Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was born a hundred years ago on 25 September 1906. The centenary of his birth provides an opportunity not just for celebration, but for re-evaluation of the man and his music. Twelve years have passed since my book Shostakovich: A Life Remembered was first published by Faber and Faber and Princeton University Press. It is opportune to mark this event with a revised edition in which new information has been absorbed, while maintaining the essential vision of the original book.

The incorporated revisions have been motivated not so much by the need for reappraisal of Shostakovich’s personality, for I believe that the original edition of Shostakovich: A Life Remembered still offers a highly credible picture. Rather they aim at sharpening the focus on his image, and elaborating the details of his life, while gaining a wider perspective.

For the new edition I have retained the integral structure of the original book, where reminiscences of contemporaries are woven into the fabric of the text with the composer’s writings and documents from published sources, as well as my own commentaries. Into this I have threaded new material garnered from more recent publications: reminiscences, the composer’s own letters and working diaries, and other documents relating to his life.

I have also considerably revised and extended my own commentaries, focusing more attention on the music, in so far as the compositional work mirrors Shostakovich’s inner world, as well as referring to external events in his life. In rewriting and reordering my material I have attempted to maintain the essential balance between reminiscence and documentary evidence, comment and background history. In compensation I have also cut repetitive and inessential detail in the text.

The twelve years that separate the two editions of Shostakovich: A Life Remembered have seen a veritable flood of books and articles dedicated to the composer. I have sifted through a great deal of them in my search for new material and information. Whereas I decided not to seek further testimony myself from Shostakovich’s remaining contemporaries (for I had already covered the ground quite well in the late 1980s), I have raided published sources to extract new reminiscence material. My references are acknowledged in footnotes and in the list of sources at the end of the book.

Of particular value to the biographer are the volumes of source materials published in Russia, where the selection of letters and documents usually represent the holding of one particular archive. To cite an example, the 560-page volume, Dmitri Shostakovich through his Letters and Documents by I. A. Bobykina, published by the Glinka State Museum of Musical Culture in Moscow, is a treasure trove of information, which has been thoroughly edited, yet leaves the material uncontaminated by superfluous commentary or interpretation. Such books, I should add, constitute a much loved and idosyncratic genre which has become part of established Russian biographical tradition.

No less important are the the new publications of the composer’s letters. (For instance the above-cited book contains an important collection of Shostakovich’s youthful letters to Boleslav Yavorsky.) The composer’s vivid epistolary style is reminiscent of his music, for his language bristles with understated sardonic humour, rhythmic repetitions and a parodying use of Soviet officialese. His knowledge of Russian literature shines through, reminding the reader of Gogol at one moment, and of Zoshchenko or Daniil Kharms at another.

Not surprisingly Shostakovich reveals more of himself in his early letters, written with directness, sincerity and youthful passion. Later he exercised far greater restraint, as he increasingly felt the need to guard his privacy. In addition the need for self-censorship imposed on him a coded linguistic style, where risky subjects could be alluded to only cryptically. Nevertheless the epistolary inheritance provides wonderful documentation, throwing insight into the composer’s moods and chronicling the dates of his composition.

Today no Shostakovich scholar can ignore two invaluable works; namely the impeccably researched biography by the American scholar Laurel Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2000), and the Polish composer Krzystzof Meyer’s book, Shostakovich: Life, Work and Times, in the revised Russian edition (DSCH/Kompozitor, St Petersburg, 1998). I also found much that stimulated thought in Levon Hakobian’s most interesting book, Dmitri Shostakovich: An Essay in the Phenomenology of his Work.

My own insights into the endlessly fascinating world of Shostakovich’s music have also benefited from acquaintance with several new publications: suffice it to mention the volumes of essays published under the editorship of Lyudmila Kovnatskaya, Laurel Fay, David Fanning and Rosamund Bartlett. (These are included in the list of sources.)

Thanks to the efforts of the composer’s widow, Irina Antonovna Shostakovich, the DSCH publishing house has been set up in Moscow, with the aim of publishing the composer’s music and books relating to his biography and work. A complete new edition of the composer’s work in 150 volumes under the general editorship of Manashir Yakubov is currently in progress: 49 volumes have been produced so far. Yakubov’s extensive articles on the works and their sources are a valuable part of every new volume, offering important new information about the content and background to the compositions concerned.

On the reverse side of the coin, the so-called ‘Shostakovich Wars’ have given rise to debate, ranging from tendentious quarrels to mudslinging, all copiously described in acres of print and cyberspace. Ultimately this has held up rather than promoted the advance of Shostakovich scholarship. The arguments originated in Solomon Volkov’s claims that Testimony (published in 1979) represents the composer’s own memoirs as recounted to him. Laurel Fay, in her recent article ‘Volkov’s Testimony Reconsidered’ (in A Shostakovich Casebook, edited by Malcolm Hamrick Brown), has conclusively demonstrated that Volkov’s methods and claims do not stand up to examination.

It cannot be denied that Volkov’s Testimony makes compulsive reading, and that when it appeared it stimulated new interest in the West in Shostakovich’s music. It also dealt a fatal blow to the primitive view that the composer expressed himself as an official Communist in his music – although I admit to being amazed that even at the height of the Cold War anybody with any knowledge of the music could regard such a view as credible.

However, Testimony has also been indirectly responsible for equally tendentious but opposite interpretations of the oeuvre. At worst Shostakovich’s music has been reduced to little more than a vessel for hidden political agenda and autobiographical secrets. While the composer’s frequent use of quotation and allusion is undeniable, a dangerous problem occurs when the right to the understanding of his work, and not least the ‘decoding’ of its signals, is claimed exclusively by one or other party. This results in emphasis being placed on secondary issues, and overlooks the intrinsic value of the music for its own sake.

One might argue that a composer who continues to provoke controversy remains constantly in the public eye, and this is a healthy sign. Over the years Shostakovich’s music has provoked all kinds of criticism, and not just by Stalin and Communist Party ideologues. It was dismissed as hopelessly provincial by Stravinsky, and more recently as a kind of sub-Mahlerian ‘third pressing’ by Boulez (using an analogy with the ‘dregs’ of olive oil). In Russia the generation of composers that succeeded Shostakovich often fought against the shadows his music cast on them.

Another category of musicians who claim a unique understanding of Shostakovich are the performers of his music. An authentic performing tradition (in so far as it has been acknowledged to exist) has been evolved by those Russian interpreters who were trusted by Shostakovich during his lifetime. The interpretative credo that they have handed down demands a willingness to go beyond the letter of the score. The performer’s personal ‘I’ must be totally involved but self-effacing enough to allow the music to speak on its own terms with its inherent emotional power. This involves always keeping sight of the overall structure, while addressing the metaphysical ‘secondary’ meaning through the sound world, allowing room for significant imagery as well as revealing the music’s extra-spatial dimension. As Rostropovich has told me on more than one occasion, the scores of Shostakovich’s symphonies and concertos may look simple on the surface, but they have an almost ‘magical’ sonority in the playing of a live orchestra. The fact that abstract signs on the page can be confidently transformed into physical sound as the composer heard it in his head is a sign of Shostakovich’s enormous mastery.

Having spent seven years as a student of Rostropovich at the Moscow Conservatoire in the 1960s and early 1970s, I was privileged to be present at many of Shostakovich’s triumphant premieres, all of them unforgettable occasions. I was lucky to be given the chance to live in the Soviet Union in the final years of what Anna Akhmatova called ‘the epoch of Shostakovich’. My experience (albeit as an ‘ignorant but privileged’ foreigner) of Soviet society at that time allowed me to develop a perception of the complex multifarious background to the life and culture of its citizens.

This no doubt influenced my initial conception of Shostakovich: A Life Remembered as a documentary biography in which ‘oral narrative’ plays a large part. My aim was to tap collective memory of the generation of Shostakovich’s contemporaries, in order to convey the spirit of a particular political era (which by now has been allocated to the dustbin of history). It seemed to me essential to place the composer in the context of the culture and society in which he grew up and lived, viewing his life from the standpoint of his family, friends and colleagues.

By the time I was conducting my research in Moscow and Leningrad (from 1988 to 1990) the Soviet Union had ceased to exist as I had known it. It was a time of confusion and excitement, as Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost took root, and gave Russians the chance to express themselves openly and without fear. While young people wished to leave the past behind as quickly as possible, an older generation was anxious to put the historical record straight before the Soviet Union disintegrated altogether. On the whole this worked in my favour, for the composer’s contemporaries were aware of the importance of transmitting their knowledge of Shostakovich the man, and shedding light on the symbolic significance of his music. I was also aware that some reminiscences were coloured by the thornier issues at stake, not least by the wish for self-justification.

Shostakovich himself was extremely cautious in his dealings with the outside world, conditioned as he was by an inbuilt mistrust of people, whether as petty gossips or potential informers. Suspicion of his fellow men was exacerbated by the condition of life in a police state. Hence he rarely revealed himself fully in public, even to those he trusted and liked. His extreme sensibility to others defined his attitudes and behaviour in every particular instance. He felt relaxed only with the intimate family circle, or when discussing music with trusted colleagues and favourite pupils.

In my capacity of compiler of both living and written testimony, it was (and still is) important to try to discern the nature of the relationship of the informants with the main protagonist. A valuable and preceptive reminiscence is not necessarily the exclusive right of close friends. It is also defined by the power of observation and the nature of the sensibility of the contributors, who inevitably also leave something of themselves in the telling of their story. This has provided me with complementary material which has helped build up the atmosphere and psychological outlook of the times in which Shostakovich lived and worked.

No book on the composer is comprehensive. Despite continuing achievements in the world of Shostakovich studies, there remains work to be done by future biographers and music scholars. Sketches and whole compositions continue to be discovered in the archives, while many of the composer’s letters and private documents will, I suspect, remain inaccessible in private collections for many years to come. I myself am totally convinced that interest in the composer and his music will continue for as long as classical music is still played and loved.

I hope that this new edition of Shostakovich: A Life Remembered achieves my initial and unchanged aim of viewing the composer’s life from the perspective of his contemporaries against the historical backdrop of his times and culture. For this reason I have tended to proceed with the biography by theme, rather than always observe strict chronological order. As before, I do not claim to deal with the music in any depth, although I have attempted to give more space to the principal compositions, which Shostakovich viewed as important landmarks in his life.

The revisions to the original edition are intended to give this book a new lease of life and make it useful to readers new and old. I will be happy if the reader is in a position to draw his own conclusions about the composer and his music, for I have attempted to avoid making final pronouncements or being one-sided. My great hope is to have succeeded in constructing a convincing and lifelike portrait of Shostakovich, whereby he is seen as a person of overwhelming humanity and integrity, whose art has illuminated our lives. As I wrote in my original preface, any human weaknesses he displayed are far outweighed by the steadfast courage he found in order to live by his convictions. Shostakovich has, in my opinion, emerged from Russian twentieth-century culture as a towering figure of his age.

 

ELIZABETH WILSON
Cumiana
October 2005