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The Shostakovich wars
Sep. 7th, 2004 08:28 amSo I posted a couple days ago about Alex Ross's latest article on the interpretation of the music of Dmitri Shostakovich.
Ross has been exemplary in trying to rise above the flamewars that have been consuming this subject for the last 25 years: his best article on it is here, in which he points out that however you interpret it, the music remains the same. I'll go along with that. I liked Shostakovich's music when everybody thought he was a Soviet lackey, and I still liked it when everybody thought he was a secret dissident. All that's changed is the extramusical context we put it in, and context while interesting and informative is not music.
The latest twist is the emergence (finally) of the typescript of Shostakovich's purported posthumous memoirs, Testimony, the book whose publication in 1979 set this off. The typescript provides devastating circumstantial evidence that the bulk of the text is a fake. The "editor," Solomon Volkov, a then-young music journalist who glommed on to Shostakovich in his last years, put a big one over on the entire music world, and tried to hide it by not letting anyone see the whole typescript. He's the reincarnation of Anton Schindler, the glutinous creep who made himself useful as Beethoven's lackey in his last years, then issued a spurious memoir as soon as the great man was dead. (Have you ever read that the opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth are supposed to be "fate knocking at the door"? Beethoven never said that. Schindler made it up.) Further comparisons to Walter Hooper (of C.S. Lewis posthumiana fame), Ralph Schoenman (who tried to take over for Bertrand Russell while he was still alive, but was found out and given the boot) and even Robert Craft (who made up some of his conversations with Stravinsky) at no extra charge.
But Volkov's fakery has been suspected from the beginning, because his story never quite hung together. The question is where does this leave Testimony's main claim: that Shostakovich was himself putting one over on the Soviet authorities, posing as a good Communist but secretly thumbing his nose and encoding this in his music? Ross's argument in his older article is that it doesn't matter what the composer intended, because the music remains the same; but others think it does matter. Volkov's defenders began by saying that the text of Testimony might be a fake but its portrait of the composer was real: this was Ian MacDonald's position in his 1990 book The New Shostakovich, and he backed it up with affadavits from people who knew the composer. The need for deception in the Soviet system explained a lot. Now Ross is saying that you can't back up truth with a lie (fiction writers might disagree with that), and others are offering affadavits from some of the same people saying they don't believe Testimony is Shostakovich at all. I'm confused.
Meanwhile, under the influence of a couple of belligerent trolls named Ho and Feofanov, MacDonald recanted his doubts about Volkov's honesty, and started issuing flames himself. What I didn't know until I read Ross's new article was that MacDonald committed suicide last year. Maybe the pressure got to him? (Yes, this is the same Ian MacDonald who wrote Revolution in the Head, an alternately insightful and vacuous song-by-song study of the Beatles.) The Volkovist camp claims that their opponents are trying to reduce Shostakovich to pure Communist lackey again for unfathomable reasons of their own: Norman Lebrecht makes that argument here. A stunningly foolish piece of invective, I thought. If Lebrecht honestly doesn't know what motivates the anti-Volkovites, he could start with this article (registration required, alas) by their leading figure Richard Taruskin, which not only says that it's the other side that's reducing the composer to pure dissident, but movingly puts the case that what makes Shostakovich important is that he was both dissident and lackey at once.
Do you want to judge for yourself? Get a recording of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony (1937), one of his finest works. Listen to the whole thing, but pay particular attention to the finale, with its mighty conclusion in a shining D Major. What does it sound like to you?
1) A triumphal rejoicing after struggle, which is what the composer publicly, and Soviet critics generally, said;
2) An unsuccessful attempt to depict triumphal rejoicing, a blemish on an otherwise fine symphony, which is what pre-Volkov Western critics said;
3) A person pretending to rejoice because the government stuck a gun to his head and said "Your business is rejoicing," which is what Volkov's Testimony says;
4) Just an exciting finale in D Major, never mind what the composer intended, which is what Alex Ross says;
5) All of these at once, which is what Richard Taruskin says.
Ross has been exemplary in trying to rise above the flamewars that have been consuming this subject for the last 25 years: his best article on it is here, in which he points out that however you interpret it, the music remains the same. I'll go along with that. I liked Shostakovich's music when everybody thought he was a Soviet lackey, and I still liked it when everybody thought he was a secret dissident. All that's changed is the extramusical context we put it in, and context while interesting and informative is not music.
The latest twist is the emergence (finally) of the typescript of Shostakovich's purported posthumous memoirs, Testimony, the book whose publication in 1979 set this off. The typescript provides devastating circumstantial evidence that the bulk of the text is a fake. The "editor," Solomon Volkov, a then-young music journalist who glommed on to Shostakovich in his last years, put a big one over on the entire music world, and tried to hide it by not letting anyone see the whole typescript. He's the reincarnation of Anton Schindler, the glutinous creep who made himself useful as Beethoven's lackey in his last years, then issued a spurious memoir as soon as the great man was dead. (Have you ever read that the opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth are supposed to be "fate knocking at the door"? Beethoven never said that. Schindler made it up.) Further comparisons to Walter Hooper (of C.S. Lewis posthumiana fame), Ralph Schoenman (who tried to take over for Bertrand Russell while he was still alive, but was found out and given the boot) and even Robert Craft (who made up some of his conversations with Stravinsky) at no extra charge.
But Volkov's fakery has been suspected from the beginning, because his story never quite hung together. The question is where does this leave Testimony's main claim: that Shostakovich was himself putting one over on the Soviet authorities, posing as a good Communist but secretly thumbing his nose and encoding this in his music? Ross's argument in his older article is that it doesn't matter what the composer intended, because the music remains the same; but others think it does matter. Volkov's defenders began by saying that the text of Testimony might be a fake but its portrait of the composer was real: this was Ian MacDonald's position in his 1990 book The New Shostakovich, and he backed it up with affadavits from people who knew the composer. The need for deception in the Soviet system explained a lot. Now Ross is saying that you can't back up truth with a lie (fiction writers might disagree with that), and others are offering affadavits from some of the same people saying they don't believe Testimony is Shostakovich at all. I'm confused.
Meanwhile, under the influence of a couple of belligerent trolls named Ho and Feofanov, MacDonald recanted his doubts about Volkov's honesty, and started issuing flames himself. What I didn't know until I read Ross's new article was that MacDonald committed suicide last year. Maybe the pressure got to him? (Yes, this is the same Ian MacDonald who wrote Revolution in the Head, an alternately insightful and vacuous song-by-song study of the Beatles.) The Volkovist camp claims that their opponents are trying to reduce Shostakovich to pure Communist lackey again for unfathomable reasons of their own: Norman Lebrecht makes that argument here. A stunningly foolish piece of invective, I thought. If Lebrecht honestly doesn't know what motivates the anti-Volkovites, he could start with this article (registration required, alas) by their leading figure Richard Taruskin, which not only says that it's the other side that's reducing the composer to pure dissident, but movingly puts the case that what makes Shostakovich important is that he was both dissident and lackey at once.
Do you want to judge for yourself? Get a recording of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony (1937), one of his finest works. Listen to the whole thing, but pay particular attention to the finale, with its mighty conclusion in a shining D Major. What does it sound like to you?
1) A triumphal rejoicing after struggle, which is what the composer publicly, and Soviet critics generally, said;
2) An unsuccessful attempt to depict triumphal rejoicing, a blemish on an otherwise fine symphony, which is what pre-Volkov Western critics said;
3) A person pretending to rejoice because the government stuck a gun to his head and said "Your business is rejoicing," which is what Volkov's Testimony says;
4) Just an exciting finale in D Major, never mind what the composer intended, which is what Alex Ross says;
5) All of these at once, which is what Richard Taruskin says.
