‘I myself said the first part is as if played in a toyshop. I myself said it, but maybe it didn’t quite come out that way.’ This is how Dmitri Shostakovich diffidently described the first movement of his 15^th Symphony when taking audience questions at Illinois’ Northwestern University in 1973. The question session, part of a visit for Shostakovich to receive an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts, was a rare event; the composer was reticent to speak freely in public about his music – partly because he was a deeply private person, and partly because he was nervous of possible consequences. After his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had been severely castigated in Russian newspaper Pravda in January 1936, at a time when Joseph Stalin was vigorously intensifying his repressive policies, he was highly cautious about communicating with anyone – about himself or about his music.

For the remainder of his life, he trod a delicately fragile path between his deeply inward personal expression and the overt kind of public creations that he knew the authorities demanded in the interests of ‘Socialist Realism’. This was despite – or perhaps on account of – the exposure he experienced after receiving the highest honours in Soviet Russia. Seven years before his appearance at Northwestern University, he became the first composer to be awarded the Soviet Union's supreme title: Hero of Socialist Labour, on his 60th birthday. But he never felt safe or secure. As his close friend, cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, told me: ‘Shostakovich had different periods of his life. In one period the Soviet government brought him to the top of the mountain, declaring him “the greatest composer in the world”; in another period the government brought him down accusing him of “not being a composer with any talent at all”.’

Indeed, even honours including the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, the Stalin Prize, and the Order of Lenin did not protect him from being censured, along with several other composers including Sergei Prokofiev and Aram Khatchaturian, at the meeting of the Communist Party’s Central Committee in February 1948. Instructed to attend that meeting called by the Party Secretary Andrei Zhdanov, Shostakovich was, alongside other composers, accused of writing ‘formalist’ music, which the Committee designated had ‘distortions and anti-democratic trends alien to the Soviet people and its artistic tastes’, advocated ‘atonality, dissonance and discord’ and displayed ‘preference for confused, neuropathological combinations that turn music into cacophony, into a chaotic conglomeration of sounds. This music smacks very much of the spirit of the contemporary modernist bourgeois music of Europe and America, which is a reflection of the decay of bourgeois culture and signifies complete negation of musical art, its impasse.’

Private and public music

The immediate result of this censure was Shostakovich’s decision to write some music that he did not intend for public performance, unlike other works that he did. Among the latter were the 24 Preludes and Fugues for Piano and in due course his Symphony No 10, and among the former were the Violin Concerto No 1 (which he was already working on at the time of the Zhdanov event), and his song cycle From Jewish Poetry. These two creations were not performed in public until 1955 when the climate in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, was less draconian.

There was notably one other private composition that was very securely locked away. Had it been discovered while Stalin was alive ‘Shostakovich would have been shot,’ Mstislav Rostropovich told me with a wry chuckle. Finally, 14 years after Shostakovich’s death in 1989, Rostropovich directed the premiere performance of Rayok (sometimes known as Antiformalist Rayok and A Learner’s Manual). The Russian word ‘rayok’ is the diminutive form of ‘rai’, which means ‘paradise’ (so, ‘little paradise’), however it can have a second theatrical meaning as ‘the gods’, i.e. the top-gallery in a theatre. Over the years it also took on the meaning of a puppeteer’s peep-show, which was how it was inferred in Modest Mussorgsky’s Rayok, a satirical work for voice and piano. In the knowledge of Mussorgsky’s creation, Shostakovich gave his work the title Rayok with all the aforementioned connotations, including also by implication the subtitle “Little Gods”. It is a hilarious and vitriolic send-up of the actual 1948 meeting in which he and the other composers received their dressing down from the Central Committee and also contains texts of speeches that had been given by Stalin, Zhdanov, and Zhdanov’s successor Dmitri Shepilov. Shostakovich gives Zhdanov the pseudonym Dvoikin (Number Two – literally the diminutive ‘Two-ie’), Shepilov becomes Troikin (Number Three – ‘Three-ie’), and Yedinitsyn (Number One – ‘One-ie’) is Joseph Stalin himself. On the title page of the manuscript, Shostakovich writes ‘The Department of Musical Security informs us that the authors are being sought; the Department assures us that they will be found’. The music – which is brilliantly obtuse, vacant, and at the same time bombastically grand – contains quotes from Stalin’s favourite Georgian song Suliko, popular Russian folk tunes in the style that the Central Committee had deemed were required of Soviet composers, and other references, some of which (including Shepilov’s mispronunciation of Rimsky-Korsakov’s name) were added in expansions to the work in 1957, 1965 and 1968.

In the 1960s when life was, on the whole, not as dangerous as it had been in Stalin’s time, Shostakovich considered publishing Rayok – but ultimately decided to keep it under wraps. After all, he had found himself in trouble in 1962 when he had dared to take a risk by setting the poem Babi Yar by Yevgeni Yevtushenko as part of his 13^th symphony. The poem, which first appeared in the Soviet journal Literaturnaya gazeta in 1961, pointed an implicit finger at the Soviet regime’s refusal to erect a memorial to the Jews massacred by the Nazis at Babi Yar in 1941, and Shostakovich was profoundly moved by it. The Communist Party did all it could to try and stop the premiere of the 13^th symphony going ahead. It did premiere, mainly through the courage and ingenuity of conductor Kyril Kondrashin, but after two performances it was banned until, bowing to pressure, the composer and the poet reluctantly agreed to change the emphasis of suffering from the Jews to the Russians, some of whom had perished at Babi Yar, although vastly more Jews were murdered.

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Riddles

Even during this so-called ‘Khrushchev Thaw’, public figures had to be cautious, and after Nikita Khrushchev was removed from power in 1964 and replaced by hardliner Leonid Brezhnev, life became more precarious for non-conformists and dangerous for outspoken critics of Soviet policies. Shostakovich was understandably tight-lipped about his music for this reason. But above this, I personally believe he could not be drawn on easily definable explanations because few existed; his feelings were complex. In response to a question that was put to him at Northwestern University about why he quoted Rossini’s William Tell Overture, a romance of Glinka (Razuverenije / Do not Tempt Me Needlessly), and the Todesverkündigung (Annunciation of Death) from Wagner’s Die Walküre in his 15^th Symphony he said: ‘I don’t know, I don’t really know – it just seemed to be necessary…much of the question of creativity is an inexplicable phenomenon, and why I took these particular fragments – I can’t explain very precisely or exactly why I did this’.

While we can of course speculate, the conductor Kurt Sanderling, who personally knew Shostakovich well, had this to say to me: ‘When I heard this symphony for the first time it was at the first Berlin performance. I sat by the composer and knew that the press considered it a light-hearted symphony with a cheerful first movement containing toy symbolism. After the first movement I turned to Shostakovich and said quietly into his ear, “Please tell me: am I wrong or is this really not jolly happy music – rather the opposite?” He turned to me, for a moment looked me straight in the eye, and said, short and sweet: “You are not wrong”. Thereafter he gave me a copy of his symphony and I began immediately to work hard on it, and sensed immediately that it was like a last will and testament, his musical will.’

And the quotations? Sanderling continued: ‘I do not know the answer, but I would like to make some propositions. First the meaning of his quotes of William Tell in the first movement. Since Schiller, the meaning of William Tell for European humanity has been without any doubt that he was a freedom fighter – and it is not an exaggeration to regard it as a call to fight for freedom. In the last movement, the quote from Wagner is not the Trauermarsch, the Funeral Music from Götterdämmerung, as it is often said to be: it is the Todesverkündigung, the Death Proclamation from Die Walküre. It is a statement that “you must die”, which makes him fearfully anxious, fearfully afraid, and he uses this Fate Theme in the same way as Wagner does in the second act of Die Walküre as a frightening ‘Mene teke’ (i.e. Belshazzar) proclamation that “you must die”. The whole last movement is, so to speak, a recapitulation of his difficult, dreadful life and its end.’

Preoccupation with death

The 13^th and 15^th Quartets are strongly redolent of death, and the 14^th Symphony is specifically concerned with mortality. At the Northwestern University event, the composer said about his Symphony No 14, in which he set 11 poems for soprano and bass soloists, strings, and percussion: ‘This is a symphony, it is quite possible to say, about death. But I had an idea like this when I was doing it: It seemed to me that with composers of the past, and the very greatest composers such as Mussorgsky, Wagner, Schubert, Tchaikovsky – even Strauss – in their works, when one has to meet with the inevitable phenomenon of our life that is its unknown end, death figures as a kind of calming peace. It would be difficult for me to argue or even compete with such great composers, but in my 14^th Symphony I tried to protest – not to be happy and say, “Thank God life has ended”, but rather to protest. Perhaps it was not entirely successful, but that was my thought, that was my intent. Not long before that, when I was orchestrating Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, I thought “I have to make a polemic, I have to make an argument with these people at this point”, and that was my chief concept, my chief task.’

This is why the majority of the poems that Shostakovich chose speak of tragic or untimely death. The author and musician Elisabeth Wilson, who knew the composer and wrote the highly lauded biography Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, further points out how, in the way that Shostakovich determined the order of the texts, he, ‘conveys a specific message of protest at the arbitrary power exercised by dictators in sending the innocent to their deaths’.

Encryptions

So, in that respect there is an encrypted personal message in the 14^th Symphony. And what about the enigmatic musical motto of “DSCH”? It was first heard in Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No 1, and subsequently in his Symphony No 10 and String Quartet No 8, using the notes D, E flat, C, and B (which in German musical nomenclature are D, Es, C, H, pronounced as ‘De-Es-Ce-Ha’), as a musical symbol of the first letter of his first name – D for Dmitri – and the first three letters of his family name – S, C and H for Schostakovich in the older Russian spelling. There have been many interpretations as to why he sometimes chose to include this motto. In his book Testimony, published four years after Shostakovich’s death, musicologist Solomon Volkov published what he declared were secretly arranged interviews with the composer, many pouring intense scorn on the Soviet regime and purporting to reveal unspoken references in his music to life and events in Russia. While some people I have spoken with have expressed their doubts about the book’s veracity, others have claimed its authenticity to me. For Kurt Sanderling, many of Shostakovich’s apparent views in the book concurred with statements the composer had privately made to him. ‘All I can say to you’, he told me, ‘is that much of what Volkov describes in his book I also heard from the mouth of the composer. Volkov’s descriptions agree with what I heard also myself with my own ears.’ That is surely as well-founded evidence as one could hope to find, but I am not yet convinced that it necessarily specifies finite contexts behind Shostakovich’s music.

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Shostakovich and opera

Much earlier in his life, Shostakovich had astounded the world with two operas: the satirical Nos (The Nose), based on Nikolai Gogol’s short story of the same name, which he composed in 1927-28 when he was not yet 22, and his great masterpiece of just a few years later, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, based on the novella by Nikolai Leskov, in which the music oscillates between grotesque humour, biting parody and, at the work’s core, profound and violent tragedy. The composer presented remarkably lucid written introductions to both. Prefacing Nos he wrote: ‘I was attracted to The Nose because of its fantastic, absurd content, presented by Gogol in a very realistic manner. I did not feel the need to back up the satire in Gogol’s text with irony or parody in the music – indeed, on the contrary, the musical accompaniment is perfectly serious. The contrast between the comic action and the serious symphonic music is meant to create a special theatrical effect.’ And for Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk he wrote: ‘This excellent story is a vivid, realistic and tragic portrayal of the fate of a remarkable, talented and intelligent woman who perished in the nightmarish conditions of pre-revolutionary Russia. I would call Lady Macbeth a tragic, satirical opera… By “satirical” I do not mean “funny” or “scoffing”. On the contrary, in Lady Macbeth I wanted to unmask reality and to arouse a feeling of hatred for the tyrannical and humiliating atmosphere in a Russian merchant's household.’

Ironically, Joseph Stalin and his Politburo viewed Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, a scathing indictment of social attitudes in Imperial Russia, as a subversive undermining of Soviet doctrines: ‘All this is coarse, primitive and vulgar’, decried Pravda’s notorious 1936 denunciation. ‘The music quacks, grunts, and growls, and suffocates itself in order to express the love scenes as naturalistically as possible. And “love” is smeared all over the opera in the most vulgar manner… While our critics, including music critics, swear by the name of socialist realism, the stage serves us, in Shostakovich's creation, the coarsest kind of naturalism. He reveals the merchants and the people monotonously and bestially. The predatory merchant woman who scrambles into the possession of wealth through murder is pictured as some kind of “victim” of bourgeois society. Leskov's story has been given a significance which it does not possess’.

After the trauma of having his opera suddenly extinguished after two years of sensational success, Shostakovich never again composed music in this daringly confrontational style – and he never again composed an opera. After he had publicly stated his approval when a critic reviewing the premiere of his Symphony No 5 of 1937 called it “an artist’s response to just criticism”, he also had to contend with being accused by some Western critics of being a supporter of the Communist Soviet regime. This was especially the case after he had joined the Party in 1960 – which it is now known that he was coerced into doing. He had always been an unquestionably strong believer in the tenets of the Russian Revolution, writing in an article in 1931 how, in contrast to many composers from earlier generations ‘We, as revolutionists, have a different conception of music. Lenin himself said that music was a means of unifying broad masses of people. It is not a leader of the masses, perhaps, but certainly an organizing force.’ It is, though, very clear from what Shostakovich did confide to his friends, such as Isaac Glikman, who based his Story of a Friendship on letters the composer had written to him, that he abhorred the political excesses, corruptions and oppressions that he had witnessed in his country. Exactly how or whether his symphonies, quartets, and other chamber and solo music may directly refer to this is ultimately open to conjecture – but what we can know for certain is how precise and demanding Dmitri Shostakovich was about how he wanted his music performed.

Shostakovich’s performance demands

In 1963 Shostakovich visited the Royal Opera House Covent Garden to attend rehearsals for Katerina Ismailova, his revised adaptation of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Sir Edward Downes, who conducted the production, recalled to me: ‘He knew exactly what he wanted, and he went on asking for it until he obtained it. Each day after a rehearsal he wrote some notes and gave them to me the next day. In particular he was very concerned about tempi and dynamics… He was also concerned very, very much about the contrasts between extreme quiet music and extreme loud music. It was violent contrasts that he wanted.’

Shostakovich attended a rehearsal of his song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry at the Edinburgh Festival in 1962. The then Artistic Director of the Festival, the Earl of Harewood remembered: ‘Shostakovich came to a rehearsal, and afterwards he sent Rostropovich to me to say he wouldn’t allow the performance to take place. Rostropovich was full of apologies, but he said, “this is the composer’s message, and I think he may be right”. In the end, I went to see him and remonstrated as much as I could, telling him it was very important that we should do the performance, and he agreed to come and hear another rehearsal and give some advice. He did then allow the performance – whether or not he accepted it I just don’t know. So, he was very particular.’

It is most remarkable, then, that when the, at the time, very young Fitzwilliam Quartet rehearsed the composer’s 13^th Quartet in his presence at York University in November 1972, he gave them little feedback, as the founder member violist Alan George explains: ‘He just sat and listened… Apart from immediately spotting a mistake by our cellist as he had misread the clef marking (easily done!), he had virtually nothing to say. After the performance, the lady who was looking after Shostakovich and his wife Irina on his visit and was also acting as our English/Russian interpreter said to us under her breath “He’s very pleased”, and he was so generous to us that he asked us to go to his hotel the next day and play some more quartets for him – just personally in private. And he later wrote to Benjamin Britten and asked if he could engage us to play the 15^th Quartet at Aldeburgh.’ The Fitzwilliam Quartet went on to become the first quartet to record all the Shostakovich Quartets –and with the added knowledge by then that they were the composer’s ‘preferred performers’ of this repertoire. If one played as Shostakovich wanted, with an understanding of his music as well as with the high technical mastery his writing demands, he happily allowed musicians to express themselves.

We can also discover how astoundingly pin-point Shostakovich’s musical memory was. In 1974, Nos was revived in Russia for the first time in 44 years. Boris Pokrovsky’s radical Moscow Chamber Musical Theatre mounted a production, staged by Pokrovsky and conducted by Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, and Shostakovich attended the rehearsals when the orchestra and singers came together. It was the first time the composer had heard the music in more than four decades, and just a few weeks ago I recorded a unique memory of the event from the production’s assistant director, Grigori Spektor – now 98 years old, and with the mind and energy of a man half his age: ‘The rehearsal began. At this time, I was nearby, and I watched Shostakovich more than the stage, because I had already seen the preliminary rehearsals many times. I was observing the composer for the first time. He didn't turn a single page of the score – but he was aware of everything: where all the instruments of the orchestra entered, all the singers' entries, all the details. After 44 years, he remembered every bar of his score!’.

The complete interview with Spektor will appear in the August edition of Opera Magazine, and I am grateful to the magazine’s Editor for permitting the above quoted advance extract. By way of a finale to this commemoration of Dmitri Shostakovich in the 50^thanniversary year of his death, it is perhaps an ideally apt means of underlining the grippingly powerful effect this sensitive, charismatic, private and – right up to his final days – prodigiously inventive artist exerted with his deep and inspired genius.