Music History, Hilary Term, Oxford University, K.Ho         

Even under the most oppressive political and social conditions Dmitry Shostakovich managed to preserve his artistic integrity in his music. In maintaining this degree of integrity Shostakovich wrote pieces that required the listeners to delve deeper than the surface to find the ‘meaning’ of the work. His music has a duality to it. Almost incidentally, this phenomenon forged the much-needed link between surface level music and deeper music that confirmed the validity of music as a valid form of expression that Theodor Adorno wrote to. Shostakovich’s music, when heard on a surface level more or less met the criteria of the Soviet State, but on a deeper level his music mocked and ridiculed that same state. Therefore, if his music is listened to in Adorno’s “correct” fashion, sardonic music of despair, desperation and parody is revealed. This essay will focus on the most public of Shostakovich’s works, the symphonies. I hope to demonstrate the duality that Shostakovich’s music had and the not-so-quiet, but subtle, notion of rebellion they imbued. A survey of his works set against the context of the Soviet State, in particular, provides the listener with a chronology that reveals a pattern of State suppression and Shostakovich’s clever responses to official tastes.

          In the introduction to Testimony Solomon Volkov lays out the notion of yurodivy:

The yurodivy has the gift to see and hear what others know nothing about. But he tells the world about his insights in an intentionally paradoxical way, in code. He plays the fool, while actually being a persistent exposer of evil and injustice. The yurodivy is an anarchist and individualist, who in his public role breaks the commonly held ‘moral’ laws of behaviour and flouts conventions. But he sets strict limitations, rules and taboos for himself. (Volkov 1987:xxi)

Shostakovich was certainly played for a fool with various state campaigns of musical repression that were directed at the mass of Soviet composers, but with him as the prodigal scapegoat. However, Shostakovich was no fool, and authorities recognized the power and usefulness of Shostakovich’s music. Volkov argues that Shostakovich jumped through the hoops of Soviet cultural policy, however, but still expressed himself in music. As Stalin consolidated his power, and replaced moderates like Anataol Lunacharsky (the People’s Commissar of Public Education) with more hard-liners like Zhdanov and Krennikov, the role of yurodivy became much more apparent and he had to learn to adapt. (Ibid.) Shostakovich was quick to realize the failure of the socialist paradise, but equally had the fortune of being recognized as an asset by Stalin, and was spared from a ‘bad ending’ due to a campaign that focused on his Lady Macbeth of Mtensk (1934).

          The story of Lady Macbeth serves as a parable for Shostakovich’s interaction with the state. A full two years after its premiere, Lady Macbeth, after all the national and international acclaim, was lambasted an unsigned review in the party organ, Pravda. Any acclaim and prestige Shostakovich had quickly evaporated and Shostakovich was immediately in danger. The article lambasted Shostakovich, saying that the work took for granted the most idyllic composing environment, that it alienated “appreciative audiences” that it contained “deliberate dissonance,” “snatches of melody,” and that it was “musical noise.” (Pravda in Strunk: 1936) The opera, it was argued, threatened the foundations of the socialist state, that it was petty and bourgeois. In reality, the attack on the opera indicated a new crackdown on the relatively ‘liberal’ artistic climate in the Soviet Union. Despite the open threat of reprisal against the composer, Shostakovich was not purged. Instead, as Volkov asserts, Stalin gave Shostakovich a reprieve. Volkov again draws on his notion of yurodivy in an attempt to explain why Shostakovich was spared:

In the framework of Russian culture the extraordinary relationship between Stalin and Shostakovich was profoundly traditional: the ambivalent ‘dialogue’ between tsar and yurodivy, and between tsar and poet playing the role of yurodivy in order to survive, takes on a tragic incandescence. (Volkov 1987: xxiv)

Shostakovich was well aware of the fluid nature of the artistic climate in Russia. No matter what the initial and critical reception was, the ultimate judgment of his music was up to the party elite:  

It didn’t matter how the audience reacted to your work or if the critics liked it. All that had no meaning in the final analysis. There was only one question of life or death. How did the leader like your opus. I stress: life or death, because, we are talking about life or death here, literally, not figuratively. That’s what you must understand. (Shostakovich 1979: 72)

Shostakovich not only recognized his predicament, but also recognized that the tastes of the leadership, no matter how distorted and whimsical they may be, they represent the tastes of the people. (Ibid. 92) However, if we view his position in relation to politics on the whole the picture becomes more varied.

Noted Russian music critic Alexander Ivashkin writes about Shostakovich’s music as a reality for the masses to cling on to since lives of the proletarians were so much like a Potemkin village that substance for them can be found in the form of Shostakovich’s symphonies:

In the symphonies and quartets of Dmitry Shostakovich the entire finale appears to be a big, non-structural coda. Sometimes the whole work is only coda (like the Fifteenth String Quartet.) The Russian attitude tends towards this development. The large form becomes more and more irrational, less and less structural. And that is because nowhere, except in Russia, have art and music been so firmly bond to the political and social situation. Nowhere, except in Russia, has art been such a substitute for real life. Nowhere, except in Russia, has the real life of a great country with enormous intellectual potential been so empty and hopeless…. (Ivashkin in Haskell 1996: 381)

That fusion of State and society during Soviet times that Ivashkin talked about, cannot be understated. In the Soviet Union music and the arts had to serve a purpose, to rouse the masses. Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky damns the conclusion that this reduction of music into a purposeful device for political propaganda. Arguing that Russian music was already in the process of liberating itself form the “rigid academicism” of Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky paints a picture of Bolshevik opportunism. Stravinsky argues that in the early days of the Revolution, the Bolsheviks jumped at the opportunity of having pre-packaged revolutionary music to rouse the masses, while not having to do anything but sit back and reap the benefits of the emergence of a new musical style in Russia. (Stravinsky 1942: 103) Stravinsky was adamantly against this “stupid concept” of art and culture being useful in a political sense, decrying it as a product of a society that was devoid of true intellect that, in turn, underpinned genuine culture. (Ibid.: 117-118)

Lacking any authentic forms of expression of its own, the communist patriotism imposed upon the Soviet government by the pressure of events (‘Thou thinkest to press, and thou art pressed’) expressed itself, via subversion, through one of the purist masterpieces of classical Russian music, a masterpiece which had been conceived and composed in entirely different circumstances and embodied and entirely different meaning. (Stravinsky 1942: 113)

However, Shostakovich was wise to this and tried to work within the framework as the yurodivy to reveal the State for what it really was, however, this was not always successful as the powers that be were sometimes too great. Stravinsky’s points could no more have been realized than with the mythology surrounding Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony (1941). Written during the German siege of Leningrad during 1941, Shostakovich wanted to present a portrait of Leningrad before the war, and emphasized the mood of a requiem was central to the piece as it was to mourn the loss peace due to the Nazis. However, the authorities took the famous “march episode” from the first movement and turned it into a representation of the Nazi onslaught, and turned the entire piece into a propaganda device rallying for victory and perseverance in the face of the Germans. (Volkov 1987: xxviii) Shostakovich himself comments:

The Seventh Symphony had been planned before the war and consequently it simply cannot be seen as a reaction to Hitler’s attack. The ‘invasion theme’ has nothing to do with the attack. I was thinking of other enemies of humanity when I composed the theme. (Shostakovich 1979: 118)

With this piece, and with many others o follow, we see the artists intentionally ignored. Instead of music becoming a commodity as Adorno warned, here it becomes a propaganda device. Still though, Adorno’s advice for ‘true’ listening can be headed here, and Shostakovich’s original intentions can be heard. Stravinsky would come to warn against this notion in Russia, but the politicization of music was commonplace throughout the war. 

          To illustrate this point, we can refer back to Stites.

The warring nations of 1939-1945 showed an extraordinary tendency to exalt and revere classical music and, through media promotion turn it into something like a popular art. The occupied nations treasured their own musical heritage, particularly the romantic productions of the previous century. The music of Dvorak, Chopin, Rachmaninov, and Grieg in American radio and movies was associated with the heroic struggles of beleaguered peoples. In war-wracked Russia the most mournful strains of Chopin, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky filled the concert halls and airwaves. On the radio, Russian classics lorded it over folk music, lyrical songs, and military band music. Soviet composers turned their talents to war-related subjects—Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” Symphony being the most famous of these. (Stites 1995: 103)

This universal popularity of the Seventh Symphony might have worked against Shostakovich in the end. Against a backdrop of increasing tensions between the Soviet Union and the West, backlash on the part of weary State authorities against Shostakovich’s popularity in the West in the late ’40s was, perhaps, a result of this politicization of classical music and mass culture. Stites:

Andrei Zhdanov and his associates railed against foreign influence and formalism and made it crystal clear that Soviet art was superior to all others. He called for a fusion of politics and culture, the hegemony of party over art, “mass interest” over the whims of artists, and sharp hostility to both elitism in art and to popular culture…. Shostakovich and Prokofiev fell into the mesh of discord once again along with other major Soviet composers because Zhdanov (and Stalin) saw them drifting back into the sinful zone of formalism, abstraction, atonalism, and excessive complexity—all traceable to foreign sources. (Stites 1995: 117)

However, Shostakovich’s reputation was set and he felt secure enough to write a non-triumphant Ninth Symphony, much to the irritation of Stalin. Stalin had demanded a triumphant Ninth Symphony, celebrating him and the Russian defeat of the Nazis, complete with double choir, huge fanfares--the regular propaganda bonanza. (Shostakovich 1979: 106) Stalin, according to Shostakovich had “went off the deep end,” and was completely shocked at the subdued and embittered ironic piece of ‘cheerful’ Symphony which Shostakovich produced. (Ibid.: xxx)

After the Ninth, it can be argued that Shostakovich had somewhat of a more liberal attitude towards expression in his writing, especially after Stalin’s death in 1953. It was after that the First Violin Concerto and the Fourth Symphony were finally released. This notion of a ‘new day’ in Russia can be heard in the finale of the Tenth Symphony (1953). The Eleventh Symphony (1954) might be viewed as a commentary on the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Spring. The “Babi Yar” Symphony (number Thirteen) can definitely be viewed as a commentary against forgetting Russian and German anti-Semitism. (Volkov ix, 120) However, there is always an air of fear and represssion in his music, which stems from the fears that Shostakovich had about being purged.

The techniques Shostakovich used to get his characteristic style are difficult to pin down, It is my feel that by using tragic material with a fervent intensity for his symphonic and instrumental works, Shostakovich was not only thumbing his nose to the likes of Stalin and Zhdanov, as tragic subject matter had no real place in art according to official standards, but giving the audience what it wanted. The incorporation of folk music in Shostakovich’s music was a long Russian tradition continued, but with Shostakovich it became more and more political. In his examination of popular song, historian Richard Stites cites that Shostakovich would incorporate popular revolutionary songs sung in factories like the “Workers’ Merseillaise,” “Internationale,” and “Varshavianka,” into his works, like the opening of the Eleventh Symphony (1957) Stites offers this:

Revolutionary lyrics were funereal, visionary, accusatory, or menacing, but the tunes were overwhelmingly mournful. As illegal sounds of protest, they had small audiences but they unquestionably deepened and defined radical sentiments of those who sang them. After 1917, as hymns of a Bolshevik religiosity, they nearly drowned out all other forms of public celebratory music. (Stites 1995: 16) 

In terms of music for the masses—symphonic writing and concerto writing—the contradictory style of Shostakovich is most evident. The broad appeal, almost primal in nature—rhythmic, unrelenting, tormented, folk song filled—can be contrasted with the deeper meaning in his music. This notion of deeper meaning is hard to pin down analytically, but while symphonies and concertos are very public works, Shostakovich used them to communicate on an intimate level with his audiences. Such analysts as Norris say that, analytically, the defining features of Shostakovich’s sardonic style are difficult to pin down. (Norris 1981: 166) However, it is my sense that by engaging the ear with juxtapositions and distortions of folk material Stites pointed out which was common to the masses, and by engaging the mind by providing notes or subtitles, Shostakovich was appealing in a deeper level to his audiences. On the surface, this may have been all well and good to the authorities, but the question that got him into trouble those Soviet authorities was what he was really communicating to the masses. Hence, Shostakovich was living up to his yurodivy title by working within this oppressive environment to produce music that mocked the very structures that led to its inception.

Perhaps, on first glance, the confusion between politically motivated music (that is devoid of a true meaning) and genuine ‘artistic’ music (that has real expression) may be applicable to the works of Shostakovich. But this is not the case; in fact, by meeting the requirements of Soviet authorities in the most mocking of ways, I would contend that Shostakovich’s music is filled with a greater amount of expressiveness than many would give him credit for. Remembering Theodor Adorno’s point of how music is listened to, Shostakovich can be viewed as the link between music written for the masses that actually has a ‘deeper’ meaning, which is still a valid form of expression.

It was with all these considerations that Shostakovich was thumbing his nose at Soviet authorities. Therefore, it is on this basis that Shostakovich showed his love for Russia, by mocking the authorities who ruled it during his lifetime. Shostakovich mocked the leaders who ran his country, but ended up speaking directly to his countrymen through music in the face of adversity.  

Sources Cited:

Anonymous. “Chaos Instead of Music,” in Pravda (28 January 1936) in Robert Morgan, Ed. Strunk’s Course Readings in Music History, vol. 7.. London: W.W. Norton, 1950, 1998.

Alexander Ivashkin. “The Paradox of Russian Non-Liberty,” in Musical Quarterly, 1992 in Harry Haskell Ed., The Attentive Listener. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Christopher Norris, Ed. Shostakovich: The man and his music. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1982, 1992.

Richard Stites. Russian popular culture: Entertainment and society since 1900. CUP, 1992, 1995.

Igor Stravinsky. The Poetics of Music: In the Form of Six Lessons. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942, 1998.

Solomon Volkov, Ed. Testimony: The Memoirs of Dimitri Shostakovich, As related to and edited by Solomon Volkov. London: Faber & Faber, 1979, 1987.

© 1999, K.Ho