On the last point Fay takes a broadly similar view, emphasising the idiom clearly owing more to contemporary classical developments than to either traditional Russian opera or socialist realism, more to Berg and even American jazz than Rimsky-Korsakov. There is however an important distinction between the two authors concerning the purpose of the denunciation. MacDonald views it as a result of state domination of the arts which was thoroughly in place by January 1936, hence his account of “mediocrities” with whom Shostakovich supposedly had to battle to have the opera staged. Fay argues that, rather, what precisely “socialist realism” meant with respect to music was still unclear at the start of 1936, so much so that some musicians initially understood Pravda’s article as an input to this ongoing debate, rather than a damning official pronouncement. Muddle Instead of Music was therefore for the régime a means of clarifying and defining what it expected of its composers by making the opera the antithesis of everything that socialist realism was supposed to be: “Taken together with the endorsement of Dzerzhinsky’s The Quiet Don and the attack on The Limpid Stream… an approved recipe for Socialist Realism could be deduced by example.” The article caused an intensification of state control, more than it was a product of it.
In any case, the effects ramified around Soviet cultural circles for years. Though musicians suffered less under Stalin than artists and writers, all artists were under no illusions that falling out of favour with the régime meant at the very least loss of privileges and income, and most probably arrest followed by either deportation or execution. The composer’s friend Vissarion Shebalin found himself ostracised merely for refusing to condemn Shostakovich at a “discussion” session concerning the article, recounted Shebalin’s wife. Terrified, Shostakovich spent the following year writing mainly film music, on account of Stalin’s known affinity for cinema. Official rehabilitation finally came in 1937 with his famous fifth symphony.
The Symphony No. 5 in D minor (1937) was the piece which restored Shostakovich to favour after the denunciations of 1936. Publicly described as “a Soviet artist’s response to justified criticism”, the régime received the piece well, official reviewer Alexei Tolstoy describing it as “bright, optimistic, [and] life-affirming”. Once, the standard view was that this represented a natural evolution in the composer’s style: Shostakovich was moving away from atonalism anyway and Pravda only hastened this. Today it is more commonly held that the piece represents a modernist composer stifled by fear: forced to cease innovation Shostakovich restricted himself to usual symphonic forms, handling them masterfully to produce a splendid if conventional piece, but nevertheless changing his style only under extreme coercion and bowing to the wishes of the censors. Fay broadly takes this view: “In his Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich consciously scaled back his ambition to more manageable, more traditional dimensions”.
The revisionist view of the work is very different: whereas the fourth symphony (completed 1936) is a depiction of totalitarianism (according to the revisionists), the fifth contains more subtle criticism, “expressing precisely the same sentiments in only slightly less obvious form.” Changes in style were coerced, but Shostakovich hid dissident elements within his compositions which the authorities failed to spot. Hence MacDonald: “… he must have looked for a way out… A man of such strong feelings cannot have contemplated abandoning his inner principles with anything but nausea…” There then follows a brief musical commentary on the symphony, interposed with views on what particular passages depict: the figure 27 march for example, according to MacDonald, represents Stalin walking through crowds at a rally, the brashness of the passage in question taken as criticism of the leader. The author presents no evidence to support a claim (which he makes explicitly) that such interpretations are anything more than his personal responses to music, certainly not that they represent the composer’s intentions.
All music-listeners can describe what certain passages depict for them, but it is a fundamental error to assume that these are the composer’s own views, without supporting evidence. Certainly this is no way to write historical biography. MacDonald’s book is full of this fallacy: the author takes his personal responses to Shostakovich’s music, which sometimes are wild speculation and at other times are somewhat plausible. (Richard Taruksin is less kind, describing them as possessing, “astounding blatancy and jejune specificity.”) However, MacDonald then asserts without substantiation that these are not only his, but the composer’s also. An attempt is being made to blur the distinction between emotive response and historical fact, and in so doing the author loses his claim to be a serious historian. In fact, as Francis Maes writes: “The urge to lay down an irrefutable and unassailable meaning… follows the method used by the Soviet aesthetic. In socialist-realist theory the content, the message of a work, plays a more important role than its aesthetic effect… The same method was now being applied, albeit in reverse, by the revisionist Shostakovich exegetes, Ian MacDonald being the most obvious example.”
When considering the Symphony No. 13 “Babi Yar” in B-flat minor (1962), the argument is reversed: here the obvious understanding is of a piece which contains a sustained critique of the Soviet system. Beginning with a setting of Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem about the massacre in the symphony’s subtitle, the last four movements are primarily a satire on Soviet communism, ridiculing party careerism as well as memorialising the victims of Stalin’s purges. For revisionists this represents an airing of views which the composer had long hidden; Shostakovich was here taking advantage of the thaw which ensued from Nikita Khrushchev’s second denunciation of Stalin at the 22nd Party Congress in 1961, to voice to the world his anger at the régime. MacDonald describes it as: “Shostakovich’s last major clash with the Soviet state… an astonishingly outspoken piece.” Of course the thirteenth symphony is critical of the bureaucracy. The composer’s scoring, especially the savage orchestral effects of the second movement and the cruelly tranquil opening flute of the finale, display Shostakovich’s sense of irony at its finest.
However, such an understanding must be very carefully qualified. In the era of Khrushchev’s reforms, the satirical elements stayed entirely within the boundaries of tolerated criticism, attacking governmental corruption and inefficiency whilst not questioning the fundamental principles of Marxism or one-party rule. Ten years later the piece would have been “outspoken”, after Leonid Brezhnev came to power and reimposed tight censorship; ten years earlier “astonishingly outspoken”, but in 1962 the satire was almost unremarkable. Taruskin makes the obvious but important point: “Four of the five poems… had already appeared in the official Soviet press by the time Shostakovich set them”, as had the fifth by the time of the première. Only a month prior to the first performance Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had been published in the Soviet Union for the first time; in this context Shostakovich’s relatively mild criticism was not at all considered by the authorities as overly subversive.
The government did have objections to the textual content, but these mostly centred around the Jewish themes of the first movement. After two performances Yevtushenko was required to edit eight lines of the text in order to affirm (truthfully) that Russians and Ukrainians died alongside Jews at Babi Yar, and faced with the alternative of his symphony being banned Shostakovich agreed to the substitutions though did not copy them into his manuscript score. This was clearly a grudging concession by the composer, who despised anti-Semitism in all its forms: “He was not a Jew, but he sympathized with the Jewish people,” to quote Kirill Kondrashin who conducted the symphony’s première. In fact it is a very plausible contention that it was this aspect of the symphony’s message, and not its satire, which was closer to the composer’s heart. The first movement was written with avid enthusiasm, before the others, and was originally intended as a standalone setting which only later was incorporated into a larger work. Fay emphasises the composer’s attachment to the Jewish themes when discussing the symphony’s origins, barely noting the satire which she seems to view as secondary; or, at least more a representation of the composer’s sense of humour than of principled opposition to communism. The thirteenth symphony was a critique of the régime, as evidenced by how, “Silence… descended upon the work” after March 1963, to use Maes’s words, as the censors’ standards tightened. But it is by no means a work of outright dissidence, as MacDonald and others would have one believe. The work is an attack on anti-Semitism and a humorous caricature of Soviet life, not the musical equivalent of The Gulag Archipelago.
A crucial distinction must be drawn, which the revisionists usually fail to appreciate, between opposition to a government because it restricts one’s artistic freedom, and opposition on principled, ideological grounds. Shostakovich expressed ideological ambivalence, barely passing his exam in Marxist methodology in 1926, and finding the régime’s attempts to explain the history of musical tonality in “social” terms highly amusing. Like his predecessors in earlier eras required to use religious texts for political and financial reasons, he was willing to set any Stalinist propaganda to music, provided that the censors did not interfere with the composing of the music itself; evidence the four symphonies glorifying one revolution or another and film scores for endless propaganda works. The composer had a reputation as a “signer”, which was entirely deserved: he joined the Party in 1960, never disowned collaboratory material published in his name without his permission, and in 1973 put his name to a denunciation of Andrei Sakharov (the latter act the subject of later regret).
One should not condemn him for any of this, but as Taruksin comments: “Going along to be left alone is the response you or I might make to totalitarian pressure, not the response of a “moral beacon.”” Shostakovich was a musician who resented the meddling of party ignoramuses in his work, simplifying only when forced to do so and reincorporating elements of tragedy back into his music immediately after the death of Stalin and especially towards the end of his life. His awareness of irony was acute, as shown in the letter reproduced in appendix two. But for a picture of the composer as a firm enemy of communism, who used his music to inspire solidarity against the régime and defy the evils of Marxism, there remains virtually no evidence.
* * *
In conclusion, the efforts of Soviet governments to control and influence music in this period were largely successful. Shostakovich rarely dared to do anything other than follow the party line after 1936, and the terror he experienced under Stalin left him in a permanent state of compliance and non-resistance. Even into the 1970s this led him to sign Sakharov’s denunciation when there would have been no negative consequences had he not done so. In 1936 he had had the will to declare, “Even if they chop my hands off, I will still continue to compose music – albeit I have to hold the pen in my teeth,” but as the composer aged he simply no longer had the will nor the energy to resist. The Soviet authorities were determined to have Dmitri Shostakovich as a state artist and were not uniformly successful, but they certainly prevented him from broaching any significant open dissent.
This was a contrast with the tsarist governments, who were not successful principally because they lacked the willpower to control culture embodied by later rulers. There was censorship aimed at supressing criticism, but no attempt to make all culture an instrument of state propaganda. The Bolsheviks asked the profoundly utilitarian question, “What is art for?”, and concluded that it was for the propagation of Marxism. The tsars never asked, and had a largely apathetic attitude towards music in particular. Their intense patronage of Chaikovsky however went far towards creating the tradition of Russian romantic music which influenced later Stalinist thinking on the subject, especially during the war, as well as naturally inspiring generations of later Russian composers. Imperial Russian government thus influenced music far more after its demise than whilst it actually ruled.
appendix one: original and revised versions of the text for the first movement of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 “Babi Yar” in B-flat minor (1962). By Yevgeny Yevtushenko.
See above for discussion. The altered passages are four lines near the beginning and another four towards the end:
Original:
I imagine now that I am a Jew.
Here I wander through ancient Egypt.
And here, I am crucified on the cross and die,
And still bear the marks of the nails…
And I become like a long, soundless scream
Above the thousand thousands here interred.
I am each old man shot dead here,
I am each child shot dead here.
Replacement:
I stand there as if at a wellspring,
That gives me faith in our brotherhood.
Here lie Russians and Ukrainians
With Jews they lie in the same earth.
I think about Russia’s heroic feats,
In blocking fascism’s path.
To the very tiniest dewdrop,
Her whole essence and fate is dear to me.
appendix two: letter from Dmitri Shostakovich to Isaak Glikman, December 29th 1957:
Dear Isaak Davidovich,
I arrived in Odessa on the day of the All-Peoples celebration of the 40th anniversary of Soviet Ukraine. This morning, I went out into the street. You, of course, understand that one cannot stay indoors on such a day. Despite wet and foggy weather, the whole of Odessa was out of doors. Everywhere are portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and also of comrades A. I. Belyaev, L. I. Brezhnev, N. A. Bulganin, K. E. Voroshilov, N. G. Ignatov, A. I. Kirilenko, F. R. Kozlov, O. V. Kuussinen, A. I. Mikoyan, N. A. Mukhitdinov, M. A. Suslov, E. A. Furtseva, N. S. Khrushchev, N. M. Shvernik, A. A. Aristov, P. A. Pospelov, Ya. E. Kalnberzin, A. P. Kirichenko, A. N. Kosygin, K. T. Mazyrov, V. P. Mzhevanadze, M. G. Pervukhin, N. T. Kalchenko.
Everywhere are banners, slogans, posters. All around are happy, beaming Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish faces. Here and there one hears eulogies in honour of the great banner of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and also in honour of comrades A. I. Belyaev, L. I. Brezhnev, N. A. Bulganin, K. E. Voroshilov, N. G. Ignatov, A. I. Kirichenko, F. R. Kozlov, O. V. Kuussinen, A. I. Mikoyan, N. A. Mukhitdinov, M. A. Suslov, E. A. Furtseva, N. S. Khrushchev, N. M. Shvernik, A. A. Aristov, P. A. Pospelov, Ya. E. Kalnberzin, A. P. Kirilenko, A. N. Kosygin, K. T. Mazyrov, V. P. Mzhevanadze, M. G. Pervukhin, N. T. Kalchenko, D. S. Korotchenko. Everywhere one hears Russian and Ukrainian speech. Sometimes one hears the foreign speech of the representatives of progressive humanity who have come to Odessa to congratulate its residents on the occasion of their glorious holiday. I too wandered around and, unable to restrain my joy, returned to my hotel where I resolved to describe, so far as I can, the All-Peoples celebration in Odessa.
Do not judge me harshly.
All the best,
D. Shostakovich
Source analysis:
What follows is a brief discussion of a selection of the sources I consulted in writing this enquiry. A complete bibliography is included, and cited material is examined more extensively in endnotes. Sources are listed here in the order in which they appear in the bibliography.
Fay, Laurel E. (2000), Shostakovich: A Life, p.231, Oxford University Press (2005). Fay’s biography is the product of decades-long research, and is in terms of its factual information the most valuable source I have consulted on the composer. Her biography is, to quote Richard Taruksin, “an attempt to counter the torrent of fantasies with a quiet recital of the factual record.” (Taruksin, p.5.) I have cited her extensively throughout, and in historiographical passages seek to contrast her scrupulously documented text with the wild inventions of MacDonald and others.
MacDonald, Ian (1990), The New Shostakovich, Pimlico (2006). Discussion of this book is extensive in the text itself, which I will not reproduce here.
Service, Robert (2004). Stalin: A Biography, p. 305, Pan Books (2010). This source was useful to me in providing a general understanding of the Soviet period. Its author however, (rightly) keeps the focus on his designated subject matter and discusses music only briefly; its factual content has therefore been mostly incidental to my purposes.
Wilson, Elizabeth (1994), Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, p.114, Faber and Faber (1995). Wilson’s book is primarily a collection of source materials on the composer compiled herself, many of the interviews conducted personally. I have used it as a sourcebook for primary materials to which I would otherwise have had limited access.
Schneider, Peter Otto (1966), preface to Shostakovich Symphony No. 5 in D minor, op. 47 (score), p.V, Edition Eulenburg No. 579. Schneider was a German-born musician who from 1933 lived and worked in Switzerland; this source has therefore been one of the very few available to me written in the west before the publication of Testimony. I have been able to access few other sources from this period, and it was useful as a contrast with modern historiography.
Weinstein, Larry (director) (1997), Shostakovich against Stalin: The War Symphonies. I consulted this source in an effort to obtain more “revisionist” views of the composer. The film completely abandons all historical seriousness by including a narrated voice-over of “Shostakovich”, being passages lifted from Testimony without even an acknowledgement of their origins. (A brief note in the credits states only that the book was used, not that it was the source for the Shostakovich commentary; I only confirmed this by searching for the relevant passages myself.) Nevertheless it contains some interviews with various people which I supposed might have been useful as primary sources. These individuals are typically described as “Vladimir Rubin, composer” and “Ilya Musin, conductor”; no indication is given of the nature of their relationships with Shostakovich, which I have been unable to establish and which one must conclude was tenuous at best. The sole interviews with people who knew the composer well, with Flora Litvinova and the composer’s daughter Galina, contain only anecdotal and unhelpful information. I have therefore found the film completely useless as a source and have not cited it anywhere in the text.
Complete Bibliography
Articles
Anonymous (1936), Muddle Instead of Music, originally published in Pravda, January 28th 1936, retrieved by this author 6th November 2011 from: http://www.arnoldschalks.nl/tlte1sub1.html
Fay, Laurel E. (1980), Shostakovich versus Volkov: Whose Testimony?, Russian Review 39, no. 4 (October 1980), pp.484-93; reproduced in A Shostakovich Casebook (2004), Brown, Malcolm Hamrick (editor), pp.11-21, Indiana University Press.
Taruksin, Richard (2000), Casting a Great Composer as a Fictional Hero, New York Times 5th March 2000.
Books
Brown, Malcolm Hamrick (editor) (2004), A Shostakovich Casebook, Indiana University Press.
Fay, Laurel E. (2000), Shostakovich: A Life, Oxford University Press.
MacDonald, Ian (1990), The New Shostakovich, Pimlico (2006).
Maes, Francis (1996), A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar, University of California Press (translated from the original Geschiedenis van de Russische muziek: Van Kamarinskaja tot Babi Jar by Arnold J. and Erica Pomerans) (2006).
Figes, Orlando (1996), A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924, Pimlico (1997).
Norris, Christopher (editor) (1982), Shostakovich: The Man and his Music, Lawrence and Wishart (1989).
Oxley, Peter (2001), Russia 1855-1991: From Tsars to Commissars, Oxford University Press.
Prokofiev, Sergei (1979), Prokofiev by Prokofiev: A Composer’s Memoir, Doubleday and Company.
Roseberry, Eric (1981), The Illustrated Lives of the Great Composers: Shostakovich, Omnibus Press (1986).
Service, Robert (2004), Stalin: A Biography, Pan Books, Macmillan (2010).
Various (2002); edited by Cooke, Mervyn and Horn, David, The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, Cambridge University Press.
Volkov, Solomon (1979), Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, Faber and Faber (1987).
Wilson, Elizabeth (1994), Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, Faber and Faber (1995).
Misc.
Weinstein, Larry (director) (1997), Shostakovich against Stalin: The War Symphonies.
Webpages
The Prokofiev Page: prokofiev.org
Notes:
A note on dates: as the completion dates of works by Dmitri Shostakovich in particular are frequently unclear, all compositions have been dated by their premières, except where explicitly stated otherwise.
Maes, Francis (1996), A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar, pp.203-4, University of California Press (translated from the original Geschiedenis van de Russische muziek: Van Kamarinskaja tot Babi Jar by Arnold J. and Erica Pomerans) (2006). Maes’s book is a largely narrative account of Russian musical history, stretching from the early 19th century into the late Soviet period. I have found it invaluable as a factual source, especially concerning the tsarist period which has been the subject of far less study than has Shostakovich. On the latter subject the author presents his own opinions, broadly aligning against the revisionists, which I discuss below.
“Formalism” was a fairly generic term of abuse used by the régime against its cultural opponents, generally applied to works perceived as modernist. In short, a piece described as formalist was probably worth listening to.
Fay, Laurel E. (2000), Shostakovich: A Life, p.231, Oxford University Press (2005). Fay’s biography, appearing for the first time in 2000, is the product of decades-long research, and is in terms of its factual information the most valuable source I have consulted on the composer. Her own opinions are well-known – she has written many articles critical of MacDonald, Volkov and others – but these barely feature in her book except for a brief note in the preface dismissing Testimony. Instead her biography is, to quote Richard Taruksin, “an attempt to counter the torrent of fantasies with a quiet recital of the factual record.” (Taruksin, p.5 (see below)). I have cited her extensively throughout, and in historiographical passage seek to contrast her scrupulously documented text with the wild inventions of MacDonald and others.
Figes, Orlando (1996), A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924, pp.736-7, Pimlico (1997).
All of this coming more than a decade before Edgard Varèse’s revolutionary Ionisation.
This performance is one of the best I have been able to find: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BEMxk2ESUI. It is scored for very similar instruments to those used by Proletkult, though performed with far more order and professionalism than would have been the case in the early 1920s. Perhaps this example is closer, with its emphasis on unpitched percussion and straight noise over pitches and structure: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WTvm3Hk7bs&feature=endscreen. Without contemporary recordings however, which I have not been able to find, it is very difficult to know how similar such pieces are to the music actually produced in Bolshevik Russia.
Volkov, Solomon (1979), Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, Faber and Faber (1987). My description of Volkov’s work as a “discredited forgery” requires elaboration. The book first appeared in 1979, since then having been published in many translations (though curiously never in the original Russian), and was largely responsible for renewing interest in Shostakovich and his music, being the first attempt at depicting him as something other than a dedicated Party believer. The full title is Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov; Volkov claims that the composer dictated the contents to him, signed each chapter of the resulting manuscript and agreed to its publication, but only after his death. This claim is important because of the controversial statements contained within the book, including disparaging remarks about fellow musicians and overtly political statements, such as: “… I have nothing against calling the Seventh the ‘Leningrad’ Symphony, but it’s not about Leningrad under siege, it’s about the Leningrad that Stalin destroyed and that Hitler merely finished off.” (p.118)
From the start the authenticity of the purported memoirs were heavily disputed. Laurel E. Fay herself published an article in 1980, entitled Shostakovich versus Volkov: Whose Testimony? in which she and Simon Karlinsky demonstrated, that the material at the beginning of seven out of eight chapters consisted entirely of text lifted verbatim from autobiographical pieces which the composer had authored or put his name to in various official Soviet sources from the past. According to Volkov’s account which has the composer autograph the first page of every chapter the conclusion seemed obvious: one has no reason to think other than that he presented to Shostakovich copies of non-controversial words he had publicly uttered previously, convinced him to sign them, and then invented the rest of the contents himself. Such an allegation could easily be settled by examining Volkov’s own typescript, but the author has not allowed this and more than three decades later he has never answered the charges. (Volkov still lives.) One wonders at the reluctance to have Testimony’s claims properly investigated. The opening passages of the book’s preface display something of a nervous obsession with demonstrating its author’s links to the composer. There is also something suspicious about the description of the two’s given working methods, which if they were not constructed specifically to make their claims unverifiable certainly read that way. The sessions took place, “early in the morning, when the office was still empty” (p.xiii) – thus there were no witnesses. No taped interviews were made, with Volkov instead relying on shorthand notes (p.xiii). To quote Fay, “Obligingly, Volkov has provided an explanation for almost every possible objection that could be raised.” (Fay, Laurel E. (1980), Shostakovich versus Volkov: Whose Testimony?, Russian Review 39, no. 4 (October 1980), pp.484-93; reproduced in A Shostakovich Casebook (2004), Brown, Malcolm Hamrick (editor), pp.11-21, Indiana University Press; this citation p.18.).
There is also the basic question of how and when Volkov would have been able to work with Shostakovich in order to receive his memoirs. The composer’s widow Irina, who in the last years of his illness was with her husband almost constantly and managed all of his affairs, maintains that Volkov saw him on only a few occasions: “three or maybe four times… He was never an intimate friend of the family… I don’t see how he could have gathered enough material from Dmitrich for such a thick book.” (Fay (1980), p.12) Volkov’s own description of his relationship with Shostakovich is presented to be taken at the author’s own word, which one has no reason to believe. There is nothing to suggest that the two were anything more than formal acquaintances, certainly not that their meetings were frequent and long enough for the production of a memoir.
There are smaller objections also, concerning various verifiable factual errors in Testimony (Fay (1980), pp.12-13), the absence of a publication in the original Russian, and the suspicious three years which passed between Volkov’s emigration from the Soviet Union in 1976 and the appearance of his book (Fay (1980), p.19). The evidence is conclusive: Testimony is a wilfully fraudulent publication which was swallowed whole by the western public amidst Cold War hostility, spawning a wave of fanatical hagiographies which no amount of rational scholarship will likely overcome.
Here referring to a viewpoint treating Shostakovich as an “embittered secret dissident”, to use MacDonald’s own words. (p.271).
MacDonald, Ian (1990), The New Shostakovich, pp.1-11, Pimlico (2006). There is a case to be made that MacDonald fundamentally compromises his historical objectivity by including passages from Testimony, albeit with a grudging concession of its disputed origins. In the preface to his book, MacDonald discusses Testimony at some (undue) length, presenting the views of its critics and going to rather too great efforts to assign some credence to its supporters. He concludes, in his own words: “Testimony is a realistic picture of Dmitri Shostakovich. It just isn’t a genuine one.” (p.8) Nevertheless throughout the book he reproduces passages from Volkov, sometimes with a brief note conceding their questionability and sometimes not. One may give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he does this only for illustrative rather than evidential purposes, but it nevertheless undermines the factual basis for his biography. As such I have avoided citing him as a factual source.
My contention would be that he makes a fundamental mistake in taking Volkov seriously to begin with: the correct response is Laurel E. Fay’s. The edition of MacDonald’s book which I am using is in a 2006 version revised by Raymond Clarke after the author’s death. Clarke evidently has tried to make the biography more reputable, by “correcting facts” (xvii) and most notably by excising some extremely spurious passages about “symbolic code language” which MacDonald claimed to have discovered in Shostakovich’s music (xiv). Nevertheless it retains a great many unsubstantiated assertions and highly subjective interpretations of the composer’s work in efforts to idealise Shostakovich as a dissident on a par with Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov (see below). The book has many faults, but by comparison with other revisionist pieces is positively rigorous.
Full text of Muddle Instead of Music: Maes, p.299-300. Also accessible at http://www.arnoldschalks.nl/tlte1sub1.html, retrieved by this author 6th November 2011. Pravda articles such as this are in general useful historical sources for ascertaining the wishes of the Soviet government with respect to its musicians: they were produced by Party journalists and the newspaper came to be regarded as the primary official voice of the bureaucracy. A subscription to Pravda was mandatory for most state-owned businesses and its contents were read both by Communist devotées and by the general public. It was here that Soviet leaders chose to make their most important announcements, and to present propagandistic justifications for government policy. In short, Pravda was the picture of the USSR its rulers wanted one to see.
This particular article, perhaps the most famous ever to be printed in the newspaper, is an especially useful source because of the massive effects it had on Soviet culture for decades afterwards, incomprehensible developments without familiarity with the text itself. The publication of the denouncement in Pravda rather than in one of the Party’s official music journals demonstrates the importance the authorities placed upon controlling music, and the importance of Shostakovich in particular. It is also significant for its not-too-thinly veiled threats towards a named individual, when official policy at the time was to deny even the existence of the gulag system. It has sometimes been claimed that Muddle Instead of Music was the personal work of Joseph Stalin; if so this would increase its significance even further, but such a provenance has never been conclusively demonstrated.
MacDonald, p.106-7. “Surrounded as Katerina is by vicious, soul-destroying mediocrities similar to those who beset him during the genesis of the opera, Shostakovich’s identification with his beleaguered heroine isn’t hard to understand.”, (p.106).
For the Stalin government, especially during the Second World War but during this period also, glorifying the achievements of Marxism through socialist realist art went hand-in-hand with extolling traditional Russian cultural figures such as Tolstoy and Chaikovsky. Rimsky-Korsakov was lauded in particular for his use of traditional folk music (Fay, p.89). In contrast to communism’s supposed internationalism, the Stalin régime appealed increasingly to these figures both as a means of linking itself to Russia’s imperial past and hence winning the support of the peasantry, and of contrasting the country’s “pure” cultural heritage with the supposed decadence of the bourgeois occident. Thus, to describe a work as throwing off Russian traditionalism was almost as severe a criticism as to say that it was anti-Marxist or “against the people”.
Various (2002); edited by Cooke, Mervyn and Horn, David, The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, p. 36, chapter 2, The jazz diaspora (Johnson, Bruce), Cambridge University Press.
The factual accuracy of this is open to challenge: Lady Macbeth was ushered through the censors with little trouble, and indeed over two years passed between the opera’s première and its denunciation. (Fay (2000), pp.74-5. “The audition had been organised for the purpose of vetting by Commissar Bubnov; while recommending that the language of the libretto be sanitised, he gave his blessing for work on the production to proceed.”)
ibid, p.89. “In Leningrad especially, some musicians expressed disagreement with the tendentious article, mistakenly assuming that the position advanced by Pravda might leave room for debate.”
An opera by Shostakovich’s former protégé Ivan Dzerzhinsky. Dzerzhinsky had been summoned to be congratulated personally by Stalin when the leader attended a performance of his opera; Shostakovich was hoping for similar treatment when the politburo came to see Lady Macbeth, to no avail. (Fay, p.84.)
A ballet by Shostakovich, denounced in another Pravda article only days after that attacking Lady Macbeth. The state attacked the work principally for its “unrealistic” portrayal of life on a collective farm and its lack of the folk-based material which supposedly should have characterised a theatrical work in a pastoral setting. (Fay, p.85.)
Service, Robert (2004). Stalin: A Biography, p. 305, Pan Books (2010). This source was useful to me in providing a general understanding of the Soviet period. Its author however, (rightly) keeps the focus on his designated subject matter and discusses music only briefly; its factual content has therefore been mostly incidental to my purposes.
Alisa Shebalina interviewed by Elizabeth Wilson, accessed in Wilson, Elizabeth (1994), Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, p.114, Faber and Faber (1995). Wilson’s book is primarily a collection of source materials on the composer compiled herself, many of the interviews conducted in person. I have used it as a sourcebook for primary materials to which I would otherwise have had limited access.
Schneider, Peter Otto (1966), preface to Shostakovich Symphony No. 5 in D minor, op. 47 (score), p.V, Edition Eulenburg No. 579. “With his Symphony No. 5 Schostakowitch [sic, German rendering] finally turns his back on atonality, but it can be taken as certain that this step corresponded to the inner urge of the composer, and that sooner or later he would have pursued the same path without external pressures being brought to bear on him.” Schneider was a German-born musician who from 1933 lived and worked in Switzerland; this source has therefore been one of the very few available to me written in the west before the publication of Testimony. It is therefore representative of then-standard opinion that Shostakovich was a dedicated communist believer, the view repeated by Soviet authorities immediately after his death, and the view which Fay, Taruksin and others are often accused of holding. I have been able to access few other sources of this nature and such a view is as oversimplistic as the “revisionist” understanding. It was nevertheless useful as a contrast with modern historiography.
ibid, p.153: “Given the time and place in which it was written, the target can only be Stalin – an amazingly bold stroke.”
Taruksin, Richard (2000), Casting a Great Composer as a Fictional Hero, New York Times 5th March 2000, accessible at http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/05/arts/spring-music-shostakovich-casting-a-great-composer-as-a-fictional-hero.html?scp=1&sq=&st=nyt&pagewanted=3, p.2, retrieved by this author 15th February 2012.
Taruksin, p.3; this passage is also reproduced in MacDonald, p.320.
The two versions are reproduced in appendix one.
Fay (2000), pp.169-70. Maes 361-2.
Interviewed by Nolda Broekstra-Kondrashin (1979); reproduced in Wilson, p.357.
Fay (2000), pp.228-9. Enthusiasm: “According to Glikman, who claims to have given the composer the poem a day or so after its publication, Shostakovich’s decision to set the text had been taken immediately.” (p.228)
Letter from Dmitri Shostakovich to Boleslav Yavorsky, 24th December, 1926, “Khorosho bïlo bï ne dumat”. Quoted in Fay (2000), p.36.
Glikman, Isaak, Letters to a Friend pp.8-10, reproduced in Wilson, p.111.