This month features: Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov, Faber & Faber, 0571227929, £12.99 |
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It is past midnight. The house is empty. You are completely alone. Classical music (so called) is often amusing, sometimes humorous but very rarely funny. What jokes it contains are often on the level of puns and pranks rather than wit: blowing raspberries on the trombones, getting the violins to miaow like cats; thought it was going to end? well it’s not, and not now, either, nor now, NOW or now! diddle-diddle krump.
The music of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), however, is full of jokes. But many of them are so bleakly black that you don’t laugh so much as wince. And others are so musicologically obscure that, unless you’re a bored second violinist with a crossword mentality, you’re never actually going to ‘get’ them.
At one point in Testimony, Shostakovich comes close to uttering a credo: ‘the things you love too much perish. You have to treat everything with irony, especially the things you hold dear. There’s more of a chance that they’ll survive.’
During Stalin’s reign of terror, Shostakovich witnessed the decimation of Russia’s intelligentsia. Perhaps the blackest joke of all was the composer’s own survival. Given Uncle Joe’s particular difficulties with Shostakovich’s music, it is bizarre that he was spared a one-way trip to the gulag. On January 28, 1936, the Stalin-penned editorial “Muddle Instead of Music” appeared in Pravda, the official Communist Party newspaper.
‘I’ll never forget that day, it’s probably the most memorable of my whole life… The article… changed my entire existence… Everyone turned away from me. There was a phrase in the article saying that all this “could end very badly”. They were all waiting for the bad end to come.’
But Shostakovich survived, and continued to make jokes – musical and other - at the risk of his life. Those times were dangerous for everyone with a sense of humour.
‘Even then [1936] you had to take a guest to the bathroom to tell him a joke. You turned the water full force and then whispered the joke. You even laughed quietly, into your fist.’
Grief, too, could not be openly expressed.
‘Everyone had someone to cry over, but you had to cry silently, under your blanket, so that no one would see.’
All of this was a great distortion, of society and of individuals.
‘So many unsaid things collect in the soul, so much exhaustion and irritation lie as a heavy burden on the psyche. And you must, you must unburden your spiritual world or risk a collapse.’
Shostakovich took the opportunity of the Second World War to unburden. Negative-sounding music was once again permissible. In 1941 his Seventh Symphony, the Leningrad, was an unprecedented global success – and a propaganda vehicle of the highest order. The glasses-wearing, always sickly composer was even pictured on the cover of Time magazine, looking steely with determination and heroically wearing a fireman’s helmet. Yet all of this success was based on a misinterpretation.
‘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.’
And this is where things start to get very complicated. For Testimony is one of the most divisive texts in musical history. Here is what one musicologist wrote:
‘At best, Testimony is a simulated monologue, a montage stripped of its original interrogatory and temporal context, by an unproven ghostwriter who has repeatedly professed ignorance of the basic published materials by and about the composer, and who has admitted to having resorted to guesswork. At worst, Testimony is a fraud.’
The crux of the matter is there in the first line of this article: ‘as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov’. For Shostakovich didn’t write down his memoirs – he held conversations with amanuensis Volkov, during which he recalled the pasts of other people and, through them, his own. The opening lines of his Testimony run:
‘These are not memoirs about myself. These are memoirs about other people. Others will write about us. And naturally they’ll lie through their teeth – but that’s their business.’
It was Volkov who recorded Shostakovich’s words, then shaped them into chapters which the composer then read and initialled. The resulting manuscript was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in 1979.
Those on either side of ‘the Shostakovich debate’ line up as either revisionists and anti-revisionists. By opening with the statement that I thought Shostakovich’s music is full of ironies and jokes, I immediately allied myself with the revisionists. Beyond which point, I’m not going to venture. If you’re interested, there are plenty of websites out there to help try and persuade you one way or the other.
All I will say is that the sense of humour running throughout Testimony is 100% Shostakovich.
‘Everyone wrote denunciations then. Composers probably used music paper and musicologists used plain. And as far as I know, now one of the informers has ever repented. In the middle of the 1950s some of the arrested began returning, the lucky ones who survived. Some of them were shown their so-called files, which included the denunciations. Nowadays the informers and former prisoners meet at concerts. Sometimes they bow.’
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