© Dmitri N. Smirnov
MY SHOSTAKOVICH
1.
For
myself and everyone else in Russia living during the epoch of Shostakovich,
it was impossible to imagine contemporary culture without his music.And,
like others, I couldn’t help but feel pride in the fact that somewhere
nearby there was such an immense personality, such a giant figure in music
living and creating his masterpieces.The
music of Shostakovich was always in our ears: on waking we were “met
with the fresh of the morning”;[1]
by day we were sure that “the Motherland hears, the Motherland knows”;[2]
by evening “the invasion theme” was rumbling;[3]
and by nightfall the “torch was lit up – our continuous guard”;“Burn…
burn… burn…” was repeated in Shostakovich’s song, again and again![4]
From
time to time a modest and not quite healthy man with the hair of a boy
and with suffering in his eyes appeared on our TV screen.Faltering
and stammering, Shostakovich would share his creative plans with the people.Then
he would either read or recite by heart the “right” and the “ideologically
correct” slogans that, however, did not sit well with his appearance.Of
course the Russian people knew that such conditions were ‘a gamble’
so to speak, and that it was impossible for Shostakovich to behave in any
other way.The people knew and loved
their composer.Even taxi-drivers
treated the
Romance from the film Gadfly as their favourite
piece of “classical” music.[5]Everyone
knew something about the disastrous Muddle Instead of Music, [6]
and also about the perhaps unnecessarily righteous Decree 1948,[7]
and everyone felt compassion towards Shostakovich.Sometimes
you could hear people speaking enigmatically in hushed tones that he also
had some hidden pieces that were quite different, which perhaps would never
be heard…And this was terribly
intriguing.
In
childhood, when asked what future profession I was going to choose, I would
always answer “a composer”.They
would ask “as Shostakovich?”“Of
course, as Shostakovich, because Prokofiev has already died, and we are
not going to count the rest!”Shostakovich
and Prokofiev were the only two composers
of contemporary music who had an influence on me at that time.In
Russia it was hard to imagine a newer, a more contemporary “music of
today” than the music of Shostakovich.However,
by the time I had become a composer, there were some new strange names
beginning to appear on the Soviet scene: Stravinsky, Ives, Hindemith, Schoenberg,
Webern, Berg, Bartók, Britten, Messiaen, Cage, Nono, Xenakis – and one
more not-so-easy to pronounce name, something like Stuckenschmidt or Stockhausen…[8]
After these names appeared on the Russian scene it was of course not long
before their unimaginable music began secretly leaking out.Then
Boulez, followed by Lutoslawski and Penderecki, visited Moscow to conduct
what struck us as such puzzling opuses, mixing and confusing everything
in our, what seemed to be, entrenched outlook.
***
In
the 1960s I lived very far away from Moscow – in Middle Asia in Frunze
(now Bishkek), the capital of the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic.As
a student there in the music college, I took my first steps into composition.At
that time I was very taken by the music of Prokofiev; his music struck
me as incredibly fresh, witty and inventive, especially with regard to
harmony and melody.As a result,
Prokofiev’s influence was very noticeable in my first composing experiments.
But
it was impossible to escape the influence of Shostakovich.His
music had such an immense power that was able to grasp the listener entirely,
despite the fact that it seemed to me more heavy and depressive compared
with that the music of Prokofiev. I especially liked his Third and
Eighth
Quartets,[9]
and was very impressed with his Fifth and Tenth Symphonies[10]
(the latter I was fortunate enough to see performed live in Frunze).I
used to listen to the opera Catherine Ismailova[11]
on record, and I was captivated by Shostakovich’s piano music.Grigory
Kozintsev’s film adaptation of Hamlet[12]
became another love of mine and, of course, the soundtrack was written
by Shostakovich.However, alongside
these fascinations, lay pieces in the vein of his Festive Overture,
his Eleventh Symphony[13]
and especially his Twelfth Symphony, as well as the pompously played
Overture
on Russian and Kyrgyz Themes[14].All
these “properly” crafted, official, and openly conformist, propaganda-type
compositions produced a feeling of regret and perplexity.The
question then arose: how was one to treat all of these works?It
seemed to everybody that there was really two different Shostakovichs –
each trying to strangle the other, and it was so difficult to predict the
winner!
One
day in my last year of college in Frunze I was chatting with the student-theoretician,
Vera Karpachova, and out of the blue she showed me a whole collection of
postcards that she had received, from none other than Shostakovich.The
postcards were filled with his characteristically nervous, petite, undecipherable
handwriting that was at that time unfamiliar to me.I
simply could not believe my eyes!Karpachova,
who was specialising as an opera stage director, explained that she had
decided to study, and subsequently stage, the one-act opera Rothschild’s
Violin (1941) by Veniamin Fleishman, who had been a student of Shostakovich.Rothschild’s
Violin was perhaps Fleishman’s only musical creation and even this
was left incomplete when he was killed at the very beginning of the Second
World War at the age of 28.In memory
of his talented student, Shostakovich completed and orchestrated Fleishman’s
opera in 1944.[15]And
because it was impossible to obtain a score of Rothschild’s Violin
anywhere
in Frunze, Karpachova had decided to write directly to Shostakovich for
a copy of the score, and Shostakovich provided Karpachova not only with
the score, but with all the necessary materials she would need to stage
Fleishman’s opera, as well as answering all her questions connected with
the expected staging.I was amazed
by the daring and business acumen of my companion, who had taken the courage
to contact Shostakovich who in my eyes was of course ‘up there with the
Gods’.
I
eventually moved to Moscow in 1967 and became a student at the Moscow Conservatory.Unfortunately,
it had been a long time since Shostakovich had taught at the Conservatory,[16]
so there was nobody as significant with whom I could study composition.Nevertheless,
the musical life in Moscow was what could be described as extremely rich
and full-blooded.First and foremost
there were many concerts where Shostakovich’s pieces could be heard.During
the years living in Moscow I was very fortunate to have had the opportunity
to attend almost all the Premieres of his music, beginning with the Second
Violin Concerto[17]
and ending with his Sonata for Viola and Piano[18].The
only Shostakovich Premiere I missed was his Sonata for Violin and Piano,[19]
which I managed to hear at a later date.
At
concerts, Dmitry Dmitrievich would sit in the middle of the hall together
with his wife Irina Antonovna, and at the end of each performance he would
always walk out onto the stage (each year with what appeared to be increasing
physical difficulty), making clumsy nods to the applauding hall, and everything
would finish with standing ovations.Then
later, off stage, there was always a huge queue, which I would worm my
way into, hoping, if I was lucky, to shake hands with the Maestro.
On
one occasion, after the third ring signalling the end of the interval when
everyone else was already back in their seat, I was hurrying along an empty
corridor to get back to my seat when suddenly I found myself face-to-face
with Shostakovich, as he came out from the Artist’s Entrance.Immediately
I spoke of my admiration to his music that we had just heard and introduced
myself as a student-composer.Dmitri
Dmitrievich warmly and, as it seemed to me, sincerely expressed his thanks
and shook my hand.I shall remember
this handshake for the rest of my life.
The
most memorable of these performances included the Moscow premiere of the
Fourteenth
Symphony,[20]
which for a long time was one of my favourite pieces, his Fourth Symphony
that had remained unperformed for many years, and the opera Nose[21].These
three compositions seemed to represent, as it were, the rumbles of a long
expected thunder out of the suffocating, stagnant atmosphere of those officially
repressed artistic times.They showed
the face of the Shostakovich that we were not accustomed to for such a
long time – his real face; not the face of forced hypocrisy. And these
compositions effectively rehabilitated Shostakovich in the minds of those
who were ready to categorise him as being entirely of the conformist camp.
A
day which I very much regretted was the afternoon of 24th of
June 1969, when I could not make it to the general rehearsal of Shostakovich’s
Fourteenth
Symphony at Maly Hall of the Conservatoire.Rudolf
Barshay was the conductor, and Dmitri Dmitrievich himself was giving an
introductory speech.The word afterwards
was that during the rehearsal of the fifth movement “On the Alert” the
body of Apostolov was carried away from the foyer and out of Maly Hall..“Apostolov
who?” – “Pavel Ivanovich Apostolov, famous for his lampoons and denunciations
of Shostakovich!”The tragedy of
this occurrence could not conceal the symbolism that it contained – the
oppressor and persecutor of the music of a genius died from this self-same
music![22]
‘Death’
as a theme, was included in what was known to all Soviets as the official
‘Forbidden List’[23],
and such themes were not allowed openly in the creative work of any Soviet
artists, writers or composers – being deemed to be against the authorised
principles of“Socialist Realism”.As
a result, all artistic works of tragedy, if not concealed for example by
a military-patriotic subject, were ruthlessly censored.Yet
there took place a public performance of a whole
piece on this ‘forbidden’ theme of Death, the Fourteenth Symphony,
featuring the lyrics of the almost-equally
‘forbidden’ poets such as “Rilkes, Lorkas and other Guillaumes”[24].This
performance represented a kind of revolution, defying the conditions and
rules that had been set by the governing ideology, and it was like a slap
in the face to all the executive party servicemen attending the concert
who simply seemed to be going out of their minds with not knowing how to
react!
However
the essence of this revolution lay in the music itself – brave, distinctive,
incredibly strong and, in some respects, quite new for all of us.And
what themes! The beginning itself (De Profundis), for example, was
so melodious and beautiful but replete with open and hidden meanings that
could be perceived even by the “unarmed ear”; and it was clear that
all was created from the monograms of Bach, Shostakovich and “Dies Irae”.It
begins with the “Dies Irae” motive: Bb–A–?b–G,
(whose semitone-intervals give: –1+1–3), and which represents the eternal
symbol of Death. This “Dies Irae” motive appears at least five times
in its basic form, and once in inversion.
Example
1: Fourteenth Symphony Op. 135 (1969), movement I, the opening
Also
embedded within this structure is a ‘sound monogram’ (or motto), of
arguably the greatest composer of all time: “B–A–C–H” (spelt
in German as: B=Bb and H=B natural, whose semitone-intervals give: –1+3–1),
and which frames the 12-note succession of the tones (bars 1 – 5):
Bb–A–G–D–Db–Ab–Gb–F–Eb–E–B–C
(not counting repetitions).
What
do we suppose this signifies?Is
it just playing with a Schoenberg-style of composition, or is it a conscious
necessity as in late Stravinsky?Later
in this paper I will attempt to answer this question.However,
it is surely quite possible that such attempts to construct 12-tone rows
represented a deliberate act of provocation by Shostakovich against the
governing ideology, as dodecaphony too was in the list of “forbidden
means” to composers.Incidentally,
in the “Druzhba” (“Friendship”) shop around the corner in Gorky
street just a few steps from Shostakovich’s house,[25]
the book The Classics of Dodecaphony by Boguslaw Shaeffer was for
sale (even if it was only available in Polish)![26].
It
is possible in this symphony to find multiple use of the monogram of Shostakovich
in the hidden “ciphered” form “D–S–C–H” (spelt in German,
which, when translated in English is D–Eb–C–B with the intervallic
structure (+1–3–1).My analysis
shows this fragment to contain six appearances of D–S–C–H.In
the first presentation of the monogram it appears in bars 7 – 8 transposed
down a tone giving C-Db-Bb-A, and it is constructed in such a way that
three of its notes simultaneously overlap with the B-A-C-H monogram.Perhaps,
by way of such encryption, Dmitri Dmitrievich wished not only to express
his profound admiration for Bach, but also wanted to communicate how much
he felt himself to be indebted to Bach, and to acknowledge feeling utterly
beholden to the Great Master!
It
is interesting that this encrypted gesture to relate himself to Bach appears
in another presentation, this time in the accompanied voices of the last
bars of the 12-bar instrumental introduction. Here the second violins delineate
Shostakovich’s monogram in the transposed form of “C-Db-Bb-A” again,
overlaps simultaneously with the “Bb-A” of the beginning of Bach’s
monogram (the harmonic support in violas sound a fifth lower, “Eb-D”,
which happens to be the beginning of Shostakovich’s monogram in retrograde
form).It is not difficult to identify
many other quotations and quasi-quotations, for example, the inverted form
of the “Dies irae” motive coincides with Catherine’s motive at the
very beginning of the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District:
“[Ah,] … no sleep at all…”(or
in the later version “[Ah,] … it is so boring…”: +1–1+3–3)[27].
I
would now like to return to the question of dodecaphony.In
the 60’s for me as well as for everyone else, this question was especially
fascinating.For example, I was
intrigued to find evidence of the use of 12-tone rows in tonal music of
past composers such as Bach, Mozart, Schumann, Liszt, Wagner, Mussorgsky
and Rimsky-Korsakov – especially as this seemed to ‘vindicate’ my
attraction to what was officially perceived as the forbidden sphere of
12-tone music.Also (and perhaps
less surprisingly), it is not difficult to find evidence of the use of
12-tone rows in the music of Shostakovich, both in his earlier as well
as in his later works[28].Shostakovich’s
Sonata
for Violin and Piano written just before the Fourteenth Symphony
in the same gloomy and pessimistic mood, although entirely instrumental,
seems to me without doubt to convey the same “forbidden” theme of Death,
commencing with a piano introduction of the following 12-note series:
Example
2: Violin SonataOp.134
(1968) movement I, the opening
This
note row, presented in what could be described as a skyward-directed construction,
is then transformed in bar 13 by way of a precise inversion to be directed
earthwards.[29]The
violin is placed alongside this pattern, slowly spelling out the pitches
of the D-S-C-H monogram: D-Eb-Db-C-B, etc.It
seems more than apparent what this passage is supposed to represent; a
sad, musical-philosophical discourse about the soul of the composer on
its way to face Death: will the soul rise to heaven, will it sink deeply
beneath the soil, will it fly around whither and thither, or, will it simply
disappear, crushed by heartless Death?
I
am convinced that further analysis of such a series can greatly clarify
our understanding of how composers structure their compositions.From
the moment a composer decides to base thematic material on this or that
series, the process of composition itself is principally transformed –
that is to say, such a composition grows from a given pre-compositional
procedure of a more or less abstract chain of pitches or intervals, and
only then, on the basis of this chain, does the process of the construction
of a thematic structure emerge.It
is very well known that the New-Viennese composers formed their series
not only by a variety of logical, organic schemata, but also with the aid
of inspiration, and they treated their choice of a given series “almost
as seriously as marriage”[30].
Let
us now attempt to analyse Shostakovich’s 12-note row; reduced to the “fundamental”
intervals it is presented:
Example
3: Violin SonataOp.134
(1968), movement I, the 12-note row
The
main intervallic content of the row is the tritone – in semitones: ±6
(plus/minus, because an inverted tritone gives the same interval – a
tritone) – which is presented five times as if “quilting” the row
throughout.The series begins with
an ascending fourth, with
another descending fourth near the end of the row.The
remaining intervals of the row are: an ascending major third, a minor second
and two descending major seconds.
There
is no doubt in my mind that Shostakovich possessed a very refined sense
of the intervals, which could convey in his music a special expressiveness
and certain symbolic meaning.It
always seemed to me that for Shostakovich, the elementary interval of the
fourth is somehow connected with the image of Death, and during some recent
research I identified what I believe is corroborative proof of this: “the
ascending fourth… is
the staple for Shostakovich’s symbol of imperative faceless power…that
could be applied to the ascending fifth as well”.[31]In
the Violin Sonata the initial fourth
(as well as its inversion, the fifth) serves as a certain ‘leit-interval’
associated with the image of heartless Death.The
mysterious fourths played tremolo sul ponticello that enclose the
first and third (final) movements of this piece could
be labelled as the leitmotif of “mortification” (or “necrosis”).In
the Second movement of the Fourteenth Symphony the same interval
of the fourth plays a similar role.
If
we attempt to analyse the initial series of the Fourteenth Symphony, we
will immediately see the strictest logic of its organisation that could
not be “created by chance”.The
series, reduced to its simplest intervals, is presented as gradually descending:
“where to?” – you may ask, “ to the grave!” – can be the only
answer.
Example
4: Fourteenth Symphony Op. 135 (1969), movement I, the 12-note row
In
forming this 12-tone series only two intervals are used– the second and
the fourth.To be precise; Shostakovich
presents three descending minor seconds, three descending major seconds,
three descending perfect fourths and two ascending minor seconds, and as
can be seen, the choice is very limited!The
row is simply divided into 3 x four-note segments, each consisting of a
descending fourth and two seconds.The
first two segments which are divided by the minor second are in perfect
symmetry to each other, as in the Principal or Prime Form P (–1–2–5),
and in the Retrograde Inversion RI (–5–2–1).We
might by analogy, compare these segments with the figures of the Father-Creator
and his Likeness – his son Adam, who reach out their hands to touch each
other on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; there is no doubt that Shostakovich’s
eyes were fixed more than once on this wonderful Michelangelo fresco).The
third segment differs from the two previous, in that it is symmetrical
unto itself, presented as a descending fourth surrounded by two ascending
minor seconds:what might this resemble?Why
of course, the Cross on the grave!)
In
its strict architectonics and mirror symmetry, Shostakovich’s row can
only be compared with some of Anton von Webern’s series in his late compositions.
Of course, we will not find a faithful reproduction of the 12-tone technique
of the New-Viennese Masters by looking at the treatment or development
of this row in Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony.However,
some conscious
and perhaps intuitive workings of the series seem nevertheless to be present.If
we look for example at how the segments of Shostakovich’s row are “shuffled”
in the continuation of this musical fragment: 10–11–12, – 4–5,
– 1–2–3, – 7–6, – 8–9, – the technique is seen very much
to resemble that which can be found for example, in Pierre Boulez’s Notations.I
am sure that if we were to “dig deeper” in this direction, that we
could expect to find similar surprising discoveries.[32]
It
is not possible to stop speaking about the Fourteenth Symphony!For
example, how wonderful is the theme Three Lilies[33],
this grandiose and even earth-shaking musical symbol!Or,
the introductory xylophone passage from the fifth movement On the Alert,
a dodecaphonic theme that could be memorised like a simple song:
Example
5 Fourteenth Symphony Op. 135 (1969), movement V, On the Alert,
I
would suggest to the reader that they analyse at their leisure this extremely
interesting yet not difficult series:
Example
6
Shostakovich’s
Fourteenth
Symphony was and is viewed by many as being the major musical event
of its time. After first hearing the work I was convinced that it represented
the highest pinnacle within Shostakovich’s many peaks, and what more,
I realised that this conviction would never fade.
In
the autumn of 1969 I began studying instrumentation with Edison Vasilievich
Denisov.Almost from the first lesson
I began to express my zeal for Shostakovich’s Fourteenth.Denisov
agreed – the Fourteenth was very good, but he felt the instrumentation
(strings and percussion) to be anaemic, colourless, and inexpressive.Such
a view was, for me, a complete shock. At
that time Denisov had the idea of re-orchestrating the Fourteenth
for large symphony orchestra.I
imagined to myself how wonderful it would be if an exquisite Master of
orchestration such as Denisov were to undertake such a plan!And
I am still terribly sorry that Denisov’s idea has never been realized.
Text edited by
Helen Tipper and Guy Stockton