The Ups and Downs of Dmitri Shostakovich

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 460, 16 April 1948, Page 9

The Ups and Downs of Dmitri Shostakovich

RECEN T reports in the newspapers that Dmitri Shostakovich has been forced to give up his chair at the Moscow Conservatory provide what is apparently the latest development in a series of reprimands and recantations that has been going on for many years between this bad boy among Russian composers and the ever-watch-ful Politburo. It is difficult to know what is truth and what rumour in cases like these, and impossible to feel that we ever have the whole truth. But the situation as presented in British and American journals comes to something like this.

THOUGH composers the world over afte known to have their ups and downs, the bewildered-looking young Shostakovich seems to have had a particularly bad time of it. Many will remember the castigation he got from the official journal Pravda over his opera Lady Macbeth of Mzensk. But his troubles began much earlier than that. It was when he was still a gangling youth just out of musical school that he suffered his first mild rebuke-from his former professor. It was only a mild rebuke, of course, because 19-year-old Dmitri had just been hailed by the populace as a second Tchaikovski after they had heard his brilliant First Symphony. But the professgr was very. annoyed. "His First Symphony is the result of his study in the Conservatory," he said, "and I was very distressed by his published allegation that in the Conservatory we only ‘hindered him from composing.’ When he left the Conservatory he came under the influence of people who professed the musical principles of the extremist West, and already in his October SymPhony there was an unhealthy tendency to adapt formalistic language for the expression of revolutionary ideas. When he brought his Aphorisms to me, I told him that I understood nothing in them, that thef were quite foreign-after which he ceased coming to me." Early Apologies Shostakovich made haste to explain. It was the first of many explanations. He had just begun to realise, he said, that music was not just a combination of sounds arranged in this melody or that (i.e., "formalistic"), but an art capable of expressing the most varied ideas, and feelings. "I did not easily win through to this conviction," he added, "but it is sufficient to say that during 1926 I did not write a single note." It seemed that he had begun to realise what every Soviet composer should know, that it doesn’t do to be too highbrow in a country that insists on music for-"the people" rather than for intellectuals with highly trained ears and sophisticated tastes. Unfortunately, some pople find it hard to match their words with deeds, .and although for several years Shostakovich continued on happily composing in his Leningrad apartment, in 1929 he made another faux pas. He was writing an opera based on Gogol’s fantastic tale The Nose, and in trying to get a satirical effect he fell into the treacherous quagmire of atonality, one of the worst sins of extremist Western music. In fact he made the work far too cleverly

satirical and sophisticated for the likings of his fellows, and it was assailed by the Russian Association of Proletarian Composers as a product of "bourgeois decadence," and had few performances. Once again Shostakovich hastened to make amends, this time in the form of a First of May Symphony, a popular work full of mob oratorical trumpet and drum passages, obvious rhythms that "the people" could follow, and rowdy’ orchestration, The "Lady Macbeth" Affair But the Lady Macbeth affair was already looming up darkly on the hori-zon-it was an episode that put him really under an official cloud for five years. He may have been a little apprehensive about the opera from the start, for at its first performance in 1934 he said in the programme notes, "I have tried to make the music as simple as possible." However, the axe didn’t fall at once, and for another two years he lived on in a kind of: fool’s paradise, basking in the effusions of such people as Boris Mordvinov (the opera’s producer), who said, "We realised we were confronted with a phenomenon of the highest creative- order. No one cared to use common terms of praise. .. . The opera was accepted’ without: hesitation." Then one night, so the story goes,’ Marshal Stalin decided to pay a visit to the opera; the flags were hung out, the company gave the best performance of their lives, when, to everyone’s horror, (continued on next page)

The Music Goes Right to Left

(continued fram previous page) the Marshal got up in the middle ot the show and stalked majestically from the theatre. Lady Macbeth was indeed doomed, and the Pravda article followed hard on the heels of this incident. Under the title A Mess Instead of Music it said, "The popular masses want good songs and good operas. . . Officious music critics exalt this opera to the high theavens and spread its fame far and wide. But the listener is from the very first bewildered by a stream ot extremely discordant sounds. .. On the stage singing is replaced by screaming.

+ «. expressiveness is replaced by frenzied rhythm, noise expresses passion. . . The stirring quality of good music is sacrificed in favour of petty-bourgeois formalistic (that word again!) celebration, with pretence to originality by means of cheap clowning. It is a ‘game that may end very badly. . ." This was a hint’ that a blind horse could " follow, and a_ second article attacking his ballet The Clear Stream made things all too clear. The local boy had failed to make the grade, so he did what composers anywhere would like to do-turned out another winner. After the withdrawal of his Fourth Symphony (as "not in accordance with his new creative principles") it was his Fifth Symphony (described as "a Soviet artist’s practical creative reply to just criticism") that saved the day. It was written by a man a little over 30 years of age who was practically half-blind, but by its success young Dmitri was vindicated. Professional critics, fellow composers, and leading Soviet intellectuals wrote glowing reviews; Shostakovich was welcomed back into the fold like a prodigal son. Stalin Prizes On the wave of his success he wrote a Sixth Symphony (1939) and in 1940 received a special Stalin prize of 10,000 roubles for a Piano Quintet. During the war a violent attack .of patriotism produced the Seventh Symphony, which, dedicated to the "ordinary Soviet

citizens who have become the heroes of the present war," was written between tours of duty digging trenches in the outskirts of Leningrad and fire-watching on the roof of the Conservatory. It won another Stalin prize of 10,000 roubles. His Eighth, which "sought to express the Soviet’s new optimism and the spirit of the Red Army as it takes the offensive after discouraging retreat," won congratulations from the directors of the Union. of Soviet Composers. But then-inexplicably-it happened again/ The Ninth Symphony was a dismal failure. Young Dmitri-was on the downgrade once more. *An imitation of archaic, classical models," the journal Life and Culture said of it; the composer was "taking a vacation to rest from modern problems when he should have been bending every effort to render in music the post-war heroism of his people." But promptly (he was well up on the correct procedure by now) Shostakovich recanted once more. "Shallow, unmeaning music without any ideas behind it, should not be written by us," he said. "We must declare war on bad taste..." and so on. And by January, 1947, Shostakovich was in such favour that he received (perhaps as a resylt of this very fine speech) the Soviet’s highest civil decoration, the Order of Lenin, Shortly after that we heard that he was teaching at the Moscow and Leningrad Conservatories. Now he is in trouble again. Is it because of statements he made about his teaching principles, like "I demand _that my pupils carefully study the works of the classics’? Nobody knows, But in January of this year, Dmitri was obliged once more to make a full recantation. "When our party and the entire people condemn my erroneous formalis. tic tendéncies, however difficult it ig for me to admit it, I see that the party and the people are right," he said. Apparently this statement was not. enough, however, for in this most recent purge he has been compelled to give up his chair. Prokofieff Too Other musicians concerned in the purge were Khachaturyan, Prokofieff, Shebalin, . Myaskovsky, Popov, and Muradeli. All these composers have had their ups and downs in the past, too, but the inclusion of Prokofieff was a surprise to many people. After years of voluntary exile he had become a Soviet citizen in 1935 (after writing a ballet The Ptodigal Son), and although reprimanded at first for his "bourgeois" lyricism, had quickly found his feet in the Soviet musical world. His cantata Alexander Nevsky is considered by many to be his masterpiece, and generally Prokofieff has been as well behaved as Peter in his own musical fable Peter and the Wolf, who only annoyed Grandpa by going into the meadow. But like Shostakovich and many another Soviet composer to-day, Prokofieff must be beginning to realise that although Grandpa can be a very mild and helpful old man, he can also, if his wishes are too flagrantly flouted, turn into a very big, snarling Russian bear.