Shostakovich

   I first discovered Shostakovich’s music when the Music Appreciation Club of Brooklyn Technical High School went to hear Toscanini perform the Leningrad Symphony, the Seventh, with the NBC Symphony. While I found out decades later that the composer strongly disapproved of that rendition, I was quite smitten. Many years later, I remember driving along on a highway, I don’t remember where, and hearing his Fifth on the car radio of what sounded like a particularly vital performance; the conductor turned out to be Bernstein. Since those days I have acquired recordings of all the symphonies, conducted by Mariss Jansons with quite an array of different orchestras. I have CDs of all the quartets and I have the scores for them. I got those scores when I asked the big wig of the Russian department at Northwestern—who frequently went to visit the Soviet Union—to bring me a copy of the quartet scores, thinking of inexpensive miniature scores of the kind I had quite a few. What I received instead were two large hard cover volumes, pulled out from the set of Shostakovich’s Complete Works that he talked some acquaintance to give up. I was embarrassed and reciprocated, guided by my colleague. A wonderful work I only discovered more recently, Twenty-four Preludes and Fugues for piano: Bach brought up to date.

   I haven’t read much about the composer beyond Solomon Vokov’s Testimony, but now I have just finished Julian Barnes’  The Noise of Time. He calls it a novel and I suppose that is what it is, but in effect it is wholly biographical, based on the best available sources, without the de rigueur scholarly trappings. He says nothing that does not reflect what I know and a great deal more that is utterly plausible. There are numerous reviews of this Barnes oeuvre to be found on the internet.

   There is no sign that Shostakovich was ever less than confident about his compositions or concerned about their appeal to audiences, but that was not enough in the days of Stalin. Shostakovich was subjected to severe criticism by Stalin (the great musical expert) for his opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsenks and ever since worried that he might be eliminated, Stalin-style. Fearfulness was his way of life during those years, though throughout it, he was busy composing, about which Barnes doesn’t say very much. In effect, the book tells the story of Shostakovich as a citizen—though that’s not quite the right word—rather than of the composer.

   Under Khrushchev’s reign he was honored and dragooned to join the party. In a variety of ways, he was always on the outs with the country of his birth. I know of no other composer, certainly not of Shostakovich’s stature, who had to cope with what amounts to a hostile political environment, at times fiercely so.
   I suppose that as a composer, Shosti is most plausibly compared with Gustav Mahler. He probably comes in second between those two, certainly in appearance on the world’s concert programs. But unlike Mahler, he is remarkably versatile, with scores for ballets and films (Gebrauchsmusik?), several concertos, most of which are played, two operas, one of which, The Nose, (written when the composer was twenty-two years old) was recently—and flamboyantly—staged by the Met, fifteen symphonies, to fifteen string quartets, some of which are currently played.  I don’t know a twentieth century composer with as large and versatile an output. Certainly not one who can write music that is truly sardonic.