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| Dimitri Shostakovich |
In the midst of capricious terror and the flagrant
disregard for truth, due process and human life, the voice of humanity had not
been totally silenced. During these nightmarish times, there were extraordinary
individuals who allowed their art to register feelings that could not otherwise
be expressed. Dimitry Shostakovich, perhaps the most important Soviet composer
of the twentieth century, had his Symphony No. 5 premier performance in
Leningrad in November 1937 during the height of the purge of the Party. For
almost two years he had lived with the fear that he could be another victim
because of a savagely hostile Pravda review of his opera, The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk after Stalin attended a performance.
The unsigned editorialist of “Muddle Instead of Music” accused him of being an
“aesthete” and a “formalist,” and hinted that “it might end badly” for him.
Sleeping with a suitcase beside his bed, he clearly encoded into Symphony No. 5 his fear, sadness and grief, feelings that the audience at the premier
performance obviously shared as they openly wept during the funereal slow
movement indicating that almost everyone present would have suffered the loss
of loved ones or friends during one of the waves of recent terror. Notably
absence in this symphony was the sarcasm and irony that had featured in much of
his earlier compositions, and to rehabilitate himself, he adopted the heroic
classicism that is most evident in the electrifying climax which was followed
by a noisy thirty-minute ovation. Whether the slow movement induced as one
contemporary critic noted a “numbness” and “torpor” that might have sunk the
composer had the finale not saved him, or as some later critics[i] contended,
his oeuvre was charged with subversive messages revealing the composer to be a
bitter dissident with a disdain for the system, misses the significance of this
music.
What he intended to convey in his art is irrelevant because symphonic music lends itself to multiple meanings, a richness which explains why it was so highly valued by the multitude of listeners in the Soviet Union.[ii] The extravagant mea culpa that he expressed in public also cannot be taken seriously because of the extreme duress that he experienced. It is most likely that the shy, polite Shostakovich expressed in his art his deeply felt fears that included the loss of his teaching position at the Leningrad Conservatory, the effects of being publicly insulted and shunned and the grief of losing loved ones to the terror. But as a survival strategy, he incorporated the upbeat triumphal march of the Soviet state that concludes Symphony No. 5 in order to ingratiate himself with the “Party musicologists” who expected him to write melodic songs. Perhaps Shostakovich was correct when he later asserted that Stalin kept him alive because he liked his film music.
What he intended to convey in his art is irrelevant because symphonic music lends itself to multiple meanings, a richness which explains why it was so highly valued by the multitude of listeners in the Soviet Union.[ii] The extravagant mea culpa that he expressed in public also cannot be taken seriously because of the extreme duress that he experienced. It is most likely that the shy, polite Shostakovich expressed in his art his deeply felt fears that included the loss of his teaching position at the Leningrad Conservatory, the effects of being publicly insulted and shunned and the grief of losing loved ones to the terror. But as a survival strategy, he incorporated the upbeat triumphal march of the Soviet state that concludes Symphony No. 5 in order to ingratiate himself with the “Party musicologists” who expected him to write melodic songs. Perhaps Shostakovich was correct when he later asserted that Stalin kept him alive because he liked his film music.
