Ross Alex. The rest is noice

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

181

After the mighty opening, Bukharin’s vacillations and defeats take over. The first

theme fritters away its momentum in overextended transitional passages; the

second theme is a slow, pale, lurching string of notes on the bassoon, which

wanders here and there, strikes an unconvincing heroic attitude, is blown into

jagged fragments, then falls in with a ragtag wind-band version of the first

theme. Stranger events ensue, including a madcap fugue and a screaming

twelve-note chord. The second movement is a pseudo-Scherzo that supplies

little comic relief and ends with a skeletal rattling of percussion. Much of the

final movement is given over to a dreamlike succession of genre pieces—

puppet-show music, madcap polka, hurdy-gurdy waltz, and so on—which

Fairclough hears as a clandestinely nostalgic portrait of prerevolutionary

Russia, although there must be characteristic Shostakovichian sarcasm here as

well.

If this were a model socialist realist work, all these conflicts would eventually be

resolved in a conclusive affirmation. Toward the end of the third movement,

cellos and basses play an excitedly murmuring sequence of notes (as in the

finale of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony), the timpani strike up a grandiose

pattern along the interval of the fourth, and utopia seems imminent. But the

would-be triumph goes haywire, shattering repeatedly against a dissonant

chord. A quotation underlines the sense of internal failure: as Richard Taruskin

points out, the entire sequence imitates the “Gloria” of Stravinsky’s Oedipus

Rex, in which Jocasta is mordantly praised as queen of “pestilentibus Thebis”

(“disease-ridden Thebes”). After the crack-up comes a long recessional in the

orchestra, taking up 234 hushed, dismal bars. The final chord is marked

morendo, dying away—an instruction that appears at the end of at least twenty

other Shostakovich scores.

Shostakovich set to work on the finale of the Fourth shortly after “Muddle

Instead of Music” appeared. Did he already have a tragic ending in mind? Or

did the events of early 1936 send him into a spiral of despair? Either way, it was

clear from the start that the Fourth would not suffice as a response to Pravda’s

attack. The Leningrad Philharmonic began rehearsals for the premiere in the

autumn of 1936, and word quickly spread through the music community that

Shostakovich had rejected criticism and written music of “diabolical complexity.”

Apparatchiks appeared and spoke to the director of the orchestra, who called

Shostakovich into his office. The composer came out wearing a downcast look.

After walking silently for a while, he told Isaak Glikman that the symphony would

not be played. “I didn’t like the situation,” Shostakovich later recalled. “Fear was

all around. So I withdrew it.”

For nearly two years Shostakovich placed no major works before the public.

Finally, on November 21, 1937, in the Great Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic,

he unveiled his Fifth Symphony. The change in style was dramatic. The Fifth

followed an ordinary fourmovement pattern: Moderato, Allegretto, Largo, Allegro

non troppo. Like Beethoven’s same-numbered symphony, it proceeded from

tragic minor to exultant major. Here was a work that the ordinary music lover—

Stalin, for example—could comprehend.

182

A subsequent article, which appeared under Shostakovich’s signature,

advertised the symphony as “My Creative Response” and described it as an

apology for Lady Macbeth and the unperformed Fourth: “If I have really

succeeded in embodying in musical images all that I have thought and felt since

the critical articles in Pravda, if the demanding listener will detect in my music a

turn toward greater clarity and simplicity, I will be satisfied.” Although

Shostakovich may not have written these words, they contain ambiguities that

are characteristic of his mental process. “All that I have thought and felt” might

denote personal suffering and defiance. Musical simplicity does not rule out

emotional complexity. And note the “if”: nothing about this great work is simple

or clear.

Beethoven’s “hero” symphonies, the Eroica and the Fifth, tell stories of conflict

and resolution, of protagonists overcoming obstacles to win victory. Maxim

Shostakovich, the composer’s son, indicates that his father’s Fifth follows much

the same plan: “The Fifth Symphony is his ‘Heroic’ Symphony. [The novelist

Alexander] Fadeyev once said that he was scolding someone in the finale. My

father replied: it was not just scolding. The hero is saying: ‘I am right. I will follow

the way I choose.’” The first movement sets out the grim landscape in which the

hero will have to make his way. The second theme alludes, surprisingly, to a

phrase from the Habanera in Bizet’s Carmen—the notes to which Carmen sings

the phrase “Amour, amour.” The Russian musicologist Alexander Benditsky has

discovered that the symphony is in fact riddled with references to Carmen, and

they are probably connected to Shostakovich’s lingering love for the translator

Elena Konstantinovskaya, who, after her time in prison, had gone to Spain and

married the Soviet photographer and filmmaker Roman Karmen. As in Lady

Macbeth, personal layers lie beneath the surface of what appears to be a

public, political work.

The heart of the symphony is the slow movement, the Largo. Sounds like sobs,

lonely cries in the night, calls for help, even a kind of insistent begging for

mercy—four loud repeated notes high on the violins—fill the air. Over a bank of

tremolo violins, one woodwind instrument after another comes forward to sing a

plaintive song, which falls a fourth and then a major second, as in the sorrow

chorus in Jerome Kern’s “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Aroun’.” (The neuroscientist Jaak

Panksepp has investigated the phenomenon of the “musical chill,” a tremor that

runs down the body and raises the hairs on the skin. A passage in which a solo

instrument steps in front of a softer background is especially prone to cause this

effect; Panksepp compares it to “the separation call of young animals, the

primal cry of despair to signal caretakers to exhibit social care and attention.”)

Adding to the funereal tone is an apparent allusion to Mussorgsky’s Boris

Godunov, the ultimate pageant of Russian suffering. The first five notes of

Mussorgsky’s setting of the words “Flow, flow, bitter tears, weep, weep, O soul

of the Orthodox faithful” overlap with the last five notes of Shostakovich’s main

Largo theme. They are heard again at the end of the movement, plucked out on

harp and celesta, like a music box winding down. The two final chords are a

kind of “Amen”—a significant gesture from an atheist composer.

A brassy blast of D minor shoves us into the finale. The change is so wrenching

that listeners may learn to dread its arrival. The pivotal notes D and A, which

183

sounded pensively in the first movement, now thunder on the drums, setting the

stage for a martial, declamatory theme in the trumpets, trombones, and tuba.

The barreling energy of this theme and the motorized quality of its

accompaniment nearly replicate the opening of the Fourth Symphony. The

possibility that Shostakovich may in some way be rewriting his earlier work

gives added meaning to a self-quotation that appears in the quiet contrasting

section of the movement. Just before he set to work on the Fifth, Shostakovich

made a setting of Pushkin’s poem “Regeneration,” which reads as follows:

An artist-barbarian with a drowsy brush

Blackens over the painting of a genius

And senselessly draws on top of it

His own illegitimate designs.

But over the years the foreign paint

Flakes away like old scales,

And the genius’s work appears again

Before us in its former beauty.

Thus do delusions vanish

From my worried soul,

And in their place visions arise

Of pure, original days.

In the Fifth’s finale, a yearning phrase from this song appears high in the strings

and in the harp, suggestive of some luminous, angelic sphere. It floats up until it

is out of reach, and a tapping of the timpani marks the return of the martial

mood. There may be a whole series of repaintings going on here: motifs from

the Fourth reworked, a song for voice and piano orchestrated but stripped of the

voice, the song itself blotted out by a drumbeat. From here on, the symphony is

all crescendo. The timpani pound relentlessly. Trumpets turn the main theme

into a fanfare-like statement, an emblem of power.

The question arises: Who or what is triumphing? Is this the work of the artist-

barbarian—the blackening of the work of genius that was the Fourth? Or, by the

end, has the illicit drawing been erased, revealing Shostakovich’s intentions in

their original purity?

Even before the reference to “Regeneration” became known, the brutalism of

the finale caused confusion and consternation among listeners. Some

opponents of Stalin’s regime took it as a sign that Shostakovich had joined the

ranks of the conformists. Vladimir Shcherbachev, who had spoken up for the

composer during the Pravda crisis, called the Fifth “remarkable, but sickeningly

depressing.” Nikolai Miaskovsky, himself a composer of turbulent, pessimistic

symphonies, said the ending was “bad,” a “D-major formal reply”; Osip

Mandelstam called it “tedious intimidation.” On the other side, some officials

believed that Shostakovich was defying Pravda’s wise counsel. The well-

connected critic Georgiy Khubov complained that the Largo was “an

184

expressionist etching depicting ‘numb horror,’” the finale “severe and

threatening.”

But the better part of the audience seemed to identify strongly with the

symphony’s assertion of will—what Maxim Shostakovich called “the

determination of a strong man to BE.” Many listeners had already lost friends

and relatives to the Terror, and were in a numbed, terrified state. Gavriil Popov

said to Lyubov Shaporina, the founder of the Puppet Theater: “You know, I’ve

turned into a coward. I’m a coward, I’m afraid of everything, I even burned your

letters.” The Fifth had the effect of taking away, for a little while, that primitive

fear. One listener was so gripped by the music that he stood up, as if royalty

had walked into the room. Others began rising from their seats. During the long

ovation that followed, Yevgeny Mravinsky, the conductor, held the score above

his head.

Shaporina wrote in her diary: “Everyone kept saying: ‘that was his answer, and

it was a good one.’ D.D. came out white as a sheet, biting his lips. I think he

was close to tears.”

Prokofiev Returns

Shostakovich and Prokofiev, the two giants of Soviet music, never understood

each other particularly well. They met only occasionally, and often traded

criticisms in front of colleagues and in haphazard correspondence. Prokofiev

would comment on Shostakovich’s supposed melodic deficiency, while

Shostakovich would chide Prokofiev for his habit of farming out orchestration to

colleagues.

In some ways their relationship recapitulates, in a cooler key, the rivalry

between Mahler and Strauss, with similar psychological motifs in play. Like

Mahler, Shostakovich pictured himself as a perennial victim of fate, yet he had

total confidence in his abilities. For both men, the attitude of martyrdom may

have been something of a pose. Prokofiev, like Strauss, presented a

phlegmatic, devil-may-care exterior. Where Shostakovich was cagey, Prokofiev

was forthright, even blatant in his opinions—“a kind of big baby who must tell

the truth on all occasions,” said his friend Nicolas Nabokov. A colleague

overheard the following historic exchange between them:

PROKOFIEV: You know, I’m really going to get down to work on my

Sixth Symphony. I’ve written the first movement… and now I’m writing

the second, with three themes: the third movement will probably be in

sonata form. I feel the need to compensate for the absence of sonata

form in the previous movements.

SHOSTAKOVICH: So, is the weather here always like this?

Shostakovich, like Mahler, had an exceptional ability to dramatize his inner life;

he saw no difference between his own fate and the fate of his country and the

185

world. Prokofiev and Strauss, by contrast, were “Selfians,” struggling to

maintain their poise as the world spun around them. They had a more practical,

pragmatic relationship with the craft of composition, and both have been

underrated as a result.

Prokofiev was a tall, imposing man. One American critic, on first viewing him,

described him as a blond Russian football guard; another claimed that he was

made entirely of steel. Born in the Ukraine in 1891, Prokofiev became the

prodigy and enfant terrible of the St. Petersburg Conservatory in his teens. On

December 18, 1908, three days before the premiere of Schoenberg’s Second

Quartet in Vienna, he caused a sensation with a recital of his piano music at the

Evenings of Contemporary Music in Petersburg; the highlight of the program

was a brief, savagely dissonant piece titled Suggestion diabolique. He would

also show a knack for sensuous, Rachmaninov-like lyricism (the opera

Maddalena); brooding chromatic fantasies at the outer edges of the tonal (the

piano piece “Despair”); and a pioneering essay in neoclassical, back-to-Mozart

style (the Sinfonietta). In all, Prokofiev had a gift for what the Russian literary

theorist Mikhail Bakhtin called the “carnivalesque”—farce, parody, irresponsible

merrymaking, mock grandeur.

The ten days that shook the world did not shake Prokofiev. In February 1917 he

was anticipating the first performance of The Gambler—a ferociously effective

adaptation of Dostoevsky’s novella about a young man riding the roulette wheel

to ruin—and much of his correspondence in the following months concerned his

fruitless attempts to have the premiere rescheduled. Springtime found him on a

leisurely trip up the Kama River, in the Volga region. In the summer he put the

finishing touches on two works of untroubled lyricism, the First Violin Concerto

and the Classical Symphony. Sviatoslav Richter compared the concerto to “the

sensation you get when you first open your window in spring and are assailed

by the sounds rising up from the street.”

By the time of the Bolshevik takeover, in October, Prokofiev was on a hiking

expedition in the Caucasus. (That aristocratic excursion had to be edited out of

Soviet-era histories, as David Nice notes in the first volume of his Prokofiev

biography.) Later that fall Prokofiev composed the apocalyptically noisy cantata

Seven, They Are Seven, based on ancient Akkadian incantations as adapted by

Konstantin Balmont. Again the composer seemed peculiarly disconnected:

They bring us sorrows. They bring us hatred.

They are heralds proclaiming the plague.

Seven gods of infinite worlds!

One day Prokofiev showed up at the Commissariat of Enlightenment, saying

that he needed fresh air to develop his art. Lunacharsky protested that “in

Russia we also have a lot of fresh air,” but sent him away cordially, with a

Soviet passport in case he wished to return. Prokofiev’s subsequent adventures

played out like a picaresque tale along the lines of Around the World in Eighty

Days. He set off on the Trans-Siberian Express toward Japan, intending

eventually to go to Buenos Aires. Instead, he wound up in San Francisco. When

186

the American authorities detained him as a suspect alien, he claimed to hate

the Bolsheviks because they had taken all his money.

The better part of the years 1918 to 1922 was spent in America, where

audiences applauded Prokofiev’s virtuosic piano playing but struggled to make

sense of his compositions. During the Pacific Ocean voyage, Prokofiev had

begun writing an opera libretto based on Carlo Gozzi’s deliciously absurd

commedia dell’arte play The Love of Three Oranges, using an adaptation that

Meyerhold had made for his experimental studio in the years before the

revolution. This was “estrangement” in a lighthearted vein: in the Prologue,

Tragedians, Comedians, Romantics, Eccentrics, and Empty-Heads debate

among themselves what genre of entertainment should be performed, and as

the fairy-tale plot plays out, they periodically intrude to offer observations and

criticisms. The soprano Mary Garden, a famous exponent of the roles of

Mélisande and Salome, arranged a successful staging of The Love of Three

Oranges at the Chicago Opera Company in 1921, but a subsequent New York

run flopped, curtailing dreams of American fame. The country left one major

mark on Prokofiev, though; he fell under the influence of Mary Baker Eddy’s

Christian Science movement, according to which people can overcome

sickness, sin, evil, even death itself if they achieve the right spiritual

understanding.

By 1923, the adventurer had settled in Paris, where he had to contend with the

politics of style. For all his compositional virtuosity, Prokofiev could not rival

Stravinsky and Les Six in their rapid invention and assimilation of musical

trends. Stravinsky, Prokofiev commented, “frightfully desires his creativity to

adhere to modernity. If I want anything, it’s that modernity should adhere to my

creativity.” Circa 1908 the teenage Prokofiev would have been perceived as the

more modern of the two; Stravinsky, at that time, had barely made a mark on

the Petersburg scene. In the twenties it was Prokofiev who was struggling to

keep up, and after several years of frustration he decided to go his own way.

Although composers in the Diaghilev circle went around proclaiming that opera

was defunct, Prokofiev devoted much of the twenties to the composition of The

Fiery Angel, a comparatively oldfashioned drama of sexual obsession and

demonic possession in which Faust and Mephistopheles have supporting roles.

It was an extravagant, alluring, floor-rattling affair, recalling the Symbolist door-

to-the-beyond mentality that prevailed before the war, and, not surprisingly, it

failed to arouse interest in Stravinsky’s Paris. Prokofiev then turned his attention

to Berlin, where, he hoped, one of Leo Kestenberg’s state-supported theaters

would stage the opera. A production of The Fiery Angel was scheduled for

1927, but the conductor Bruno Walter peremptorily canceled it when the

orchestral parts arrived late. Prokofiev’s biggest work to date was effectively

dead.

Prokofiev had no trouble satisfying Diaghilev’s demand for propulsive,

percussive, machine-age ballets—in the mid-twenties he produced The Step of

Steel, an aestheticized and eroticized Ballets Russes fantasy of life in the Soviet

Union—but he was tiring of the bludgeoning, dissonant manner that he had

perfected in his youth. Instead, he wished to give free rein to his melodic gift—

187

one area in which Stravinsky could not rival him. He drew on a seemingly

inexhaustible supply of long-breathed melodies that start with a voluptuous

upward reach and then graciously sink down. As in Shostakovich, the diatonic

scale is so richly ornamented with added tones—the lowered fifth, the lowered

second, and so on—that the harmonies constantly float away from their home

key. In the harshest passages of early Prokofiev scores such as The Gambler,

those extra tones are like symptoms of spreading infection. The same air of

corruption, of a world gone wrong, floats through much of Shostakovich’s music.

But the mature Prokofiev is striving for lyrical release, and “wrong notes”

become a play of light and shadow around a shapely form.

By the early thirties, Prokofiev had committed himself to what he called, in an

interview with the Los Angeles Evening Express, a “new simplicity”—a

conservative modernism rooted in Classical and Romantic tradition. Since

socialist-realist ideology was demanding the same, Prokofiev concluded that the

Soviet worldview magically coincided with his own. In fact, he had been

carefully primed to think so. Stalin placed a priority on bringing illustrious

cultural exiles back into the fold, and the project of seducing Prokofiev was

supervised by the OGPU, as the secret police were known at the time.

When the composer came back to Russia in 1927, he saw a panorama of

Soviet life that was controlled in every detail. Hardly blind to the OGPU’s

presence, he noted in his diary the shady characters lurking in restaurants, the

mysterious clicks on the phone line, the personal searches, and other signs of

surveillance. Hearing that a cousin had “taken ill,” he understood at once that

she had been arrested. Nonetheless, he chose to focus on the improvements

that the regime had brought about in some sectors of society—the increase of

literacy in the rural population, the shiny new high-rises in the cities, the

nationwide project of electrification, the paving of roads, and so on. As a

Christian Scientist, he may have believed that he could will the evil away—

although there was certainly also personal calculation in his decision to return, a

sense that the Soviet Union would give him due attention and support.

The final stage of Sovietization was accomplished by a simple trick: Prokofiev

didn’t need to “become” a Soviet composer, because he had been one all

along. He still had his Soviet passport; his works had been published by the

official Soviet house; many of his recent premieres had taken place on Soviet

soil; and his style already fulfilled the mandate for simplicity. All that remained

was a bureaucratic matter of changing his address.

Prokofiev’s first “official” Soviet work, the dance epic Romeo and Juliet, showed

him at his optimistic peak. In his autobiography he identified five main lines in

his writing: the classical, the modern, the motoric, the lyric, and the grotesque.

In Romeo these modes find equilibrium, with the lyric at the center. Prokofiev’s

extended tonal language achieves maximum sophistication: the lovely opening

melody of the work is interspersed with just enough passing semitone clashes

and lowered or raised pitches that it acquires a grainy, acidic finish, avoiding

sentimentality or kitsch. The ballet was written at high speed in the summer of

1935, in the last months before the onslaught of the Terror. It had the makings

of an instant classic, yet inexplicable obstacles appeared in the way of the first

188

performance. Members of the Bolshoi Ballet declared the music undanceable.

Soviet officials, reversing their usual stance on the inadvisability of tragic

endings, said that Prokofiev had betrayed Shakespeare by letting the lovers live

happily ever after. Even with a new ending of ardent heartbreak, Romeo did not

reach a Russian stage until 1940. What Prokofiev could never understand was

that these difficulties had nothing to do with the notes he put on paper; they

were the ritual of humiliation that every Soviet composer had to undergo.

Perplexed by the indifferent reception of Romeo, Prokofiev now tried his hand at

propaganda. In contrast to Shostakovich, who dispatched his official duties as

efficiently and soullessly as possible, Prokofiev worked painfully hard at such

projects as the Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of October, Songs of Our

Days, and Zdravitsa (Toast to Stalin). The ten-part Cantata, with its two large

choruses and four distinct orchestras, including an ensemble of accordions, was

too raucous to gain approval. Songs of Our Days, in which a mother reassures

her child,

There is a man behind the Kremlin walls

And the entire land knows and loves him

Your joy and happiness come from him

Stalin! That is his great name!

also failed to please, this time on the grounds that Prokofiev had simplified too

much and ceased to be himself—the same mind game that commentators had

played with Shostakovich in the reviews of The Limpid Stream.

With Zdravitsa, Prokofiev finally hit the mark. The text is a paean to the loving

attentions of the man in the Kremlin, who, it is claimed, brings sunshine,

nourishes meadows, and whitens the cherry orchards. Prokofiev took the idea

of Stalin’s love at face value, writing surreally beautiful music in the vein of

Romeo and Juliet. Indeed, as Philip Taylor points out, the opening melody has

more or less the same lilting accompaniment as in the ballet’s balcony scene.

Zdravitsa was considered sufficiently true to life that it was broadcast from

loudspeakers on the Moscow streets. Oleg, the composer’s younger son, ran

into the house one day and said, “Daddy! They’re playing you outside!”

Official applause also greeted Prokofiev’s score for Sergei Eisenstein’s film

Alexander Nevsky, a celebration of the thirteenth-century prince who routed the

Teutonic Knights on the ice of Lake Peipus. Few experiences in Prokofiev’s

checkered career gave him more satisfaction than his collaboration with

Eisenstein, who treated his composers not as hired hands but as creative

equals. The tour-de-force scene in Nevsky, the battle on the ice, was filmed

only after the music had been sketched out, and the resulting integration of

sound and image rivals anything in the animated creations of Walt Disney,

whom both director and composer admired. In other scenes Eisenstein implied

rhythm in the sequence of images. Watching in the screening room, Prokofiev

would tap his fingers in time to the footage. He would deliver a finished piece by

noon the following day, and Eisenstein would use the music to finalize his edit.

This almost unprecedented vision of film as spoken-word opera was one that

189

Stalin did not fail to appreciate. When, in 1941, the first Stalin prizes were

handed out, Alexander Nevsky was among the winners.

By the time Eisenstein’s film received that honor, however, Prokofiev had begun

to understand the dimensions of his velvet prison. In 1938 and 1939, the

composer labored away on his first Soviet opera, Semyon Kotko, which told of a

young man’s transformation into a socialist hero and his concomitant defeat of

various class enemies. The libretto is alternately fatuous and vicious, but

Prokofiev lavished on it some of the strongest dramatic music of his career,

including a German invasion sequence of malevolent splendor. What most

excited him was the opportunity to work with Meyerhold, whom he had long

idolized.

Meyerhold was readying Semyon Kotko for rehearsal at the Stanislavsky Opera

Theater when, on June 15, 1939, he made some ill-advised remarks on Soviet

arts policy, the precise nature of which remains a matter of debate. On June 20,

he was arrested, his fate probably having been sealed long before. Meyerhold’s

wife was later found stabbed to death. The opera’s premiere was, of course,

postponed. Prokofiev was still recovering from these events when a change in

Soviet foreign policy forced a revision of the opera’s libretto. The signing of the

Hitler-Stalin pact in August 1939 meant that Germans could no longer be

depicted as villains. Hasty cosmetic changes failed to save Semyon Kotko from

obsolescence, and it disappeared from Soviet stages soon after its premiere.

On January 16, 1940, Stalin signed 346 death sentences, Meyerhold’s and

Babel’s among them.

Throughout the late thirties Prokofiev continued to make trips to the West,

waving his passport at the border. Talking to his friends outside Russia, he kept

to a pro-Soviet line, but close acquaintances thought they could see the strain.

Nicolas Nabokov, in his book Old Friends and New Music, reported that “behind

this mask of optimism and official praise, one could detect a feeling totally

contradictory to the very nature of Prokofiev’s character: the feeling of profound

and terrible insecurity.” According to the Russian-American composer Vernon

Duke, a Hollywood studio offered Prokofiev the huge salary of twentyfive

hundred dollars a week. Duke himself conveyed the offer and watched the

reaction—momentary excitement turning to truculent dismissal. “That’s nice

bait,” Prokofiev said, “but I won’t swallow it. I’ve got to go back to Moscow, to

my music and my children.”

Dostoevsky’s story The Gambler, which formed the basis for Prokofiev’s great

early opera, has a line that may pinpoint the major weakness in the composer’s

personality. Alexei, the protagonist, is looking back at the moment when he

might have turned away from the roulette wheel and overcome his compulsion.

“I ought to have gone away,” he says, “but a strange sensation rose up in me, a

sort of defiance of fate, a desire to challenge it, to put out my tongue at it.”

Prokofiev’s diary of his first Soviet tour records a similar turning point. “Should I

forget the whole thing and stay here?” the composer asked himself as he

boarded the train to Moscow. “Can I count on coming back or will they stop

me?” Again, during a change of locomotives at the Latvian border, he said to

himself: “This is our last chance, it’s still not too late to turn back.” But he

190

brushed aside his misgivings and stayed on the train. A little over ten years

later, upon returning from his 1938 American tour, Prokofiev handed in his

foreign-travel passport, per Soviet procedure. He never got it back, and never

set foot outside the Soviet Union again.

The Great Patriotic War

“A blizzard is raging outside the windows as 1944 approaches,” Shostakovich

wrote to Isaak Glikman on New Year’s Eve. “It will be a year of happiness, of

joy, of victory, a year that will bring us all much joy. The freedom-loving Peoples

will at last throw off the yoke of Hitlerism, peace will reign over the whole world,

and we shall live once more in peace under the sun of Stalin’s Constitution. Of

this I am convinced, and consequently experience feelings of unalloyed joy.”

This quintessentially Shostakovichian utterance exemplifies the composer’s

penchant for talking through a mask of Soviet doublespeak. Indeed, he appears

to be echoing, for comic effect, Stalin’s own wearyingly repetitive prose style;

the threefold use of the word “joy” (radost’) is a typical Stalinist tic. Yet the

repetition is also a private code. Glikman informs us that whenever

Shostakovich repeats himself unnecessarily, or emphasizes some stale phrase,

he means the opposite of what he appears to be saying. Thus, when he writes,

“Everything is so fine, so perfectly excellent, that I can find almost nothing to

write about,” he is in fact saying that things are too awful to be described in

correspondence that is being monitored by the NKVD. Glikman says that

Shostakovich used this code even in conversation. “I’m feeling fine” had a

variety of implications.

But did Shostakovich always mean the opposite of what he said? Did he take

no joy at all in the prospect that “freedom-loving Peoples will at last throw off the

yoke of Hitlerism”? Even in the grip of totalitarian terror, life goes on. People are

able to feel joy, rage, sorrow, love. Music is, in fact, better at communicating

these primal emotions that it is at managing anything as tricky as irony. Irony, in

the standard definition, is saying something other than what one appears to be

saying. To talk about musical irony, we first have to agree on what the music

appears to be saying, and then we have to agree on what the music is really

saying. This is invariably difficult to do. We can, however, learn to be wary of

any interpretation that displays too much certitude about what the music is

“really saying,” and stay alert to multiple levels of meaning. Shostakovich’s Fifth

Symphony becomes a rich experience when heard in this way. So does his

Seventh Symphony, or Leningrad, which for many years was dismissed as an

exercise in wartime propaganda.

Shostakovich displayed patriotic fervor from the start of the war. In late June

1941, immediately after the Nazi invasion began, he reported to the civil

defense headquarters with his pupil Veniamin Fleishman and volunteered for

duty. Rejected on account of his poor eyesight, he joined the Leningrad

Conservatory fire brigade and moved into a barracks in the building. A famous

photo shows him wearing a fireman’s helmet on the conservatory roof. The