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Dmitri Shostakovich’s output (147 opus numbers), one of the most abundant, performed, and recorded of the twentieth century, is inseparable from the political and cultural context in which he lived. Much of it written in Stalin’s Russia, then that of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, Shostakovich’s music records the career of a composer living under a political system in which the arts held a key ideological function and were judged mainly on their cultural impact on the people.
Shostakovich’s precocity and exceptional gifts attracted notice early, but by the same token they also attracted constant surveillance of his work. Following the fluctuations of the party line, they might take the form of official compositions, often conventional and of limited musical interest, or more audacious, avant-garde, subversive creations, to cite the two extremes. The ambivalence of his language frustrates any musicological reading that tries to distinguish clearly between “free,” personal works and constrained ones that merely decorate an official façade. Fundamentally, this ambiguity appears as an essential characteristic of his work, in that it applies just as much to the composer’s personality (was he a communist? a resister? a dissident?) as to the music (alternately serious and grotesque, ironic and edifying, detached and charged with pathos) and to the musical language itself (encompassing tonality, modality, atonality, tonal dodecaphony, and neoclassicism). Indeed, critical musicology and historiography concerned with Shostakovich’s work and life have evolved to a remarkable degree since the 1970s, in tune with various controversies and with shifts in the political and ideological balance of power in our world.
Shostakovich was already composing in the 1910s, mainly for orchestra (notably in the Scherzi, op. 1 of 1919 and op. 7 of 1923-1924, in which the orchestration owes much to Tchaikovsky). He also wrote for piano, his own instrument, on which he accompanied silent films starting in 1923 — see the Eight Preludes, op. 2 (1918-1920), and Three Fantastic Dances, op. 5 (1920-1922, premiered in 1925), as well as the Sonata No. 1, op. 12 (1926), and Aphorisms, op. 13 (1927), which betray the influence of piano works by Prokofiev, Scriabin, and Glazunov (the last of whom, as director of the Petrograd Conservatoire, considerably aided the young composer in his studies after the loss of his father in 1922). It was in May 1926 that Shostakovich first made a name for himself, with the success of the work written as a capstone for his composition degree, the First Symphony, which communicates humor, dance, and the grotesque through an expanded tonality and an orchestration rooted in the great Russian tradition of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Scriabin, early Stravinsky, and Prokofiev. This sensational rise to fame immediately garnered Shostakovich a commission for a work to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, which he fulfilled with his Second Symphony, op. 14, dedicated “To October.” Despite audacious harmony and orchestration in the early movements, which reflect the Constructivism that was also of interest to Prokofiev and Alexander Mosolov at the time, the final movement, one of his first essays in vocal music, sets an insipid and predictably revolutionary text by the poet Alexandr Bezymensky — “horrid, abominable verses,” Shostakovich would later say. They are no doubt similar in that respect to those written by Semyon Kirsanov for the final chorus of Shostakovich’s Third Symphony, op. 20 (1929), subtitled “First of May,” which, despite exalting the proletarian revolution and portraying the uprising of the communist people against the Czarist old regime, is nevertheless considerably more elaborate. In these two symphonies, the motives are non-thematic, based entirely on relationships of contrast through juxtaposition (of dynamics, texture, tempo, etc.), and served by a language in which an overgrowth of polyphony often suspends tonality. In the orchestration, the towering figure of Rimsky-Korsakov remained a point of reference. Critics and an enthusiastic public praised the young Shostakovich for his precocity, and often compared him to Glazunov, who also used dense polyphony.
The Nose, op. 15, composed between 1927 and 1929, marks the start of a transition period in which Shostakovich embarked on a collaboration with the avant-garde man of the stage Vsevolod Meyerhold. This opera, which displays the variety and eclecticism of light music, owes something to Shostakovich’s work around the same time for the cinema, the stage, and dance (The New Babylon, op. 18, 1929-1930, would become his first of about forty film scores; in his music for the play The Bedbug, op. 19, 1929, by Vladimir Mayakovsky, a foxtrot recalls that Shostakovich playfully orchestrated the famous song Tea for Two by Vincent Youmans in 1927; and among his ballets are The Golden Age, op. 22, 1929, and The Bolt, op. 27, 1930). The Nose premiered in January 1930 but was quickly withdrawn (it would be revived only in 1974, one year before Shostakovich’s death, by the Moscow Chamber Orchestra under Gennady Rozhdestvensky). The opera shows an audacity and liberty of tone that, though tolerated during the cultural ebullience of the 1910s and 1920s, would be censured and banned in the 1930s. Stalin, having amassed total power, now controlled the whole artistic sphere, notably through the Union of Soviet Composers, created in 1932 to replace all other existing musical organizations. The Nose, written at the dawn of the Stalin era, presented a worrisome depiction of police repression under the rule of Czar Nicholas I. Shostakovich used unprecedented techniques to express the satire and grotesquery of Nikolai Gogol’s story: the voices are set in extremely wide ranges, going as far as screams. The influence of popular music (jazz, film music, folk dances) is unmistakable, alongside noises of farts, burps, and erotic moans. One scene in Act III, showing the simultaneous reading of two letters, has the stage split in two, like a split screen in film. Act I includes an interlude for solo percussion, as in Varèse’s Ionisation, to portray the implacable character of the police machinery and the fear incited by it.
Though a success at its premiere in 1934, the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, op. 29 (1930-1932), based on a novella by Nikolai Leskov, was targeted by an article in Pravda on 28 January 1936, “Muddle Instead of Music.” The doctrine of Socialist Realism, used after 1935 to condemn composers such as Schoenberg, Milhaud, and Stravinsky, prohibited harsh dissonances, atonality, melodies “impossible to memorize,” and references to jazz. On these bases, it held Shostakovich’s opera to be cacophonic and pornographic (particularly the trombones’ evocation of the sexual act between Sergei and Katerina). Political tones are again extremely present (notably in the heroine’s poisoning of her tyrannical stepfather), which also provoked its condemnation. Only after Stalin’s death did Shostakovich dare to revise the work as Katerina Ismailova, op. 114 (1954-1963), attenuating the explicit character of the crudest scenes and touching up the melodic lines and brass orchestration.
Preferring to leave his Fourth Symphony, op. 43, in a drawer (dating from 1935-1936, it would only be premiered in December 1961), Shostakovich redeemed himself with another instrumental work, the Symphony No. 5, op. 47 of 1937, which he officially presented as “a Soviet artist’s creative response to just criticism.”1 Its imposing and highly transparent form in four movements presents a post-Romantic trajectory that seems to recall Sibelius and Mahler. Shostakovich stayed away from ballet and vocal music for a while, and never finished another large project for the theater (the opera The Gamblers, op. 63a, after Gogol, on which he worked in 1941-1942, would remain incomplete). This avoidance no doubt explains some of his interest in the string quartet, initiated in 1938 with the First Quartet, op. 49, a genre he later valued greatly, as well as in the re-orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, op. 58 (1939-1940). These projects were a more neutral kind of work, less likely to bring down criticism from the regime.
Historical circumstances in the early 1940s, namely the siege of Leningrad, finally created the opportunity for Shostakovich to be proclaimed an official composer and celebrated as a hero. The case of the Seventh Symphony, op. 60 (1941), played in a besieged Leningrad on 9 August 1942, points to the ambiguity inherent in every creative act: presented as a program symphony about the resistance of the people of Leningrad to the siege by German troops, the symphony was in fact written before the beginning of the conflict. The famous “invasion” theme from the first movement, which gives rise to twelve variations over an ostinato in the snare drum, showcasing Shostakovich’s inexhaustible fund of counterpoint, would be raised to the status of an official hymn in the victorious USSR and broadcast around the world (allowing Bartók to parody it in his Concerto for Orchestra, written in the United States in 1943).
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In 1948, Stalin and his lieutenant Andrei Zhdanov, displeased with the opera The Great Friendship (1947) by Vano Muradeli, launched an “anti-formalist” campaign designed to expose the
tendency [that] expresses a formalism alien to Soviet art, a rejection of the classical heritage under the false pretext of the search for novelty, a rejection of the popular character of music, a refusal to serve the people, all that for the benefit of the narrowly individual emotions of a small group of chosen aesthetes.2
The presence of text and the primacy of melody were back in favor and outrageously valorized. Numerous works by Shostakovich were forbidden, and he, obliged to engage in self-criticism, conformed to the new rule of “songful” music and priority for vocal works based on folklore. His From Jewish Folk Poetry, op. 79 (1948), officially follows this line, though it fell afoul of the antisemitic campaign launched by Stalin in January 1949; this song cycle belongs to a series of works in an idiom close to klezmer, along with the First Violin Concerto, op. 77, and the String Quartet No. 4, op. 83 (1948-1949). In the oratorio The Song of the Forests, op. 81 (1949), on a text by Yevgeny Dolmatovsky that celebrates the reforestation decreed in 1946, the people are represented by voices: solo bass, solo tenor, mixed choir, and children’s choir (additionally, the orchestra includes a band of six trumpets and six trombones). Shostakovich’s first work for a cappella choir, the Ten Songs on Texts by Revolutionary Poets, op. 88 (1951), again takes up Mussorgsky’s idea of the choir as representation of the people. In a more sarcastic vein, Shostakovich composed a jeering score for Mikheil Chiaureli’s propaganda film The Fall of Berlin, op. 82, in which a parody of a German march is meant to show Hitler as a buffoon who lost the war through his own incompetence. The Anti-Formalist Rayok, left in a drawer and premiered in 1989 by Rostropovich, no doubt dates from the same period. In this cantata, Stalin, Zhdanov, and the apparatchik Dmitri Shepilov are roundly ridiculed; each sings various absurd official speeches to the accompaniment of sardonic music that includes a parody of “Souliko,” Stalin’s favorite tune.
Instrumental music, lacking a text to guide interpretation, was held suspect by the regime. Though Shostakovich’s maxim “Those who have ears will hear” hints at a will to hold onto hope, he remained vulnerable to accusations of formalism. A new task emerged for composers: to create a discourse around the work. By presenting an acceptable, particularized, official version of the intentions supposedly communicated in the work, this discourse became an indispensable way to orient interpretations, while still preserving the work’s ambiguity; in short, doublespeak became routine. Whatever the case, reference to the past came to seem necessary, whence the revival of classical forms and movements (waltzes, scherzos, passacaglias, fugues). A notable example is Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues, op. 87 (1950-1951), written to commemorate the two-hundredth anniversary of the death of Bach and dedicated to Tatiana Nikolayeva, a laureate of the International Bach Competition, for which Shostakovich had served on the jury in Leipzig in 1950. The influence of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier is also visible in the fifteen string quartets, each in a different key, on their way to sketching out an incomplete cycle of twenty-four.
In 1953, the year of Stalin’s death, Shostakovich composed his Tenth Symphony, op. 93, of which the second movement, an implacable scherzo, is said to be a musical portrait of the Little Father of the Peoples. Similarly, the second movement of the Eleventh Symphony, op. 103, subtitled “The Year 1905” (1956-1957), portrays the crowd massed in front of the Winter Palace on 9 January 1905, the day known as “Bloody Sunday,” which saw the repression of the Russians’ first attempt at a revolution. Shostakovich drew on revolutionary folklore for the main themes of this work. All the same, ambiguity persists: the musicologist Lev Lebedinsky — a friend of Shostakovich — heard in it not “the salvos of the police firing on the crowd before the Winter Palace in 1905, but the thunder of the Russian tanks in the streets of Budapest” in 1956.3
Shostakovich’s growing attention to the string quartet, especially after 1955, reveals the same orientation toward autonomous music. These often-introspective works sometimes harbor encrypted messages or autobiography. The Eighth String Quartet, op. 110 (1960), officially dedicated “To the victims of the war and of fascism,” features, in addition to a traditional Jewish theme also found in the last movement of the Second Piano Trio, op. 67 (1944), the DSCH motif (derived from the German spelling of his name, Dmitri Schostakowitsch, where S = E-flat and H = B) also found in the Tenth and Fifteenth Symphonies, the First Violin Concerto, the Second Piano Sonata, and the Fifth and Seventh String Quartets, where it appears as a recurring motif, an idée fixe.
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Rehabilitated in 1953 and again in 1958 during the period of de-Stalinization, Shostakovich organized performances of older works that he had hidden. He also turned toward vocal music. Some of the texts, set in Russian translation, are openly subversive or have an autobiographical tenor, sketching out a musical aesthetic of death and mourning (his health was further weakened by a heart attack in 1966). For instance, Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s verses for the Symphony No. 15 “Babi Yar,” op. 113 (1962) for bass, men’s choir, and orchestra, refer to the mass grave of Jews discovered in the Ukraine; the premier of the work was turbulent and led to an open rift with the regime. Other examples include the sonnets in the Suite on Poems by Michelangelo, op. 145 (1974), for bass and piano (orchestrated as op. 145a); the poems by Lorca, Apollinaire, Küchelbecker, and Rilke in the Fourteenth Symphony, op. 135 (1969), for soprano, bass, and chamber orchestra, which concern the deprivation of artistic liberty; and poems by Alexander Blok (Seven Romances, op. 127, 1967), Marina Tsvetaeva (Six Poems for Contralto and Orchestra, op. 143, 1973), and Dostoyevsky (Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin, op. 146, 1974). Even more than in the previous decade, Shostakovich’s style is characterized by clarity and sparsity in the lines and harmony, narrativity, orchestration favoring low timbres, and reminiscences of Mussorgsky, especially in the Second Cello Concerto, op. 126 (1966), and the Second Violin Concerto, op. 129 (1967).
Besides an ever-growing dominance of the intervals of fourths and fifths, one marker of the greater musical freedom in Shostakovich’s late work is what André Lischke calls “the presence and negation of dodecaphony.”4 The chromatic aggregate is objectively discernable, but serial combinatorics are absent, and the rows are deliberately arranged in a tonal perspective, as seen in the Violin Sonata, op. 134 (1968), the Fourteenth Symphony, the String Quartet No. 13, op. 138 (1970), the Suite on Poems by Michelangelo, and the String Quartet No. 12, op. 133 (1968), in which the theme is at once dodecaphonic and laden with tonal indicators:
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Despite his failing health, and a musical style that had evolved little (perhaps because it was already fully in place by the 1930s), Shostakovich in his last decade reached a sort of tragic fulfilment. The theme of death is omnipresent in his music. Self-parody and the grotesque dominate the Five Romances on Texts from Krokodil Magazine, op. 121; the Preface to the Complete Edition of My Works and Brief Reflections on This Preface, op. 123 (1965-1966); the very official but somewhat offbeat and ironical symphonic poems October, op. 131 (1967); and March of the Soviet Militia, op. 139 (1970). A nostalgic, disillusioned outlook on artistic creation comes to the fore, as witness the proliferation of homages, allusions, quotations, and self-quotations (for example, in the Fifteenth Symphony, the Michelangelo Suite, and the Viola Sonata, op. 147). Chamber music, and especially the string quartet (his fifteenth and last is characterized as his requiem or musical testament), takes on the function of private journal in which a twilight language, quite distant from that of the official compositions, comes into its own.
Subject to the vicissitudes of Soviet artistic policy, Shostakovich’s output, at least in the interim between his blazing modernist debut in the 1920s and his return to a freer language after 1960, prolongs Romanticism or post-Romanticism. From those eras, he took his topics (funeral marches, waltzes, scherzos, program music, concertos, giant symphonies, etc.) and sometimes treated them in a grotesque or sarcastic mode tinged with Neoclassicism, while scheming to undermine the tonal system (through dominant substitution, total chromaticism, bi-modality). As the composer Claudy Malherbe observes,
His obstinate attachment to tonality was not mere blindness but strategic: the novelty that can no longer be given to him by construction will come from deconstruction. So his phrases blubber, or turn around on themselves in a loop. The directionality formerly ensured by the play of cadences and modulations becomes muddled, sometimes to the point of immobility. Hollow, uncertain sonorities are often preferred to clear, affirmative ones. Quotations and borrowings seem incongruous once placed in a context that challenges their original meanings.5
Malherbe points to the quotation from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata in the third movement of the Viola Sonata, Shostakovich’s last work:
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Like its creator’s own personality, the music of Shostakovich remains profoundly and indefectibly ambiguous: imprinted with multiple and often contradictory interpretations and official commentaries, prey to the ideological and political controversies played out between the USSR and the West, and revived in the hope that it might reveal the coded messages of a musical autobiography.
Translated from the French by Tadhg Sauvey
1. SHOSTAKOVICH, “My Creative Response,” in the newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva, 25 January 1938. ↩
2. Andrey ZHDANOV, Sur la littérature, la philosophie et la musique, Paris, Norman Béthune, 1972, p. 74. ↩
3. Unpublished article cited in Elizabeth WILSON, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, London and Boston, Faber & Faber, 1994, p. 317-318. ↩
4. André LISCHKE, “Présence et négation du dodécaphonisme dans les dernières œuvres de Dimitri Chostakovitch,” Analyse musicale, Oct. 1989, p. 31-37. ↩
5. Claudy MALHERBE, “Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui. L’espace musical contemporain, une logique de la différence,” in Hugues Dufourt and Joël-Marie Fauquet (eds.), La musique depuis 1945. Matériau, esthétique et perception, Liège: Mardaga, 1997, p. 248-249. ↩
Do you notice a mistake?