Contemplating Shostakovich: Life, Music and Film

Andrew Kirkman, Alexander Ivashkin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317161011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Contemplating Shostakovich marks an important new stage in the understanding of Shostakovich and his working environment. Each chapter covers aspects of the composer's output in the context of his life and cultural milieu. The contributions uncover 'outside' stimuli behind Shostakovich's works, allowing the reader to perceive the motivations behind his artistic choices; at the same time, the nature of those choices offers insights into the workings of the larger world - cultural, social, political - that he inhabited. Thus his often ostensibly quirky choices are revealed as responses - by turns sentimental, moving, sardonic and angry - to the particular conditions, with all their absurdities and contradictions, that he had to negotiate. Here we see the composer emerging from the role of tortured loner of older narratives into that of the gregarious and engaged member of his society that, for better and worse, characterized the everyday reality of his life. This invaluable collection offers remarkable new insight, in both depth and range, into the nature of Shostakovich's working circumstances and of his response to them. The collection contains the seeds for a wide range of new directions in the study of Shostakovich's works and the larger contexts of their creation and reception.

PART I
Music and Style

Chapter 1
Through the Looking Glass: Reflections on the Significance of Words and Symbols in Shostakovich’s Music

Elizabeth Wilson

Dmitrii Shostakovich was born and brought up in the free-thinking liberal intelligentsia, a class aware of its moral responsibilities and sympathetic to the Russian revolutionary traditions of protest. Literature was of prime importance to the Russian professional classes of the time, not only for its intrinsic artistic value but because of the many potential social and moral messages it could convey. As a boy Dmitrii witnessed the events of 1917, amongst them a procession honouring victims of revolution, where he sang along, with the rest of the crowd, ‘Zamuchen tiazheloi nevolei’ [Tormented by Grievous Bondage], a dirge dating from 1876 that paid tribute to the young revolutionary student Pavel Chernyshev, who had died after a long state-imposed incarceration. The song became a symbol for all victims of political unrest, one that Shostakovich incorporated into his Eleventh Symphony and Eighth Quartet, thereby showing his compassion also for those more recently repressed. Its sixth verse perhaps had particular relevance to the times in which the composer lived:

We share the same path as you

Like you we will rot in prisons

Like you for the Cause of the People

We will lay down our lives …1

The word ‘People’ as cited in this song had a nobler ring than the ‘People’ of the post-revolutionary decade, when the term was applied first and foremost to the proletariat. (Indeed the ‘workers’ came to represent the ‘people’ to the exclusion of all other classes, to the extent that many were forced to hide their ‘non-proletarian’ origins in order to survive.) The October revolution of 1917 and the civil war of 1919–20 gave rise to a new lexicon that became inextricably associated with the power of the Soviets. Here is an example of the new imagery from the rousing ‘Aviators’’ song of 1920. Aeroplanes, those symbols of innovation so eagerly embraced by both Italian and Russian Futurists, are compared to falcons striving ever higher: ‘The safety of our frontiers / Breathes in every propeller!’2 The song also refers to ‘passionate motors in place of hearts’, anticipating Stalin’s famous maxim about writers as the ‘engineers of the human soul’.3

From his youth Shostakovich developed an acute awareness of the powerful undercurrents of ideology that ran through the new Soviet art. In both his Second and Third Symphonies (1927 and 1929) he included politicized texts sung by a chorus. Thus in the Second, which was originally entitled Dedication to October rather than ‘Symphony’, the heroic image of ‘factory chimneys reaching up to the clouds’ is followed by an invocation to Lenin ‘Oh Lenin, you forged freedom from our torment, you forged freedom from out toil-hardened hands’ (the words belonged to the komsomol poet Alexander Bezymensky). In several letters Shostakovich expressed active disgust at the text he had to set;4 no doubt the words by Semen Kirsanov that provided the text for his Third, ‘May Day’, Symphony were equally foreign to his taste – for instance the exhortation ‘Listen Proletarians to the speech of our factories, Burn out the Old so as to kindle the reality of the New’. Shostakovich gave a fitting explanation for the different aims articulated by the two symphonies: a sense of ‘struggle’ predominated in the Second as opposed to the ‘Festive spirit of Construction’ in the ‘May Day’ Symphony.5

Setting out on his professional career in the second half of the 1920s, Shostakovich was in good time to absorb the influence of such Western modernists as Stravinsky, Berg, Krenek and Hindemith. Amongst his experimental works from the late 1920s was his opera The Nose, a brilliant translation onto stage of Gogol’s satirical story. Opening his opera with the words ‘Your hands stink’ (sung by Kovalev as he is being shaved) was certainly a daring device that defied operatic tradition. But more interesting was the innovative way the composer defined his perceptions, making it difficult to distinguish the borderline between ordinary life and nightmarish phantasmagoria. The gallery of secondary characters in The Nose was chiefly characterized through the music, which mimics the tone and manner of speech, rather than illustrating the words’ meaning. The opera’s experimental structure and fractured momentum was derived to a large extent from techniques used in the avant-garde theatre and cinema of the day, including montage, and the concept of ‘destruction of habitual context’. These were ideas that had roots in such differing sources as the Formalists’ radical concepts, the constructivist theatrical experimentation of Meyerhold and other directors, the cinema of Eisenstein and the Feks directors, and also some aspects of the legacy of Proletkult.

This misplacement of perceptions, where the ordinary and the imaginary are interchangeable, was developed to an extreme by the Leningrad absurdist writers, the Oberiuty.6 Its founding member Daniil Kharms wrote aphoristically short stories, where in a few disconcerting lines he could subvert an ordinary situation through pitting the absurdly grotesque against the ingenuously simple. In one such miniature, entitled Opticheskii Obman [Optical Illusion] the protagonist Semen Semenovich puts on his glasses and clearly sees a man in a tree shaking his fist at him. When he takes off his glasses, this fantastic vision disappears, only to reappear as soon as he puts his glasses back on. Kharms concludes that ‘Semen Semenovich doesn’t wish to believe in this phenomenon and considers it to be an optical illusion’.

Kharms put his finger on what we can consider a serious malady of Soviet society, where ‘illusion’ often substituted for surrounding reality. It was easier to close your eyes, (or take off your glasses) than confront the horrors around you. This story from the Blue Notebook [Golubaia Tetrad’] dates from 1934, not long after the Creative Unions had been set up under the aegis of the Party and ‘Socialist realism’ was proclaimed as the only ideologically correct artistic principle. Some confusion ensued about whether realism and reality had anything in common. Creating illusions was nearly as dangerous as independent thought, a theme that Andrei Platonov confronted in his disturbing novels about the Soviet working class. For instance in Kotlovan [The Foundation Pit] the worker Voshchev is dismissed for ‘standing and thinking during production’:

‘What were you thinking about Comrade Voshchev?’

‘The Plan of Life’

‘The factory works according to the Workers’ Management Plan. As for the Plan of your private Life, you can think about it later in the workers’ club or in the Red Corner [krasnyi ugolok].’

Voshchev protests that he was thinking of the social plan, of happiness for everybody. But the administration refuses to accept this argument, and admonishes this worker for speaking out of turn: ‘If we all started thinking, who then would take action?’

During the Orwellian nightmare of the Stalinist period, it was the Party who did the thinking. All citizens were but ciphers acting out parts in some overall masterplan. Thinking for oneself became a criminal act, optical illusion a ‘cop-out’.

One might say that in all this Shostakovich represented an anomaly, somebody who thought independently and wrote in a confusing quantity of styles, although he took care to justify his actions in print. In the early 1930s he still chose topical themes for his stage works, whether in the various unfinished operas (Bol’shaia Molniia [The Great Lightning] and the newly re-discovered Orango,7 both from 1932), the vaudeville Uslovno Ubityi [Hypothetically Murdered] or the three ballets. Naturally this aspect of topicality was implicit in the films and theatre productions for which Shostakovich produced music. In his first ballet, Zolotoi Vek [The Golden Age], a Soviet football team travels to a capitalist country, proving the superiority of Bolshevik ideology and athletic training, and by implication criticizing Bourgeois Western society; similarly Nikolai Aseev’s libretto to The Great Lightning – or what has survived of it – describes a Soviet team of specialists visiting the West. The libretto of Orango, based on Alexei Starchakov’s Kar’era Artura Kristi [The Career of Arthur Christie], belongs to a different, although equally popular genre, lying somewhere between satirical farce and early science fiction. Its story of a hybrid creature (Orango) resulting from the experimental breeding between a man and a monkey is highly reminiscent of Ilia Selvinsky’s popular drama in verse PauPau (1931), and to some extent also of Mikhail Bulgakov’s fantastical story Sobach’e Serdtse [A Dog’s Heart] (written during 1924/25 although only published in 1937).

Shostakovich’s second and third ballets once more return to highly politicized (and hence dangerous) topics back home in the Soviet Union: sabotage in industry in Bolt, and the collective-farm idyll in Svetlyi Ruchei [The Limpid Stream]. Here the reality depicted was far removed from the realities of the times, if we recall the the Shakhty Trials of 1928 with engineers or ‘professional specialists’ being accused, tried and executed on trumped–up charges of wrecking, let alone the cruelties of enforced collectivization and de-kulakization, which caused widespread famine and millions of deaths. The subversive side of Shostakovich’s ballet music emerges through parody and caricature, while sheer entertainment occupies the surface area. Just through deft orchestration he could draw a stunning musical portrait, ridiculing the strutting bureaucrat with high piccolo pitted against deep bassoon or exposing the delusions of grandeur of a political activist with a bombastic brass band march. Yet Shostakovich’s ballet music was criticized at the time not so much for its satire, but for ‘the st...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Music Examples
• Transliteration Note
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Part I: Music and Style
• Part II: Film
• Part III: Life and Documents
• Select Bibliography
• Index