Public Lies and Unspeakable Truth: Interpreting the Fifth Symphony

PERESTROYKAS AND PERESTROYKAS

THE WORD perestroyka, perhaps needless to say, hardly describes what is going on now in the lands of the former Soviet Union. The communist institutions that were to undergo preservative restructuring have ceased to exist. The Union of Soviet Composers is one of them. Composers in the former USSR now face the same grave problems confronted by everyone else who (while complaining of its drawbacks) had become used to the illusive advantages of a command-driven, production-oriented economy, the economy the Gorbachev perestroyka had tried and failed to rescue. It is ironic, then, to continue reflecting on the circumstances that attended the union’s creation. The decree establishing it, promulgated by the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party on 23 April 1932 (and which, as we have seen, Shostakovich at first greeted with enthusiasm), was titled “On the Restructuring [perestroyka] of Literary and Artistic Organizations.” Unlike Gorbachev’s this was an entirely cynical perestroyka that had its origin in a political coverup.

The first Five Year Plan, Stalin’s great push toward the building of “socialism in one country,” was inaugurated in 1928. An orgy of totalitarian coercion in which the country was forced headlong into urban industrialization and rural collectivization, it was a time of unprecedented political and economic violence, replete with show trials, mass arrests and punitive mass starvation, ceaselessly accompanied by a din of mass indoctrination that included the hardening of the Stalin personality cult. As part of the general effort, a cultural revolution was set in motion. In December 1928 the Central Committee passed a resolution establishing ideological controls over the dissemination of art and literature, and placing members of proletarian organizations in charge of the organs of dissemination and training. In music, executive power was concentrated by decree in the hands of the so-called RAPM, the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians.

This was the period during which the Moscow Conservatory was renamed the Felix Kon School of Higher Musical Education (Vïsshaya muzïkal’ naya shkola im. F. Kona), after the editor of the newspaper Rabochaya gazeta, the Workers’ Gazette.¹ A nonmusician, Boleslaw Przybyszewski, the doctrinaire Marxist son of the Polish decadent writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski, was installed as rector. The composers Myaskovsky, Gliere, and Gnesin, stalwarts of the old, prerevolutionary musical elite, were denounced and fired from the faculty. Grades and examinations were abolished, and admission restricted to students of acceptable class background. Ideologists of the RAPM like the young Yuriy Keldïsh consigned the composers of the past wholesale to the dustbin of history, excepting only Beethoven, the voice of the French revolution, and Musorgsky, the proto-Bolshevist “radical democrat.” Chaikovsky, virtual court composer to Tsar Alexander III, was a special target of abuse. Composers were exhorted to spurn all styles and genres that had flourished under the Tsars and cultivate instead the only authentically proletarian genre, the marchlike massovaya pesnya, the “mass song,” through which proletarian ideology could be aggressively disseminated. The only politically correct concept of authorship was collective, epitomized in the so-called Prokoll (Pro-izvodstvenniy kollektiv), a group of Moscow Conservatory students who banded together to produce revolutionary operas and oratorios that were in essence medleys of mass songs.

The joyous declaration of a prematurely successful completion to the first Five Year Plan was the leadership’s way of retreating from a ruinous situation without admitting error. The country was in misery—a misery that could be conveniently blamed on local administrators and “wreckers” in the case of the real tragedies such as forced collectivization (hence the show trials), and on survivals of “left” deviationism on the intellectual and artistic fronts. The reining-in of the proletarian cultural organizations became necessary in order to regain the good will of an alienated intelligentsia, but especially in order to woo back émigré luminaries like Gorky and Prokofiev, who were fearful of proletarianist opposition. (Prokofiev, whose eventual decision to return to Soviet Russia had been sparked by the triumphant success of his first post-emigration visit in 1927, had been frightened off by the RAPM, which all but wrecked his second tour in 1929.) So the same party that had installed the proletarianists at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution now suppressed them in the name of benign perestroyka. The RAPM and its sister organizations in the other arts were dissolved, and replaced by all-encompassing unions of art workers. The Union of Soviet Composers was established at first in Moscow and Leningrad, and over the next sixteen years grew geographically and organizationally to encompass the entire country, becoming fully centralized just in time for the Zhdanovshchina, the musical show trials of 1948.

At first the 1932 perestroyka was seen and touted (like Gorbachev’s, at first) as a liberalizing move, for it meant the removal from the scene of the fractious radicals who since Lenin’s time had hectored Soviet artists of the academic tradition (as well as their heirs, the elite modernists), and who had lately been allowed to tyrannize them. Now the radicals were stripped of power and their leaders forced to make satisfying public recantations.² Nominal power reverted to the old guard, from whose standpoint the 1932 perestroyka meant salvation from chaos and obscurantism—an obscurantism that was now officially labeled levatskoye (“left,” for which read “Trotskyite”) and thus politically tainted.³ The grateful old professors were given back their classrooms and installed as willing figureheads in the organizational structure of the union—along, eventually (and very significantly), with the pupils of their pupils. To all appearances, the Composers’ Union was a service organization, even a fraternal club.

The real power, of course, lay elsewhere, and the real purpose of the organization, though this was not immediately apparent, was to be a conduit of centralized authority and largesse. As the guarantor of its members’ right to work, as the channeler of state patronage through commissions (kontrakta-tsiya, as it was called), and as dispenser of material assistance through the so-called Muzfond, the union was ostensibly engaged in protecting the interests of composers, but by the same token it was implicitly endowed with the power to enforce conformity.⁴ The union’s chief social functions were the so called internal pokazï—meetings at which composers submitted their work in progress to peer review in the spirit of idealistic “Bolshevik self-criticism”⁵— and open forums at which composers and musical intellectuals shared the floor discussing topics like Soviet opera or “symphonism” for eventual publication in Sovetskaya muzïka, the union’s official organ, which began appearing early in 1933.

Acting through an Organizational Bureau set up to implement the April decree, the Central Committee installed one Nikolai Ivanovich Chelyapov (1889-1941) as chairman of the Moscow union and editor of Sovetskaya muzïka. He was not a musician. A jurist by training, Chelyapov was an all-purpose bureaucrat (what in Soviet jargon was called an obshchestvennïy de-yatel’, a “public figure”) by profession. He functioned as a sort of middle manager, presiding at meetings, articulating official policy in his editorials, and organizing the union’s formal activities. From the beginning of 1936 he reported directly to the future Ministry of Culture, then called the Ail-Union Committee on Artistic Affairs (Vsesoyuznïy komitet po delam iskusstv), a subdivision of the Sovnarkom, the Council of People’s Commissars (later the Council of Ministers). Centralized totalitarian control of the arts was now complete. The command structure was in place. The next year Chelyapov, a superfluous Old Bolshevik, shared the general fate of his cohort. He disappeared into Lethe, not to be mentioned again in print until the 1960s.

For the new control system was one of the many harbingers of the coming storm, and the Composers’ Union assumed the role for which it had been created. It all happened very dramatically. The February 1936 issue of Sovetskaya muzïka opened with what editor Chelyapov called “three historic documents,” consisting of the TASS communiqué, quoted in the previous chapter, reporting a friendly conversation between comrades Stalin and Molotov and the creators of the opera The Quiet Don (composer Ivan Dzerzhinsky, conductor Samuil Samosud, and the director M. A. Tereshkovich), and two unsigned editorials reprinted from Pravda, both of them vilifying one composer, not yet thirty years old: “Muddle instead of Music” (Sumbur vmesto muzïki) attacked Shostakovich’s wildly successful opera The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, and “Balletic Falsehood” (Baletnaya fal’sh) denounced his ballet The Limpid Stream, then in the repertory of the Bolshoy Theater. These articles were indeed historic documents. They were unprecedented, not because of the militant philistinism for which they are chiefly remembered but because they are couched in terms of political denunciation and threats of violence, indistinguishable in diction from the scattershot attacks on the so-called “Zinovievite faction” that had by then become ubiquitous in the Soviet press in advance of the great show trials of 1937 and 1938. Shostakovich was simultaneously accused of levatskoye urodstvo— “left deformation”—and “petit-bourgeois” sympathies.

Needless to say, his union offered Shostakovich the very opposite of protection. For what the Pravda editorials signaled above all was an end to even the semblance of public debate or discussion. The March and May issues of Sovetskaya muzïka were devoted practically in toto to zealous ratification of the attack, in a manner exactly paralleling the unanimous endorsement of war whoops against the “Zinovievites” that had been appearing in Sovetskaya muzïka, as in every other Soviet publication, since the middle of 1935.

The format of the old union “discussions” was retained, but only as a vehicle for a campaign of organized slander. Under the heading “Against Formalism and Falsehood” (Protiv formalizma i fal’shi), the members of the Moscow and Leningrad unions were marched to the rostrum one by one in the February days following the second of the Pravda editorials to deliver denunciations of their fallen colleague and fulsome praise of the historic documents. The mobilization of such demonstrations of “solidarity” would henceforth be among the unions’ paramount functions. The dire period thus ushered in was hailed as a new perestroyka.⁶

Among the individual contributions to the “discussions,” two stand out as especially poignant and revealing. Maximilian Steinberg, Rimsky-Korsakov’s son-in-law and successor as professor of composition at the Leningrad Conservatory, took the floor to declare that “insofar as he was my best pupil . . . the drama of Shostakovich is my personal drama, and I cannot look with indifference upon what my pupil is going through in his creative work.” The tone is quickly modulated, however, into one not of defense but of personal exculpation and distance, illustrating the quintessential Stalinist theme: the fraying of the social fabric in the face of fear. “The utmost expression of Shostakovich’s ‘new’ direction was his ‘Aphorisms’ [for piano, Op. 13 (1927)],” Steinberg testified. “When Shostakovich came to me with the ‘Aphorisms,’ I told him that I understood nothing in them, that they are alien to me. After this he stopped coming to see me.”⁷ In Moscow, the twenty-two-year-old Tikhon Khrennikov spoke for “the rising generation of Soviet composing youth”: “How did the youth react to Lady Macbeth? In the opera there are some big melodic numbers that opened up for us some creative vistas. The entr’actes and a lot of other things called forth total antipathy. In general, our youth is healthy. A certain faction has succumbed to formalist influences, but this is being overcome; it does not represent any principal objective on our part.”⁸ The oldest generation and the youngest were being deployed as pincers against the most vital one, as represented by its outstanding member, who had been chosen as sacrificial victim not only as a demonstration of the might of Soviet power but because his precocious fame and his phenomenal talent had made him the object of the greatest envy.

CODE WITHOUT KEY

That is enough about the phoney perestroyka. It is an ugly story and a much-rehearsed (if still underdocumented) one, and I have recalled it only as preface to the perestroyka that is my subject, Shostakovich’s own. That story is very much worth telling, because we do not fully understand it yet, and because its many repercussions still affect our lives.

We do not fully understand it, and perhaps we never will, because no one alive today can imagine the sort of extreme mortal duress to which artists in the Soviet Union were then subjected, and Shostakovich more than any other. The only possible analogy is to the experience of condemned prisoners or hostages or kidnap victims. The nearest thing to it in the prerevolutionary history of the arts in Russia was the case of Dostoyevsky, who, condemned to death for political subversion and granted a last-minute reprieve, became a fervent believer in the Russian autocracy and a religious mystic. The nearest parallel in today’s world is the case of Salman Rushdie, whose response to dire death threats has included reconfirmation in the faith of his oppressors.

It is with thoughts like these in mind that I want to examine Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, notoriously designated “a Soviet artist’s creative response to just criticism” and first performed in Leningrad on 21 November 1937, in the midst of mass arrests, disappearances, and executions. Its tumultuous, ecstatic reception has become legend. It led to the composer’s rehabilitation—or would have, were it not that his forgiveness was surely just as foreordained as his fall. Thanks to the system of pokazi and the need for securing performance clearance from the Committee on Artistic Affairs, Shostakovich’s work was known on high before its public unveiling. Its status as apology and as promise of a personal perestroyka was a conferred status, bestowed from above as if to show that the same power that condemned and repressed could also restore and reward.

Shostakovich’s rehabilitation became an opportunity for fulsome official self-congratulation. “One feels that Shostakovich has been through and thought through a great deal,” wrote Mikhail Mikhailovich Gromov, the polar aviator and Hero of the Soviet Union, who in a fashion so typical of the day was serving as all-purpose Party mouthpiece. “He has grown as an artist. His growth, one cannot doubt, was abetted by stern, just criticism.”⁹ “Shostakovich is a great, truly Soviet artist,” wrote the very partiynïy critic Georgiy Khubov on behalf of the union in its official organ. He was at pains to note that Shostakovich’s perestroyka went beyond mere style to the profoundest levels of consciousness.¹⁰ The theme of ongoing personal perestroyka, beginning precisely with the Fifth Symphony, was sounded again a year later by Yuliy Kremlyov, writing in the official organ about Shostakovich’s First String Quartet.¹¹ The word continued to resound in Soviet critiques of the Fifth Symphony to the end of the Stalin period.¹²

The same critics who wrote about Shostakovich’s perestroyka also wrote about his “realism,” which gives a clue to their meaning. By realism, of course, they meant socialist realism. The theory of socialist realism has always been an occult subject, especially when applied to music. The critic Victor Gorodinsky had tried, soon after its coining, to explicate it theoretically in the very first issue of Sovetskaya muzïka,¹³ only to have his waffling efforts derided by none other than Shostakovich in the days when the union still functioned as something resembling a forum.¹⁴ Over the next few years the idea had been roughly defined in practice. The recipe, to put it bluntly and oxymoronically, was heroic classicism.

That Soviet reality required a monumental scale and a high rhetorical tone for its proper celebration was an old proviso. It had been the topic of Chelyapov’s first sermon as editor of Sovetskaya muzïka. Distinguishing the union’s aims from the program of the old discredited RAPM—no mean task, actually—Chelyapov fastened on scale. “At a time,” he sneered, “when proletarian literature was giving us great canvases of socialist construction, beginning with Gladkov’s Cement and [Serafimovich’s] The Iron Flood [Zheleznïy potok], continuing with The Quiet Don, [Panfyorov’s] Ingots [Bruskf], and so forth, ... in the realm of music we were told: large forms are something for the future; now let us work on the small forms of mass song; first vocal works, afterward we will get to writing instrumental music.”¹⁵ One might say that the future of Soviet music, fated to preserve in a totalitarian aspic all the mammoths and mastodons of the Western classical tradition—the program symphony, the oratorio, the grand historical opera—was decided right here.

Except for his withdrawn Fourth Symphony, Shostakovich’s Fifth was his first really heroic symphonic work. And while the unconventionally structured, maximalistic Fourth had been grandiose (or so the composer would later put it) to the point of mania, it was anything but “classical”—which is exactly why it could not be performed in the aftermath of his denunciation. For it was precisely at this point, the very apex of political pressure, that Soviet composers were first directed to emulate russkaya klassika as a timeless model, signifying a return to healthy, “normal” musical values after the excesses of early-Soviet modernism.¹⁶ With its ample yet conventional four-movement form, even down to an improbably minuetish scherzo, its unextravagant yet sonorous scoring, and its notable harmonic restraint, the Fifth Symphony amounted to a paradigm of Stalinist neoclassicism, testifying, so far as the powers were concerned, to the composer’s obedient submission to discipline. It was time to reward him.

The immediate reward was an orgy of public praise (later there would be Stalin prizes and titles and honorary posts). It went on for months, to the point where Isaak Dunayevsky, the songwriter who was then president of the Leningrad Composers Union, tried to apply the brakes. On 29 January 1938, the day of the Moscow première, he circulated a memorandum comparing the Fifth’s reception to a stock speculation, a ballyhoo, even a psychosis that threatened to lead Soviet music into a climate of “creative laissez-faire” in which the union might not be able to exercise its police function.¹⁷ (It was inevitable that Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony would meet a hostile reception—and so his career would go on, yo-yo fashion, practically to the end.) Typical of the composer’s official welcome back into the fold (and typical as well of the tone of groveling civic panegyric that inevitably accompanied Soviet public rhetoric) was a pronouncement by the composers An-atoliy Alexandrov and Vasiliy Nechayev: “A work of such philosophical depth and emotional force,” they wrote, “could only be created here in the USSR.”¹⁸

There were many, both at home and abroad, who willingly granted the last point, though not necessarily in a spirit of praise. The symphony’s manifest philosophical and emotional freight, far more than its traditional form, made not only it but Soviet music generally seem backward and provincial to many Western musicians in an age of burgeoning formalism. Many will recall how bitterly Igor Stravinsky mocked it in his Harvard lectures of 1939, later published as Poetics of Music. And he mocked it through the prism of the famous review by Count Alexey Tolstoy—”a consummate masterpiece of bad taste, mental infirmity, and complete disorientation in the recognition of the fundamental values of life,” as Stravinsky described it—in which the celebrated Soviet novelist attempted an inventory of that philosophical and emotional cargo:

Here we have the “Symphony of Socialism.” It begins with the Largo of the masses working underground, an accelerando corresponds to the subway system; the Allegro, in its turn symbolizes gigantic factory machinery and its victory over nature. The Adagio represents the synthesis of Soviet culture, science, and art. The Scherzo reflects the athletic life of the happy inhabitants of the union. As for the Finale, it is the image of the gratitude and the enthusiasm of the masses.¹⁹

“What I have just read to you is not a joke which I myself thought up,” Stravinsky assured his audience. But this was true only to the extent that the joke had been thought up not by Stravinsky himself but by his ghostwriter, Pierre Souvtchinsky. Yet for over half a century now Stravinsky’s jape has been believed, even though as fabrications go it is very crude, with the movements misnamed and in the wrong order.²⁰ Stravinsky has been believed not only because he was Stravinsky (hardly an assurance), and not only because one is ready to attribute any sort of statement about music to a literary man (especially one named Tolstoy), but because we accept the notion that Shostakovich’s symphony not only invites but requires an interpretation, if not this particular one. More than that, it is obvious that there is no way of rejecting the kind of interpretation Stravinsky derides (whatever we may make of the given reading), without rejecting the music outright.

So before addressing the vital matter of interpreting Shostakovich’s Fifth, before examining past interpretations (beginning with Tolstoy’s actual one) or proposing new ones, it is worth reopening briefly, and from a somewhat narrowed perspective, the question that pervaded the first section (“Shostakovich and Us”) of this chapter, and inquire into just what it is that makes interpretation of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony so necessary.

Like the symphonies of Mahler, with whom Shostakovich is constantly compared, and the late ones of Chaikovsky (only recently rehabilitated in the Russia of the purge years, and shortly to be deified on his centenary), Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony self-evidently belongs to the tradition established in the wake of Beethoven’s Ninth, whereby the music unfolds a series of components, gestures, or events that are immediately recognizable as signs or symbols, but signs and symbols whose referents are not specified by any universally recognized and stable code (though they may, and obviously do, participate to some finally undeterminable extent in such codes).²¹ Such signs are often said to exist on two broad levels, defined as “syntactic” vs. “semantic,” or, following Russian formalism, as “introversive” vs. “extroversive,” related in “Shostakovich and Us” to the familiar interpretive levels of “manifest content” and “latent content.”²² Syntactic or introversive signs are those with referents that are perceived to lie within the boundaries of the work itself. In the case of music they include reprises, transformations, and recombinations of previously heard events or gestures such as motives and themes, culminating in broad sectional repeats and “recapitulations.” Semantic or extroversive signs are those with referents that lie outside of the work in which they occur. They cover a range all the way from primitive onomatopoeia to imitation of speech to metaphors, at times quite subtle, of physical motion or distance or modes of temporality (time consciousness). Very often they invoke other music, whether by allusion to specific pieces or by more general reference to “topics,” genres, and styles.

But this distinction—syntactic vs. semantic, introversive vs. extroversive—can be maintained only in theory. It is not usually possible, or even desirable, to distinguish them in practice, in the actual act of listening. While thematic or motivic recurrences are in themselves defined as syntactic, their interpretation often depends on semantic codes. The climactic unisons at figure 36 in the first movement of Shostakovich’s Fifth, for example, derive their significance equally from both perceptual spheres. Their loudness speaks—or shouts—for itself. At the same time, they remind us of the famous passages all’unisono in Beethoven’s Ninth, with which Shostakovich’s symphony shares its key. These are obviously extroversive references (or, to be precise, intertextual ones). But hardly less significant is the fact that the climactic unisons are a reprise of some of the quiet music from the first thematic group (cf. the music from figure 3 to figure 5). That may be a syntactic feature, but the huge contrast in dynamics and texture asks to be read semantically, in relation to some mimetic or iconic convention. Another apparently syntactic observation concerns the tonal significance of the passage at figure 36: it marks the arrival at the tonic key after a long series of modulations and an elaborate preparation. Yet when we recognize the effect as that of a sonata-form recapitulation, which we think is an introversive observation, we are instantly reminded of other recapitulations and of their expressive effect—semantics again.

To pick another example: surely the most conspicuous structural or syntactic peculiarity of the symphony as a whole is its use of a pervasive rhythmic cell, presented interchangeably as dactyl or anapest, unifying all four movements. Yet the same feature is simultaneously a heavily laden intertextual reference to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and its motivic “dramaturgy,” to use the Soviet jargon. Add to that an exceptionally wide-ranging panoply of suggestive generic or topical references (pastoral, rustic, military, religious)— again curiously paralleling those in Beethoven’s Ninth—plus a network of specific allusions that includes conspicuous self-reference as well as more oblique yet still specific reference to passages in works by other composers, and it is clear that this symphony is a richly coded utterance, but one whose meaning can never be wholly encompassed or definitively paraphrased.

Given the conditions in Russia in 1937, this last was a saving, not to say a lifesaving, grace. It opened up the work to varying readings, which is precisely what made for the seeming unanimity of response at its première. Each listener could inscribe a different, personalized construction on the work’s network of references and participate, as a result, in the same general enthusiasm. The process of continual, heavily fraught inscription and reinscription has gone on to this day, surely one of the circumstances that has kept the Fifth, of all of Shostakovich’s symphonies, the most alive. The obvious questions: What constrains interpretation? What validates or invalidates a reading? What, finally, does the symphony mean? Answers cannot be asserted from general principles—at least, none I’ve ever seen—only deduced from practice and from the specific case.

“ALL THAT I HAVE THOUGHT AND FELT”

The most obvious early constraint was the symphony’s inescapable relationship to its composer’s recent life experience (viz., the 1936 denunciations), a connection almost immediately bolstered by the composer’s public testimony, amounting to a plea—not to say a demand—that the symphony be read as autobiography. This “conferred status,” as I would call it, surely furnished Alexey Tolstoy—the real Count Tolstoy, not the one invented by Stravinsky—with the point of departure for his very influential critique. Solomon Volkov, speaking through the first-person voice in Testimony, has speculated that the article was ghostwritten by “musicologists . . . summoned to Tolstoy’s dacha [who] helped him through the morass of violins and oboes and other confusing things that a count couldn’t possibly fathom.”²³ In fact, the review, which avoids all technicalities, is just what might have been expected from a writer. Combining the autobiographical assumption with what he must have taken to be the “Beethovenian” mood sequence of the symphony’s four movements (Beethoven, that is, construed in his “revolutionary” guise), Tolstoy assimilated the music to a literary prototype: the Soviet Bildungsroman, a very popular genre of the period, exemplified by such prestigious books as Valentin Katayev’s I Am the Son of Laboring Folk (Ya—sin trudovogo naroda), on which Prokofiev would later base his opera Semyon Kotko, or Nikolai Virtá’s Loneliness (Odinochestvo), on which Khrennikov would base his opera Into the Storm, or—most famous of all—Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered (Kak zakalyalas’ stal’). These novels concerned the formation of new consciousness—personal perestroyka—on the part of “searching heroes,” honest blunderers whose life experiences teach them to embrace revolutionary ideals.

Tolstoy viewed the composer of the Fifth Symphony as such a one, and proceeded to paraphrase the work in terms of the catchphrase stanovleniye lichnosti, “the formation of a personality (within a social environment).” In the first movement the author-hero’s “psychological torments reach their crisis and give way to ardor,” the use of the percussion instruments suggesting mounting energy. The second movement, a sort of breather, is followed by the most profound moment, the Largo. “Here the stanovleniye lichnosti begins. It is like a flapping of the wings before takeoff. Here the personality submerges itself in the great epoch that surrounds it, and begins to resonate with the epoch.” The finale is the culmination, in which “the profundity of the composer’s conception and the orchestral sonority coincide,” producing “an enormous optimistic lift,” which, Tolstoy reports (and his report is corroborated), literally lifted the spectators out of their seats at the first performance, many of them before the piece was over.²⁴ That response, Tolstoy averred, was at once proof that his reading of the symphony was correct, and proof that the composer’s perestroyka was sincere: “Our audience is organically incapable of accepting decadent, gloomy, pessimistic art. Our audience responds enthusiastically to all that is bright, optimistic, life-affirming.”

The whole review, in fact, is one enormous tautology, not only for the way the audience reaction is construed, but because it amounts throughout to a rehash of ready-made socialist-realist clichés. Compare, for example, a passage from a speech the former RAPMist critic (and union boss) Vladimir Iokhelson delivered at one of the Leningrad meetings at which Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had been denounced the year before. Socialist realism, Iokhelson proclaimed,

is above all a style of profound optimism. The whole historical experience of the proletariat is optimistic in essence. And we can and must affirm that optimism is intended as an obligatory feature of this style, its very essence. It is a style that includes heroics, but a heroics that is not merely tied to narrow personal interests. Here we mean a heroics of an individual connected with the mass, and of a mass that is capable of bringing forth such a hero. It is necessary that the connection between the hero and the mass be made intelligible.²⁵

“A mass that is capable of bringing forth such a hero . . .” Tolstoy ended his review with a toast, not to Shostakovich but to “our people, who bring forth such artists.”

No wonder Tolstoy’s review was influential. Its tenets were, to quote Iokhelson, obligatory. And no wonder, then, that the composer was among those whom it “influenced,” for Shostakovich was quick to seek (or to be granted) its protection. In an article that appeared over the composer’s name in a Moscow newspaper shortly before the first performance in the capital—its headline, “My Creative Response,” became the symphony’s informal subtitle—we read: “Very true were the words of Alexey Tolstoy, that the theme of my symphony is the formation of a personality. At the center of the work’s conception I envisioned just that: a man in all his suffering. . . . The symphony’s finale resolves the tense and tragic moments of the preceding movements in a joyous, optimistic fashion.” That man, the symphony’s hero, is explicitly identified with the composer and his recent past: “If I have really succeeded in embodying in musical images all that I have thought and felt since the critical articles in Pravda, if the demanding listener will detect in my music a turn toward greater clarity and simplicity, I will be satisfied.” A special effort was made to dissociate the symphony’s “tense and tragic moments” from any hint of “pessimism”:

I think that Soviet tragedy, as a genre, has every right to exist; but its content must be suffused with a positive idea, comparable, for example, to the life-affirming ardor of Shakespeare’s tragedies. In the literature of music we are likewise familiar with many inspired pages in which [for example] the severe images of suffering in Verdi’s or Mozart’s Requiems manage to arouse not weakness or despair in the human spirit but courage and the will to fight.”²⁶

In keeping with this last idea, Shostakovich’s Fifth was assimilated to yet another factitious literary model. At a special performance for Leningrad Party activists, the musicologist Leonid Entelis first attached to it a phrase that would become another unofficial emblem, one that perfectly summed up the whole oxymoronic essence of socialist realism: recalling Vsevolod Vishnevsky’s bombastic play about Bolshevik maritime heroism during the Civil War, Entelis declared Shostakovich’s symphony an “optimistic tragedy.”²⁷

HERMENEUTIC FOLKLORE

Thus the official reading. The author of Testimony was of course at special pains to repudiate it, especially as concerned the “joyous, optimistic” finale:

I think that it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in Boris Godunov. It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, “Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,” and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, “Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.” What kind of apotheosis is that? You have to be a complete oaf not to hear that.²⁸

As a matter of fact, this was not news. People did hear that, and even wrote about it—but in private or obliquely. It, too, was a standard, if at first hidden, interpretation, which eventually reached public print in the Soviet Union around the time of the so-called post-Stalin “thaw.” Volkov mentions Alexander Fadeyev, the head of the Writers Union, whose diary, published posthumously in 1957, contains his reaction to the 1938 Moscow première: “A work of astonishing strength. The third movement is beautiful. But the ending does not sound like a resolution (still less like a triumph or victory), but rather like a punishment or vengeance on someone. A terrible emotional force, but a tragic force. It arouses painful feelings.”²⁹

Four years after this avowal appeared in print, the musicologist Genrikh Orlov, who has since emigrated from the USSR, came forth with the startling suggestion—of a type unheard of in Soviet criticism—that the composer’s own commentary be set aside. “It is well known,” he argued, “how often the objective results of a creative effort fail to coincide with the artist’s subjective intentions. And if pretentious conceptions often lead to insignificant results, so, more rarely, a modest autobiographical theme may assume the dimensions of a broad generalization about life.” Avoiding any awkwardly direct challenge to the veracity of Shostakovich’s commentary, still less to its authenticity, Orlov nonetheless succeeded in challenging its relevance. The symphony’s great strength, he asserted, lay in its ability “to engrave in broad artistic generalizations the typical ideas, sensations, conflicts, and hopes of its epoch.”³⁰

That was letting in a great deal between the lines. Over the five years that had elapsed since Khrushchev’s “secret speech” at the twentieth Party congress, the “epoch” of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony had received a far harsher public evaluation in the Soviet Union than was possible before. The subtext to Orlov’s remarks was unmistakable. And there was more:

In the years preceding the creation of the Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich had grown not only as a master but as a thinking artist-citizen. He grew up together with his country, his people, sharing their fate, their aspirations and their hopes, intently scrutinizing the life around him, sensing with all his being its inner pulse.”³¹

This places an altogether new and different construction on “My Creative Response,” with its famous allusion to “all that I have thought and felt since the critical articles in Pravda.” Shostakovich’s last Soviet biographer, writing under less liberal conditions than Orlov had enjoyed, went farther yet, managing through a fleeting aside at once to enlarge the ambit of Orlov’s interpretation of the symphony and to project it onto the early audiences. “Shostakovich had created a universal portrait,” wrote Sofiya Khentova. “The people of the thirties recognized themselves, grasping not only the music’s explicit content but also its general feeling.”³²

This was classic “Aesopian” language, describing what was undescribable: a symphony that spoke the unspeakable. We can understand it only if we make the requisite adjustments, translating “people of the thirties” as “people in the grip of the Terror”; “explicit content” as “official interpretation”; “general feeling” as “unstated message.” And that is why they wept, then stood up and cheered, grateful for the pain.

There are contemporary witnesses to this reaction, the most explicit, if somewhat tentative, from a defector, the violinist Juri Jelagin, who had attended the première:

Later when I tried to analyze the reason for the devastating impression the Fifth Symphony made on me and on the entire audience I came to the conclusion that its musical qualities, no matter how great, were by themselves not enough to create that effect. The complex background of events and moods had to combine with the beautiful music of the Fifth Symphony to arouse the audience to the pitch of emotion which broke in the Leningrad auditorium. . . . The Soviet Government had set the stage for the incredible triumph of the gifted composer with long months of persecution and with the senseless attacks on his work. The educated Russians who had gathered in the auditorium that night had staged a demonstration expressing their love for his music, as well as their indignation at the pressure that had been exerted in the field of art and their sympathy and understanding for the victim.³³

“The complex background of events and moods ...” Jelagin, from his musician’s perspective, construed it narrowly. For a fuller contemporary reading of the symphony’s “broad artistic generalizations,” we must turn to what on its face seems the unlikeliest of sources.

Georgiy Khubov’s review, first delivered orally at an official Composers Union “discussion” on 8 February 1938 (eleven days after the Moscow première), was published in the March issue of the union’s official organ. Adopting the repellent tone and language of officious bureaucracy, the union reviewer began by chiding those who had overpraised the symphony in their eagerness prematurely to exonerate the composer from all the old ideological charges. His overall strategy was to compare Shostakovich’s actual musical performance with the Tolstoy-derived platitudes affirmed over his signature in the Moscow press, and to note the ways in which the music fell short of the stated goals. Pointedly, and very significantly, Khubov fastened on the “static and drawn out” Largo (which the author of “My Creative Response” had called the movement that best satisfied him), protesting the way other critics had overemphasized and overrated it. “The problem of the stanovleniye lichnosti” Khubov pompously concluded, “viewed from the point of view of genuine tragedy—that is, tragedy informed by a life-affirming idea—is in point of fact resolved in Shostakovich’s symphony (the Largo and the finale) only formally, in any case inorganically, with great strain.”

The symphony, the critic declared, was an attempt to find a way out of existential “loneliness” (again compare Nikolai Virtá’s Bildungsroman), a loneliness stated as a dialectical thesis in the first movement’s first thematic group (dubbed the “epigraph theme”). The masterly development depicts the composer’s “strenuous contest” with his alienation until a powerful proclamation of the epigraph theme—the massive unisons described above—temporarily stills the struggle. So far the critic entirely approves, as he approves of the scherzo, where in place of the composer’s former manner (“specious urbanity, flaunting of cheap effects”) there are “new traits of fresh, hearty humor, naivety, and even tenderness.”

Now the problems begin. Khubov calls the Largo a “poem of torpidity,” (poèma otsepeneniya), in which “a pallor of deathly despondency reigns.” According to the terms of Shostakovich’s stated program, this cannot be called tragic, “since the truly tragic in art can only be expressed by great, inwardly motivated struggle, in which the high life-affirming idea plays the decisive role, determining the bright outcome through catharsis.” Complaint is piled upon complaint with unbelievable repetitiveness, the tone meanwhile turning sinisterly prosecutorial:

Precisely this is what the Largo lacks. And therefore, for all the expressivity of its thematic material, for all its crushing emotional impact on the listener, the third movement lowers precipitously the high level of symphonic development [attained in the first movement]. . . . The listener had a right to expect a further, even more determined dramatic development of the symphony’s underlying idea. But instead the composer has revealed to the listener with naked candor a motionless little world of subjectively lyrical sufferings and . . . tearful apothegms. Instead of a great symphonic canvas ... he has set out an expressionistic etching depicting “numb horror.”

Let us put it to the author straight out: what does it say, where does it lead, . . . this numb, torpid Largo? Could it be an organic link in the process of the life-affirming stanovleniye lichnosti? Even the composer could hardly give an affirmative answer to this question. For what he shows with such expressionistic exaggeration in his Largo is torpidity, numbness, a condition of spiritual prostration, in which the will is annihilated along with the strength to resist or overcome. This numbness, this torpidity is the negation of the life-affirming principle. This is clear to all and does not require any special proof. . . . What is the way out? What is the ultimate solution going to be?

The finale. The “answer,” as “My Creative Response” had put it, “to all the questions posed in the earlier movements.” The critic is obdurate:

It breaks in upon the symphony from without, like some terrible, shattering force. . . . Having analyzed the third movement, we understand that Shostakovich had no other choice; for there was no way to develop that mood of torpidity and bring it to life affirmation. It could only be broken. . . . And this function the main theme of the finale fulfills. It definitely makes an impression, and no small one. But at the same time, precisely because of its unexpectedness, its lack of logical preparation, it lacks conviction. . . . And similarly lacking in conviction, therefore, is the loud coda with its hammering over a span of thirty-five measures at the opening motive of the main theme in D major! ... A perceptive, attentive listener feels all the while that this theme is not the result of an organic development of the symphony’s idea, that for the composer this theme is the embodiment of a superb but external, elemental, subjugating force . . .

And that is why the general impression of this symphony’s finale is not so much bright and optimistic as it is severe and threatening.³⁴

Solomon Volkov could not have put it better. Khubov, writing from the depths of the Stalinist freeze, leads his “perceptive, attentive listener” to all the unmentionable truths adumbrated by Orlov and Khentova after the thaw, and stated outright (but to himself alone) by Fadeyev, all the while proclaiming their falsehood. By insisting on the probity of “Shostakovich’s” commentary, he exposes its untruth. He and Orlov have a common strategy; they both dwell upon the music’s incongruity with the stated program. Where Orlov could risk upholding the music, Khubov must uphold the muddle. But both rely on “the complex background of events and moods” to right the score. I do not think it merely wishful to see in Khubov’s bullying review—the work of a critic who remained a Party stalwart to the end, who was widely suspected of having helped draft the Pravda editorials of 1936, and whom therefore Isaak Glikman, half a century later, still remembered as a “reptilian musician”³⁵— a rich vein of rhetorical ambiguity inviting readerly irony—in short, of doublespeak as classically defined.³⁶

SOUND EVIDENCE

Confronted with two diametrically opposing perspectives on the symphony, the one public and canonical, the other a sort of folk tradition that could be only alluded to or hinted at, it is fair to assume that nowadays few will hesitate to choose the second. But is it only Kremlinological habit or bourgeois prejudice that so inclines us? Is there evidence to support the choice?

There is, of course, and Khubov even cites it for us. “Numb horror” . . . “torpidity” . . . “spiritual prostration, in which the will is annihilated along with the strength to resist or overcome” . . . these were the dominant moods of the Yezhovshchina, the peak purge years, as a whole library of émigré, samizdat, and glasnosf-inspired memoirs by now openly attests. Anna Akhmatova, in the prose preface she added in 1957 to the poem “Requiem,” which she began composing mentally in 1935, chose the very same word that Khubov so conspicuously overused—otsepeneniye, “torpidity”—to characterize the mood that reigned in the endless queues of women that gathered daily at the prisons of Leningrad to learn the fates of their arrested loved ones.³⁷ The “life-asserting principle” demanded by the theorists of socialist realism, and embodied in such exemplary musical compositions of the period as Dunayevsky’s Marsh èntuziastov (with which Shostakovich’s symphony was often invidiously compared, incredible as that may seem), or with Vasiliy Lebedev-Kumach’s “Song of the Motherland” (Pesnya o rodine, 1935), the egregious mass song that Akhmatova parodied in the verse dedication of her “Requiem”³⁸—that was the public lie. Count Tolstoy and the author of “My Creative Response,” writing virtually without reference to musical particulars, enthusiastically identified the symphony with the public lie. Khubov, whose ostensively chilly review is full of musical examples and precise descriptions, managed, wittingly or unwittingly, to identify the work with the unmentionable truth.³⁹

One could go much farther with description—farther than any Soviet writer before the officially proclaimed age of glasnosf dared go—toward identifying the Largo with publicly inexpressible sentiments. The movement is saturated with what, adopting the familiar Soviet jargon, we might call the “intonations” and the “imagery” of leave-taking and of funerals, ironically disguised by the suppression of the brass instruments (anyone who has attended a Soviet secular funeral with its obligatory lugubrious brass quintet will know what I mean). But that very suppression works together with multiple extroversive references to invoke the all-vocal Orthodox obsequy, the panikhida. At figure 86 the imitation is so literal that you can almost hear the string instruments intone the vechnaya pamyaf (Eternal Remembrance), the concluding requiem hymn (example 14.1). This near-citation comes in the second half of the movement, in the midst of a process that could be described thus: “The solo instruments of the orchestra file past ... in succession, each laying down its . . . melody . . . against a . . . background of tremolo mur-murings.” That is Stravinsky’s description, from his Chroniques de ma Vie, of his Pogrebal’naya pesn , the funerary chant he composed in memory of Rimsky-Korsakov.⁴⁰ Performed once only, in 1909, it is now lost and obviously can have had no influence on Shostakovich. But it was a representative of a distinct genre of Russian orchestral pieces that Shostakovich surely did know: in memory of Rimsky-Korsakov there were also compositions of this type by Glazunov and Steinberg, Shostakovich’s teachers, and there were also well-known “symphonic preludes,” as the genre was called, in memory of the publisher Mitrofan Belyayev, the arts publicist Vladimir Stasov, and others. They all quoted from the panikhida; it was a defining attribute of the genre.

In the Largo of Shostakovich’s Fifth, the evocation of the panikhida comes amid a sequence of woodwind solos—first the oboe, then the clarinet (accompanied by flutes), then the flute, all accompanied by a steady violin tremolo. The melody these instruments play resonates neither with the orthodox liturgy nor with Russian folk song (as some Soviet writers have maintained), but with Mahler—specifically, with two movements from Das Lied von der Erde: “Der Einsame im Herbst” (The Lonely One in Autumn), and, of course, “Der Abschied” (The Farewell) (example 14.2). That Shostakovich’s movement was a mourning piece cannot be doubted—and surely was not doubted, though it could not be affirmed openly. It has been suggested that the movement was a memorial to Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky, Marshal of the Soviet Union and Shostakovich’s protector, whose infamous execution—now the very emblem of the Yezhovshchina and perhaps its single most terrifying event—had taken place during the symphony’s gestation. But why limit its significance? Every member of the symphony’s early audiences had lost friends and family members during the black year 1937, loved ones whose deaths they had had to endure in numb horror.

The agony of suppressed grief comes to the fore in a searing fortissimo at figure 90, when the farewell melody is transferred to the cellos, the clarinets reinforcing the liturgical tremolo, and the double basses emitting violent barks of pain (to which only Leonard Bernstein’s, among recorded performances, have done justice).⁴¹ One would think no one could miss the significance of this passage, but someone did. Prokofiev, a composer of prodigious invention and facility but a man of small feeling, sent Shostakovich a grudging note of congratulations on the Fifth, reproaching him however for one detail: “Why so much tremolo in the strings? Just like Aida”⁴²

EXAMPLE 14.1

a. Shostakovich, Symphony no. 5, third movement, figure i

b. Obikhod notnogo tserkovnogo peniya, ed. N. I. Bakhmetev (St. Petersburg: Pridvornaya pevcheskaya Kapèlla, 1869), vol. 2, p. 330, transposed up a semitone to facilitate comparison

EXAMPLE 14.2. Mahler, Das Lied von der Erde, second movement (“Der Einsame im Herbst”), one bar after figure 3; and sixth movement (“Der Abschied”), two measures after figure 41

As for the finale, the quality of intrusion from without, which Khubov found “severe and threatening” and therefore unconvincing as optimistic life affirmation, applies not only to the beginning, in which the brass section, silent throughout the Largo, bursts in upon and destroys its elegiac mood. It is explicitly confirmed within the movement. The long, quiet stretch in the middle, from 112 to 121 (and could it be a coincidence that it is cast in the key of B major, the alternative tonality of Beethoven’s Ninth and the key of its visionary slow movement?), culminates, at figure 120, in self-quotation, the violins, and later the harp, alluding to the accompaniment to the final quatrain in Shostakovich’s setting of Pushkin’s poem “Rebirth” (Vozrozhdeniye, Op. 46, no. 1), composed immediately before the Fifth Symphony, Op. 47 (example 14.3).

In this poem a painting that had been defaced but is restored by time is compared to a spiritual regeneration: “So,” the final quatrain runs, “do delusions vanish from my wearied soul, and visions arise within it of pure primeval days” (Tak ischezayut zabluzhdenya I s izmuchennoy dushi moyey, I i voznikayut v ney videnya I pervonachal’ nïkh, chistikh dney). The image suggests not the promise of a bright future but an escape into the past.⁴³ When the local tonic chord is resolved as a submediant to the dominant of the main key in the restless six-four position; when that dominant, A, is hammered out by the timpani as a tattoo, reinforced by the military side drum, over a span of fifteen measures; and when the woodwinds bring back the main theme to the accompaniment of a pedal on all four horns (the whole maneuver replaying the approach to the coda in the finale of Chaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony), the effect is that of puncture, of sudden encroachment (of the present, of unsettling objective reality, of the “artist-barbarian”) on that subjective escape into the past. The resulting affect of grim passivity mounts into ostensible resolution as the coda is approached.

EXAMPLE 14.3

a. Shostakovich, Symphony no. 5, fourth movement, figure 120

That coda, emulating a whole genre of triumphant “Fifth Symphony” finales from Beethoven’s to Chaikovsky’s to Mahler’s, has been a special bone of interpretive contention from the beginning. Many musicians have found it—like Chaikovsky’s and Mahler’s!-simply inadequate or perfunctory: Myaskovsky, writing to Prokofiev (describing rehearsals he had attended) shortly before the Moscow première, pronounced it “altogether flat.”⁴⁴ Yevgeniy Mravinsky, the conductor of the première, offended the author of Testimony when, comparing the finale of the Fifth with that of the masterly Tenth (where “there is a full synthesis of the objective and the subjective”), he wrote that in the earlier work

b. Shostakovich, Vozrozhdeniye (“Rebirth”), Op. 46, no. 1, mm. 18-29 (end)

Shostakovich makes a great effort to make the finale the authentic confirmation of an objectively affirmative conclusion. But in my view this confirmation is achieved to a large extent by external devices: somewhere in the middle of the movement the quick tempo spends itself and the music seemingly leans against some sort of obstacle, following which the composer leads it out of the cul-de-sac, subjecting it to a big dynamic buildup, applying an “induction coil.”⁴⁵

UNTOUCHED BY THE FORCES OF EVIL?

The question, of course, is whether the coda fails on purpose, as, in the wake of Testimony, many writers now contend. Is the ultimate meaning of the symphony, or its method, one of mockery? Behind that question lurks a much larger one; for if we claim to find defiant ridicule in the Fifth Symphony, we necessarily adjudge its composer, at this point in his career, to have been a “dissident.” That characterization, popular as it has become, and attractive as it will always be to many, has got to be rejected as a self-gratifying anachronism.

There were no dissidents in Stalin’s Russia. There were old opponents, to be sure, but by late 1937 they were all dead or behind bars. There were the forlorn and the malcontented, but they were silent. Public dissent or even principled criticism were simply unknown. “People’s minds were benumbed by official propaganda or fear,” Adam B. Ulam has written, continuing: “How could there be any public protest against the inhuman regime when even a casual critical remark to an old acquaintance would often lead to dire consequences, not only for the incautious critic but for his family and friends?”⁴⁶

Precisely with the collapse of Soviet power and the opening up of the past has come (or should come) the painful realization that the repressive Stalinist apparatus left few of its hostages uncoopted. It is all too convenient to forget that pervasiveness now. “Anyone who did not wish to take part” in the evil of those days, as honest late- and post-Soviet writers admit, “either left this world or went to the Gulag.”⁴⁷ The warning is most often addressed to those who would accuse their fathers, but it applies with equal pertinence to would-be romanticizers.

Dissidence resulted from the loosening of controls, not the other way around. It began very mildly, under Khrushchev, with circumspect critiques of the bureaucracy like Vladimir Dúdintsev’s novel Not by Bread Alone (1956); it gained momentum with samizdat (clandestine self-publication in typescript) and tamizdat (unauthorized publication abroad), and only flared into open conflict when the Brezhnevite regime tried to reinstitute Stalinist controls (most visibly in the 1966 trial of Andrey Sinyavsky and Yuliy Daniel for tamizdat) but lacked the will or the wherewithal to reinstitute full Stalinist repressions. Even so, outspoken anti-Communism—as against specific policy critique, vindication of victims, or defense of the historical record—did not make its real debut until the Gorbachev years. Even Solzhenitsin preached explicit anti-Communism only from abroad. And yet Shostakovich is now portrayed, both in Russia and in the West, as if he had done so at the height of the Terror.

It is natural that latter-day dissidents would like him for an ancestor. It is also understandable, should it ever turn out that Shostakovich was in fact the author of Testimony, that he, who though mercilessly threatened never suffered a dissident’s trials but ended his career a multiple Hero of Socialist Labor, should have wished, late in life, to portray himself in another light. The self-loathing of the formerly silent and the formerly deluded has long been a salient feature of Soviet intellectual life. But genuine dissidents like Sakharov and Solzhenitsin, having paid for their dissent with reprisals, have not been ashamed to admit that they had once been silent or deluded. Lev Kopelev, the exiled scholar, confessed to having as an idealistic young Communist participated enthusiastically in forced collectivization, starvation tactics, and denunciations during the winter of 1932-33. In a chilling passage from his memoirs, he even admitted to having collaborated—precisely out of misguided idealism—with the secret police.⁴⁸

Yet now that the dissidents have won, it seems nobody ever really believed in the Soviet way of life. Commonplace now are media interviews in which comfortably situated post-Soviet intellectuals and celebrities like Tatyana Tolstaya or Vasiliy Korotich, to say nothing of the egregious Yevtushenko, blandly assure their interlocutors that everyone had always seen through everything.

It is to that pharisaical pretense, so forgetful of the way things were in the Soviet Union until so very recently, that Shostakovich is now being eagerly assimilated. How pleasant and comforting it is to portray him as we would like to imagine ourselves acting in his shoes. For a vivid illustration of the process, we need only survey chronologically a few readings of one of the most striking pages in the Fifth Symphony—the march episode in the first movement’s development section (figures 27-29)—beginning with Alexey Tolstoy, who like General Grant evidently knew only two tunes (one the “International,” the other not). For him, a march was a march. “It is like a short discharge of the whole orchestra’s breath,” he wrote, “foreshadowing the symphony’s finale, a finale of grandiose optimistic exaltation.”⁴⁹

For those who could actually hear music, and could appreciate the march’s discordance and its harsh timbre, there could be no question of optimism. The interpretations grow progressively more negative. Alexander Ostretsov, writing in 1938, saw frustration: “In this passage all human willpower and fortitude are concentrated, but they can find no outlet.”⁵⁰ For Georgiy Khubov, committed to an autobiographical reading, the march epitomized “the sharply dynamic, troubled, anxious character of the development (and of the whole first movement), some kind of strained craving to find within oneself the positive, life-affirming strength of creative victory.”⁵¹ Ivan Martinov, in the mid-1940s, comparing Shostakovich’s methods to Chaikovsky’s (in the Symphonie pathétique) or Scriabin’s (in the Ninth Sonata), calls the march a “tragic grotesque. ... In this transformation of the main theme there is something incongruous. It is like a monstrous mask, a deformed grimace frozen on one’s face.”⁵²

By the Khrushchev period, as we have seen, the symphony’s meaning had been divorced from autobiography. Genrikh Orlov interprets the march as “the source of tormenting premonitions,” a generalized, disembodied “image of aggression and annihilation,” suggesting that, in contradistinction to the Seventh Symphony, which treats of actual military conflict, the Fifth concerns the struggles “of daily life, and within the human soul, the struggle that defines the essence of life.” He, too, sees Shostakovich’s march in terms of a tradition—the tradition of Berlioz’s “Marche au supplice” from the Symphonie fantastique, or the menacing fanfares in Chaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. In all of these symphonies, “the moment of the decisive onslaught of the forces of evil is given a martial, bellicose character.”⁵³ By the time of Khen-tova’s biography, of which the relevant volume was published in 1980, the march has been effectively pigeonholed. She calls it, simply, “the march of the forces of evil,” and, contradicting Orlov, equates its purpose and effect with those of the invasion episode in the Seventh Symphony.⁵⁴

It remained for the post-Testimony literature to define those forces. The definition is altogether predictable, but the assertive self-assurance with which it is advanced is nevertheless extraordinary. Ian MacDonald, whose colorfully written recent book puts him at the forefront of this latest revisionism, has brought the Emperor’s-new-clothes rhetoric of Testimony to a supreme pitch. His commentary on the Fifth Symphony is riddled with intimidating echoes of Volkov’s Shostakovich (“You have to be a complete oaf . . . ,” etc.). Here is how he paraphrases the lengthy passage that proceeds from the march episode on into the recapitulation:

A startling cinematic cut sends us tumbling out of the world of abstraction and into representation of the most coarsely literal kind. We are at a political rally, the leader making his entrance through the audience like a boxer flanked by a phalanx of thugs. This passage (the menace theme dissonantly harmonised on grotesquely smirking low brass to the two-note goosestep of timpani and basses) is a shocking intrusion of cartoon satire. Given the time and place in which it was written, the target can only be Stalin—an amazingly bold stroke.

The appearance of the Vozhd [Leader] evokes an extraordinary musical image of obeisance, the orchestra thrumming the one-note motto in excited unison before bowing down to the symphony’s keynote D. . . . At the peak of a wildly struggling crescendo, [the main theme’s] basic two-note component abruptly, and with vertiginous ambiguity, turns into a flourish of colossal might on drums and brass, punctuating a frenzied unison declamation of the motto rhythm. . . . There can be absolutely no doubt that introspection plays no part in this, that it is objective description—Shostakovichian, as opposed to Socialist, realism.

As this declamatory passage ends, the brass and drums de-crescendo in triumph on the three-note pattern from bar 4, as if grimly satisfied with their brutalisation of the rest of the orchestra and of the symphony’s earnestly questing opening bars, all elements of which have been deformed during this convulsion. Over the thrumming rhythm, flute and horn now converse in a major-key transposition of the second subject: two dazed delegates agreeing that the rally had been splendid and the leader marvellous. (A typical stroke of black comedy here has the horn doggedly copying everything the flute says, to the point of reaching for a B clearly too high for it.)⁵⁵

Perhaps needless to say, this apodictic paraphrase cannot be refuted on its own terms. Every one of MacDonald’s points has its referent in the score; with one exception, the musical events he describes are undeniably “there.” It does no good to point out that his characterization of the melody first heard quietly at figure 1 as the “menace theme” is arbitrary, and that the reading of the march passage is therefore tautological. That will not dislodge the interpretation from its internal consistency, and internal consistency is what always “proves” a verificationist thesis or a conspiracy theory. One cannot empirically determine that a snatch of music does not represent Stalin. But all of this is as true of Tolstoy’s reading of the symphony (or even of Stravinsky’s version of Tolstoy’s) as it is of MacDonald’s. They are all internally consistent, and all therefore tautologically true, impervious to empirical refutation.

The exception, the one point in the cited passage that can be empirically “falsified,” is the last point, about the horn’s high B. It is based on a footnote in the score: “If the hornist cannot play the top ‘B’ piano, then [the] lower octave should be played, as indicated.”⁵⁶ But what the footnote shows is that Shostakovich wished to avoid the very effect to which MacDonald calls attention. The only performance he sanctions is one in which the horn’s high B does not sound “clearly too high for it.”

So there is no black comedy at that point. What about the rest? One could easily and, I think, rightly object on grounds of anachronism, as outlined earlier with respect to “dissidence” in general: if it is indeed true that “there can be absolutely no doubt that ... it is objective” mockery of Stalin Shostakovich meant to perpetrate, then it would have been more than “an amazingly bold stroke” to have had the Fifth Symphony performed. Like Osip Mandelstam’s reckless recitations of his little poem about Stalin, it would have been suicide. The considerations that caused Shostakovich to withdraw his Fourth Symphony under duress on the eve of its première were no less relevant a year later, when the political atmosphere had grown incomparably more stringent. If any oaf could hear the “shocking intrusion of cartoon satire,” so could any informer.

But even this is not the really decisive argument against MacDonald’s interpretation. The question was raised earlier as to what in principle can validate or refute an interpretation of music. It seems to me that the standards one applies to musical interpretations of this kind should be no different from those one applies to any theory. That theory is better which better organizes the available information, or organizes more information. MacDonald’s reading pays attention only to the most local extroversive referents. Every one of the events that make up the caricature of Stalin entering the hall (and, by the way, were grand entrances his style?) and delivering a thunderous Hitlerian oration (and, by the way, wasn’t his a tremulous high-pitched Georgian-accented voice, and weren’t his public speeches few?) is a transformation of previously presented material, as is the purported exchange between the two delegates that follows. Any convincing exegesis, therefore, should account for the introversive semiotic along with the extroversive; it should relate the various thematic or motivic appearances to one another, not merely take note of the immediate musical environment—the local dynamic level, the local instrumentation, or the locally characteristic harmonies—surrounding a single one.

Leaving aside the motives that carry loaded labels in MacDonald’s analysis, there is the theme that constitutes the actual content of Stalin’s purported “declamation.” It had been heard only once before, between figure 3 and figure 5, a quiet passage in the violins that links up with others (such as the one that comes four measures before figure 12) that have the characteristics of recitative, musical “speech.” When recitative appears in an instrumental context (e.g., in Beethoven’s late quartets, or Shostakovich’s) it is well understood to be an iconic convention, one that creates a sense, as Kerman puts it, of “direct communication” from the author, a special “immediacy of address.”⁵⁷ There is an inescapably subjective, self-referential component to the expression; the melody MacDonald associates with Stalin’s farcical harangue had already been marked for us as the composer’s own voice. Failure to note the thematic relationship here—the introversive semiotic—has led, I believe, to a fatal misconstrual of the extroversive. I am convinced that those critics— Khubov, for one—are right who have seen the climactic unison passages as representing the efforts of the buffeted, brutalized subject—the hostage, if you will—to regain a sense of control at any cost.

The same point, writ much larger, applies to the much-debated coda. Leo Mazel has recently contributed a convincing, and very moving, intonatsionnïy andliz of the very last gesture in the symphony, in which the stereotyped manifestations of rejoicing give way to a sudden modal mixture that introduces not only dissonances but also a melodic progression Shostakovich frequently employed in other works, including texted ones, to evoke “a sorrowful, gloomy, or angrily plaintive character.”⁵⁸ This may be viewed as irony, perhaps; but it is not mockery. Like the funereal third movement, it is an act of witness that gives voice to the silent wounded. And it does so not by “objective description” but by the purposeful intrusion of subjective feeling, the composer having learned that this subjectivity alone is what gives art—his art—its enduring value.

This is what sensitive Soviet listeners perceived from the beginning. It is what Georgiy Khubov sensed and signaled to his readers even in 1938, though he had to do so under cover of ostensible censure. It is what Alexander Ostre-tsov sensed and signaled when, also under cover of complaint, he informed his readers that “the pathos of suffering in a whole series of places is driven to the point of naturalistic wails and howls; in some episodes the music seems almost capable of evoking physical pain.”⁵⁹ It is what Leo Mazel recorded in 1960, though he had to do so under cover of ostensible reference to the Patriotic War, trusting that his readers would remember the Fifth Symphony’s actual date:

A sense of responsibility, consciousness that “the struggle of progressive humanity with reaction is not over,” that one must remember fallen heroes and think of future generations, that into our thoughts of victory our former grievous anxiety and the tormenting pain of former misfortunes must flow like a living current—all this permeates the work of this composer. And it is important for understanding him—for understanding, for example, why there is a mournful episode in the finale of the Seventh Symphony, and why even the dazzlingly bright major-mode conclusions to the finales of the Fifth and Seventh symphonies are interspersed with intimations of the minor and sharp dissonances.⁶⁰

And it is what has kept Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, alone among the products of Soviet music from the time of the Terror, alive not only in repertory but in critical discourse and debate.

AN UNHAPPY CONVERGENCE

So Ian MacDonald’s reading is no honorable error. It is a vile trivialization, graphically exemplifying the poshlosf—the smug vulgarity, the insipid pretension—that always informs a high moral dudgeon that comes so cheap. What level of criticism is it that seeks to anthropomorphize every fugitive instrumental color and every dynamic shade, and from these analogies assemble a literalistic narrative paraphrase of the unfolding music? Shostakovich himself, as we recall, wanted to scream when he found critics writing “that in such-and-such a symphony Soviet civil servants are represented by the oboe and the clarinet, and Red Army men by the brass section.” The same holds, one may assume, for the flute and horn. And what kind of investigator builds sweeping forensic cases on such selectively marshaled evidence? To that question the answer is obvious, and sinister. MacDonald’s method is precisely what is known in this country as McCarthyism. It is our own, our homegrown Stalinist manner. Ian MacDonald, it thus transpires, is the very model of a Stalinist critic.

All of which would be merely comical to relate, were it not that the same reversed stereotype is now being applied to Shostakovich in his homeland, too, in the spirit (or in memory) of glasnosf. The politically correct late- or post-Soviet position on Shostakovich has become a facile inversion of the old official view (but still no gray). The new inverted or negative portrait came strikingly into view in the September 1989 issue of Sovetskaya muzïka, which contained a quintet of revisionist pieces on the composer that portrayed him as a martyr to his beliefs, a romantically heroic resister from the start. “He was not afraid of Stalin,” proclaims the title of one of these articles, by Rudolf Barshai, the now-emigrated conductor who gave the first performance of the Fourteenth Symphony. Isaak Glikman’s piece takes its title from a remark the composer is said to have made in response to the martyrdom of Lady Macbeth in 1936: “Even if they cut off both my hands, I’ll go on writing music just the same, holding the pen between my teeth.” A third, entitled “His Greatness and His Mission,” places the world-renowned and decorated Shostakovich in the same category as Roslavets and Mosolov, silenced composers, and compares them all with repressed literary figures such as Bulgakov, Zamyatin, Pasternak, and Pilnyak.

An essay by a self-styled “kulturológ” named Georgiy Gachev practices a familiar form of ventriloquism on the music. For him, as for Ian MacDonald, the Fifth Symphony is an objective narrative, wholly reducible to paraphrase: “And now, 1937—to the howl of mass demonstrations, marching, demanding the execution of the ‘enemies of the people,’ the guillotine machinery of the State goes resoundingly into action—and there it is in the finale of the Fifth: the USSR is building—only it is unclear what it is building, a bright future or a Gulag.”⁶¹ The height of impertinence is reached when Gachev begins playing compulsively, irresponsibly, and untranslatably with words: Ne prosto muzïkoVED—Shostakovich, no muzïkoVOD, vozhd’ muzïki (“No simple musicologist was Shostakovich but a music-leader, the Fiihrer of music”).⁶² Vozhd’—Fiihrer—was Stalin’s sobriquet. Gachev makes Shostakovich the anti-Stalin—Stalin’s equal, Stalin’s match, the musical Stalin—but, needless to say, a good Stalin.

One understands the motives—or rather, the compulsion. The author’s father, Dmitriy Gachev, a Bulgarian-born Communist and an old RAPMist who crusaded for partiynosf in musical criticism in the early days of the Composers Union,⁶³ had fallen victim to that roaring guillotine the Fifth Symphony is supposed to illustrate. Romanticizing Shostakovich as an avenging angel is for members of Georgiy Gachev’s generation a cathartic. But now that anything can be said in Russia, the inevitable inflation of rhetoric has produced correspondingly diminished returns. The hedged, risky, guarded statements of the past were so much more powerful, so much richer. Viewing Shostakovich through them brought a measure of understanding and exhilaration. The discourse of glasnosf produces a sense of futility. It is not, after all, by egoistically trivializing the agonies of the Stalin years that whatever replaces Soviet music will find its way to the twenty-first century.

To me, the most heartening bit of writing on Shostakovich in quite some time was a piece by Liana Genina, the deputy editor of Sovetskaya muzïka, writing this time in a rival journal, Muzïkal’ naya zhizn’. It is called “Hoping for Justice,” and it calls a halt to cheap inversionism: to the insistence on reading formulaic ideological programs or primitive story lines into every Shostakovich composition—only the reverse of what was read before—and especially to the easy presumption that Shostakovich, “in the grip of horror, said, signed and did one thing, but always thought another.”⁶⁴ So far, most commentators, both in and out of Russia, have followed the line of least resistance to a specious, falsely comforting sense of purification. But as Caryl Emerson has written, “the genuine de-Stalinization of Shostakovich, like the de-Stalinization of the [former] Soviet Union in every other area, will require a much more critical look at the ethical dimension, and a much more painful catharsis.”⁶⁵

We can learn a great deal from the cultural artifacts of the Stalin period, but only if we are prepared to receive them in their full spectrum of grays. The lessons may be discomforting, unpalatable, even repellent, but all the more necessary and valuable for their being so. The chief ones may well be the moral ambiguity of idealism, the inescapable ethical responsibilities of artists, and the need to resist the blandishments of Utopia. Stalinism was a double thing, as Irving Howe, an impeccable anti-Stalinist, had the courage to remind us shortly before he died. I want to end this chapter, and this book, by quoting, in tribute, some eloquent words of his:

If humanity cannot live without a measure of idealism, idealism can turn upon humanity. Prompted by impatience with the laggard pace of history, idealism generated a counterforce within itself, an involuntary poisonous secretion. Dos-toyevsky understood this brilliantly when he wrote in A Raw Youth about man’s “faculty of cherishing in his soul the loftiest ideal side by side with the greatest baseness, and all quite sincerely.” The last four words are the words that count.⁶⁶

THIS chapter, though given as a Gauss lecture in December 1993, was originally prepared for a conference organized around the theme “Soviet Music toward the 21st Century,” which took place on the campus of Ohio State University from 24 to 27 October 1991. Between the planning and the convening, of course, the history of Soviet music came dramatically to an end. The conference, envisioned as a hopeful toast to perestroyka, celebrated not the meliorating continuity that Russian word implies but instead a great historical divide fraught with peril and uncertainty. (Speaker after speaker at that unforgettable meeting mounted the podium to voice fears for the survival of institutions supporting the creation and performance of contemporary concert music in Russia, and some saw emigration as the only way to carry on with their lives.) My original assignment had been to narrate in detail the early history of the Union of Soviet Composers, now sketched briefly in the first section of this essay; the decision to focus instead on questions of interpretation was a reaction to the march of events. It was my own perestroyka (the Russian for “changing course midstream” being perestroyit’sya na khodu). For furnishing the immediate pretext to do a job that had been long simmering within me, and for generously allowing me to follow my impulse, I thank Margarita Mazo, the organizer of the conference.

¹ Juri Jelagin, The Taming of the Arts (New York: Dutton, 1951), pp. 188-90; Yuriy Keldïsh, 100 let Moskovskoy Konservatorii 1866-1966 (Moscow: Muzïka, 1966), pp. 127-29.

² See the article by two leading RAPMists, Lev Lebedinsky and Viktor Belïy (the latter the editor of the RAPM organ, Za proletarskuyu muziku), entitled “Posle aprelya: Sovetskoye muzïkal’naya pod’yom” (“After April: The Soviet Musical Upsurge”), Sovetskoye iskusstvo, no. 22 (1933). Lebedinsky (1904-93) lived long enough to take part in the recent Shostakovich debates: see “O nekotorïkh Muzïkal’nïkh tsitatakh v proizvedeniyakh D. Shostakovicha,” Novïy mir, no. 3 (March 1990): 262-67 (on Shostakovich’s use of musical quotations and in particular about the meaning of the “invasion theme” in the Seventh Symphony); the article was later attacked in Pravda by the composer Yuriy Levitin (“Fal’shivaya nota, ili Grustnïye razmïshleniya o delakh Muzïkal’nikh” [11 November 1990]; Lebedinsky’s rebuttal [“O chesti mastera: vozvrashchayas’ k teme”] was published in the issue of 19 March 1991).

³ See “Vïvodï po chistke yacheyki VKP(b) Moskovskoy Gosudarstvennoy Konservatorii v 1933 g.,” Sovetskaya muzïka 1, no. 5 (1933): 161-64.

⁴ For organizational details see the report by Levon Atovm’yan, “God rabotï Soyuza sovetskikh kompozitorov,” ibid., pp. 131-41. A similar report for Leningrad, by A. Ashkenazi, appeared in ibid., vol. 2, no. 6 (1934): 61-64.

⁵ See Victor Gorodinsky and Vladimir Iokhelson, “Za bol’shevistskuyu samokritiku na muzïkal’nom fronte,” ibid., vol. 2, no. 5 (1934): 6-12, where the internal review of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth is described in detail. (The authors express dissatisfaction at the lack of aggression on the part of the critics and at the lack of receptivity on the part of the composer.)

⁶ “Na visokom pod’yome,” ibid., vol. 4, no. 7 (1936): 4-12.

⁷ “Protiv formalizma i fal’shi: Vïstupleniye tov. SHTEYNBERGA,” ibid., vol. 4, no. 5 (1936): 38.

⁸ “Protiv formalizma i fal’shi: Vïstupleniye tov. KHRENNIKOVA,” ibid., vol. 4, no. 3, (1936): 45.

⁹ M. Gromov, “Zametki slushatelya (O 5-y simfonii D. Shostakovicha),” ibid., vol. 6, no. 3 (1938): 29. (The quoted comment echoes the one attributed to the composer; see the text that follows.) One can still find similar heartless claims in the literature on Shostakovich, though now only in the uncomprehending West—cf. Malcolm Barry, “Ideology and Form: Shostakovich East and West,” in Christopher Norris, ed., Music and the Politics of Culture (New York: St. Martins Press, 1989), p. 181: “If, for example, a substantial body of expert opinion declared that the revision [of Lady Macbeth as Katerina Izmailova] was a finer work (based on whatever criteria), might there not have to be a revision of the critical commonplace about the reprehensibility of ‘Chaos instead of Music’? Could it be that the intervention, brutal and traumatic as it was, might have been helpful to the composer, even within the context of a ‘value-free’ approach to the music as such?”

¹⁰ “5^-aya simfoniya D. Shostakovicha,” Sovetskaya muzïka 6, no. 3 (1938): 14-28.

¹¹ “Strunnïy kvartet D. Shostakovicha,” ibid., vol. 7, no. 11 (1939): 46-54.

¹² See, for example, Ivan Martïnov, Dmitriy Shostakovich (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1946), p. 43.

¹³ “K voprosu o sotsialisticheskom realizme v muzïke,” Sovetskaya muzïka 1, no. 1 (1933): 6-18.

¹⁴ “Sovetskaya muzïkal’naya kritika otstayot,” ibid., vol. 1, no. 3 (1933): 120-21.

¹⁵ “O zadachakh zhurnala ‘Sovetskaya muzïka,’” ibid., vol. 1, no. 1 (1933): 5.

¹⁶ See Anna Shteynberg, “Pushkin v tvorchestve sovetskikh kompozitorov,” ibid., vol. 5, no. 1 (1937): 53-59. The Pushkin centenary, first marked at the Union of Soviet Composers with a conference on 11 and 12 December 1936, was the occasion for the earliest explicit exhortations to revive “classical” models.

¹⁷ Sofiya Khentova, Molodïye godï Shostakovicha, vol. 2 (Leningrad: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1980), p. 192. The political threat was overt: referring to Leonid Entlelis’s remarks (see n. 27), Dunayevsky warned against any suggestion that “the Party may have wrongly judged Shostakovich’s work, that there had been no formalist high-jinks, no muddle, but just the innocent mistakes of youth.” (My thanks to Laurel Fay for Dunayevsky’s text.)

¹⁸ “Vpechatleniya slushateley,” Muzïka, 26 November 1937; quoted in Genrikh Orlov, Sim-fonii Shostakovicha (Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1961), p. 64.

¹⁹ Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, trans. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 153-55.

²⁰ James Billington actually reproduced Stravinsky’s parody, accepting it at face value as “Alexis Tolstoy’s paean to Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony as the ‘Symphony of Socialism,’“ as a paradigm to illustrate “the role of music in the Stalin era.” See The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Vintage, 1970), p. 478.

²¹ For a fuller discussion of Beethoven’s role in establishing this stylistic and critical heritage, see R. Taruskin, “Resisting the Ninth,” 19th-century Music 12, no. 3 (Spring 1989): 241-56.

²² For extensive discussion of the musical significance of this distinction, see V. Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), chapters 2 and 3.

²³ Solomon Volkov, Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 224.

²⁴ “Pyataya simfoniya Shostakovicha,” Izvestiya, 28 December 1937, p. 5. For descriptions of the reactions of the audience at the première, see Jelagin, The Taming of the Arts pp. 167-68 (thirty-minute ovation); A. N. Glumov, Nestertïye stroki (Moscow, 1977), p. 316, quoted in Khentova, Molodïye godi Shostakovicha, vol. 2, p. 186 (rising from seats during finale); Isaak Glikman, “. . . Ya vsyo ravno budu pisat’ muzïku,” Sovetskaya muzïka 57, no. 9 (1989): 48; Pis’ma k drugu, p. 14 (open weeping during the third movement).

²⁵ “Tvorcheskaya diskussiya v Leningrade,” Sovetskaya muzïka 4, no. 4 (1936): 5-15.

²⁶ “Moy tvorcheskiy otvet,” Vechernyaya Moskva, 25 January 1938, p. 30. It is often stated that the “subtitle” was Shostakovich’s own, but near the beginning of this article there is a specific statement to the contrary: “Among the often very substantial responses [otzivi] that have analyzed this work [after its Leningrad performances], one that particularly gratified me said that ‘the Fifth Symphony is a Soviet artist’s practical creative answer to just criticism’ [pyataya simfoniya—eto delovoy tvorcheskiy otvet sovetskogo khudozhnika na spravedlivuyu kritiku].” I have not seen this comment or review, nor (rather strangely, in view of its significance) has it been traced to its source in the huge subsequent literature. One might therefore suspect that Shostakovich coined his symphony’s sobriquet after all, then cautiously attributed it to an unnamed reviewer or discussant. But to assume this would be to assume that Shostakovich was in fact the author of the article that appeared over his name, and that of course is a great deal to assume.

²⁷ Quoted in Khentova, Molodïye godi Shostakovicha, vol. 2, p. 187.

²⁸ Testimony, p. 183.

²⁹ Za tridtsat’ let (Moscow: Sovetskiy pisatel’, 1957), p. 891; quoted in G. Ordzhonikidze et al., eds., Dmitriy Shostakovich (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1967), p. 43. The Ordzhonikidze collection also contains the 1966 memoir by Yevgeniy Mravinsky (“Tridtsat’ let s muzïkoy Shostakovicha,” pp. 103-16) that occasioned the Brahms-like animadversion in Testimony; it will be quoted in what follows.

³⁰ Orlov, Simfonii Shostakovicha, pp. 68-69.

³¹ Ibid., pp. 69-70.

³² Khentova, Molodïye godi Shostakovicha, vol. 2, p. 189.

³³ The Taming of the Arts, pp. 167-68. Jelagin’s memoir was finally published in the Soviet Union in the weekly Ogonyok in October 1990.

³⁴ Georgiy Khubov, “5-ya simfoniya D. Shostakovicha,” Sovetskaya muzïka 6, no. 3 (1938): 14-28.

³⁵ Pis’ma k drugu, p. 323.

³⁶ Khubov was careful to conclude on an explicitly positive note so as to mitigate the risk of his review being read as a political denunciation (doubly an embarrassment if official approval, as suggested above, had been mandated): the symphony, despite its flaws, “tells us that the composer has decisively thrown over all tawdry formalistic affectation and stunt, has made a brave turn onto the high road of realistic art. Sincerely, truthfully, with great force of unfeigned feeling he has told his own story in the Fifth Symphony, the story of his recent doleful meditations and perturbations, of his inward, strenuous and complicated creative struggle” (“5-ya simfoniya D. Shostakovicha,” p. 28).

³⁷ The preface (actually titled “Vmesto predisloviya,” or “In place of a preface”) in full: “In the terrible years of the Yezhovshchina I spent seventeen months in the Leningrad prison lines. One day someone ‘fingered’ me. Then the blue-lipped woman standing behind me, who of course had never heard my name, roused herself out of the torpor [ot otsepeneniya] we all shared and whispered in my ear (everyone there spoke in whispers): ‘But can you describe this?’ And I said, ‘I can.’ Then something like a smile slid across what had once been her face.” Anna Akhmatova, Sochineniya, 2d ed. (Munich: International Literary Associates), vol. 1, p. 361.

³⁸ See Susan Amert, “Akhmatova’s ‘Song of the Motherland’: Rereading the Opening Texts of Rekviem” Slavic Review 49 (1990): 374-89.

³⁹ Glikman seems to allege that the composer (reacting, perhaps, to its rhetorical camouflage or to the author’s reputation) was put out by Khubov’s interpretation of the Largo, though many ambiguities in the wording of the relevant passage defeat evaluation of the claim: “One day Dmitriy Dmitriyevich thrust toward me a magazine that had fallen into his hands and pointed to a page on which I read that the trouble with the Largo was its coloration of ‘deathly despondency.’ Dmitriy Dmitriyevich said nothing about this ‘revelation’ by the famous critic, but his face very graphically reflected a bewildered question” (“. . . Ya vsyo ravno budu pisat’ muzïku,” p. 48; Pis’ma k drugu, p. 15). On the same page Glikman records that at the first performance “I was shaken to see that during the Largo . . . many, very many were weeping: both women and men” (cf. n. 24).

⁴⁰ Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (New York: Norton, 1962), p. 24.

⁴¹ Particularly worthy of recommendation is Columbia MS 6115 (1959), with the New York Philharmonic, recorded immediately after returning from a Soviet tour in which the orchestra had performed the symphony in the composer’s presence.

⁴² M. G. Kozlova, ed., Vstrechi s proshlim, vol. 3 (Moscow: Sovetskaya Rossiya, 1978), p. 255.

⁴³ The point is worth insisting on, since the English-language literature on Shostakovich, however it has construed the passage, has consistently relied on the inaccurate rendering of Pushkin’s quatrain in George Hanna’s translation of David Rabinovich’s Shostakovich (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959), p. 49: “And the waverings pass away / From my tormented soul / As a new and brighter day / Brings visions of pure gold.” See, inter alia, Ian MacDonald, The New Shostakovich (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), p. 132. In a radio talk delivered in January 1993, the composer and Shostakovich scholar Gerard McBurney made the intriguing observation that the first four notes of the “menacing” main theme of the finale coincide in pitch (and almost in rhythm) with the first four notes of the song, which carry the words khudozhnik-varvar, “artist-barbarian.” See Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, p. 127, n. 32.

⁴⁴ S. S. Prokofiev and N. Ya. Myaskovsky, Perepiska (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1977), p. 455.

⁴⁵ “Tridtsat’ let s muzïkoy Shostakovicha,” p. 109. Of course the Tenth has an equally famous “finale problem” (see David Fanning, The Breath of the Symphonist: Shostakovich’s Tenth [RMA Monographs, no. 4; London: Royal Musical Association, 1989], chapters 5 and 6).

⁴⁶ Review of Yuri Orlov, Dangerous Thoughts: Memoirs of a Russian Life, New York Times Book Review, 1 July 1991, p. 6.

⁴⁷ Andrey Ustinov, “Pravda i lozh’ odnoy istorii” (“The Truth and Falsehood of a Certain Story”—concerning the authorship of “Muddle instead of Music”), Muzïkal’noye obozreniye (July-August 1991): 3, trans. David Fanning.

⁴⁸ Lev Kopelev, To Be Preserved Forever, trans. Anthony Austin (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1977), p. Ill: “The GPU representative at the factory, a stern but good-natured veteran of the Cheka, would often visit us in he evenings, asking us to take note of the workers’ attitudes, keep an eye out for kulak propaganda, and expose any remnants of Trotskyist and Bukharinist thoughts. I wrote several reports on conditions at the plant, although there was little I told him that I had not already said at meetings or written in our paper. My editorial colleagues did the same. The GPU man would chide us for our frankness in public. ‘Don’t you see, now they’ll hide things from you—they’ll give you a wide berth. No, fellows, you’ve got to learn Chekist tactics.’ These words didn’t jar us. To be a Chekist in those days seemed worthy of the highest respect, and to cooperate secretly with the Cheká was only doing what had to be done in the struggle against a crafty foe.”

⁴⁹ “Pyataya simfoniya Shostakovicha,” Izvestiya, 28 December 1937, p.6.

⁵⁰ “Pyataya simfoniya Shostakovicha,” Sovetskoye iskusstvo, 2 February 1938.

⁵¹ Sovetskaya muzïka 6, no. 3 (1938): 21-22.

⁵² Dmitriy Shostakovich, p. 46.

⁵³ Simfonii Shostakovicha, pp. 80-82.

⁵⁴ Molodïye godi Shostakovicha, vol. 2, p. 181.

⁵⁵ The New Shostakovich, pp. 129-30.

⁵⁶ Edition Eulenburg, no. 579, p. 58. The concert pitch in question, of course, is E.

⁵⁷ Joseph Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets (New York: Norton, 1979), pp. 199-200.

⁵⁸ “K sporam o Shostakoviche,” Sovetskaya muzïka 5 (1991): 35.

⁵⁹ “Pyataya simfoniya Shostakovicha,” Sovetskoye iskusstvo, 2 February 1938; quoted in Khentova, Molodïye godi Shostakovicha, vol. 2, p. 190.

⁶⁰ Lev Abramovich Mazel, Simfonii D. D. Shostakovicha (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1960), pp. 8-9.

⁶¹ “V zhanre filosofskikh variatsiy,” Sovetskaya muzïka 57, no. 9 (1989): 36.

⁶² Ibid., p. 39.

⁶³ See D. Gachev, “Za partiynost’ khudozhestvenno-muzïkal’noy kritiki,” Sovetskaya muzïka 11, no. 5 (1933): 152-58.

⁶⁴ “S nadezhdoy na spravedlivost’,” Muzïkal’naya zhizn’, no. 5 (1991): 3.

⁶⁵ Caryl Emerson, “Grotesque Modernism in Opera: Shostakovich’s Nose and Lady Macbeth,” paper read at a panel (“Russian Modernism: Art and Literature”) at the annual convention of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, Washington D.C., 1989. My thanks to Prof. Emerson for allowing me to quote from the typescript (p. 13).

⁶⁶ Irving Howe, “The Great Seduction,” New Republic, 15 October 1991, p. 47.