizzicato. He warned us, ‘Don’t let it sound as if you’re playing on some threadbare piece of string!’
This brings to mind an episode concerning the Twelfth Quartet.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich addressed the cellist, Sergei Shirinsky: ‘You know there is something I have wanted to say to you for ages about the way you play a certain passage, only I am afraid that if I do you will then spoil it.’
Shirinsky smiled in confusion but promised Dmitri Dmitriyevich that he would do his best not to spoil it.
‘Well, when you play the pizzicato motif (quaver quaver crotchet crotchet, repeated twice) while the twelve-tone theme is played on the viola, your notes don’t quite coincide vertically with the viola’s quavers; that in all probability is the real essence of musical luxury!’
Dmitri Dmitriyevich never allowed us to wallow in our emotions while playing, however much we liked the music. His attitude was akin to Beethoven’s in that respect. ‘You don’t need to listen to the music!’ he exhorted us. ‘You must work, work. Let the audience listen.’
Only once did we see Shostakovich visibly moved by his own music. We were rehearsing his Third Quartet. He’d promised to stop us when he had any remarks to make. Dmitri Dmitriyevich sat in an armchair with the score opened out. But after each movement ended he just waved us on, saying, ‘Keep playing!’ So we performed the whole Quartet. When we finished playing he sat quite still in silence like a wounded bird, tears streaming down his face. This was the only time that I saw Shostakovich so open and defenceless.
Despite this inner vulnerability, his exterior manner was always strict and objective; he never failed to point out any errors in the performance, especially if they referred to the musical form.
When a new quartet was to receive its premiere, Dmitri Dmitriyevich always wanted us to play an earlier quartet in the first half of the concert, maybe together with a group of the Preludes and Fugues for piano, so as to fix the audience’s attention on the new work in the second half. We often played his First Quartet or a work from the classics, in particular Mozart. But we never programmed the Third or the Fifth Quartets in the first half of such a concert, bearing in mind their amazingly forceful effect.
Shostakovich invited Dmitri Kabalevsky to one of the later rehearsals of the Fifteenth Quartet, an orthodox ideologue with a rather dubious aesthetic outlook, who had repeatedly criticized Shostakovich in the past. I was afraid of Kabalevsky, well remembering his reactions and critical remarks after the first performance of the Fifth Quartet in the Union of Composers in 1952. This quartet had a shattering effect on all those who heard it (including Kabalevsky). It was decided that after a brief interval it should be played a second time. During this brief pause Kabalevsky had been talking behind the scenes, and after the second performance all his enthusiasm for the piece suddenly evaporated. I could never forgive him this hypocrisy.
When we had finished playing the Fifteenth Quartet, the first thing that Kabalevsky said was that, in his opinion, Shostakovich should change the titles of the movements and he would be well advised to borrow them from Romain Rolland, for instance, ‘Meditations over the Plateau of Life’. With innocent amazement Shostakovich demanded, ‘But why the plateau?’64
VLADIMIR OVCHAREK, the leader of the Tanyeev Quartet, recalls playing the Fifteenth Quartet to the composer prior to the premiere in Leningrad:
Starting with his Fourth Quartet, Shostakovich used to send us the scores of his quartets regularly, giving us permission to perform them immediately after the Beethoven Quartet had played the premiere in the Small Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich always found the time to listen to us and to offer his comments on our interpretation. His remarks were made in a correct and laconic manner, as he was always careful not to hurt the self-esteem of the performers.
In October 1974 Dmitri Dmitriyevich approached us with the suggestion that we should be the first performers of the Fifteenth Quartet. What immense joy we felt! We set aside all our other commitments and started to tackle the piece. We were shaken to the core by the scale and tragedy of this quartet, and tried to give it every ounce of our soul.
We were shortly to go on a concert tour of Sweden, where we had programmed Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Quartet. As we were to leave from Moscow, we made an arrangement to meet Shostakovich in his Moscow home. Dmitri Dmitriyevich had said that he could hardly bear to wait for the moment when he would finally hear his new work.
Our appointment was for five o’clock, but as usual our documents had not been prepared in time by Gosconcert, and we only received our passports from the Ministry of Culture at eight o’clock in the evening. Therefore we only managed to reach Shostakovich’s flat at nine-thirty that evening.
We found him in a state of tremendous anxiety; he had thought that we would never arrive, and he was impatient to hear the new quartet played ‘in the flesh’. His wife, Irina Antonovna, and the musicologist G. Khubov were also present. I can never forget Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s state of nervous tension as he waited for us to begin the performance. Finally, after Irina Antonovna had switched on the microphone, we were ready to begin.
After our performance, Dmitri Dmitriyevich remained in a state of agitation for quite some time. He then thanked us for ‘having penetrated so deeply the essence of this philosophical work, which I hold most dear’.65
In 1971 Boris Pokrovsky staged the first production of The Nose in Russia (after the original 1930 Leningrad production) with student forces from GITIS, the State Institute of Theatrical Art, conducted by Vladimir Delman. The performances were not publicized, and in Moscow only a restricted circle of listeners went to this revival. However the GITIS production was taken on tour in the south of Russia.
At this point Pokrovsky proposed to the Bolshoi Theatre that they should stage The Nose. The artistic management procrastinated, claiming they could not make a decision as they did not know the score, and no recordings existed. Pokrovsky arranged a special performance of his student production which would serve the Bolshoi Management as an opportunity to ‘audition’ the piece. To his amazement, only twenty minutes into the performance, all representatives of the Bolshoi had left the hall, with the exception of the conductor Boris Khaikin.
In the wake of the Bolshoi’s cynical lack of interest in The Nose, Pokrovsky decided to put on the opera at his newly founded Moscow Chamber Theatre. When he told Shostakovich of his plan, the composer was sceptical about its realization for several reasons. He was not sure that Pokrovsky could find singers able to cope with the music, and pointed out that the orchestral forces of the Theatre were inadequate, in view of the unusual scoring which calls for balalaika, domra and percussion. But chiefly Shostakovich did not believe that Pokrovsky would have the persistence to push for the necessary permissions from the authorities to stage his opera.
Pokrovsky, however, proved Shostakovich wrong on all counts. Rehearsals for The Nose started even before the Moscow Chamber Theatre had a space of its own; they were held in hired clubs, theatres and studios. At an early stage of the proceedings, Pokrovsky got into conflict with his original conductor, Delman, who soon left the production team, and shortly afterwards emigrated from the Soviet Union.
Left without a musical director, Pokrovsky now turned to Gennadi Rozhdestvensky. Initially Rozhdestvensky expressed doubts about the feasibility of staging The Nose for much the same reasons as Shostakovich. But after seeing rehearsals in progress, he immediately agreed to participate. As it happened, he held no position at that time, having recently terminated his association with the Bolshoi Theatre, so he was able to join the Moscow Chamber Theatre as chief conductor and musical director.
On learning of Rozhdestvensky’s involvement, Shostakovich became more confident of the project’s success. He lent his active support to Pokrovsky in the acquisition of a suitable venue for the Theatre by interceding with Tikhon Khrennikov, who also supported Pokrovsky, and used his authority at the level of the Central Committee. Soon the Theatre was given the venue that it occupied for several decades, in the basement of an old cinema near the Sokol Metro station.
Here is BORIS POKROVSKY’S account of the staging of The Nose:
Before I staged The Nose myself, I saw some very good productions of the opera in Dresden and East Berlin, put on by most talented directors, solid, daring and well studied in the German manner – but not what Shostakovich had in mind. I was asked by these directors to contact Dmitri Dmitriyevich on their behalf and to ask him for a concrete description of the concept behind the work.
When I was back in Moscow I saw Shostakovich, and while we were chatting I mentioned the query of the German directors. Dmitri Dmitriyevich just laughed and said, ‘There’s no concept there.’ It is one thing to understand a work, another to feel it. Even today I can honestly say that I don’t understand The Nose, any more than you can understand Gogol or Shostakovich.
Maybe Shostakovich was joking when he denied that there was a concept behind The Nose, but I don’t think so. As far as he was concerned he had done his job and written the piece. Either the piece has an effect on you, and you feel it and relate to it, or it doesn’t.
I remember what an enormous impression Shostakovich’s words made on me when I suggested that he might like to correct the balalaika part in the score. In the original production two players had to play the part as it was impossible for one player to play the notes as written.66 Dmitri Dmitriyevich exclaimed, ‘On no account should you correct it! Don’t change anything, even though there may be some bad things there.’
When we started to rehearse in our own theatre, Shostakovich was anxious to attend. But he was very ill at the time and could hardly walk. He sent his wife, Irina Antonovna, to see what we were up to and whether it was worth taking seriously. She came and was evidently sufficiently impressed to encourage him to come. For Dmitri Dmitriyevich walking was so painful that it was virtually impossible for him to cope with the staircase that led from the foyer at street level down to the hall. He didn’t wish people to see his infirmity, he was very touchy and fastidious in his sensibilities, and hated any form of pity. Our actors were quite ready to carry him down the stairs, but he refused their offer. Instead he used a back entrance in the courtyard where there were less stairs and he was not exposed to public view.
At the rehearsals Shostakovich was completely immersed in the music. He had no interest whatsoever in the staging and never interfered with it. In this respect, he was like Prokofiev – he would watch, listen, sometimes show surprise or delight when things happened which he hadn’t expected. He was very tactful, but very business-like in his dealings.
As it was he only intervened twice. The first time was when he asked the baritone singing the part of Kovalyov to try a phrase an octave higher. He told us that in Scene 8, when Kovalyov tries unsuccessfully to put his nose back in place, the singer Zhuravlenko in the original Leningrad production had sung the words, ‘Nu, nu, polezai, durak,’67 up an octave. Dmitri Dmitriyevich was almost apologizing when he asked our singer if he wouldn’t mind trying it. It didn’t matter if he couldn’t manage it, it wasn’t essential, but perhaps he’d have a go all the same? Of course the baritone (and all subsequent ones who have sung the role of Kovalyov in my production) had time to learn it and always performed it as Dmitri Dmitriyevich requested.
The second case was quite comic. During a break in rehearsals, Dmitri Dmitriyevich called me over to make the following suggestion: ‘Please forgive me for making a suggestion. It’s just spilled out of me, maybe it’s a stupid idea, if you don’t like it, you know, forget it, forgive me …’ and so on.
In fact his suggestion was radically daring, and my only regret is that we cannot continue to implement it without him being there. It concerned a piece of original Gogol text that I had added at the end of the opera. Here the crowd enter into a discussion of the story and of how they had experienced these bizarre happenings. ‘How can a nose disappear, what can have happened, how could it be cut off, let alone stuck back on again, what a stupid idea! An altogether ridiculous story, quite outrageous – in the first place it brings no benefit to the Fatherland, and in the second place it brings no benefit for the Fatherland,’ and so on – a truly Gogolian dialogue. It finished with these lines: ‘It is most surprising that authors should address themselves to such subjects. We’ve never heard the likes before.’
Shostakovich suggested to me that the actor who spoke these lines should come up to him in the hall, and, pointing a finger accusingly at him, recite the words.
Of course I loved the idea. I would say that Shostakovich revelled in high-spirited pranks and daring ideas. But the musicologist Yarustovsky was incensed at my taking such liberties: ‘How dare Pokrovsky meddle with Shostakovich’s opera!’ Shostakovich had reacted with an open mind, and was delighted: ‘Why didn’t I think of it myself in the first production?’
Shostakovich came to all the rehearsals, which at some point were filmed for a small documentary. Although it wasn’t that well put together, there is one amazing moment, when the cameraman filmed Shostakovich’s face simultaneously with the chorus in the Summer Gardens – one of the most difficult scenes in the opera, written with a youthful daring bordering on malice. Here one can see the spontaneity of Shostakovich’s reactions, his surprise, his delight, his humour – you sometimes see him mouthing the words as the music is sung. It is a remarkable study of how a composer responds to what he sees (as opposed to what he hears) in his own work.
Overall, this production of The Nose was a happy experience for Dmitri Dmitriyevich. He saw a favourite child re-born, performed by young and enthusiastic performers, led by artists he trusted, in this small ‘underground’ theatre.68
The conductor GENNADI ROZHDESTVENSKY recalls finding the long-lost score of The Nose in the basement of the Bolshoi Theatre:
At the end of the 1950s I was working at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. One Saturday, a communist ‘subbotnik’69 was announced; our ‘voluntary’ task was to clean up a bomb shelter deep in the cellars of the theatre. It was reached by a side entrance, no. 15. During the war, people had hidden there from the enemy bombs. This bomb shelter was chock-a-block with planks, boards and old buckets, and our mission was to tidy it up. The first thing I noticed on entering was a large book under a plank. I retrieved it, brushed off the dust and gave it a wipe. On opening the book, what did I see written on the title page but the words The Nose. I froze in my tracks. It was a copyist’s score (not the original manuscript) of Shostakovich’s opera. The composer had entered his comments and markings on almost every page, including his corrections to the copyist’s errors in both music and text.
I had no intention of throwing this volume into one of the old buckets with the boards and planks. I grabbed it and rushed off home. However, as the score had the stamp of the Bolshoi Theatre Library in it, it was clear that I had effectively stolen it. Since it is taught in the Bible that theft is a sin, I thought to myself I had better make amends by formalizing some sort of exchange with the Bolshoi Theatre.
Here chance was on my side. Shortly afterwards, I happened to go to the music shop on Neglinnaya Street, which formerly housed Jurgenson Publisher’s showrooms. They have a second-hand section, which usually has a rather slow turnover. But that day the salesgirl addressed me: ‘Here’s something of interest for you. We’ve just acquired a copy of Anton Rubenstein’s opera The Demon.’
It was in two volumes with a wonderful binding, published by Roders of Leipzig during the composer’s lifetime. In fact it was a lithograph copy, with a number on the flyleaf; only about a hundred copies of the score had been printed for hire purposes. I immediately bought the score, not yet foreseeing its final destiny.
When the question arose of a swap with the Bolshoi, I recalled that The Demon was in their repertoire, performed in the nearby Bolshoi studio theatre, where the Moscow Operetta now has its home. It struck me as a brilliant idea to offer the score of The Demon in exchange for The Nose. The Bolshoi Theatre’s copy of The Demon was in a terrible state. Their production had been in existence for an interminable age. The corners of the score were dog-eared, or had disintegrated altogether. Over the years, lots of different versions had been produced, each involving different cuts which had been scribbled in, then rubbed out, then marked in again.
I realized that this could be my trump card. I said to the librarians: ‘Just look at the condition of your Demon, no self-respecting conductor is going to conduct from a score in that state. I’ll give you a completely new one. Take a look at it, what a beautiful binding it has, what a stroke of fortune for you, a completely unused copy, you’ll never find the likes again.’
They answered, ‘Yes, it is exactly what we need. Let’s draw up a document legalizing this exchange.’
I was very happy and I rang up Dmitri Dmitriyevich to tell him of my acquisition. Before the war he had sold the rights of The Nose to Universal Edition in Vienna, and they now owned all the material, including the manuscript. Then with the advent of the war and other events, all communications were lost between Shostakovich and Universal. He was left with nothing, not even a copy of the score. I remember when I spoke to him, he asked if I could temporarily lend him this copyist’s score – just for a few days.
I said, ‘Of course, I will have a photocopy made for you.’ I suppose it was mean-spirited of me not to give him this copy as a present. As it was I had decided to keep it as my working score, and indeed it was the copy I used to conduct the 1974 revival of The Nose at the Moscow Chamber Theatre.
This production of The Nose was the first to take place in Russia since the original Leningrad staging in 1930. Dmitri Dmitriyevich attended almost all the rehearsals at the underground theatre at Sokol, where the Moscow Chamber Theatre has its home. He was by then very ill, and his arms and hands hardly functioned. He would sit in the stalls, completely absorbed in following the singers, mouthing their every note and word. I remember how during the Epilogue, when Kovalyov reappears with his nose in place and everything, so it seems, is once again in order, the singer sang the words, ‘Dushechka, Raskrasotochka.’ Dmitri Dmitriyevich shouted out from the stalls, ‘Not “dushechka”, but “dushenka”, that’s how it is in Gogol.’70
Some extraordinary things happened during this rehearsal period. For instance, once Dmitri Dmitriyevich stopped me after the orchestral entr’acte and asked, ‘Why did the harpist play a stopped note instead of the natural harmonic that was written?’
I couldn’t believe my ears – this was in the middle of a loud full tutti section, where it was hard to distinguish any detail. I approached the harpist and asked her what she had played.
She replied, ‘Excuse me, I played a stopped note at ordinary pitch instead of the harmonic marked in my part.’
I recall another occasion which astounded me no less. After we had recorded The Nose, Dmitri Dmitriyevich came to the studio on Kachalov Street to listen to the result of our recent work, prior to the final editing. He had been unable to attend the actual recording sessions because of ill health.
I then committed a terrible blunder. I had come to this playback session with this self-same score, rescued from the cellar. I offered it to Shostakovich, but he turned round to me and said, ‘It’s all right, fortunately I can still remember the whole work.’
He proceeded to listen to the opera right the way through with his eyes closed. He never even glanced at the score. Afterwards he made a series of comments of a very concrete nature, saying exactly where there were errors to be corrected or adjustments to be made.71
With the Fifteenth Symphony, Shostakovich bade farewell to symphonic music, although he created orchestral versions of his last two superlative vocal cycles. The Six Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva for contralto and piano were completed in the summer of 1973 and are dedicated to Irina Bogachova. In this sensitive portrayal of the highly personal world of this tragic Russian poetess, Shostakovich aptly renders not only Tsvetayeva’s lyrical tenderness, but her stoic fortitude in the face of affliction. Significantly, the last song is a dedication to his Leningrad contemporary, the poetess Anna Akhmatova.
The greatest of all Shostakovich’s song cycles, the Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Op. 145 (completed on 30 July 1974) was written with the voice of the bass Evgeni Nesterenko in mind, and was dedicated to his wife, Irina Shostakovich. Originally conceived as a commemoration of the fifth centenary of Michelangelo’s birth, Shostakovich consciously links himself with this great artist in a celebration of the immortality of Art. Like the Fourteenth Symphony, the work is in eleven movements; however, here the composer transcends mortal fears and suffering, and, refuting the idea of protest in the face of death, offers the serenity of acceptance as the final resolution to life itself.
In complete contrast to the grandeur of this concept is his penultimate work, the Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin Op. 146 (completed immediately after the Michelangelo Suite), a portrait of Dostoevsky’s grotesque buffoon. Here the composer mocks the boorishness of petty officialdom, which he himself had suffered in silence over the years.
The mezzo-soprano Irina Bogachova, and the pianist SOFIYA VAKMAN were invited by Shostakovich to give the first performance of Six Poems by Marina Tsvetayeva, which took place on 27 December 1973 at the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire. The composer had been discharged from hospital that very day, but, with his usual determination, would not have dreamed of missing the concert which also featured the Moscow premiere of the Fourteenth Quartet. Here Vakman describes their rehearsals with the composer in his Moscow home:
Irina Bogachova and I went to see Shostakovich twice. We were astonished by many things. First that in his study Shostakovich tried to sit as far away from us as possible, so as to be outside the acoustic ‘performance zone’. But the main thing that struck us was his own curiosity in regard to what he had himself composed. He sat absolutely motionless, only his hands fidgeted nervously, maintaining a complete silence, as he listened to us perform the cycle right through.
Then he got up and asked, ‘And would you mind doing it again?’ And the second time through he listened in the same manner without uttering a word, as if trying to penetrate the very sound that issued from us. He was intent on listening in order to assess his own achievement, as a continual re-examination of himself. Thus on this occasion we performed the cycle three or four times before he started making comments. And these were made almost as if in apology.
In some of the music, Irina felt that the range was uncomfortable for her voice. She asked if Dmitri Dmitriyevich would be willing to transpose the cycle up a semi-tone. ‘No, please, leave it as written. I’d rather not change it.’
Shostakovich respected and trusted his performers. If one should question him, ‘Dmitri Dmitriyevich, you wrote allegro, and the metronome marking is …’ he would interrupt and say, ‘Take no notice – I never know if I mark the metronome correctly.’ He granted the performers the right to their interpretation, and never exerted pressure on them. His remarks were made shyly, with great tact, almost as if they carried little significance.72
In the early 1970s the celebrated Soviet bass Evgeni Nesterenko formed a duo with the pianist EVGENI SHENDEROVICH. They were the first performers of the Suite on Verses of Michelangelo and the Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin. Shostakovich wrote of their interpretation of the Michelangelo Suite (recorded for Melodiya in late March 1975): ‘This performance surpasses all words of praise.’ Here Shenderovich recalls his close working contact with Shostakovich in the last twelve months of his life:
We were to play through the Michelangelo Suite for Shostakovich in mid-October 1974 for the first time. But when Nesterenko suddenly fell ill this plan had to be changed. We asked Dmitri Dmitriyevich if I might come on my own to play some fragments of the Suite for him to check on our proposed tempi and to seek answers to some of our queries in relation to the text. Dmitri Dmitriyevich agreed and within fifty minutes of the call I was at his flat.
I sat at the piano with Dmitri Dmitriyevich beside me. I was very nervous, but I felt that Dmitri Dmitriyevich was even more anxious than I was – it meant so much to him to hear his new work played and given life. He himself was unable to play the piano any more due to the illness that incapacitated the use of his hands.
Shostakovich asked me to repeat several episodes over and over again. It was as if he could never have his fill of the music, and wanted to re-live the whole process of its creation.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich possessed a rare and remarkable quality – he showed a special trust to the performers of his music, allowing their fantasy free play. I found this fact extremely helpful when performing, all the more so when playing in his presence. I was amazed how readily he accepted our interpretation, including my somewhat risky ‘imaginative’ pedal techniques.
When I asked him why a work with so perfect a form, constructed on monothematic principles, should be called a Suite, Shostakovich explained that he disliked the term ‘cycle’ but that he would give some further thought to the title.
Nesterenko and I were amazed at the philosophical power of the cyclic links between the movements, for instance, in the introduction to the first movement, ‘Truth’, and the tenth movement, ‘Death’. In both cases the music is absolutely equal to its theme. I asked Dmitri Dmitriyevich only one question: whether these two introductions should be played in the same way. He answered, ‘Absolutely identically.’
This introduction should be performed with a harsh trumpet-like sound reminiscent of the fanfares signalling the start of an ancient Greek tragedy. It seems to me that Shostakovich’s work is indeed on a par with a tragedy by Sophocles in the profundity of its philosophical concept, its universal, all-embracing force. The music is written as a dialogue for piano and voice, as a duet of equal partners, and in this it is new and original.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich never made declarations about his musical principles and overall intentions. At best, one could hope to hear some specific comment concerning a certain phrase or change of tempo. Here all I had to do was to hint at something, say, the clarinet-like timbre of the piano’s refrain in the third movement, ‘Love’, and Dmitri Dmitriyevich would quickly respond, ‘Yes, yes, very good, that’s the right timbre.’
Before starting the eighth movement, ‘Creation’, I timidly suggested, ‘Dmitri Dmitriyevich, I cannot rid myself of the association of the first chord in this movement with your music for …’
‘My music for Hamlet?’ Dmitri Dmitriyevich finished my sentence for me. He did not deny it, but he informed me that this movement contained another association: he had read that Michelangelo possessed such power and precision that with his very first blow he could hew out of a boulder all the superfluous marble. He very rarely needed to correct his work.
And indeed this image is almost visually present in Shostakovich’s music, with the abrasive chords, the syncopated rhythms and the short passages spiralling upwards like a whirlwind. You can vividly hear the great sculptor’s hammer blows and the scraping of his chisel on the marble.
For the introduction to the ninth movement, ‘Night’, I wanted to create a sense of tense and hushed silence, a sort of numb detachment resulting from long reflection on grief. I decided to allow myself a trick to achieve this mysterious colour, whereby I pressed down both the sustaining and the muting pedals, getting a smudgy, smoky effect. Instinctively I wished to recreate the impression made on me by Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures, where a large part of his conception remains imprisoned in the original marble block, and yet the sculpted contours of the figure fuse with the unworked marble.
Shostakovich’s reaction was totally unexpected. He put his hands on mine and said quietly, ‘Don’t change it. Leave that sonority exactly as it is.’
Dmitri Dmitriyevich also accepted a similar pedal technique in the analogous postlude of number ten, ‘Death’, where the bell-like sound of the bass resounds for a long time, sustained by the pedal, while the introductory theme rings like a distant reminiscence in the high register of the piano.
When Nesterenko was well again, we performed several movements from the Suite for Shostakovich. Then, in the presence of Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s friends and colleagues, we played the work right through. We were more nervous than at a concert, which can be attributed not only to the highly select audience, but to the fact that Shostakovich insistently requested that we should perform with the piano lid fully open.
Shostakovich believed that the piano lid should always be open, even when the piano served as an accompanying instrument. Dmitri Dmitriyevich said that the construction of a piano was calculated to make it sound at its best with the lid fully open. ‘After all, the natural position of a level-crossing is open! It is shut in case of necessity,’ he quipped. He told us that his teacher, Nikolayev, had created a whole theory about the harm caused to the piano soundboard by keeping the lid closed, because it subjected the soundboard to an unforeseen phenomenon, an enormous number of vibrations reflected by the lid.
For instance, Dmitri Dmitriyevich told us that he always played the cello sonata with the lid fully open. In regard to any doubts about the balance, Shostakovich defended his point: ‘A soloist doesn’t shut the lid when he is required to play softly – it would be like a violinist playing his instrument without taking it out of its case.’ He regarded the pianist in ensemble as an equal partner.
The premiere of the Michelangelo Suite took place on 23 December 1974, at the Small Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic. The dress rehearsal, which Dmitri Dmitriyevich attended in the company of various friends and pupils, was filmed, and some fragments were included in a TV documentary about Shostakovich.
The programme was chosen in accordance with Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s wishes: in the first half, a selection of Glinka Romances and Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death; the Michelangelo Suite occupied the second half.
Late at night, after the concert, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, as thoughtful and attentive as ever, rang us to thank us for the performance.
On 8 January 1975 we played the Suite at Shostakovich’s Moscow home for his colleagues, composers and Union Secretaries. The guests, including Aram Khachaturian, Khrennikov, Kabalevsky and Maxim Shostakovich, all arrived together. Maxim sat next to me to turn the pages.
The work left an overwhelming impression. Aram Khachaturian asked if Dmitri Dmitriyevich intended to orchestrate the Suite. Shostakovich answered that no, for the moment he didn’t intend to. Khrennikov wanted to know of the origins of the first melody in ‘Eternity’. Dmitri Dmitriyevich told him he had composed his theme in his youth, but it was the first time he had used it in a finished work. With its sound of angelic bells in the piano’s upper register, its effect in this mature masterly work is loaded with profound meaning.
Dinner followed, the usual postlude to such an evening. Dmitri Dmitriyevich was in lively spirits, and recounted all kinds of curious incidents from his life as a concert artist. He told us about the origin of the Spanish Songs. The soprano, Zara Dolukhanova, had brought these simple folk melodies with their original texts to him, asking him to harmonize them. However, when the texts were translated into Russian, it turned out that they were intended for a male performer. One can but imagine Dolukhanova’s disappointment. Nevertheless, Shostakovich created one of his best works at her instigation.
At the end of the evening, the poet Andrei Voznesensky dropped by, bearing his new translations of Michelangelo’s poems. Shostakovich had used translations by A. M. Efros, but these did not satisfy him. He had told Nesterenko to wait before learning the initial text from memory, as he expected to correct it. In the meanwhile, Dmitri Dmitriyevich had asked Voznesensky to ‘polish’ these translations with his expert ear.
However, Voznesensky wrote completely new versions of the poems, using a different metre. Despite the fact that in themselves they were wonderful translations, there was no hope of them coinciding with the melodic line of the vocal part. Shostakovich was most upset that he had troubled Voznesensky for nothing. Efros’s translations became the established text.
But that evening Voznesensky read us his translations. In the future Dmitri Dmitriyevich used his influence to help their publication.
In the early months of 1975 Nesterenko and I received from Shostakovich the music of a new, highly original composition, the Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin, with the texts from Dostoevsky’s The Possessed.
Again Nesterenko and I had to learn the work apart, as I had to return to Leningrad. Shostakovich in the meantime came up to Leningrad. He worked at Repino, where he also underwent treatment for his illness. During that time I visited him several times. His right hand was in appalling condition, and I saw what heroic effort it required for him to write down the music. He leant his hand on a specially constructed sloping stand which lay next to the manuscript paper on his desk. Overcoming severe physical pain, he succeeded in writing down his music.
I spoke to Dmitri Dmitriyevich about various points in the Lebyadkin songs. He agreed to some of my suggestions about the fingerings in the piano part. Then, after a moment’s pause, he said: ‘You know, Lebyadkin is of course a buffoon and laughing stock. But there is something frighteningly creepy about him. Tell this to Nesterenko, maybe it will give him an indication of the image I had in mind.’
Soon Nesterenko and I went to Kiev for concerts, and we rehearsed intensively for three days. I have to say, despite the fact that we had performed Shostakovich’s humorous cycle ‘Five Romances on Texts from Krokodil’, we found the Lebyadkin cycle very hard; it required much more technical mastery, a more incisive satire, and much more subtle innuendo and variation of intonation than in the Krokodil cycle.73
Shostakovich had a remarkable knowledge of Russian classical literature, and throughout his life followed developments in contemporary Russian (and Soviet) literature with interest. His own bent for satire was reflected in his love of Gogol, Saltykov-Shchedrin and Zoshchenko – the latter, of course, appealed to him for his merciless exposure of the petty realities of the ‘new Soviet man’ and his restricted vision of the world.
The film director Grigori Kozintsev remarked on Shostakovich’s ability to adopt as his own Gogol’s axiom that the Russian language has the potential to transform itself within a single sentence from the elevated to the everyday, from the frivolous to the tragic. ‘This feature permeates the atoms and cells of Shostakovich’s musical themes.’74 Furthermore, he pointed out that in the composer’s everyday behaviour and mannerisms of speech there was much that could be traced back to his favourite writers. For instance, the way Shostakovich peppered his everyday speech with such interjections as ‘you know’, ‘one might say’, ‘so to speak’ and ‘as it were’ was typical of the language of Dostoevsky’s and Gogol’s heroes.75
Gogol’s grotesque fantasy world had enormous appeal for Shostakovich, and it was a natural choice for him to turn to Gogol for his opera libretti. But he evaded setting texts by his favourite authors, Chekhov and Dostoevsky, until the very end of his life. As far back as 1925 Shostakovich had cited his fascination with Chekhov’s story ‘The Black Monk’ and confessed to identifying with its ‘anti-hero’ Kovorin.76 Evidently Kovorin’s nocturnal hallucinations (which aroused Chekhov’s interest in the form of clinical illness) excited Shostakovich’s imagination, in particular since these visions are associated with the illicit taste of euphoria acting as a drug to the creative artist.
During the late 1930s Shostakovich proposed the idea of ‘The Black Monk’ as a subject of an opera to his pupil Venyamin Fleishman, and in 1943 he also mentioned it to Revol Bunin.77. Neither of his pupils acted on the suggestion. But in May 1973 Shostakovich told Isaak Glikman that he himself was planning an opera on the subject. His immediate interest had evidently been awakened by a first hearing of Gaetano Braga’s78 Serenata (also known by the name Leggenda Valacca). The Serenata is played at two crucial points of the story, at the first and last appearances of the Black Monk to the weak and exhausted Kovorin. In a letter to Tishchenko dated 22 September 1972, Shostakovich told him that ‘only yesterday did I manage to acquaint myself with this wonderful work’.79
In the early months of 1975 Shostakovich contacted Alexander Medvedyev, a writer and opera librettist with whom the composer had worked during 1965 on the subsequently abandoned project Quiet Flows the Don. Now the composer turned to Medvedyev, requesting him to provide librettos for two stories; Gogol’s ‘The Portrait’ and ‘The Black Monk’. Evidently because of the supernational connections between the stories, Shostakovich conceived them as a double bill, each to last just over an hour.
Between March and May 1975, while Shostakovich was staying in Repino, Medvedyev had twelve meetings with him to discuss the project.80 The libretto of ‘The Portrait’ was ready and approved in May, but finding a form for ‘The Black Monk’ libretto was more problematic. Despite Shostakovich’s remark that Chekhov’s story is written in ‘sonata form’, solutions for the dramatic structure were not immediately obvious, given that so much of the story is ‘in the mind’, and not revealed through action.81
Shostakovich did not live to write either of the operas, and hence did not realize his dream of setting Chekhov’s words to music. However, with his penultimate work, the ‘Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin’, Shostakovich turned to another favourite writer, Dostoevsky. The texts taken from The Possessed are settings of the appalling lines of ‘verse’ by one of the most grotesque of Dostoyevskyan figures, Captain Lebyadkin.
ABRAAM GOZENPUD writes about his contacts with Shostakovich at the time that he was preparing for publication a book on Dostoevsky and music. Gozenpud had been introduced to Shostakovich by their mutual friend Sollertinsky in 1934. Their relations thereafter were formal and never close. However, Gozenpud must have won Shostakovich’s respect through his unpretentiousness and his refined sensitivity of perception:
Acompassion for the wretched and unfortunate, a desire to help them and to defend them from abuse, injustice and the power of the forces of darkness – these are characteristic features of Shostakovich’s work. And in this he is close to Dostoevsky.
Shostakovich, like Dostoevsky, shows how evil is born, and how what appears to be harmless in origin can turn into something dangerous and destructive. In The Possessed, Lyamshin improvises on the piano and combines ‘The Marseillaise’ with the sentimental song ‘Ach, mein lieber Augustine’. Gradually this harmless little song changes its character and acquires a threatening note; it starts to rage and rampage monstrously and terrifyingly.
In the first movement of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony the harmless marching song gradually acquires the force of a hurricane which blows everything from its path. There is of course a radical difference between Lyamshin’s improvisation, which was derived from France’s defeat in the 1870 war with Prussia, and the Seventh Symphony created during the Second World War, which depicts not only the theme of the enemy’s attack, but a faith in a Soviet victory. But it seemed to me that the idea behind the conception of the central episode in the Symphony’s first movement shares a certain similarity with Lyamshin’s improvisation.
Although Shostakovich turned to Gogol and Leskov in his operas, I think that it was Dostoevsky who was particularly close to him. And this closeness is not just deduced from the fact that Kovalyov’s lackey in The Nose sings Smerdyakov’s song ‘With Unconquerable Strength’, borrowed from The Brothers Karamazov.
In his opera Lady Macbeth the composer touched on Dostoevsky very closely (and not just in the last act). Leskov condemns the heroine of his story, whereas Shostakovich attempts to justify her in depicting the unbearably cruel conditions of the Izmailov household, and elevating her love for Sergei ….
In writing Lady Macbeth Shostakovich wished to create both a satire and a tragedy. Dostoevsky wrote in his workbook: ‘Why should satire exclude tragedy? Tragedy and satire are two sisters and belong to each other; thus jointly, their name is – the truth.’ These words could serve as an epithet to this opera.
I wanted Shostakovich to confirm my conjecture on these points, so I wrote to him in Kurgan, where he was undergoing treatment at Dr Ilizarov’s clinic.
Despite the illness which made writing for him very difficult, he answered my letter. He wrote that ‘it is very hard for me to convey to you what Dostoevsky’s work stirs up in me. He has too powerful an effect on me, so powerful that it is difficult for me to organize my impressions.’ Dmitri Dmitriyevich went on to write about the contradictions of the great writer’s personality, which are reflected in his work, particularly in A Writer’s Diary. Shostakovich was more than anything offended and outraged by those ‘creators’ of lampoon and parody in literature who claim in Dostoevsky a like-minded thinker ….
In a subsequent conversation with me, he said that writers of genius are motivated by love, whereas creators of lampoons and parody are indulging in the religion of hatred. ‘And hatred is the soil which gives life only to poisonous plants.’
In the same letter Shostakovich wrote of his attitude to Dostoevsky: ‘I love him and admire him as a great artist, I admire his love for people, for the humiliated and wretched.’
In the summer of 1971 Dmitri Dmitriyevich came to the Composers’ House of Creativity at Repino, and I gave him a typescript of my book Dostoevsky and Music. A week later he wrote inviting me to visit him. He mentioned in his letter that he had been re-reading The Possessed and was more firmly convinced than ever that this was a prophetic book, a warning about the dangers that threaten mankind if political murderers, demagogues and executioners seize power.
He informed me that when he was composing Lady Macbeth he never parted with Dostoevsky’s From the House of the Dead. In regard to the similarity of Lyamshin’s improvisation to the central episode of the Seventh Symphony, he could not answer. Maybe somewhere in his subconscious the memory of ‘Ach, mein lieber Augustine’ had flashed by. ‘But here we need the help of a Freud.’ He added, ‘I have many times thought of writing on themes from Dostoevsky, but cannot bring myself to do so. It is too frightening. I thought of The Meek and Oppressed, and that most Dostoevskyan of all his works, Bobky, and also the scene from Crime and Punishment with the crazed Marmeladov and his children. But I always retreat from these ideas. Do you know that it is easier to have dealings with Shakespeare than with Dostoevsky? I envy the courage of those composers who dare to handle Dostoevsky. In truth I am frightened to do so – like Herman in The Queen of Spades.’
Dmitri Dmitriyevich responded to my book with praise. However, he voiced a request: ‘Dostoevsky did not like Offenbach, perhaps because he was put off by the frivolity of his performers (particularly the female ones) and their abandoned behaviour on stage. But Offenbach cannot be dismissed because of this. Your own attitude is not clear to me. I cannot believe that you do not love this great composer. Therefore, if you don’t object, please define your own position clearly. Offenbach is dear to me for his ability to combine irony and lyricism, sarcasm and poetry.’
Naturally I did not hesitate to carry out Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s wish.
A few months later I approached Shostakovich again in writing. And despite the deterioration of his health, he immediately hastened to answer my letter from hospital, attaching to it a short note, recommending my book for publication. This recommendation played a decisive role, and my book was brought out in the Jubilee year of Dostoevsky.
A few years later Dmitri Dmitriyevich turned to Dostoevsky, creating the cycle Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin. The doggerel composed by this character from The Possessed fulfils a function of parody verging on absurdity which debases the ‘exalted’ genre of poetry.
In the novel fragments of poems by Afanasy Fet and Kukolnik float into Lebyadkin’s memory. And into that of his musical double drift intonations of Count Monterrone from Verdi’s Rigoletto, then Tchaikovsky’s Romance ‘In the Silence of the Mysterious Night’, but of course in a debased rendering. In ‘The Cockroach’ the melodic basis is derived from a version of the children’s song ‘Chizhik’82 in the minor key. And ‘The Ball in Aid of the Governesses’, with ringing of bells, has features of a triumphal cantata. However, this show of grand festivity is but a parody. Shostakovich succeeded brilliantly in creating an image of a drunkard aspiring to the role of romantic hero ‘with a grenade in his breast’.
In the Lebyadkin cycle the composer continues the satirical exposure of bourgeois petty-mindedness and trivial vulgarity. And in this his ally is no less than his favourite Dostoevsky.83
The Polish composer KRZYSZTOF MEYER enjoyed a close rapport with Shostakovich, whom he met in 1961. His biography, Dmitri Shostakovich, was first published in Poland during the composer’s lifetime, and was published in a revised and expanded version in Germany in 1995 and in Russia in 1998. Meyer, himself a prolific composer, completed Shostakovich’s opera The Gamblers in 1980. It was first staged in Wuppertal in 1984.
Shostakovich was a closed person. He spoke in laconic, simple sentences; this same characteristic was evident in his journalistic articles, written throughout his life. But his face always expressed the depth of his feelings. He was hypersensitive, especially in regard to anything connected with music. In 1962, when Jan Krenz conducted the Eighth Symphony in his presence at the Edinburgh Festival, the composer, overcome, burst into tears like a child.
He always appeared extremely nervous. His face was a bag of tics and grimaces: he would either twitch his lower lip, or unexpectedly blink, or keep correcting his glasses and stroke his hair, which, as a result, was in a state of permanent chaos. While talking, he would insert a lot of asides, ‘so to say’, ‘a kind of’, ‘you understand’, which often had no connection at all with the sentence he was uttering at that given moment. I have at home a tape of a rehearsal of the Fifteenth Quartet held at the composer’s home. After the rehearsal, Shostakovich thanked the performers, saying, ‘Thank you all, you know, for this kind of concert, you understand.’ When he sat at his desk or at a table, he would always nervously drum at it with his fingers, or, pressing his left palm to his cheek, he would tap various rhythms with his fourth and fifth fingers.
He was absentminded. When engaged in conversation, his eyes always wandered past his interlocutor, and he continually jumped from subject to subject. Often he couldn’t remember which opus he had just completed, and to find out he would have to ask his elder sister who lived in Leningrad. For that reason his works often lacked opus numbers, or had double numbers. When I look at the letters he sent me I am amazed that not one of them has been correctly addressed, each time there is a different mistake, and he found my name so complicated that he never managed to write it without an error.
He had an idiosyncratic sense of humour and a love of acting. I remember visiting him once at his home and finding a militiaman there who had come from Gorky to Moscow on business relating to Shostakovich’s duties as Deputy to the Supreme Soviet.84 When eventually the man left, Shostakovich spent nearly half an hour laughing and imitating his salutes, bows and mannerisms. Another time he enacted for me the scene of a misunderstanding with an optician who had prescribed spectacles which were too strong for him. He enjoyed all this like a child, and maintained this sense of humour until the end of his days.
He used to say to me, ‘I don’t know if you are aware that there was a composer called Hindemith, who …’ or, ‘Here in this score a trumpet is used – you no doubt have heard of such an instrument.’
Once he wrote to me, ‘I am now on Lake Baikal,’ which was followed by an asterisk; at the bottom of the page he added: ‘It’s a long way from Moscow.’ Another time he introduced the composer Eshpai to me, ‘He is a very talented composer, he even knows how to orchestrate all by himself.’
I could quote many examples like that. I also remember with what glee he would boast his knowledge of Leningrad tram numbers. This sense of humour would appear unexpectedly; then equally unexpectedly he would revert to his serious manner.
His politeness to other people was at times disarming. I was told that, when he was lying in hospital after his heart attack, the doctors categorically forbade him any movement, but he would still greet his visitors, lifting himself on to the pillows and almost sitting up. Despite the fact that towards the end of his life he walked with the greatest difficulty, he would accompany all his guests not just to the door, but to the lift on the landing outside. He would greet anybody he knew with, ‘Well, well, so tell me how is your health?’ He finished most of his letters with a similar phrase: ‘You must look after your health.’
His last years were plagued with health problems. Apart from his developing illness, he started to undergo difficulties in writing music. Despite his having composed such unquestionable masterpieces as the Fourteenth Symphony, and the Twelfth and Thirteenth Quartets, he seemed to lose faith in his own possibilities. ‘Nothing goes right,’ he once told me. ‘I’ve dried up, why should I continue with all this …’ In one of his letters to me he complained that he could not complete the music for the film of King Lear.
In 1971 I received a very depressed letter:
‘Dear Krystof, Thank you for your Third Quartet … It’s a great joy and honour for me that you have dedicated your new work to me for my sixty-fifth birthday. Thank you. As for myself, I’ve recently been ill for a long time. I’m not well now either. But I still hope to recover my strength. I am very weak. Last summer, I completed one more symphony, the Fifteenth. Probably I shouldn’t be composing any more. But I cannot live without it…. I would love to show you the score.’
These words were written on the eve of his second heart attack. This letter is the best illustration of his modesty. It is rather unusual in that Shostakovich hardly ever mentioned his own music, and he hated questions that were in any way connected with his work.
But we often talked about the music of others. In the earlier years of our friendship we used to play through works on the piano. Shostakovich had a phenomenal ear and a phenomenal memory. I remember one day he suggested, ‘Let’s play Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge,’ and handed me the score. In his study there were two pianos which were always out of tune.
‘You play the first violin and viola parts on that piano, and I’ll play the second violin and cello parts on the other one.’
As we only had one copy of the score, I asked, ‘How are we going to divide the music?’
Shostakovich waved his hand. ‘It’s all right, I’ll play it from memory,’ and then proceeded to play the whole quartet with me without a single mistake.
He always raved about Mahler. When I asked him which of his symphonies he rated highest, he hesitated and answered: ‘The First, to be sure, also the Second … and the Third … and also the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Seventh … and the Eighth is marvellous … and the Ninth! And also the Tenth! But if someone told me that I had only one more hour to live, I would want to listen to the last movement of The Song of the Earth.’85
For years I had been trying to persuade him to write a clarinet quintet. Shostakovich hesitated. ‘Who knows? Maybe it is even an interesting idea, although I don’t particularly like the Brahms Quintet … the Mozart is excellent, but Brahms? … Brahms is probably first and foremost a symphonic composer …’ Suddenly he got agitated. ‘Oh, how I love the Fourth Symphony, most of all of course, and then the Second, and the First, and, without doubt, least of all the Third.’
He once violently burst out: ‘Debussy and La Mer? It’s just a piece of candy in the mouth, nothing more.’
When we had such discussions, most often in his huge and spacious study, Shostakovich would often interrupt the conversation, jump up from his chair and either go to the piano or leave the room. I had the impression of someone so highly stimulated that he lived in a state of constant excitement. I never knew the cause of these interruptions. They might happen several times within an hour, but did not last longer than one minute.
His study was an enormous room. Just next to the door stood a very old and dilapidated sofa and a small bookcase whose shelves were strewn with books in fantastic disorder. Over the sofa hung a portrait of the thirteen-year-old Mitya Shostakovich by a family friend of his childhood, the painter Kustodiev. On the opposite side of the room were two pianos, and over them hung all manner of things: posters of the composer’s concerts (always the most recent), diplomas of honorary doctorates, photos of the composer, and also of Mahler, Mussorgsky and the Soviet composer of children’s songs, Blanter.
Between the two windows stood an enormous desk, the composer’s work place during his healthy years. Placed on the desk was a huge antique lamp with a shade, and two very large silver candlesticks. Shostakovich kept two photographs under glass on his desk top; one of himself surrounded by the members of the Beethoven Quartet, and a large portrait of Stravinsky, for whom Shostakovich never publicly expressed any sympathy. But after the death of the composer of The Rite of Spring, he placed his portrait under the glass.
Additionally, there was always a clutter of things scattered about: a box with traditional nib-holders and an old ink blotter, which he used to the very end when writing his music; a number of ballpens; scissors for cutting papirosi; boxes of various kinds; a calendar; two huge inkholders; the telephone; and many other objects.
There was also a large antique clock, which ticked loudly and chimed on the half hour. I always wondered if this loud ticking didn’t interfere with his work. Not far from the desk stood a small table with a tape recorder, which he never learned to use.
Thinking back to the last years of Shostakovich’s life, I try to guess the man’s thoughts and feelings, living in the knowledge that he was terminally ill. He mentioned death only once, when I saw him after his second heart attack. ‘I knew someone,’ he said suddenly, ‘who had eight heart attacks … he is no longer alive … but I know that soon … over there …’ (here he made a vague gesture with his hand) ‘we will meet.’
He devoted his penultimate symphony, the Fourteenth, to the theme of death. Fatalistic touches of a specifically personal nature appear in some of his last pieces: in the Michelangelo Suite and in the tragic Fifteenth String Quartet.
For the last few years, death (before it claimed Shostakovich) was making the rounds of his close friends and colleagues from his younger days. One of the first to go was Vasili Shirinsky, the second violinist of the Beethoven Quartet, to whose memory Shostakovich dedicated his Eleventh Quartet. Then it was the turn of his elder sister Mariya; a friend from his student days, Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky; the film director Grigori Kozintsev. Then Vadim Borisovsky, the viola player of the Beethoven Quartet died, and after him Lev Oborin, Shostakovich’s friend from his youth, with whom he took part in the first Chopin competition. His secretary of many years, Zinaida Merzhanova, also died; and eventually, in the last year of his life, he lost almost simultaneously two friends, David Oistrakh and the cellist Sergei Shirinsky. Broken, Shostakovich didn’t have enough strength to stay to the end of Oistrakh’s funeral.
Shostakovich maintained close relations with Polish composers. He always spoke with the highest respect of Lutoslawski, whom he called ‘master’. He also had a high opinion of Penderecki. I have in front of me a letter addressed to the author of the St Luke’s Passion, which he wrote in January 1975: ‘Thank you very much for the record of your excellent music. [It included among other things Penderecki’s First Symphony.] I’ve listened to this record several times already. Your music has made a great impression on me. I wish you from the bottom of my heart all further success. I would love to come to Cracow. However at the moment my health does not allow me to undertake such a journey. Maybe in the future I will feel better, and then I will most certainly come.’
Unfortunately, he didn’t live to see that moment. He had enough strength to go to Leningrad for a whole month from 20 February until 20 March. It coincided with the premiere of Moisei Weinberg’s opera The Madonna and the Soldier. He always loved and valued Weinberg’s music, and had dedicated his Tenth Quartet to him.
Throughout this month’s stay in his native city Shostakovich felt unexpectedly well. He went to the theatre every evening and attended all the rehearsals of Weinberg’s opera. On 20 March he returned to Moscow and left for his dacha, where he stayed till the end of the month. All of April was spent at the Barvikha Sanatorium near Moscow. The condition of his hands and legs suddenly improved; he partially regained the use of his right hand, and he also put on weight.
In the early days of May he stayed in his Moscow flat, where he made a draft of his new opera, The Black Monk, based on Chekhov’s story, for which Alexander Medvedyev was to write the libretto. He planned to work on this new piece in August, when he was to stay in the small village of Yadrino (not far from Cheboksar). The previous year he had been made one of the village’s deputies to the Supreme Soviet. He wanted, as he told one of his friends, ‘to meet – dead or alive – the people who have elected me’. From 5 to 25 May he stayed in Repino near Leningrad. There he met with a few of his former students, who brought him their compositions. For the first time he noticed that his eyes were failing, and the tiny notes of the score started to become invisible. All his life he had been short-sighted, but recently his myopia exceeded 15 diopters. He understood that he was beginning to go blind.
For the last five days of June he stayed again at his dacha outside Moscow. On 1 July, he suffered from a severe malfunction of the heart. He stayed in hospital throughout July, and came home on 1 August, very weakened. On 3 August, while eating a peach, he choked, and as a result of a prolonged attack of coughing which lasted several minutes, the malfunction of the heart got worse again. He was taken to hospital for a few days. Nothing however indicated that the end was near. On 9 August at six fifty he unexpectedly started to suffocate. This time it was not caused by the heart. For the past two and a half years Shostakovich had suffered from one more fatal illness, about which he and his wife had known for a long time – lung cancer. Double treatments with cobalt had not produced any results. In the past few months new growths were found in the kidneys and the liver. This evening the cancer attacked the artery between the heart and the lungs. The agony lasted for forty minutes, and for the last fifteen the composer was unconscious. At half past seven in the evening, he passed away. His death coincided with the anniversary of the first performance of the Seventh Symphony in besieged Leningrad, and with the eleventh birthday of his grandson Dmitri, Maxim’s son.
Afew days before, I received the last letter from Shostakovich written in hospital. In it he wrote:
‘Dear Krzysztof, thank you for remembering me, thank you for the letter. I am again in hospital, due to lung and heart problems. I manage to write with my right hand only with the greatest difficulty. Please excuse my scribbles. Best wishes to Zosia. A warm handshake. D. Shostakovich.
‘P.S. Although it was very difficult for me, I wrote a sonata for viola and piano.’86
The Viola Sonata, completed a month before his death on 9 August 1975, was Shostakovich’s swansong. Here, as in the Michelangelo Suite, Shostakovich overcomes wordly trivialities and suffering in a mood of exalted philosophical resignation. The Viola Sonata can be regarded as a fitting requiem for a man who had lived through and chronicled the scourges of a cruel age.
Throughout his difficult life, Shostakovich succeeded in keeping his personal integrity intact. Even when plagued by health problems he never diminished his working pace. Undoubtedly, as the debates and arguments recede into the mists of time, the single greatest testament to Shostakovich’s indomitable spirit and powers of mental discipline will remain the body of music.
Recently Manashir Yakubov found a sketch by Shostakovich in the archive with the same thematic material of the viola sonata, only notated in the bass clef. An interesting hypothesis that the sonata was originally scored for cello and piano is lent credibility by two facts. As Yakubov has pointed out, the final statement by the viola of the last movement’s theme in fourths is a quotation from Richard Strauss’s symphonic poem Don Quixote,87 where the cello has a soloist’s role. Then, on the eve of his departure from the Soviet Union in May 1974, Rostropovich paid a farewell visit to Shostakovich. The cellist recalled that on this painful occasion Shostakovich told him two things of importance. First he was instructed that, should he record the symphonies, ‘please start with the Fourth’! The composer’s second message was more enigmatic: ‘If you receive an anonymous packet when you are abroad, don’t throw it out; who knows, it might have an interesting composition inside.’88
Thus only many years later was Rostropovich able to solve the riddle of what the composer meant by these words. Evidently Shostakovich’s first plan had been to write a cello sonata for his friend and ex-pupil. But realizing the impossibility of keeping communications open with the exiled cellist (for to all intents and purposes Rostropovich was considered ‘out of bounds’) he transferred his concept to the viola.
Like the Fifteenth Symphony, the Viola Sonata is an elegiac work in which Shostakovich surveys his life’s work. Apart from self-quotation, he also alludes to other composers’ work and that of Beethoven in particular. Often the quotation is transformed radically from its original presentation, as in the allusion (made five bars before fig. 73 in the Adagio) to the opening of De Profundis from the Fourteenth Symphony which now sounds in a low bass register, rather than in the high tessitura of violins. The second movement, a jesting and ironic scherzo which serves to divide the two slow movements, is almost entirely built on material from the unfinished opera The Gamblers. Back in 1942, Shostakovich had composed some forty minutes’ worth of score, before giving up. He presented the score to Galina Ustvolskaya a few years later. Sometime in 1974 he requested her to return it to him, for it turned out to be the only extant copy.
Going even further back in time the composer makes allusion to a theme from his youthful Suite for Two Pianos, Op. 6, dedicated to the memory of his father. First heard at fig. 48 of the second movement, the theme then becomes the principal subject of the third and final movement. The whole finale is overlaid with the dotted-rhythm octaves associated with many of his own ‘funeral marches’ (often bearing the title of Elegy). This feature is also an obvious reference to Beethoven’s Quasi una fantasia (or ‘Moonlight’ Sonata).89
Fyodor Druzhinin and Mikhail Muntyan gave the first performance of the Viola Sonata at Shostakovich’s home in Nezhdanova Street on 25 September (the date of his sixty-ninth birthday), in front of a select audience of musicians, squeezed to overflowing into his study. The official premiere was given on 1 October 1975 in Leningrad in the Glinka Hall.
FYODOR DRUZHININ recalls the process of Shostakovich’s last urgent creative act:
The Sonata Op. 147 for viola and piano was destined to be Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s last work. (Incidentally, Dmitri Dmitriyevich hated being asked, ‘And what was the last work you wrote?’
‘What d’you mean, last work? Why, you know, maybe I’ll still manage to write something else …’)
It was also to be the last bridge in our long-standing relationship. It was all the more dramatic as Dmitri Dmitriyevich knew that he was dying, and that his days were literally numbered when he wrote this work.
The theme of death dominated all his late works, starting with the Fourteenth Symphony: the Fifteenth Symphony, the Fifteenth Quartet, the Michelangelo Songs, and finally the Viola Sonata.
On 1 July 1975 the phone rang at nine o’clock in the morning. I heard the familiar, slightly rasping voice, ‘Fedya, this is Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich speaking.’ He always presented himself thus, using his full name, although I immediately recognized his voice. ‘Fedya, you know I have the idea of writing a viola sonata.’
My heart was pounding, because I knew that when Dmitri Dmitriyevich spoke of having ‘an idea’ of writing something, it meant that the concept had ripened and the work was probably complete. He would never speak of something that was only a projected work.
‘I would like to consult you, to ask your advice on some technical points.’ There followed some questions about my family, my health and so on. ‘Where are you going to spend the summer?’ I assured Dmitri Dmitriyevich that I was entirely at his disposal, and if he wanted I was ready there and then to come and see him with my viola.
‘That would be wonderful, but I am not allowed to see anyone. I am at my dacha, but I am going into hospital very soon; as soon as I am discharged, then we will meet. I will ring you to inform you of the progress of the work; and I will write to you from the hospital.’
In two hours’ time, Dmitri Dmitriyevich rang me again: ‘I wanted to ask you this: can you play parallel fourths on the viola? I know that double stopping is traditionally in thirds, sixths and octaves. But here I want fourths, and at quite a quick speed.’ Here he sang me what he had in mind. I encouraged Dmitri Dmitriyevich to write whatever he liked – viola players would stretch their technique and learn to play scales in fourths. For several days we had conversations like this on the phone. Dmitri Dmitriyevich was touching in his punctiliousness, and kept me informed of the progress of his work. He complained about his hand: ‘You know it’s very difficult for me to write, or rather to write down the notes. I spend an awful lot of time at it as my hand shakes, and won’t obey me.’
His phenomenal creative energy was in no way impaired. He finished his magnificent work in a few days.
On 5 July Dmitri Dmitriyevich rang me and said, ‘Fedya, you would probably like to know at least in outline the programme of the sonata?’ He had never before talked, at least to me, of the inner content of his works. Sometimes he would drop a hint such as, ‘This passage should sound divine …,’ ‘Here the walls are collapsing around you …,’ or of the first movement of the Fifteenth Quartet, ‘Play it so that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience start leaving the hall from sheer boredom.’
‘The first movement is a novella, the second a scherzo, and the Finale is an adagio in memory of Beethoven; but don’t let that inhibit you. The music is bright, bright and clear.’ Evidently, Dmitri Dmitriyevich wanted to emphasize that the music was not morbid and should not be regarded as a funeral march. ‘The Sonata lasts about half an hour, and should take up one half of a concert. With whom do you propose to play?’
It was only then that I had understood that I had been chosen to give the first performance. I told him that I was playing these days with Mikhail Muntyan. Shostakovich interrupted me and said, ‘Yes, that’s wonderful, I know him, he’s a superb musician.’
That same day in the evening Irina Antonovna rang to say that Dmitri Dmitriyevich wished to speak to me.
‘Fedya, I have buckled down to it, and managed to complete the Finale. I am having the score sent to the Union of Composers to be copied, as no one could possibly read from my manuscript. As soon as the copying has been done, I’ll let you have the music. I have to go into hospital now, but I’ll have a telephone there by my bed, so we can talk. Are you intending to go away at all?’
I said that if my presence was not necessary, I would as usual go to Tarus for the summer.
‘God be with you, you must go, of course. Leave me your address so I can write to you there. Then in about two weeks’ time I think I’ll be out of hospital and we’ll meet.’
I left for Tarus to practise like mad, so as to be in top form for the new sonata.
And indeed in a few days’ time I received a letter from Dmitri Dmitriyevich in hospital, which calmed my fears. He gave me his telephone number in hospital. But when I tried to ring, there was no answer. I tried ringing his wife, Irina Antonovna, but discovered that she was with him in the hospital. Eventually I discovered that Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s condition had deteriorated, and he had been transferred to a special ward where there was no telephone. I immediately rushed up to Moscow so as to be nearer him.
The preparation of the score was dragging on, and this upset and irritated Shostakovich, although he was used to these kinds of delay. But he regarded them as a discourtesy. Eventually I got through to Irina Antonovna, and I calmed down a little, as she said that Dmitri Dmitriyevich felt somewhat better, and the music was now ready, so I would receive the score probably on 6 August. It was arranged that I would pick it up from their flat on Nezhdanova Street. When I arrived I was handed the score. On opening it I stood rooted to the spot as I read the inscription on the title-page: ‘Dedicated to Fyodor Serafimovich Druzhinin.’
I rushed home and immediately rang Misha Muntyan. He came flying over to my place and we thereupon started playing the sonata and continued playing it till late at night. Immediately afterwards I sat down to write a long letter to Dmitri Dmitriyevich to express my profound gratitude to him and my immense admiration for the sonata, which sounded marvellous, and to reassure him that there wasn’t a note in it that could not be played. I promised to be ready as soon as possible to perform it to him, and at latest, if he approved of our interpretation, to schedule it for a concert on his birthday, 25 September.
This letter was written during the night of 6 and 7 August. On 9 August Dmitri Dmitriyevich died in hospital.90
Here fate has sent me eternal sleep
But I am not dead.
Though buried in the earth,
I live in you,
Whose lamentations I listen to,
Since friend is reflected in friend
… Is reflected in friend.
I am as though dead
But as a comfort to the world
With thousands of souls, I live on
In the hearts of all loving people.
That means I am not dust,
Mortal decay does not touch me
… Does not touch me.
From the setting of Michelangelo’s verse in the final song, ‘Immortality’ of Shostakovich’s Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Op. 145.
MARK LUBOTSKY describes the ultimate farce of Shostakovich’s civic funeral at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire, followed by the burial at the Novodevichi Cemetery on 14 August 1975 (this is an extract from his diary):
9.30 a.m. Police in Hertzen Street and in the side streets standing around in groups, ready to cordon off the area. The Grand Hall of the Conservatoire has already been blocked off. Backstage, various officials from the Ministry of Culture run about with black bands on their arms. I came across Maxim Shostakovich and the composer Yuri Levitin, a one-time pupil of Dmitri Dmitriyevich. They say that during the ceremony Shostakovich’s music will be played only in recordings. None of the Moscow orchestras are in town in mid-August. Nobody has even tried to put together an orchestra of some kind. They refer to the will, which it appears forbade the funeral to be accompanied by orchestra. It all seems somewhat strange.
10.15 a.m. The coffin is in the hall. Ablack pedestal with three steps at right angles to the platform. Shostakovich. Too much pinkish-red make-up. Unrecognizable. Except for his arms. Unnaturally small from shoulders to wrists, and the hands dead and waxy, but his own, in some terrible way his own. A crowd of organizers in black suits with armbands and people who had obviously never been in this hall before. Although they were wearing different clothes, they were all alike in some way, as if the mark of Cain distinguished all those plain clothes ‘music scholars’. They were in constant action – forever sniffing around.
A detachment of soldiers marched in and took positions facing each other down the central aisle, each one cutting off a passage between two rows. The family, Shostakovich’s wife, Irina Antonovna, his daughter Galya and son Maxim, the grandchildren and other relatives, sat on special benches on the right. There were four or five rows of similarly reserved benches on the left, but as yet they were empty.
I found a place forward on the right side of the first amphitheatre with a good view of what was going on down in the stalls.
Tapes of Shostakovich’s music were being played: the Piano Quintet, slow movements from the quartets and the Fifth Symphony.
The stalls began to fill up. Two ‘music scholars’ stood in the aisle asking questions and issuing directions. The reporters bustled about – their manner was obnoxious. One of them, he must have been from the television, kept running about with an exposure meter, shoving it now at Shostakovich’s face, now at the huge wreath at his head, whose ribbon he smoothed out to expose the words ‘From the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, and Council of Ministers of the USSR’, and now under the noses of the dead man’s relatives.
Aram Khachaturian and his wife appeared. They put flowers on the pedestal and then approached Irina Antonovna, the widow, and Maxim. Khachaturian kissed them in his idiosyncratic way; from above one can see it all too evidently – at the last minute he turned his face away, so that he got kissed, thereby avoiding having to give a kiss himself.
An elderly woman carrying a bag approached the coffin. ‘Who’s that, who’s that?’ one of the nearby ‘musicologists’ cried out. He was wearing a soiled black suit and outmoded black boots and a short red tie; he had on a pair of glasses in a narrow metal frame à la Beriya. He was ready to dive into the stalls from the balcony – who knows what that lady was carrying in her bag! But she approached the family and kissed Irina Antonovna, and he calmed down.
The head of the queue which had formed out in the street was let in through the central door. People were openly grieving. They started playing the Eighth Quartet, and immediately there formed a ‘triangle’ of true things: the music, the coffin, these people. They walked slowly, many of them wanted to remain a little, but they were not allowed to; when they lingered they were hurried on. Those who had flowers asked timidly whether they could put them on the coffin. Permission was given but they were told not to tarry. A plump, middle-aged man looking vaguely Chinese detached himself from the procession, threw flowers at Shostakovich’s feet in the coffin and fell to his knees.
Various composers walked past the coffin. Yuri Butsko stopped to take a long last look at Shostakovich’s face. The soldiers hurried him on too.
Gradually the hall filled up. There were very few familiar faces, mostly functionaries and people who had nothing to do with music. Yurlov’s chorus arrived and delegations from the Moscow orchestras. They were playing the slow movement of Shostakovich’s Piano Trio. It didn’t sound like a recording. The playing was excellent; it transpired that Oleg Kagan, Natalya Gutman and Vladimir Skanavi were the performers. Then the chorus sang one of the revolutionary poems. Next a female singer, followed by a male one. Something excessively loud in Italian – probably Verdi. Why? Then for some reason Bach, the first movements from the B minor and C minor sonatas for violin and harpsichord. It was out of tune and not together, the musicians were probably sight-reading. How could they do that? True he was dead, but he was still Shostakovich.
There was a constantly changing guard of honour. At one point it consisted of the music scholar L. Danilevich, the cellist L. Evgrafov, the composers D. Kabalevsky and R. Shchedrin, the pianist D. Bashkirov and the violinist L. Kogan. Mravinsky appeared and sat on the bench next to the relatives. The pianist Nikolai Petrov, followed by the Glinka Quartet playing Tchaikovsky,91 then the pianist Tatyana Nikolayeva played Shostakovich’s C major Prelude and Fugue. Among the people processing past the coffin a portly young man stopped and gave a deep bow.
1.00 p.m. The memorial service was about to begin. The benches for the guests of honour to the right of the coffin were occupied by the guests of honour: Tikhon Khrennikov, Pyotr Demichev, Vasili Kukharsky and other deputy ministers; a plumber (or carpenter) – hero of labour from Leningrad; a dozen other characterless faces unknown to anybody; Kabalevsky, Kondrashin and Kogan.
So many people were missing; it was mid-August and they were on holiday. An unfortunate time to die.
Suddenly all the ‘musicologists’ in mufti disappeared. They must have been waiting for someone important who hadn’t turned up. At 1.30 Khrennikov started the civic memorial service.
‘We have lost …’ etc. ‘When Shostakovich and I were in California he proudly declared to the journalists that “first and foremost he was a communist” … etc.’
Kukharsky spoke from the Ministry of Culture, followed by the plumber/carpenter from the workers of Leningrad, and then by Shchedrin as Shostakovich’s successor as First Secretary of the Russian Composers’ Union (RSFSR). In Shchedrin’s speech every word was in its proper place. One only wished for a bit less self-assertion and a bit more of the grief felt by the people outside the Hall.
All the speakers declared that they considered Shostakovich a genius (the plumber spoke of ‘the Seventh Symphony’ and ‘The Song of the Counterplan’ beloved by all the working class in Leningrad). These were approved statements – the official obituary had stated as much after all, and it had been signed by all the heads and even ‘Himself’.
But – ‘first and foremost he was a communist’, and so on.
At the end a couple of foreign representatives spoke, some president of a creative union from East Germany and the vice-president of the Austria-Russia society. Poor Khrennikov must have found it difficult to provide foreigners representing ‘the correct trend’ at such notice. They spoke in German, in a sentence or two at a time, followed immediately by an interpreter reading out two whole pages of text.
*
A notice on the gate of the Novodevichi Cemetery said, ‘It is forbidden to visit the cemetery on Thursdays.’ It was cold. A military band was butchering its way through Chopin’s Funeral March. We stood around a platform listening to more speeches. The composer Otar Taktakishvili, the Georgian Minister of Culture, made a monotonous, lengthy speech. He was followed by Andrei Petrov, the Leningrad composer, who at least spoke more concisely and with a certain sincerity. To my side stood Rudolf Barshai who had just applied for permission to emigrate. In front of me the professor of the Central Music School, Anaida Sumbatyan, who had been Vladimir Ashkenazy’s teacher. She said, ‘This is the end of the road – a full stop.’
Fyodor Druzhinin, the viola player in the Beethoven Quartet, came up to me. He told me of Shostakovich’s viola sonata, his last work. Dmitri Dmitriyevich had put the finishing touches to it just before his death.
Hammers banged. They were nailing down the lid of the coffin. Then they moved. Then they stopped. It was cold and it started to drizzle.92
1 Letter dated 17 February 1969, Glikman, Letters to a Friend, p. 250
2 In fact, the third movement, ‘Lorelei’, is actually a setting of a ‘double’ translation, for Apollinaire’s poem is itself a translation of the famous verses by Clemens Brentano.
3 Letter dated 19 March 1969, Glikman, Letters to a Friend, p. 252.
4 Ibid., letter dated 19 March 1969, p. 252.
5 See Levon Hakobian, Dmitri Shostakovich: An Essay in the Phenomenology of his Work (St Petersburg, 2004), p. 374.
6 From the eighth movement, ‘The Zaporozhian Cossacks’ Answer to the Sultan of Constantinople’.
7 Rostropovich has recounted to me on several occasions how Shostakovich would ask him, ‘Which composers do you think will remain in history after their deaths?’ A heated discussion would follow.
8 Pavel Apostolov was a Party official dealing with artistic matters attached to the Central Committee of the KPSS. He had been given a musical education, and was a considered expert on military music. Records state that in fact he died in hospital on 19 July 1969 (see Fay (OUP, 2000), p. 262). But as a witness to these events in Moscow myself, I can confirm that the rumour (true or false) of the death of Shostakovich’s former persecutor on 21 June, the day of the symphony’s ‘closed’ performance, immediately started to circulate round Moscow.
9 In fact at the first Leningrad performance on 29 September 1969 the two soloists were Vishnevskaya and Vladimirov.
10 Rudolf Barshai: recorded interview with EW.
11 Mark Lubotsky, extract from unpublished memoirs.
12 From a copy in E.Wilson’s personal archive. The original is in the Britten–Pears Library at Aldeburgh.
13 Ibid.
14 DDS, ‘Foreword to a Premiere’, Pravda, 25 April 1969.
15 Meyer, p. 419. This idea is developed more extensively by Levon Hakobian; see Hakobian, pp. 384–5. Extending the religious symbolic imagery I would put forward the concept of an agnostic passion traversing the landscape of death.
16 Henry Orlov, ‘A Link in the Chain’ (article written in 1976), in Malcolm Hamrick Brown (ed.), A Shostakovich Casebook (Indiana University Press, 2004), p. 212.
17 From the LP Dmitri Shostakovich Speaks, Melodiya 33 M 40–41707.
18 In private conversation with EW.
19 Grigori Kozintsev, The Complete Works, vol. II, p. 441.
20 Shostakovich visited East Berlin in May 1972.
21 The Berlin premiere took place on 24 February 1973.
22 Thomas Sanderling: recorded interview with EW.
23 Letter dated 2 January 1969 (Glikman, Letters to a Friend, p. 248).
24 Ibid., p. 249.
25 Letter dated 23 November 1969 (ibid., p. 265).
26 Our Father, Dmitri Shostakovich, Ardov (Moscow, 2003), p. 162.
27 Khentova, Sofiya, Shostakovich: Life and Work (Leningrad, 1986), vol. 2, p. 536.
28 Letter dated 11 May 1970, Glikman, Letters to a Friend, p. 271.
29 Mstislav Rostropovich: recorded interview with EW.
30 Kozintsev, Complete Works, vol. II, pp. 437, 438.
31 Ibid., vol. II, pp. 438, 439.
32 DDS informed Glikman in a letter written on 30 December 1971 that he was going to stay at the Ruza Composers’ Retreat from 10 January 1972. Hence the conversation that Litvinova describes probably took place sometime during this visit.
33 Flora Litvinova, article commissioned for this book.
34 Solomon Volkov, Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, p. xxi.
35 Ibid., p. xxxiii.
36 This observation in confirmed by Boris Tishchenko’s notes to Letters of D. D. Shostakovich to Boris Tishchenko (St Petersburg, 1997), p. 44.
37 In a letter to Isaak Glikman dated 24 September 1968 he protested that if anybody had asked him if he would live his life in the same way again, he would surely answer, ‘No.’ Glikman, Letters to a Friend (Moscow, 1993), p. 243.
38 Letter dated 21 February 1974, Tishchenko, Letters of D. D. Shostakovich to Boris Tishchenko (St Petersburg, 1997), p. 43.
39 From unfinished letter to Boris Tishchenko dated 26 October 1965. Ibid., p. 18. The letter was never sent, and was rescued from the waste bin by his wife, Irina Antonovna, who later gave it to Tishchenko.
40 3 September 1973. The other signatories included Kabalevsky, Shchedrin, Khrennikov, Aram Khachaturian and Sviridov.
41 Tishchenko, Letters of D. D. Shostakovich to Boris Tishchenko (St Petersburg, 1997), p. 15.
42 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf: Sketches of Literary Life in the Soviet Union, p. 221.
43 In private conversation with EW.
44 In private conversation with EW.
45 Galina Vishnevskaya, Galina: A Russian Story, p. 398, 399.
46 This is amply confirmed by Isaak Glikman. In his correspondence with Glikman, Shostakovich many times asks his friend to write an article on his behalf, on subjects ranging from the poet Mayakovsky or the centenary of the Leningrad Conservatoire, to the pianists Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter. Shostakovich was always fastidious about passing on the fee that he received for such articles to the actual writer.
47 Sergei Slonimsky, ‘Brush Strokes for a Portrait of a Great Musician’, article commissioned for this book.
48 Premiered in Zagreb in May 1973.
49 Edison Denisov: recorded interview with EW.
50 Yuri Lyubimov: recorded interview with EW.
51 Glikman, Letters to a Friend, p. 277.
52 Hakobian points out that this could also be a reference to the opening of the finale of Beethoven’s D minor Sonata, Op. 31 No. 2. Hakobian, p. 392.
53 Speaking at the Secretariat of the Composers’ Union when the symphony was performed in its four-hand piano version.
54 Interview with DDS, Soviet Music, no. 4, 1974, p. 130.
55 Venyamin Basner: recorded interview with EW.
56 The concert took place on 20 November at the Royal Festival Hall with the New Philharmonia Orchestra.
57 The Shostakoviches stayed in York at the Royal York Hotel, and in London they stayed in Kensington Garden Hotel.
58 From article sent by Alan George to EW in 1993.
59 Letter dated 28 November 1971 (Glikman, Letters to a Friend, p. 280).
60 Ibid., p. 291.
61 A. Vavilina Mravinskaya, ‘Doomed by Music’, Musikal’naya Akademiya, no. 4, 1997, p. 100.
62 In notes by Glikman in Letters to a Friend (St Petersburg, 1993), p. 292.
63 An effect achieved by hitting the string with the wood of the bow
64 Fyodor Druzhinin: article commissioned for this book.
65 Vladimir Ovcharek, article commissioned for this book.
66 In fact Shostakovich had written an ‘unplayable’ part, for he had erroneously thought that the balalaika was tuned in fifths. At a later point in the production Rozhdestvensky found a practical solution. A violinist (wearing a red shirt) performed the part on stage, having tuned the balalaika in fifths like a violin.
67 ‘Go on, you fool, back in your place.’
68 Boris Pokrovsky, recorded interview with EW.
69 An unpaid voluntary day’s work, usually organized on Saturdays (‘subbota’, Saturday, hence subbotnik). See also Rostropovich’s contribution, p. 479.
70 The final words of the opera: ‘My darling, my beauty.’ The diminutive ‘dushechka’ is virtually interchangeable with ‘dushenka’.
71 Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, recorded interview with EW.
72 Sofiya Vakman, article commissioned for this book.
73 Evgeni Shenderovich, article commissioned for this book.
74 Kozintsev, Complete Works, vol. II, p. 432.
75 Ibid., vol. II, p. 426.
76 In a letter to Yavorsky dated 1 January 1926, Bobykina (ed.), Shostakovich in Letters and Documents (Moscow, 2000), p. 52.
77 Ibid.
78 Italian cellist and opera composer (1829–1907). In Braga’s original version the song is scored for mezzo-soprano, cello and piano.
79 The song is scored for violin, piano and two women’s voices. I remember meeting the violinist Oleg Kagan in Moscow just as he had come back from playing the work for Shostakovich in his Moscow apartment on Nezhdanov Street.
80 Rosamund Bartlett, ‘Shostakovich and Chekhov’, in Bartlett (ed.), Shostakovich in Context (OUP, 2000), p. 212.
81 Ibid. See pp. 208–15.
82 Chizhik-Pyzhik is the name of the most familiar of all children’s songs, which nearly every Russian child can play with one finger on the piano. Literally, ‘chizhik’ means siskin, a yellow and black Eurasian finch.
83 Abraam Gozenpud, ‘Encounters with Shostakovich’, article commissioned for this book.
84 Shostakovich had been elected a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the town of Gorky in June 1966.
85 Boris Tishchenko recalls that, while a post-graduate student of Shostakovich’s, the composer told him, ‘I used to consider The Song of the Earth the best work ever written, but now it seems to me that Bach’s music is even more forceful.’ And also that he loved ‘all of Mahler, except perhaps for the Eigth Symphony’ (‘Study for a Portrait’, in G. Shneyerson, D. D. Shostakovich, p. 100).
86 Krzysztof Meyer, extracts from an article written as an extended obituary of DDS.
87 See the clarinet’s final phrase six bars from the end of the symphonic poem.
88 Information received in conversation with Yakubov and also with Rostropovich.
89 Shostakovich had already quoted this Beethovian motif in the second movement of his Seventh Symphony.
90 Fyodor Druzhinin, article commissioned for this book.
91 I was told by one of the Quartet’s members that they were ‘instructed’ to play the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Second Quartet. They had protested, on the grounds that they had it from Shostakovich’s widow that Dmitri Dmitriyevich particularly disliked this movement. But the authorities were adamant in their choice.
92 Mark Lubotsky, extract from unpublished memoirs.