Talk like a Shostakovich

[calimac]

I'm working from home today, still indexing, so I have no-one to talk like a pirate to, but I can report that my editors liked my article on Shostakovich enough that, rather than cutting it to fit their length standards, they divided it into two parts. Part one, on the fall and rise of the composer's reputation, is out today, and part two comes next week.

Shostakovich is sufficiently well-regarded today that I put a lot of emphasis on how little was thought of his work in the midst of his career. I had great fun collecting nastygrams from famous names about his "Leningrad" Symphony, which to be fair was rather overhyped at the time of its release. But there was much more. I was sorry not be able to include record producer Charles O'Connell's complaint about "the same trivialities, the same bombast, the same mockeries, the same cold, mechanical, self-conscious tricks with which previous works have familiarized us and with which subsequent works have nauseated some of us." In the 1950s a British writer providing potted one-sentence summaries of noted composers described him as "a bolshevist composer, who believes music must have a political basis." See wha he was up against? As late as 1979, the year Volkov's Testimony was published, an admiring writer on Shostakovich could complain that he "is little appreciated and little heralded in the West ... Interest in his music grows among a limited following." Well, at least that's changed.

I came across his work in 1971 or 1972 and liked it immediately. I liked it when everyone thought he was a Soviet lackey and I liked it when everyone thought he was a secret rebel. It's the same music.

Comments

[rozk.livejournal.com]

That's a good piece - be sure to link to part two...

I remember vividly what it was like admiring Shostakovich in the early Seventies - I was listening endlessly to the first eleven quartets and waiting desperately for recordings of the next ones and my highly musical flatmates were complaining about the mere fact that I listened to this tosh, not just because I played it all too loudly. But the music had a depressed intellectual brilliance that spoke to me, and a clarity of line that I also liked - it was the Shostakovich quartets that taught me to love Haydn's, not the other way round.

Because this is a Roz Kaveney story, we now get the inevitable namedrop - my musical flatmate at the time was Paul Griffiths, and I regret bitterly that I didn't listen to him about Ligeti and Boulez and Messaien at the time, because it was many long years before I started to like them and I regret that. On the other hand, Paul loved Stockhausen, whom I will never like, and his dislike of Shostakovich went along with a distaste for other masters I like, notably Brahms. (Which was odd, given what Schoenberg said about Brahms.) Paul also didn't like Verdi - he was keen on Wagner and Berlioz, but hated to think of their music as opera.

I haven't seen him since the day I moved out of that flat, but I remember those bitter angry conversations of non-communication as if they were yesterday.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

To dislike either Brahms or Shostakovich might be simply a quirk of taste. (My mother loves Brahms, finds Shostakovich simply uninteresting.) To dislike both suggests a serious hole in one's appreciation.

I had that same box set of the first eleven quartets, though I got to know the symphonies better first. The 15th Symphony was the first major work to appear on LP that had been composed since I started listening to classical music. I found this tremendously exciting.

A lot of my most successful musical discoveries of that period came by simply combing the Schwann record catalog for symphonies in two digits. This was before Havergal Brian made it to disc in the US, but another composer I discovered this way about the same time as Shostakovich was Alan Hovhaness. Talk about delights that one had to keep secret from more sophisticated friends: man, oh, man ...

[rozk.livejournal.com]

I had the whole 'migod, this was written last year' reaction to Number 14 and the Michaelangelo Suite, both of which I like a bit more than 15. There was something very exciting about being the only person I knew who knew this music - that also applied Brian, long before you could get much of it on disc. I'd heard the first broadcast of the Gothic and loved it.

Part of the problem back in those days was a sort of Leavisite modernism among musicians like my flatmate - if it didn't hurt, it wasn't working. Specifically, the fact that I could love Bartok's quartets for simple pleasure in the sounds, or even the Schoenberg and Berg quartets, meant that I wasn't listening seriously enough. Part of my lasting resentment is that, when I did eventually fall in love with Pli Selon Pli and Harawi, it was pretty much on the same basis: oh gosh, I found myself thinking, everyone told me this was tough and intellectually gritty and actually they are art songs in a solid French tradition that includes Chausson and Roussel.

A propos of which, do you know Roussel's songs? They really are a guilty pleasure.