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Music For Silenced Voices
Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets
By WENDY LESSER
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2011 Wendy Lesser
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-17178-5
Chapter One
Elegy In him, there are great contradictions. In him, one quality obliterates the other. It is conflict in the highest degree. It is almost a catastrophe.
—MIKHAIL ZOSHCHENKO, in a private letter about Shostakovich, 1941
It is hard to say whether he was extraordinarily fortunate or profoundly unlucky. Even he would probably have been unable to decide, for in regard to his own situation and his own character, he was often dubious and always divided. He was a self-acknowledged coward who sometimes demonstrated great courage. A born survivor, he was obsessed with death. He had an excellent sense of humor and an equally strong streak of melancholy. Though reserved in outward demeanor and inclined to long silences, he was subject to bouts of intense passion. Mentally and physically he tended to be either lightning fast or practically immobilized. He was both a generous man and an embittered one. Immensely loyal to his friends, he was repeatedly guilty of disloyalty to his own principles. He cared a great deal for words, and he signed his name to documents he had never read. He was a modernist who officially despised modernism. He was a baptized unbeliever with a strong affection for the Jews. As for his country, he both hated and loved it—and the mixed emotion was returned, it seems, for he became at different times a prominent beneficiary and a prominent victim of his nation's cultural regime. He was an essentially private person who lived out his existence on a public platform. He wrote music that pleased the many, and he wrote music for the very few: perhaps, finally, only for himself. We know a great deal about him, and he remains largely invisible to us.
In this last respect, Dmitri Shostakovich is like all subjects of artist biographies, only more so. You are drawn to the life because you love the art, and you imagine that knowing more about the life will bring you closer to the art, but for the most part the life is a smoke screen getting between you and the art. You pick up threads and clues, searching for a pattern that explains the whole, forgetting that a great deal of life (and art) depends on chance events. You can never definitively find the hidden springs of an artwork; you can only attempt to grasp the results as they gush forth, and with music, which is nearly as changeable and bodiless as water, that grasp will be especially tenuous.
Nevertheless, there is a desire to connect the human being who once lived to the still-living music, which seems to have a human voice behind it—does have a human voice behind it, if only one could hear it properly. For me, and I think for many other avid listeners, Shostakovich's own voice is most clearly audible in his fifteen string quartets. He became famous in his lifetime for the symphonies and operas, and it is through these larger-scale works that most people know his name today, but those are precisely the works of his that were most subject to interference by the Soviet authorities. The interference was internal as well as external: that is, Shostakovich often censored himself, distorting and suppressing his own talent in order to write the kinds of pieces that were demanded of him as a public artist. But nobody at the top of the Soviet Union's cultural hierarchy paid much attention to what he was doing in his smaller-scale, under-the-radar chamber music. So whereas the symphonies can be bombastic or overblown or afflicted with moments of bad faith, the quartets are amazingly pure and consistently appealing. Taken individually, each represents a major contribution to the string quartet literature; taken as a whole, they stand as one of the monuments of twentieth-century music. And as a key to Shostakovich's own preoccupations—as a kind of "diary" that records "the story of his soul," as his widow put it—they offer unparalleled access to the composer's inner life.
Musicians who play Shostakovich's string quartets can read that diary through the music: that is how they manage to perform the quartets, even if they know little or nothing about the composer's life. You can get the whole story from the fifteen quartets themselves, if you are alert enough. But I am not alert enough, and I am not a musician, so I have had to go about it backwards, by way of the life first and then the music. Only after learning something of the biography have I been able to hear what was there all along in the quartets.
When we nonmusicians listen to music, we respond with an awareness of logic and pattern and history, but also with our emotions and imaginations, and to put these responses into words is not an easy matter. In speaking about Shostakovich's quartets, I have sometimes borrowed from the languages of literary and art criticism, both of which have a stronger tradition of impressionistic response than one usually finds in academic music criticism. I have tried to remain faithful to the specific demands of music, which by its very nature is less imitative of reality, less "naturalistic" or "figurative" than literature or painting. Still, my approach to Shostakovich's music is essentially that of a writer, and this entails certain pitfalls. To hazard an interpretation, in the literary sense of the word, is to venture an opinion (some might even call it a guess) about what was intended or accomplished in a work of art. The line between correct interpretations and incorrect ones is bound to be fuzzy and inconstant; even the artist is not the ultimate authority in this regard, for he may well have given rise to something that is larger than his own intentions. (In fact, if he is a good artist, he has almost certainly done so.) But there are wrong interpretations, wrong assumptions, wrong pathways in approaching an artwork—or, for that matter, a life story. To say that opinions can vary is not to say that anything goes. And in dealing with Shostakovich it seems especially important to keep the known facts in mind at all times and to adhere to them, precisely because falsehood, dishonesty, and misrepresentation were such devastating issues in his life.
To uncover the truth about a dead artist is always difficult. Many things stand in the way: jealous colleagues who lie about their competitor to make him look worse; sycophantic followers who lie about their hero to make him look better; innocently inaccurate memories, which get the facts wrong and compound the myths; contemporary reviews, which are often silly and always subjective, then as now; and the artist's own secretiveness, or evasiveness, or simple inability to articulate what he is doing in his art. But to these normal layers of obfuscation, Shostakovich's case adds many more. Silence was at the heart of his enterprise. It is there in his music (which, especially toward the end, seemed to be pulling the notes out of a deep silence, or sending them back into it), and it is there in his personality (there are numerous stories about his sitting in silence, even in the company of friends), and it is there, most particularly, in the conditions of his twentieth-century Russian life. To speak, in those circumstances, was to betray, and to speak the truth was to betray oneself. Even private letters could be intercepted; even private words could be conveyed to the wrong ears. History got rewritten every few years, and no one was safe from the sudden switchbacks. So the wise kept their own counsel and didn't put anything down on paper, except nonsense and distractions. People learned to speak in code, but the codes themselves were ambiguous and incomplete. Nothing that emerged from that world (or perhaps, indeed, any world) can be taken at face value.
This is why the uproar over Solomon Volkov's Testimony—which purports to be the unmediated truth about Shostakovich's experiences and opinions, as told to Volkov by Shostakovich himself—is finally so pointless. Perhaps the controversy had some meaning when the book first appeared in 1979, with Shostakovich only a few years dead and the Soviet Union still alive; perhaps it seemed significant then that Shostakovich could say nasty things about Stalin, the Party, and the whole Soviet machine. After all, his New York Times obituary had described him as "a committed Communist," and though people within Russia might have been aware, even at the time, of his uncomfortable relationship to authority, no one on the outside spoke of it. But now we have numerous other kinds of evidence—the oral testimony of the composer's friends and relations, recently published letters to and from him, analogous instances in previously unprintable novels, stories, and poems, and our own increasingly informed sense of how life in that time was lived—to suggest that Shostakovich could never have been the placidly obedient Party apparatchik he was sometimes made to seem. So Volkov's central and rather doubtfully obtained revelation is no revelation at all. And, perhaps more importantly, nothing is gained by this sleight-of-hand effort to transform the reluctant public figure into a secret dissident, for the Volkov portrayal of a resentful, self-righteous Shostakovich is far less appealing and finally less persuasive than the tortured and self-torturing man it replaces.
As for the rest of the book, well, anyone who has ever read a bad transcription of a poorly conducted interview will recognize in Testimony the feeble efforts of the speaker's voice to make itself heard over the static generated by the interviewer's biases and preconceptions. Some elements of his own opinions do probably make it through, which is why we Shostakovich-seekers are all tempted to mine Testimony for the fragments that are personally useful to us. But we need to recognize that in doing so we are essentially choosing at random, with no certainty about the veracity of our selections. We could be quoting Shostakovich, or we could simply be quoting Volkov—a character straight out of Gogol or Dostoyevsky, rubbing his hands with oily fake-servitude as he announces proudly in the preface that Shostakovich called him "the most intelligent man of the new generation." Even this remark needs to be taken as coded (if indeed it was ever spoken at all), seen as a typically dark joke, similar to the one Shostakovich made annually when he offered as his New Year's toast, "Let's drink to this—that things don't get any better!"
* * *
Whatever I may have heard or known of Shostakovich's work in the period when he was alive—a period that overlapped with my childhood and youth—his music did not really come into focus for me until the third decade after his death. A dozen years had passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and I was living in Berlin, along with a substantial number of the USSR's former citizens, when Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Opera and Orchestra came to town in the autumn of 2003. On their performance schedule were several works by Soviet-era composers, including the Shostakovich opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. I couldn't get tickets for Lady Macbeth (uncharacteristically for Berlin, it had sold out far in advance, mainly to the hordes of Russian immigrants), but I did manage to capture two good seats to a performance of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony.
What I didn't understand at the time was how cunningly Gergiev had constructed his programs. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was Shostakovich's second (and, as it turned out, last) major work in operatic form; it was also the first piece to bring him widespread national attention. He was twenty-four when he began writing it—basing the plot on a story by Nikolai Leskov—and only twenty-seven when it premiered at Leningrad's Maly Opera Theater in January of 1934. The new opera, which received a nearly simultaneous Moscow premiere at the Nemirovich-Danchenko Theater, was so successful that within two years it had earned a couple of performances abroad, had been given a new production at the Bolshoi, and overall had appeared more than two hundred times in Moscow and Leningrad. Shostakovich had dedicated Lady Macbeth to his new bride, Nina Varzar, and he remained fond enough of its music to quote from a key aria in his "autobiographical" Eighth Quartet, written over a quarter century later.
But by that time Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District had come to be associated with one of the bleakest moments in Shostakovich's career. Throughout his twenties he had been a rapidly rising star, praised in all the journals and celebrated by all the official institutions, and Lady Macbeth seemed at first a continuation of that success. But in January of 1936 Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin unexpectedly attended one of the Moscow performances, and neither the Party leader nor any member of his entourage stayed to the end. Two days later an unsigned commentary called "Muddle Instead of Music" appeared in Pravda; some even said it was written by Stalin himself, and though that is probably untrue, it might as well have been, given its effects.
The article condemned Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District for its bourgeois formalism and its vulgar naturalism (two charges that would seem to be completely at odds, but consistency was never the hobgoblin of these particular little minds). It criticized the score for assaulting the audience with "a stream of sounds that is—by design—inharmonious and chaotic," and argued that if Lady Macbeth had been popular abroad, that was because "the opera's twitching, clamorous, neurotic music titillates the perverted tastes of bourgeois audiences." The critic also complained that "the music wheezes, groans, pants, and gasps for breath in order to present love scenes as naturalistically as possible. And 'love' is smeared all over the opera in the most vulgar manner." Above all, the writer was concerned that the "apolitical" Lady Macbeth, with its patent rejection of "simple, accessible musical speech," represented a dangerous move away from the stated goals of Socialist Realist art. Instead, "the ability of good music to grip the masses is sacrificed to petit-bourgeois formalism, which pretends to be original while merely indulging in cheap playacting. This is a game of unintelligibility that can end in tears," the article warned darkly.
When this bombshell fell, Shostakovich was a little over halfway through writing his Fourth Symphony. He completed it as he had intended to, without conceding anything to the Pravda critique, and it was scheduled for a first performance by the Leningrad Philharmonic on December 11, 1936. Shostakovich was well aware of the cloud that hung over him during this time: he had been publicly criticized by the Composers' Union, his popularity in the music-reviewing press had plummeted, and it was clear that he was no longer safe from the sudden political arrests that were beginning to impinge on his friends and family. But terrified as he was of the possible effects of the performance, he was still deeply dismayed when, shortly before the scheduled premiere, a high-ranking bureaucrat visited the Philharmonic building and urged the composer to withdraw his symphony. This he did (under what degree of pressure, we do not know), and the Symphony No. 4 in C Minor—an extremely ambitious, unconventional work that Shostakovich would later view with regretful longing as the beginning of a road not taken—remained unperformed until 1961, eight years after Stalin's death.
What Gergiev did, in his October 2003 performance in Berlin, was to pair this symphony with Prokofiev's Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of the October Revolution, another work composed in the same period, but a much more politically calculated one (though the calculation apparently didn't succeed: Prokofiev's piece, too, was rejected for being insufficiently conventional). Because I wasn't aware of the full history at the time, I didn't realize how carefully Gergiev had chosen and placed the symphony. It was the perfect pendant to the unfairly criticized Lady Macbeth, that other grandly inventive work Shostakovich had undertaken before his thirtieth birthday. And the Fourth Symphony, coming so close upon the heels of its predecessor, was marked by the knowledge of what had happened to the composer of Lady Macbeth; its final fade to nothingness signals a darker, gloomier perspective than anything Pravda could have found to criticize in the opera. The largely Russian audience in Berlin understood all this—understood exactly the game Gergiev was playing in his pairing of the pro-Lenin cantata with the banished Fourth Symphony. So whereas the Prokofiev vocal piece was greeted, that Berlin night, by a rather frightening chorus of politically inspired boos, the Shostakovich symphony's final silence was met with an equal silence on the part of the audience, and then with deafening applause.
I had taken in Shostakovich's music, and I had been moved by it, but I had not really understood what I had heard. Eventually I was to hear all the quartets—performed, in a concentrated five-concert series, by the Emerson Quartet—and, somewhat later, most of the symphonies. And then, in the spring of 2007, I attended a Brooklyn recital by the extremely young Vertigo Quartet. On the program was Shostakovich's Twelfth Quartet. As I listened to it and watched the musicians play, I found myself thinking back to the Emersons' program notes and recalling everything about Shostakovich's life that had been associated with this quartet. The second violin was absolutely silent for the first few minutes of the piece, and that, I remembered, was not only because the Twelfth was dedicated to the first violinist of the Beethoven Quartet (the group that had premiered all of Shostakovich's quartets from the Second onward), but also because the second violinist had died not long before; this was, in essence, his ghost sitting there. Much of the rest of the piece seemed to be about death, too. How was it that such young players could perform it so well? And how was it that I found this dark, difficult music welcoming and warm, rather than frightening or off-putting? It was something to do with how personal it felt—how much of Shostakovich's own voice could be heard behind the quartet, as it could not be in even the best of the symphonies. A secretive figure behind a public mask, he had chosen the string quartet, it seemed, as his vehicle of self-revelation. And what he was revealing was not just his own personality, but all the suffering, awareness, and shame that had come to him through his peculiar placement in history.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Music For Silenced Voices by WENDY LESSER Copyright © 2011 by Wendy Lesser. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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