SHOSTAKOVICH AND THE GUNS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 169, 18 September 1942, Page 6

SHOSTAKOVICH AND THE GUNS

His New Symphony Is "A Musical Interpretation

of Russia At War"

Condensed from an article in " Time "

HEN guns speak, the muses keep silent, says an old Russian } proverb. Last winter, as he listened to the roar of German artillery and watched the sputtering of German incendiaries from the roof of Leningrad’s Conservatory of Music, Fire Warden Shostakovich snapped: "Here the muses speak together with the guns."

On a recent Sunday afternoon the U.S. heard the proof of his assertion, but the proof was already 25 years old: Blood flowed like water and froze like ice on the steps of Petrograd’s Winter Palace. Over bodies and frozen blood the Red Guards swept through the barricaded doors. By the time the final echoes of that historic assault had died, the last vestiges of Russia’s old order had (in the Bolshevik phrase) been thrown on "the garbage heap of history." Russia of the Tsars, of

Byzantine ritual, of mad monks and Cossack whips, Russia of fatalistic chaos and fatalistic inaction, was now to be kneaded with the butts of rifles into the Russia of the proletariat, of modern industry, of determined socialistic dictatorship. The time was November, 1917, Year One of the Russian Revolution. ‘ It was the year eleven in the life of a pale, slight, impressionable little bour-

geois boy who clung to a servant’s hand in the battle-littered streets of Petrograd. Said the servant: "This is the revolution, Mitya." Young Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich only stared and clutched the servant’s apron. But what he saw and heard he pondered in his precocious head. And on a recent Sunday, a special NBC symphony orchestra under Toscanini gave the Western Hemisphere its first chance to hear what Shostakovich’s Marxist muse, now 25 years older, has to say in his Seventh Symphony, his biggest, most ambitious orchestral work to date-the work that he wrote last year between tours of duty digging trenches in the outskirts of Leningrad and fire-watching on the roof of the Conservatory. It had already been heard by 5,000 enthusiastic listeners in the Royal Albert Hall, London. Not since the first Manhattan performances of Parsifal (in 1903) had there been such a buzz of American anticipation over a piece of music. Toscanini had won the right to conduct it

after a polite battle royal with Leopold Stokowski, Artur Rodzinski, and Serge Koussevitzky. Two months ago a little tin box, no more than five inches around, arrived in the U.S. In it were 100 feet of micro-film-the photographed score of the Seventh Symphony, It had been carried by ’plane from Kuibyshev to Teheran, by car from Teheran to Cairo, by ’plane from Cairo to New York, The Music Described Written for a mammoth. orchestra, Shostakovich’s Seventh, though it is no blatant battle piece, is a musical interpretation of Russia at war. In the strict sense, it is less a symphony than a symphonic suite. Like a great wounded snake, dragging its slow length, it uncoils for 80 minutes from the orchestra. There is little development of its bold, bald, four-square themes. There is no effort to (Continued on next page)

NEW SYMPHONY

(Continued from previous page) reduce the symphony’s loose, sometimes skeletal structures to the epic compression and economy of the classic symphony. Yet this very musical amorphousness is expressive of the amorphous mass of Russia at war. Its themes are exultations, agonies. Death and suffering haunt it. But amid bombs bursting in Leningrad, Shostakovich had also heard the chords of victory. In the symphony’s last movement the triumphant brasses prophesy what Shostakovich describes as the "victory of light over darkness, of humanity over barbarism." The Sevénth Symphony’s proportions are heroic, most obviously so in the 27minute first movement. The deceptively simple opening melody, suggestive of peace, work, hope, is interrupted by the theme of war, " senseless, implacable and brutal." For this martial theme Shostakovich resorts to a musical trick: the violins, tapping the backs of their bows, introduce a tune that might have come from a puppet show. This tiny drumming, at first almost inaudible, mounts and swells, is repeated twelve times in a continuous twelve-minute crescendo, The theme is not developed but simply grows in volume like Ravel’s Bolero; it is suc-| ceeded by a slow melodic passage that suggests a chant for the war’s dead. ~~ As in most of Shostakovich’s later music there are traces of Beethoven, Berlioz, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mahler, moderns like Poulenc, and Busoni. The Seventh Symphony has been described by those who have already heard it as a modern Russian version of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, It has also been called a sound-track for a psychological documentary film on Russia to-day. Stalin Walked Out Dmitri Shostakovich’s father was an engineer. His mother, a student of the St. Petersburg (later Leningrad) Conservatory of Music, believed that children should never be taught music before the age of nine, otherwise they become pedantic. But Dmitri epee ap terss had other ideas. ~

— as | At five he was taken to see RimskyKorsakov’s Tsar Sultan. After one hearing he could sing long passages from the opera. Sometimes he would sit at the piapo, strike a chord and lisp: "That’s the stars." Sometimes he struck a treble note, and said: "That’s somebody looking out the window." At 13, he entered Leningrad Conservatory. At 19, he composed his First Symphony (one of the most popular) as part of his course. His opera, Lady Macbeth of Mzensk -the first Soviet opera-nearly ruined Shostakovich. At the height of the Purge, when Russian nerves were badly frayed and people were plopping into prison like turtles into a pond, Stalin decided to hear Lady Macbeth, He did not like it, walked out before it was over. j Promptly a Pravda article called Shostakovich’s music "un-Soviet, unwhole/ some, cheap, eccentric and leftist" (atonal). A few days after that, Pravda attacked his ballet, The Limpid Stream. Friends feared that Shostakovich’s next composition might have to be called Stone Walls Do Not a Prison Make. But Composer Shostakovich was not a revolutionist for nothing. He publicly agreed that Pravda knew more about music than he did. *He withdrew his Fourth Symphony (it has never been performed) after one rehearsal, and announced that he would stake his musical future on a Fifth Symphony. His muse d:1 not fail him. Beer And Soccer Before the German invasion, Shostakovich lived in a five-room Leningrad apartment filled with his family (wife, two children, mother, sister and sister’s son) and piles of scores, books on music and sport. An enthusiastic soccer fan, Shostakovich is a regular correspondent of the chief Russian sports paper, Red Sport. Says he: "The climax of joy is not when you’re through a new symphony, but when you are hoarse from shouting, with your hands stinging from } clapping, your lips ‘parched, and you sip your second glass of beer after you’ve fought for it ‘with’ 90,000 other spectators to celebrate the victory of your favourite team."