Shostakovich in New York

Shostakovich in New York:
His last and most difficult gift

ROBERT ZALLER

Valery Gergiev has concluded his cycle of all the Shostakovich symphonies, begun last winter and spring with four concerts, with a final three performed by the Kirov Orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall.

Shostakovich symphonies are not easily grouped. Four of them contain vocal components— Numbers Two and Three, and Thirteen and Fourteen— but they share little in common otherwise, being particularly disparate stylistically. Seven and Eight are war symphonies, but they too are quite distinct from each other. And the brisk, Haydnesque Ninth, which was supposed to cap a trilogy, is completely unlike the other two. Eleven and Twelve depict the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, respectively, or so they are said to. If you don’t play the set chronologically, which presents its own difficulties, there is no obvious way to traverse it.

Threatened career, threatened life

Gergiev’s own last-minute shifts underscore this perplexity: On the first two of these second-installment concerts, he reversed the order of performance (Six and Eleven for the first concert, instead of Eleven and Six; Fourteen and Twelve instead of Twelve and Fourteen for the second). Only Eight and Thirteen, the last to be played, came off as advertised.

Does this matter? Not very much, if one hears the whole set. Shostakovich’s work falls broadly into place if one considers the two defining events of his career: the brutal attack on him in Pravda in 1936, which not only very nearly derailed his career but, in the atmosphere of the Great Purges, threatened his life as well; and the actual confrontation with death brought about by the declining health of his last decade. The first event turned the cheeky young genius of the ‘20s and ‘30s into a deeply scarred survivor; the second changed the mature composer from a man who uniquely expressed the tragedy of his time to one increasingly preoccupied with the specter of personal extinction.

A response to “just criticism”

Like any broad generalization, of course, this one begs for immediate qualification. Yet it is true that among the kaleidoscopic moods of the first four symphonies— the ones that preceded the Pravda attack— tragedy is seldom felt; for that, one must go to the Mussorgskyan fourth act of the opera that provoked it, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, with its evocation of the sufferings of a prison march. Shostakovich was still at work on the Fourth Symphony when the Pravda attack appeared, and it is impossible to consider the sudden, eruptive coda with which the work ends without taking into account the circumstances under which it was composed. From that moment— and, more comprehensively, the Fifth Symphony that followed under the groveling title (not supplied by Shostakovich himself) of “A Soviet Artist’s Reply to Just Criticism”— there is scarcely a major work in the canon that is not threaded with anguish.

Shostakovich’s mercurial, ironic style served him well here, for in a culture as relentlessly dedicated to official optimism as that of Soviet Russia, it was necessary to write in code. The code is easily broken now, but the sense of constraint remains. The poet Mayakovsky, Shostakovich’s elder contemporary and one of the first to sense the betrayal of the Revolution by Stalinism, wrote of being forced to trample on the throat of his own song. The sense of that fate is everywhere in Shostakovich after 1936.

The Nazi dimension of horror

Five years later, the Nazi invasion of Russia, with its unexampled agony— no other nation in any war was ever to suffer so many dead— added a new dimension of horror, even as it brought a grotesque kind of relief: It was now permissible to grieve; it was even, within moderation, a patriotic act to do so. Shostakovich shouldered this burden, too. Then Stalinism returned in all its brutality, and, even after Stalin himself was gone, its legacy remained.

From the Fourth on, scarcely any of the 15 symphonies Shostakovich wrote was without controversy or censorship: The Ninth was too light, the Tenth too dark, the Eleventh was taken for a comment on the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution rather than a celebration of that of 1905, and so forth. These were not critical quibbles, but terroristic threats. To compose under such circumstances, and at the highest level of art with all that demands of personal integrity, was an act of supreme courage. Those who criticize Shostakovich for not speaking out sufficiently against the regime or for making compromises with it should simply listen to the music. All they could wish of protest and witness is in it, and of a terror that, as Rilke (whom Shostakovich set in the Fourteenth Symphony) said in another context, “We can hardly bear.”

A musical map of Russia’s wartime suffering

It is in his slow movements that Shostakovich is most expressive. That of the Sixth Symphony, with which Gergiev began the autumn series, may be read as a successor to the famous Adagio of the Fifth, but it is one that goes even deeper in its stillness and restraint, with plangent solos and duets above almost continuous orchestral trilling. The Adagio of the Eighth is a canvas on which the map of Russia’s wartime suffering is laid out, but the ruminative Passacaglia of its fourth movement, which serves almost as a second Adagio, is far more personal and introspective. The slow movements of the Eleventh and Twelfth symphonies are the heart of those works, too. The Thirteenth and Fourteenth lack any slow movement proper, but are no less anguished for that (the Fifteenth String Quartet, in contrast, consists entirely of adagios, like Haydn’s Seven Last Words).

The Thirteenth Symphony, with its setting of Yevtushenko’s protest poems, is the last of Shostakovich’s “public” scores, at least in the symphonic genre. Gergiev chose it to conclude the entire series, coupling it with the equally massive Eighth. Both are five-movement scores that end quietly and ambiguously, as if irresolution must have the final word after so much passionate speech. They made an enormous impact, although Gergiev started both with a surprising lack of energy.

The private Shostakovich faces death

The Fourteenth Symphony is one of only two that belong to Shostakovich’s last period. Quite unlike anything else in his corpus, it consists of 11 settings on the theme of death, scored for soprano and bass, 22 strings, and ten percussion instruments. This is a private (though no less universal) Shostakovich, facing the abyss of the end without illusion or consolation. Atheism was officially promoted in the Soviet Union, of course, but even had it not been, it is hard to imagine Shostakovich envisaging a god in anything but the shape of a black spider in view of the hecatomb his country endured: perhaps 75 million dead of war, famine and the Gulag within 40 years.

It is interesting to note that the two former superpowers (the one that collapsed 15 years ago, and the one that is collapsing now) are alone among the great powers in experiencing a revival of religious faith in recent years. Against the retro pieties they serve up, Orthodox and Evangelical, Shostakovich now offers us the barren honesty of a beauty beyond hope. It is the last and most difficult gift of a man on whom the 20th Century set its seal as on no other.