Shostakovich: A Captive Composer
by Robert Harris
It is the ultimate irony for Dimitri Shostakovich, a man schooled in irony, that he continues to wiggle on the hook of Soviet Russia. Long after the death of both the composer and the regime that he detested, resisted and perhaps conquered by his art, it is still against the shadow of Stalinist Russia and its totalitarian horrors that Shostakovich’s artistic achievements fall into relief.
Above all, we honour freedom in the artistic West. We deny our creators many things – a decent living, esteem, often worldly honours – but we offer them something important in return: the right to create whatever they please. Dimitri Shostakovich was denied this right. An intensely creative man, he suffered the horrible fate of living his entire life within one of the most stifling societies in the history of the world, a world where a wrong note could mean suffering, exile, even death.
Shostakovich’s lifelong battle with his reality, and his ability to sublimate it, express it, even overcome it, is one of the great heroic stories in all of art. But it has robbed the Russian composer of the clear-headed examination of his powers that is his due. We are so taken with Shostakovich’s heroism, and the emotionalism of his personal story, we often ignore, forget or fail to assess his true gifts and powers.
Shostakovich was one of the most gifted, natural composers in western musical history, and he deserves to be ranked alongside the precocious Mendelssohn and supernatural Mozart. Music poured out of Shostakovich like a mountain stream. He seldom reworked his opening inspiration. When confronted with problems in any given composition, his reply was often “ I’ll fix that in the next one”. Of course, that easy inspiration of Shostakovich’s came to an abrupt halt in the mid-1930s when “Muddle Instead of Music”, the Pravda editorial that targeted him and his music, was published , and forced him to consider each note he wrote ever after with great care.
And, although his music was twice in his lifetime damned by the Soviet authorities for its “progressive” tendencies, in actual fact, Shostakovich was one of the most conservative of all 20th-century composers, a man who easily and effectively poured his inspiration into the most classic of 18th-century western forms – the symphony and the string quartet – well into the 1960s. Although his early, operatic tendencies were towards the surrealistic and expressionistic, full of the upside down world of the circus with its mordant irony, topsy-turvy morality, and cynical showmanship, Shostakovich refined his musical world over the course of his life, in response to both external and internal pressures, to develop a language that still speaks to many the pulsing accents of the suffering heart.
The power of Shostakovich’s hyper-emotional, even melodramatic world, allows few to escape its grasp, even as we note the very Russian tendency of his music to never settle comfortably into a single emotional key. All of the great 20th-century Russians -- Stravinsky, Prokoviev, Shostakovich, even Schnittke – share this same curse, if you will, the constant self-consciousness that is the basis of irony, even bitterness, in music. Without descending into sterile cultural stereotyping, it seems that the Russian soul, caught between two worlds as it has been since Peter the Great turned the face of this great Slavic nation towards the rationalizing ideals of the West, struggles still with the contradictions in its history and spirit.
Dimitri Shostakovich could have have taken us on a fascinating musical journey had he been given the opportunities of a Stravinsky or even of a Prokoviev to free his hyperactive musical imagination of the constraints of an over-politicized society. However, his fate was to bear witness to that society and to suffer Hamlet’s curse of being the one to put the dislocated time of his society back into joint. Perhaps, then, it is fairest that we leave him lodged into an eternal battle with the forces of repression that he challenged virtually every day of his creative life. He is like a mythical Sisyphus in this regard, forced over and over to retrace the same bitter theme, forced over and over again into combat with a regime that has long since disappeared. Perhaps it is just the topical, worldly aspect of his music that lifts it out of his time into all time. Perhaps we will never see another regime like that of Stalinist Russia, but then perhaps we will. And if we do, the power of Dimitri Shostakovich’s tortured, bitter, desperate fight against the deadening power of organized and institutional conformity will be a reminder for us all of what path we must, as feeling humans, follow.
Robert Harris is the host of I Hear Music which airs Saturdays at
11:00 a.m. (11:30 NT) on CBC Radio Two