Complete preparation of any composition for performance must include a study of the historical context of the work and its composer. The vocal music of Dmitry Dmitrievich Shostakovich (1906-1975) is no exception, but it does present a particular challenge for performers. Longstanding debate over the historical, political, social, and ideological components in Shostakovich’s works continues to intensify with a sense of increasing divergence in commentators’ views.1
A recent Eastern European publication of essays celebrating the centenary of Shostakovich’s birth contains a wide array of labels for the Russian composer. Descriptions such as “reluctant revolutionary,” “living weapon” for the communist cultural activists, or “dissident”/“non-conformist” who conveyed “hidden meanings [of] things that could not be said” highlight the discrepancies among researchers.2 Notwithstanding this musicological mayhem, a simple look at the life events and cultural context of Shostakovich and his music can yield information helpful in the singer’s performance preparation.
Shostakovich’s life began in St. Petersburg, a few years into the city’s so-called Silver Age. Despite its heightening internal conflict (Bloody Sunday, the spark of the 1905-07 revolution, occurred fewer than two years before Shostakovich was born), Russia was enjoying the same turn-of-the-century social excitement and growth felt in many parts of the West. In particular, the citizens of Moscow and St. Petersburg—the large metropolitan areas of Russia—were enjoying more individual liberty (albeit still very limited) than any generation of Russians before them. The division between wealthy and poor was still severe, but the number of people demanding and receiving social rights and privileges was growing. Shostakovich spent his childhood in one of the more privileged homes with access to education, private music lessons, economic stability, and the St. Petersburg intelligentsia.
Curiously, the development of Shostakovich’s musical interest coincides with the growth of the Communist Party in Russia. As demonstrations and rebellions against the struggling Romanov monarchy increased, a very young Shostakovich was defying early attempts by his mother (who had studied piano at St. Petersburg Conservatoire) to provide him musical training. His mother finally swayed him enough to take piano lessons, and he quickly blossomed. By the time Shostakovich reached the age of 10, a full-fledged revolution had taken place in Russia. The famous Finliandsky vokzal (Finland Station), home to Lenin’s 1917 speech to unite the working class, was familiar territory for Shostakovich and not far from his school.
When Shostakovich entered Petrograd Conservatoire in 1919, Russia had suffered a devastating civil war between the red and white armies and communism had taken a fairly firm hold on the nation. (Shostakovich attended the same conservatory as his mother, but the city had changed from St. Petersburg to Petrograd to eliminate German culture traits during World War I.) Shostakovich’s formal education at Leningrad Conservatoire (yet another name change after Lenin’s death in 1924) gave him a strong background in traditional form and theory—a hallmark of Rimsky-Korsakov’s personal teaching style and the conservatoire. This training was instrumental in tempering his early fascination with avant-garde into a soundly forged musical style. As Shostakovich finished his main studies at Leningrad Conservatoire and continued building his musical career, Stalin came to power and began transforming the fledging communist nation into a political and military power.
The sociopolitical environment of the Soviet Union was unpredictably dangerous. Shostakovich lost many colleagues and friends during Stalin’s Great Purge in which millions of Russians were persecuted, imprisoned, or executed. For artists, the repression found definition in the Socialist Realism doctrine, which dictated that artists produce a “truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development…with the task of ideologically remolding and educating the working people in the spirit of socialism.”3 In reality, this doctrine produced much that stood outside of truthfulness or historical concreteness, but successfully remolded and reeducated the working people in socialism.
Shostakovich struggled his entire life with the coexistence of his own ideals as an artist and the ideals of the communist dictators. The capricious threat of Stalin’s regime hit Shostakovich with a devastating blow in the height of the overwhelming national and international success of ???? ?????? ????????? ????? (Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District). Already considered a fine symphonist, Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth” marked the first widely acknowledged Russian opera composition since the communists officially gained power.
Ironically, in 1934 the understanding of Socialist Realism was so varied that many thought Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District the quintessential Socialist Realist composition, as it addressed various aspects of the historical social plight of women in Russia. On the contrary, two years after it premiered, Stalin attended the opera for the first time and, through an article published immediately thereafter, squashed Shostakovich’s reception in Russia, calling the opera “chaos instead of music” and implying serious repercussions by labeling the entire production “a meaningless game, that may well come to a very bad end.” 4
In retrospect, the article spoke truthfully of a game being played. Shostakovich lived his entire life as a player in the Soviet officials’ social games of repression and relaxation. Often criticized for his support of various state programs and procedures, Shostakovich veered back and forth in his own statements and musical works from a man seemingly in step with the “Party” to an artist living dangerously on the edge.
It is this aspect of the Russian existence (social suppression) that many analyses of Shostakovich’s music choose to ignore. While idealism and martyrdom often stand out with heroic results, the ability to live through repression also deserves acknowledgement. Shostakovich seems to have chosen this road of survival over pure idealism, which meant finding ways to preserve personal artistic ideals within a regime that repressed individual success and dictated average equality. Perhaps Caryl Emerson’s praise of Shostakovich, that “he never appeared to fear the tension of words versus music, that is, of words crippled, enslaved, or overpowered by music”5 rings true because Shostakovich was able to survive the fear of his own life being crippled, enslaved, or overpowered by the Party’s leaders, all the while producing notable works of art. Shostakovich, because of his choice to survive the regime, went to lengths of personal frustration and bitterness unknown to many of his colleagues who suffered a different and shorter fate.
The effects of Russia’s general social suppression pervade all aspects of Shostakovich’s music. As singers attempt to comprehend the vast range of Shostakovich analyses (and make personal decisions about Shostakovich’s music) it is wise to consider the psychological and emotional role his music played for Russians during the Soviet era. David Fanning, in his introduction to Shostakovich Studies, touches on this point, characterizing the bulk of recently published materials on Shostakovich as “anti-musicological, revisionist and casual in [their] ascribing of programmatic, usually subversive meaning.”
Fanning continues this thought with a keen insight into the post-Soviet era psyche: “It is not difficult to see how the urge for revisionism could have arisen. For Russians it is part of an ongoing process of demythologising their own history; more specifically, it is an acknowledgment that Shostakovich’s music provided an emotional safety-valve for tragic experiences which for decades could not be written about—indeed they could hardly even be talked about.” 6
Fanning’s next statement, however, that this revisionism is merely “replacing one mythology with another and still bringing us no closer to the experience of the music itself” —shortsightedly dismisses a key point in understanding Shostakovich’s music. Just as Shostakovich battled for over sixty years to find a measure of his own artistic coexistence with the inartistic, oppressive Soviet regime, his audience found (and continues to find) resonance in his music because they individually and collectively struggled to do the same thing. During Shostakovich’s first twenty years, Russian life offered virtually no constants. From state policy to the name of the conservatoire, everything was in constant unrest. The Soviet Union, beginning mainly with the crushingly firm rule of Stalin, eventually gave a good measure of constancy to its battered citizens. The longing for the stability of the Communist era (and the hatred of its terrors) is what drives much of the social discord, political conflict, and distrust of Western democracy in Russia today.
To simply call an end to this emotional process of self-reconciliation for the sterile goal of getting “closer” to the music in some sort of analytical vacuum is unreasonable and (ironically) self-defeating. For whatever his personal reasons may have been, Shostakovich did what was required to survive. By doing so he chronicled the life of Russia during the Soviet era and provided a musical and emotional channel through which his fellow citizens found companionship in and solace from their struggles. Galina Vishnevskaya (the renowned Russian soprano to whom Shostakovich dedicated his Satires and Seven Verses on Texts by Alexander Blok, op. 127) explained in a recent interview with Rossiskaya Gazeta (Russian Gazette) how Shostakovich’s music was inexorably connected with the external context:
Rossiskaya Gazeta: Shostakovich is performed often in the West. But his writings are difficult to separate from specific time and situations—do they understand what he was writing? Or are there some uniform performance styles of Shostakovich in the West?
Galina Vishnevskaya: Times have changed so much, as has the Western audience itself: the scales are beginning to fall from their eyes. When people shoot at you on the street like a sparrow, when skyscrapers fall you begin to listen differently to Shostakovich. His music, after all, was written about all of us—and not just this country. But for Russia it is an encyclopedia of life, the entire national history of the twentieth century. But now the entire world has ended up in this same plight.7
I remember my own first experience with this type of “survival” in modern Russia. It came after I had spent months of time and excessive sums of money to attempt to keep my family in Russia in the proper way, according to the “law.” As an American accustomed to having the rule of law ensure my rights, I was determined to live my own convictions and not give in to those telling me to just handle this in “the Russian way,” and buy my way out of the problem. After seven months of constant battling for my ideological principles (being determined to reform something or someone), I reached the highest ranking officials within this section of the federal bureaucracy and heard from them that it was “not possible to live as the laws required” because the laws were mutually contradictory. I realized then that I simply needed to survive. To push the conflict further would have resulted in deportation from Russia. I knew if I wanted to finish my degree and give my family a positive Russian experience, we needed to live our principles in other areas and find a way to survive. This absence of power for the individual permeates all aspects of Russian life.
As Vishnevskaya noted, external discomforts and dangers made up twentieth-century life for Russians. This has provided ample opportunity for passionate soul searching. Those who choose to live life in the face of the outside threats (choosing to avoid or delay becoming a martyr by not fighting some battles), develop a strong sense of self. The act of defining one’s ideals gains greater meaning in the face of conflict. This conflict—when survived—produces clearer definitions of those ideals, and the resultant soul, galvanized by the heat of conflict, grows stronger and gains a deeper appreciation of self and life.
Admittedly, some Western singers omit Shostakovich from their repertoire for understandable reasons (language, style, accessibility), and the fierce debate in the analytical community does not readily increase the palatability of the man or his music. The singer, however, who is willing to invest in Shostakovich’s vocal works, will find unmistakable rewards.
His works offers exciting programming options. Emotive works for soprano, alto, and tenor from ?? ????????? ???????? ?????? (From Jewish Folk Poetry) engage energetic collaboration with the accompanying pianist. Seven evocatively reflective songs for soprano highlight the gifts of one of the world’s best symphonists in compelling combinations of voice, piano, cello, and violin (Seven Verses on Texts by Alexander Blok). And captivating operatic writing from Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District represents the brilliance of a man who—had he been allowed to continue—could have become one of the twentieth century’s best opera composers.
The singer with a desire to perform these works and grasp somewhat the composer behind them will find the task easier by bearing in mind the following:
* Shostakovich is the focus of one of the most highly charged musicological debates because of his duality as an artist and communist functionary.
* The emotional nature of the debate belies the accuracy of many secondary sources, so one must read critically and examine the author behind the source.
* As one Shostakovich researcher and enthusiast recently observed, “Look at the texts he chose, when he chose them, and for what he wrote them—that is, for immediate premiere or for the drawer.”8 This will help indicate some of his intentions and make up for the lack of existent commentary by Shostakovich about his compositions.
* Shostakovich represents a people that has survived continual social upheaval and state oppression. His music represents his survival within the Soviet regime. Each musician should find the music that speaks to his or her sense of survival and try to learn the reasons (textual, musical, historical) for that resonance.
The analysis of one’s own sense of survival (i.e., the coexistence of one’s ideals with the people or things that contradict or suppress those ideals) in response to Shostakovich’s music can provide a glimpse of Shostakovich’s relationships to his own self, his audience and his dictators—all of which are inseparable from his music. This glimpse, in turn, can help the singer to identify the personal commitment, sacrifice, and even suffering necessary to find one’s own deeply emotive soul—a prevalent trait of many Russian musicians and a quality sought after by all artists.
1 One musicologist writes, “As each provocative voice spawns new claims and counter-claims, and as anti-revisionism is added to the morass of conflicting opinions, Shostakovich commentators begin to seem rather like libel lawyers, with a vested interest in continuing controversy. And with such a profusion of ‘evidence’ on all sides there is every prospect of an endless cycle of appeals, new submissions and retrials.” (David Fanning, Shostakovich Studies, “Introduction. Talking about Eggs: Musicology and Shostakovich” [Cambridge University Press, 2005] 3.)
2. Osteuropa, 56. Jahrgang/Heft 8/August 2006, Manfred Sapper & Volker Weichsel (Hg.). Go to osteuropa.dgo-online.org/fileadmin/OE2006/08/inhalt0806en.pdf for English-language extracts of specific articles.
3. ???????????? ?????? (Literaturnaya Gazeta), 3 September 1934, quoted in Handbook of Russian Literature, ed. Victor Terras.
4. Miranda Clare Wilson, “Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata: Its Genesis Related to Social Realism,” unpublished treatise, University of Texas at Austin, May 2005, 8-12.
5. Caryl Emerson, Shostakovich in Context, “Shostakovich, Tsvetaeva, Pushkin, Musorgsky: Songs and Dances of Death and Survival,” ed. Rosamund Bartlett (Oxford University Press, 2000). Quoted in Caleb Harris’s “Dreadful Prophecies and Melancholy Days: Shostakovich’s Seven Romances on Texts by Alexander Blok, op. 127,” unpublished.
6. David Fanning, Shostakovich Studies, “Introduction. Talking about Eggs: Musicology and Shostakovich” (Cambridge University Press, 2005) 3.
7. ?????????? ?????? (Russian gazette), 15 September 2006, www.rg.ru/2006/09/15/vishnevskaya-dz.html., translation by author.
8. Caleb Harris, conversation with the author in review of “Dreadful Prophecies and Melancholy Days: Shostakovich’s Seven Romances on Texts by Alexander Blok, op. 127,” unpublished.
