Just shy of 50 years ago, in early August 1975, while sitting in a dingy Prague cafe over my morning coffee, I learned of the death of composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Russians were hardly popular in Czechoslovakia then — not so long before, Soviet tanks had rolled in to crush the Prague Spring of 1968, an event that finally killed off what little idealism Shostakovich and other intellectuals still harbored about the Soviet regime. But a short article did appear in a Communist Party newspaper.
Struggling with my rudimentary command of Czech to grasp the details, I tried to comprehend the significance of this momentous loss to world music. At the time, my knowledge of Shostakovich’s work was limited, but I had become obsessed in college with Leonard Bernstein’s recording of the Fifth Symphony. The alternating moments of ironic exuberance and black anguish puzzled and overwhelmed me — as they had so many others since the piece’s dramatic premiere in Leningrad in 1937.
Even in Moscow, official Communist sources underplayed the news of Shostakovich’s death, reflecting the regime’s ambivalent attitude toward the composer and the taunting duality of his oracular music. Pravda waited several days to publish an obituary that appeared on page three, full of the cliches of Soviet Party-speak lauding the composer as a faithful Communist who had devoted his life and art to the struggle for peace and friendship between nations. In the West, however, Shostakovich’s passing made headlines. The New York Times ran a long unsigned obituary on the front page, calling him “the Soviet Union’s most celebrated composer” and “a committed Communist who accepted the sometimes harsh ideological criticism to which his modernistic works were periodically subjected.”
A little more than four years later, in the autumn of 1979, Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov, appeared in the West, launching a radical reappraisal of the composer’s reputation and musical legacy. I was in Moscow and had a front-row seat for the operatic furor that followed in official Soviet media and musical circles. A long essay spreading across two-thirds of the editorial back page of Literaturnaya Gazeta, the Soviet equivalent of The New York Review of Books, denounced Volkov, a Russian emigre living in New York, as “a bedbug who latched onto Shostakovich” and the memoirs as “an accumulation of scandalous speculations on the composer’s supposedly embittered nature.” Banned in the USSR but still available (in English translation) through underground channels, Testimony fell like a bombshell on Moscow’s musical and intellectual community.
“Shostakovich was always held up to us a model of the loyal Soviet artist,” a literature professor friend told me at the time. “Now we see that it just wasn’t so.” Marina Sabinina, author of the best study of Shostakovich’s symphonies (unfortunately available only in Russian) and a friend of the composer for years, stayed up all night reading the copy of Testimony I had managed to smuggle in from a trip abroad. Although she had some questions about the alleged closeness of Volkov and Shostakovich, she told me she clearly heard the voice of the man she had known and revered in its pages.
Almost immediately, however, several American scholars, led by Laurel Fay, attacked Volkov’s book as a fraud, claiming he had misrepresented his relationship with the composer and that the pair’s “conversations” had in fact never taken place. This nasty name-calling campaign continued for decades. The “Shostakovich wars” still rage today, complete with down-and-dirty polemics that resemble nothing so much as one of those scandal scenes from a Dostoyevsky novel, ending with hairpulling, indignant shrieks, and fatally besmirched reputations.
But other prominent figures, including cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, Shostakovich’s son Maxim, and conductor Kirill Kondrashin came to Volkov’s defense. In the 45 years since Testimony first appeared, many other publications have fundamentally endorsed its portrait of the composer as a closet critic whose music bristles with ironic and bitter subtext. Meanwhile, Testimony has become one of the bestselling books ever written about a classical composer and has informed discussion of Shostakovich ever since.
A friend of the composer for 40 years, Kondrashin saw Shostakovich as “the moral conscience of music in Russia,” observing that his music was “inseparable from the events of his life.” Another Soviet maestro, Kurt Sanderling, who first met Shostakovich in 1943 and worked with him for decades, called the composer “a teller of history. … He and his music were conditioned by the world he was living in. ... At the time, one had to lead two lives: one for the public eye, the other privately.”
At rehearsals, Sanderling often entertained musicians with insightful disquisitions on the hidden subtext of Shostakovich’s symphonies, based on his conversations with the composer. These insights have enriched his recordings, including his heartfelt and vivid 1973 live account of the 10th Symphony with the New Philharmonia Orchestra, recently issued in a remastered version by ICA Classics. Here, the obsessive repetition of Shostakovich’s personal motif (D-S-C-H) — a coded message telegraphed in many works of his later years — heralds and celebrates his personal liberation after Stalin’s death in 1953.
Shostakovich’s stature has grown over time, with some ups and downs. During the 1960s, his music was actually “hip,” as Tom Godell, a longtime programmer and host for classical music radio, told me, remembering that Shostakovich was John Lennon’s favorite symphonic composer. But Godell added that, in his view, Shostakovich’s output was “uneven” and that “politics had coopted” the composer.
Even today, Shostakovich’s music is used for unsavory propaganda purposes. On the 80th anniversary of the Leningrad premiere of the wartime “Leningrad” Symphony (No. 7) — Aug. 9, 2022, six months after Russia commenced its invasion of Ukraine — President Vladimir Putin presided in St. Petersburg over a performance by the Russian National Youth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Yuri Bashmet. “Shostakovich’s ‘Leningrad’ Symphony continues to evoke the strongest feelings in new generations,” Putin told an outdoor audience. “It makes them share in the bitterness of loss and the joy of victory, love for the motherland and readiness to defend it.” From allegedly Nazi Ukrainians, in this case.
Since his death, Shostakovich’s vast and influential body of work in many genres has gradually moved from the periphery to the center of the classical repertoire. In the post-Cold War era, we have come to hear Shostakovich’s music with post-ideological ears, appreciating more than ever its craftsmanship, emotional power, fearlessness, and philosophical depth.
But Shostakovich’s relationship to the Soviet regime continues to fascinate. Was he a loyal but conflicted servant, a coerced cheerleader for the Communist motherland? Or was he an embittered and alienated closet dissident, inserting into his scores secret anti-Soviet messages intended to be decoded as anguished cries of protest? The music doesn’t make it easy for us to decide where Shostakovich, the Hamlet of Soviet music, stood. How can we reconcile the apparently gung-ho socialist sentiments expressed in Symphonies Nos. 3 and 4 — full of cheering crowds and the “language of factories” — with the bitter disillusionment and sarcasm that explodes in Symphony No. 13 (“Babi Yar”) and especially Symphony No. 14, a bleak postmodernist song cycle about death, described by former longtime Los Angeles KUSC classical host Jim Svejda as “music to go out and shoot yourself by”?
These questions raise another: Should the issue of Shostakovich’s political convictions (or lack thereof) change the way we listen to his music anyway?
For Boston Symphony Orchestra Music Director Andris Nelsons, who experienced the Soviet system firsthand growing up in Latvia and has spent the last 10 years studying and conducting Shostakovich’s music, the answer is clear, as he told me in an interview in his office at Boston’s Symphony Hall. “The greatness of his music lies beyond politics. It speaks to people whether they know the times he lived in or not.” And yet Nelsons, who recently finished the monumental project of recording the complete cycle of Shostakovich’s symphonies, concertos, and other orchestral works for Deutsche Grammophon, understands that the composer’s relationship with the Soviet regime was complicated. “Shostakovich believed in the Soviet regime. You can hear this at the beginning of his career. He believed in Communism — so did I! We all did.”
“In Shostakovich’s music you can feel the extreme strength of a fragile person,” Nelsons continued, speaking in Russian. “He was nervous, and not physically athletic. When you see photos of what he looked like, and then you hear his music, it doesn’t come together somehow. He had a sort of whiny voice. The external Shostakovich and the internal Shostakovich of his music somehow don’t seem to correspond.”
That Shostakovich stands as the most important and influential Russian composer of the 20th century is for many now a settled fact. Festivals all over the world are celebrating his memory this year, including a major one in Leipzig, with Nelsons conducting both the Boston Symphony and the Gewandhaus Orchestra.
For Los Angeles Opera Music Director James Conlon, who has frequently conducted acclaimed performances of Shostakovich’s symphonies and concertos and led his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District at the Metropolitan Opera, Shostakovich represents a crucial link with Russian tradition. “Where Tchaikovsky left off in the Romantic era at the end of the 1890s, Shostakovich is to the 20th century.” Especially in the composer’s later years, every new symphony was an event of intense public interest and debate. Critic Norman Lebrecht has even suggested that the symphony as a significant art form of interest to a wide public audience died along with Shostakovich. It seems highly unlikely that our musically diminished century will see another composer of this magnitude, intellectual depth, and popular appeal.
