In Russia of the 1930s, after dictator Joseph Stalin had made it clear that artists who gravitated to the avant-garde were going to find their lives on the line, Dmitry Shostakovich became for the world the virtual face of Soviet composers. But that prestigious role made his position more precarious rather than less. He had been something of a brash young man, a provocateur, but in 1936 after an outraged Stalin walked out on a performance of his rowdy opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, a newspaper article declared that if he kept on this path “things could end very badly.” That did not mean loss of job or commissions—it meant a bullet in the back of the head. So began for Shostakovich a cat-and-mouse game with the communist regime that he survived for over forty years. In the process, submitting here and risking his neck there, he left to the world an indelible record of tyranny and suffering.
Dmitry Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was born in Saint Petersburg in 1906. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917 he shone as both composer and pianist at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. He gained international attention for his Symphony No. 1, and soon was issuing puckish works known for their “wrong-note” approach to traditional harmony, and their atmosphere of satire, parody, and sometimes grotesquerie. Meanwhile in the late 1920s into the 1930s he churned out a great deal of musical hackwork for film and stage. To this point he seemed to have little interest in being serious or profound. Then came the newspaper article “Muddle Instead of Music,” denouncing Lady Macbeth. The opera and his still-unheard Fourth Symphony were banned. Thereafter his life and work, whether he wanted or not, got very serious indeed. (Stalin, you see, was highly involved in the arts and convinced of their importance to society. That’s why he murdered so many artists he considered bad influences, and/or he just didn’t like their stuff. In general, when politicians get interested in the arts, artists better run.)
What Shostakovich did in response was kind of unbelievable. He issued a symphony, submissively declaring it “a Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism.” Anyone else would have written a nicely patriotic work, perhaps one extolling Stalin’s socialist paradise. Instead, the 1937 Symphony No. 5 was Shostakovich’s most ambitious and finest to date. It flew around the world and remains one of the most popular symphonies of the century. The stern proclamation of the opening announces an epic work, in tone if not in length. The first movement is tragic, building from quiet lyricism to shattering climaxes. Here is where the ambiguity of instrumental music comes into play, and the game that artists of any integrity must engage in under a totalitarian regime. Are those climaxes a matter of stern heroism, as Stalin would wish them to be, or transports of anguish and rage? The second movement scherzo moves between a stern march and mocking interludes. For the third movement, Largo, Shostakovich wrote an expansive, beautiful, exquisitely sorrowful movement led by the strings. What then should we make of the brassy finale? Is it a march of sometimes baffling banality? Is it a paean to the implacable strength of the Soviet worker and soldier? Or is it a send-up of the slaughter and hypocrisy of Stalin’s Russia? Cat and mouse. In any case, the symphony did the trick. The premiere gained a standing ovation that went on for over half an hour. The newspaper reviews, whose direction came from on high, were glowing.
When the Nazi onslaught arrived in 1941 Shostakovich was teaching at the Leningrad Conservatory. Stalin’s message went out: every citizen was to do his and her duty in the war; peasants were to grow food, soldiers to fight, artists to create and inspire. Shostakovich became a volunteer fireman in the siege of Leningrad, during which he witnessed first hand the most terrible things humanity is capable of wreaking and surviving. From that experience he wrote the Seventh Symphony (“Leningrad”), which became a worldwide symbol of Soviet resistance to the Nazis. However inspirational it is as a symbol, musically it is one of his lesser large works. (Bartók, having heard the “Leningrad” on radio in the United States, razzed it mercilessly in the Concerto for Orchestra.)
In a way the war allowed Soviet artists to extend their palettes, because they were expected to respond to tragedy and violence. One of Shostakovich’s great works from the war years is the 1944 Piano Trio No. 2. Shostakovich, who unusually for Russians was no anti-Semite, heard a story that SS soldiers had danced on the graves of their Jewish victims. That image seems to have sparked the haunting dance of death in the finale of the Trio, whose main theme is a Jewish melody. From the first movement on the music is stark, at times brutal, rhythmically relentless, and absolutely compelling. It is one of the most memorable creative artifacts of the war.
Much the same can be said of the Violin Concerto No. 1, from 1947–1948, though its emotional world is not so single-minded. For a first movement, it has a spacious and grand Nocturne, melancholy in tone but with a good deal of warmth and lyricism. For second movement there is one of Shostakovich’s scherzos operating between wry and demonic. The third movement takes shape around the old genre of the passacaglia, weaving gorgeous melodies over a repeated bass line. The “Burleska” finale is nervous and driving, verging at times on hysteria. See whether you can find a video of the great David Oistrakh, for whom the concerto was written, executing with astounding aplomb the enormous, finally berserk finale cadenza that seems to mount until splinters fly from the violin.
It was in 1948, while Shostakovich was working on the violin concerto, that the second great blow of his life fell. As the cold war settled in, Stalin decided to bring Soviet composers to heel. Out of the blue, at a Communist Party congress, a row of composers, starting with Prokofiev and Shostakovich, were summarily condemned for “formalistic distortions and antidemocratic tendencies alien to the Soviet people.” They had, in short, written music deemed not relevant to factory workers, not in the orbit of “socialist realism,” which is to say: propaganda.
By that point everyone knew artists in all disciplines who had disappeared. Now, as Stalin intended, the terror was complete for everyone. Shostakovich put the Violin Concerto in a drawer. He was handed an apology to read in an act of public humiliation. Afterward, he said to friends, his voice rising to a shriek: “I read like the most paltry wretch, a parasite, a puppet, a cut-out paper doll on a string!” For the time being most of his work was banned; he was dismissed from the Conservatory. It was around this point that one began to see Shostakovich’s life engraved on his face: fixed, ravaged, revealing nothing. Shortly after that, Stalin sent him to America on a tour. Shostakovich knew, and Stalin knew he knew, that artists returning from these tours often found themselves shot. It was maybe a little joke on Stalin’s part, to give the doomed a vacation first.
But Shostakovich wasn’t shot. He returned to Russia and got back to work. Gradually the bans were lifted, his music was heard again, he returned to teaching. After Stalin died in 1953, official pressures eased considerably, but not entirely.
Still, Shostakovich managed to have a full life. He was gregarious, generous to his students, a perfervid soccer fan who traveled widely to see matches. He still composed with enormous facility, for well and ill: his facility sometimes outran his judgment. In music as in life, he believed in just sticking it out. When a student came to him saying he was having trouble with a second movement, Shostakovich told him, “You should not be worrying about the second movement. You should be writing the second movement.” When authorities told his student Sofia Gubaidulina she was treading a “mistaken path,” Shostakovich told her, “I think you should stick to your mistaken path.”
In the Soviet era, chamber music was generally safer for composers, perhaps understood to be a more private expression than their big works. In recent years, Shostakovich’s fifteen string quartets have come to be seen as masterworks of the twentieth century, second only to Bartók’s. Here, if anywhere, he said what he wanted, how he wanted. They were his private rebellion.
The genesis of the String Quartet No. 8 was another humiliation. In 1960 Shostakovich was pressured into joining the Communist Party, something he had resisted for years. His son remembered him weeping in despair, saying he had been blackmailed. Shostakovich resolved to write the Eighth Quartet and then to kill himself. He wrote it in three days. Its main motif is made from notes taken from his name: D–S–C–H, in German notation the pitches D–E-flat–C–B. (He used that motto in other pieces as well.) Here they are the first notes in the quartet, and never far away in the rest of it. They form a mournful presence, heard over and over in a haunted but riveting work. The second movement is as savage as a quartet can get. Here and elsewhere Shostakovich seems to be working by indirection, implying things too terrible to speak, in trances of sorrow or explosions of rage and derision. In any case, after the piece he did not kill himself, and the Eighth became his most popular quartet. It is in the String Quartet No. 13 that he perhaps came closest to what he had witnessed and felt. This is music of bleak directness and unutterable sadness. It is like coming on a pile of dry bones in a forest.
I believe that of the leading twentieth-century Russian composers, Prokofiev is the finer artist of the two—his technique, his judgment, his range outstrip Shostakovich. But I also believe that Shostakovich is the more important of the two. More than his colleague, Shostakovich witnessed the cataclysm of midcentury before his eyes, felt it and lived it. Of the artists who worked in the midst and the aftermath of Stalin and Hitler and resonated with it, he was the one with the most vision and the most talent. That makes Shostakovich an irreplaceable witness for his age. We need to be reminded, to feel in our hearts and minds, what tyranny can wreak, and what of humanity can be saved from it.
More Shostakovich: Symphony No. 9; Symphony No. 13 (“Babi Yar”); Piano Concerto No. 1; String Quartet No. 10; Quintet in G Minor for Piano and Strings.