OPINION

Shostakovich Gets Lost in His Own Biography

By Thomas Rymer

Let's hope that those who celebrated the 100th anniversary of Dmitry Shostakovich's birth Monday stuck to playing and talking about his music.Unfortunately, it has been hard to distill Shostakovich's voice from the noise that has surrounded him. True, biographers always run the risk of minimizing, eliding, overemphasizing or otherwise distorting aspects of their subjects in the process of fitting an entire life into a book. Alas, Shostakovich has suffered here more than most.

As one of the main faces of Soviet music, his life has been plumbed for information not only about him, but about the system in which he trained and worked. Shostakovich, the man and composer, has been lost among the competing images of what others wanted him to symbolize.

During his life, Shostakovich was alternately lauded by the Soviet authorities as the proletariat's composer — an exemplar of socialism's commitment to art — and scolded and harassed by the same officials for being an avant-gardist producing music that was "anti-people."

In 1936, while still on the rise, Shostakovich was attacked in an editorial in Pravda titled "Muddle Instead of Music." Reportedly ordered by Stalin himself, the editorial targeted the composer's opera "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District," which had already been performed an estimated 200 times to wide acclaim in the Soviet Union and abroad. "The ability of good music to enthrall the masses has been sacrificed on the altar of petit-bourgeois formalism," charged the editorial, published two days after the Soviet leader attended a performance. "Such games can only finish badly."

Shostakovich was left scrambling. His 4th Symphony — which, like "Lady Macbeth," was infused with the dissonant sound characteristic of much modern music — was already in rehearsal. The piece was quickly pulled, and was not premiered until 1960. In its place, Shostakovich offered the 5th Symphony. With its more classically structured harmonies, the 5th promised not to offend conservative ears.

His rehabilitation appeared complete when, in 1942, his 7th Symphony, "Leningrad" was performed in the Soviet Union, London and New York. The piece, begun when Shostakovich was in Leningrad and completed after he'd been evacuated in the midst of the Nazi siege, became an Allied rallying cry in the battle against fascism.

But Shostakovich again fell afoul of the state when, in 1948, he and fellow Soviet composers Sergei Prokofiev and Aram Khachaturian were attacked by Stalin's cultural commissar, Andrei Zhdanov, for not composing music that could be listened to by the Soviet masses.

Stalin died five years later, and the last two decades of Shostakovich's life saw him take his place as the grand figure of Soviet music. (In a cruel twist of fate, Prokofiev died on the same day as Stalin.) Shostakovich would write another six symphonies, complete his set of 15 quartets and, in 1959, be appointed the first secretary of the Soviet Composers Union. At his death, in 1975, he was buried with full state honors in Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery. He was described in obituaries in the Soviet Union and the West as a loyal communist.

But if the composer's death brought an end to his personal struggle for artistic freedom, the battle for his legacy had just begun. Depending on whom you believed, Shostakovich had always been a committed communist and Soviet patriot; a secret dissident who took every opportunity he could find to express his disgust with the Soviet system; or an opportunist who did what he had to do to further his career.

More than any other milestone in the debate surrounding Shostakovich, it was the 1979 publication of the English translation of "Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich" that revealed the composer's contempt for the communist system. The book — based on interviews conducted by Solomon Volkov from 1971 to 1974 and published after Volkov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1976 — portrayed a secret dissident who scorned Stalin and quietly wove his dissent into his music.

The Soviets immediately launched a public-relations offensive against the book. Shostakovich's son, Maxim, denounced it as a forgery. Less expected, perhaps, was the criticism heaped on the work outside the Soviet Union, with musicologists taking issue with passages they said had been lifted from already published materials, and deriding other sections as pure invention. While Maxim Shostakovich retracted his earlier attack after leaving the Soviet Union, saying "Testimony" accurately reflected his father's thoughts, the composer's true identity is still debated.

Some questions apparently will never be answered. Why did Shostakovich decide, for example, to join the Communist Party in 1960, when artists no longer faced the same danger and pressure from the state that had characterized the Stalinist era? That move has variously been described as an act of commitment to the socialist idea, final surrender or the result of much political harassment. In a 1999 interview, just hours before he was to conduct his father's 4th Symphony in St. Petersburg, Maxim said that the day his father joined the party was one of only two times he ever saw his father cry. (The other came when Nina Varzar, Shostakovich's first wife and Maxim's mother, died.)

And what of all the discussion and speculation surrounding possible subtext in his music? The long-held belief that Shostakovich injected his works with subversive harmonies and motifs has also been questioned. Richard Taruskin, a 20th-century and Russian music specialist at the University of California, Berkeley, went so far as to argue in 1989 that, in fact, Shostakovich had sought to ingratiate the Stalinist authorities with his music. "Lady Macbeth," Taruskin said in a New Republic article, was not a dissonant refutation of the status quo but a "defense of the lawless extermination of the kulaks."

That there are no clear answers here makes sense, in a way. Shostakovich's life was simply too complex, too multifaceted, too shot through with political, cultural and historical meaning and metaphor to organize in any clearly defined, neatly delineated way. He was, or wasn't, a true believer who defended his country during visits to the United States in 1949 and 1959, a terrified sycophant, and a clandestine nonconformist.

On Monday night, in a concert marking the artist's birthday, his friend Mstislav Rostropovich, for whom Shostakovich wrote two cello concertos, conducted a program featuring the 8th Symphony and the 1st Violin Concerto at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory.

That Rostropovich chose the 8th is a hopeful sign. The second of the composer's "war symphonies," the 8th is widely considered the composer's statement on the terror of war, a sharp contrast with the patriotic anthem to Leningrad in the 7th. It is a much more enigmatic piece, with moments of despair and hope fused together in a way that evokes a sense of doubt and irresolution. It sweeps through peaks and valleys, eventually fading off into an end of sorts without providing any clear or simple answers — like the man himself.

Thomas Rymer is opinion page editor of The Moscow Times and former editor of The St. Petersburg Times.

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