Dmitrii Shostakovich, The Memoirs of Dmitrii Shostakovich. 1979
Related to and edited by Solomon Volkov.
The following passages concerning the quashing of «Lady Macbeth» are taken from the controversial «Testimony: the Memoirs of Dmitrii Shostakovich». Volkov’s claim that Shostakovich dictated the memoirs to him, and that the composer was an unspoken opponent of the Soviet regime have been highly controversial since their publication. The passage, whoever the author ultimately proves to be, gives a vivid picture of the vicissitudes of Stalinist cultural management.
I worked on Lady Macbeth for almost three years. I had announced a trilogy dedicated to the position of women in various eras in Russia. The plot of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District is taken from the story of the same name by Nikolai Leskov. The story amazes the reader with its unusual vividness and depth, and in terms of being the most truthful and tragic portrayal of the destiny of a talented, smart, and outstanding woman, “dying in the nightmarish conditions of pre-revolutionary Russia,” as they say, this story, in my opinion, is one of the best.
Maxim Gorky once said: “We must study. We must learn about our country, her past, present, and future”; and Leskov’s story serves this purpose. Lady Macbeth is a true treasure trove for a composer, with its vividly drawn characters and dramatic conflicts-I was attracted by it. Alexander Germanovich Preis, a young Leningrad playwright, worked out the libretto with me. It followed Leskov almost in its entirety, with the exception of the third act, which for greater social impact deviates slightly from the original. We introduced a scene at the police station and left out the murder of Ekaterina L’vovna’s nephew.
I resolved the opera in a tragic vein. I would say that Lady Macbeth could be called a tragic-satiric opera. Despite the fact that Ekaterina L’vovna is a murderer, she is not a lost human being. She is tormented by her conscience, she thinks about the people she killed. I feel empathy for her.
It’s rather difficult to explain, and I’ve heard quite a bit of disagreement on the matter, but I wanted to show a woman who was on a much higher level than those around her. She is surrounded by monsters. The last five years were like a prison for her.
Those who criticize her harshly do so from this point of view: if she’s a criminal, then she’s guilty. But that’s the common consensus, and I’m more interested in the individual. I think it’s all in Leskov. There are no general, standardized rules of conduct. Everything depends on the situation and on the person. A turn of events is possible in which murder is not a crime. You can’t approach everything with the same measure.
Ekaterina L’vovna is an outstanding, colorful person and her life is sad and drab, But a powerful love comes into her life, and it turns out that a crime is worth committing for the sake of that passion, since life has no meaning otherwise anyway.
Lady Macbeth touches on many themes. I wouldn’t want to spend too much time on all the possible interpretations; after all, I’m not talking about myself in these pages and certainly not about my music. In the long run, you can just go to see the opera. In the last few years it’s been produced frequently, even abroad. Of course, all the productions are bad, very bad. In the last few years I can point out only one good production-in Kiev under the direction of Konstantin Simeonov, a conductor who has a wonderful feel for music. And he starts from the music, not the plot. When his singers started over-psychologizing their parts, Simeonov shouted, “What are you trying to do, set up the Moscow Art Theater here? I need singing, not psychology. Give me singing!”
They don’t understand that too well here, that singing is more important in opera than psychology. Directors treat the music in opera as something of minor importance. That’s how they ruined the film version, Katerina Izmailova. The actors were magnificent, particularly Galina Vishnevskaia, but you can’t hear the orchestra at all. Now, what is the point of that?
I dedicated Lady Macbeth to my bride, my future wife, so naturally the opera is about love too, but not only love. It’s also about how love could have been if the world weren’t full of vile things. It’s the vileness that ruins love. And the laws and proprieties and financial worries, and the police state. If conditions had been different, love would have been different too.
Love was one of Sollertinskii’s favorite themes. He could speak for hours on it, on the most varied levels: from the highest to the very lowest. And Sollertinskii was very supportive of my attempt to express my ideas in Lady Macbeth. He spoke of the sexuality of two great operas, Carmen and Wozzeck, and regretted that there was nothing comparable in Russian opera. Chaikovskii, for instance, had nothing like it and that was no accident.
Sollertinskii believed that love was the greatest gift and the person who knew how to love had a talent just as does the person who knows how to build ships or write novels. In that sense Ekaterina L’vovna is a genius. She is a genius in her passion, for the sake of which she is prepared to do anything, even murder.
Sollertinskii felt that contemporary conditions were not conducive to the development of talents in that area. Everyone seemed worried about what would happen to love. I suppose it will always be like that, it always seems that love’s last days are here. At least, it always seems that everything is different today from what it was yesterday. And it will all be different tomorrow. No one knows how, but it will be different.
Love for Three Oranges was a success in the movies, the theaters were running plays like The Nationalization of Women, and there were debates on free love. Debates were very popular, and they debated the theory of “the glass of water.” It used to be said that having sexual intercourse should be as simple as having a glass of water. At TRAM, in some play, the heroine said that satisfying your sexual needs was the only important thing, and that drinking from the same glass all the time gets boring.
There were also debates on a popular book, Moon from the Right, by Sergei Malashkin. It’s a terrible book, but the readers didn’t care. The point was that it described orgies with young Komsomol girls. And so they tried the heroes of this book-with appointed counsel and judges. The question they were hotly debating was can a young woman have twenty-two husbands?
This problem was on everyone’s lips, even Meyerhold was taken with it, and he was a man of excellent taste. This is just further proof of what the atmosphere was like then. Meyerhold planned to stage Tret’iakov play I Want a Baby and even began rehearsals, but the play was banned. He tried for two years to get permission and failed. The censors felt that the play was too frank. Meyerhold, in defense, insisted that if you wanted to remove all vulgar words from the stage you’d have to burn all of Shakespeare and leave only Rostand.
Meyerhold wanted to put on Tret’iakov play as a debate too. In fact, things seemed to be moving toward the abolition of love. One good woman in a play said as much: “The only thing I love is Party work.” And love can fall by the wayside. From time to time, we’ll give birth to healthy children, naturally pure from a class point of view, of a good Aryan, I mean proletarian, background.
This is not a happy business. Tret’iakov dreamed of how everyone would give birth by plan, and they destroyed him. And it went on Meyerhold’s record that “he stubbornly persisted in staging the play I Want a Baby by enemy of the people Tret’iakov, which was a hostile slander of the Soviet people.”
So you see that even though my opera’s plot did not deal with our glorious reality, actually there were many points of contact, you only have to look for them. In general, a heroine like Ekaterina L’vovna is not very typical for Russian opera, but there are some traditional things in Lady Macbeth and I think they’re very important. There’s the scrawny little man, something like Grishka Kuterma, and the entire fourth act, with the convicts. Some of my friends objected that the fourth act was too traditional. But that was the finale I had in mind, because we’re talking about convicts.
In the old days a convict was called “poor little wretch”; people tried to help them, to give them something. But in my day the attitude toward the arrested had changed. If you got yourself in jail, you no longer existed.
Chekhov went to Sakhalin Island to better the lot of criminal convicts. As for political prisoners-they were all heroes in the eyes of cultured men. Dostoevskii recalled how a little girl gave him a kopeck when he was a convict. He was a poor wretch in her eyes.
And so I wanted to remind the audience that prisoners are wretched people and that you shouldn’t hit a man when he’s down. Today you’re in prison, tomorrow it might be me. That’s a very important moment for me in Lady Macbeth, and incidentally, a very traditional one for Russian music. Recall Khovanshchina, for instance-Prince Golitsyn is an extremely unsympathetic character, but when he’s taken away into exile, Mussorgskii sympathizes with him. That’s as it should be.
I think it was a great stroke of luck for me that I found the plot of Lady Macbeth, even though there were many factors promoting it. For one I like Leskov, and for another, Kustodiev did good illustrations for Lady Macbeth and I bought the book. And then I liked the film that Cheslav Sabinskii made of the story. It was roundly criticized for being unscrupulous, but it was vivid and engrossing.
I composed the opera with great intensity, which was enhanced by the circumstances of my personal life.
When I write vocal music I like to picture concrete people. Here’s a man I know-how will he sing this or that monologue? That’s probably why I can say about any of my characters, “That’s So-and-so and she’s So-and-so.” Of course, that’s just my personal feeling, but it does help me compose.
Naturally, I think about tessituras and such, as well. But first of all I think about personality and that may be why my operas don’t have an emploi and sometimes it’s hard for the performers to find themselves. It’s the same with my vocal cycles.
For instance, I have rather complicated feelings about Sergei from Lady Macbeth. He’s a bastard, of course, but he’s a handsome man and, more importantly, attractive to women, while Ekaterina L’vovna’s husband is a degenerate. I had to show Sergei’s flashy sex appeal through my music. I couldn’t resort to mere caricature because it would be psychologically false. The audience had to understand that a woman really couldn’t resist a man like that. So I endowed Sergei with several characteristics of a close friend of mine, who naturally wasn’t a Sergei at all, but a very intelligent person. He missed nothing when it came to ladies, though; he was quite persistent in that regard. He says many beautiful things and women melt. I gave that trait to Sergei. When Sergei seduces Ekaterina. L’vovna, in intonation he’s my friend. But it was done in such a way that even he-a subtle musician-didn’t notice a thing.
I feel it’s important to use real events and real people in the plot. When Sasa Preis and I did our first drafts of Lady Macbeth, we wrote all kinds of nonsense drawn from the personalities of our friends. It was amusing and it turned out to be a big help in our work.
The opera was a huge success. I wouldn’t bring it up at all, of course, but later events turned everything around. Everyone forgot that Lady Macbeth ran for two years in Leningrad and for two in Moscow under the title Katerina Izmailova at Nemirovich-Danchenko’s theater. It was also produced by Smolich at the Bolshoi.
Worker correspondents wrote incensed letters about The Nose. And the ballets The Golden Age and Bolt were also denounced in every way. But it wasn’t like that with Lady Macbeth. In both Leningrad and Moscow the opera played several times a week. Katerina Izmailova ran almost a hundred times in two seasons at Nemirovich-Danchenko’s and as often in Leningrad. You might say that that’s good for a new opera.
You must understand that I’m not indulging in self-praise here. The point isn’t only in the music and in the productions themselves, which in both Leningrad and Moscow were done with talent and care. The general atmosphere was important too, and for the opera it was good.
This may have been the happiest time for my music, there was never anything like it before or after. Before the opera I was a boy who might have been spanked, and later I was a state criminal, always under observation, always under suspicion. But at that moment everything was comparatively fine. Or to be more accurate, everything seemed to be fine.
This essentially unfounded feeling arose after the breakup of RAPP and RAPM. These unions had been on everybody’s back. Once the Association came to control music, it seemed that Davidenko’s “They wanted to beat, to beat us” was going to replace all available music. This worthless song was performed by soloists and choirs, violinists and pianists, even string quartets did it. It didn’t get as far as a symphony orchestra, but only because some of the instruments were suspect – the trombone, for instance.
You can see there was plenty of reason to fall into despair. It looked as though neither orchestral music nor the opera had any prospects at all. And most musicians were in a terrible mood. One after another, with bowed heads, they joined the ranks of RAPM. For instance, my friend Ronya Shebalin suddenly began singing the praises of Davidenko. I protected myself by working at TRAM.
RAPM had turned the screw so tight that it seemed things couldn’t possibly be any worse. (Later it turned out that they could be a lot worse.) And when RAPM disappeared, everyone heaved a sigh of relief. For a time, professionals were in charge of things; I mean, naturally they had no power, but their suggestions were taken into account, and that was quite something.
I went to Turkey as part of a semiofficial cultural delegation. They were trying to improve relations with Turkey and President Kemal
This song by one of the leaders of RAPM, Alexander Davidenko, was written in late 1929, after Soviet-Chinese conflict in the Far East. One of the first successful examples of the popular Soviet propaganda song, “They Wanted to Beat Us” remained popular fight up to World War 11, when its dashing tone seemed inappropriate.
Ataturk, who arranged endless receptions for us. All the men received inscribed gold cigarette cases and all the women got bracelets. They fussed over us greatly. Turkey’s musical life was in an embryonic stage then. David Oistrakh and Lev Oborin, who were part of the delegation, needed some sheet music – I think it was Beethoven-and it couldn’t be found in all of Ankara. They played everything they could remember by heart.
I learned to wear a tuxedo in Turkey, since I had to wear one every evening, and when I got home I showed it off to my friends and acquaintances. I was rewarded for my tuxedo sufferings with a soccer game between Vienna and Turkey. When the Austrians made a goal there was absolute silence in the stadium, and the match ended in a huge brawl.
But it was fun. We drank coffee and then didn’t sleep-not from the coffee, but from its price. I went into a store to buy a pair of glasses. The owner demonstrated how strong the glasses were by flinging them down onto the floor; twice they didn’t break. He wanted to show me a third time. I said, “Don’t bother, it’s all right.” He didn’t listen to me, threw them down a third time, and broke them.
After my trip to Turkey, which got a lot of coverage in the Soviet papers, I was offered guest performances at very flattering terms. I went on one of these trips, to Arkhangelsk, with the cellist Viktor Kubatskii. He played my cello sonata. On January 28, 1936, we went to the railroad station to buy a new Pravda. I opened it up and leafed through it-and- found the article “Muddle Instead of Music.” I’ll never forget that day, it’s probably the most memorable in my life.
That article on the third page of Pravda changed my entire existence. It was printed without a signature, like an editorial-that is, it expressed the opinion of the Party. But it actually expressed the opinion of Stalin, and that was much more important.
There is a school of thought that holds that the article was written by the well-known bastard Zaslavskii. It might have been written down by the well-known bastard Zaslavskii, but that’s another matter entirely. The article has too much of Stalin in it, there are expressions that even Zaslavskii wouldn’t have used, they were too ungrammatical. After all, the article appeared before the big purges. There were still some fairly literate people working at Pravda and they wouldn’t have left in that famous part about my music having nothing in common with “symphonic soundings.” What are these mysterious “symphonic soundings”? It’s clear that this is a genuine pronouncement of our leader and teacher. There are many places like that in the article. I can distinguish with complete confidence Zaslavskii’s bridges from Stalin’s text.
The title – “Muddle Instead of Music”-also belongs to Stalin. The day before, Pravda had printed the leader and teacher’s brilliant comments on the outlines of new history textbooks, and he talked about muddles there too.
This text by the Leader of the Peoples and Friend of Children was printed over his signature. Obviously, the word “muddle” stuck in his mind, something that often happens to the mentally ill. And so he used the word everywhere. Really, why call it a muddle?
All right, the opera was taken off the stage. Meetings were organized to drum the “muddle” into everyone’s head. 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.
It went on as if in a nightmare. One of my friends, whom Stalin knew, thought that he might be of some help, and he wrote a desperate letter to Stalin. His letter maintained that Shostakovich wasn’t a lost soul after all, and that besides the depraved opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, which was criticized with perfect justification by our glorious organ Pravda, Shostakovich had also written several musical works singing the praises of our socialist homeland.
Stalin attended a ballet with my music called Bright Stream, which was being done at the Bolshoi. Lopukhov had staged the ballet in Leningrad, where it had been popular, and he was invited to stage it in Moscow. And after doing this ballet, he was named director of ballet for the Bolshoi Theater. The results of the leader and teacher’s cultural outing are known-not even ten days after the first article in Pravda, another appeared. It was written more grammatically, with fewer nuggets, but that didn’t make it any more pleasant as far as I was concerned.
Two editorial attacks in Pravda in ten days-that was too much for one man. Now everyone knew for sure that I would be destroyed. And the anticipation of that noteworthy event-at least for me-has never left me.
From that moment on I was stuck with the label “enemy of the people,” and I don’t need to explain what the label meant in those days. Everyone still remembers that.
I was called an enemy of the people quietly and out loud and from podiums. One paper made the following announcement of my concert: “Today there is a concert by enemy of the people Shostakovich.” Or take this example: In those years my name wasn’t welcomed enthusiastically in print unless, of course, it was used in a discussion about struggles against formalism. But it happened that I was assigned to review a production of Othello in Leningrad and in my review I did not say ecstatic things about the tenor Nikolai Pechkovskii. I was swamped with anonymous letters saying in effect that I, enemy of the people, did not have long to tread on Soviet soil, that my ass’s ears would be chopped off-along with my head.
They really loved Pechkovskii in Leningrad. He was one of those tenors who know three things to do with their hands while singing: gesture toward yourself, away from yourself, and to the side. When Meyerhold heard Pechkovskii in the role of German in The Queen of Spades, he told everyone, “If I run into him in a dark alley, I’ll kill him.”
A German musicologist came to Leningrad before the war-and nothing interested him, not music, not concerts, nothing. Everyone at the Composers’ Union was sick and tired of him. What could they do with the man? Finally someone suggested, Would you like to go to see Pechkovskii? The German brightened. “Ohh! The famous pervert!” and hurried off. Everyone sighed in relief, Pechkovskii had saved the day.
Actually, Pechkovskii’s life took an unfortunate turn and he spent quite a lot of time in the camps. If I had known that ahead of time I would never have permitted myself to say anything negative about him. But in those days I stood a greater chance of ending up in the camps than he did.
Because after the articles came the “Tukhachevskii affair.” It was a terrible blow for me when Tukhachevskii was shot. When I read about it in the papers, I blacked out. I felt they were killing me, that’s how bad I felt. But I wouldn’t like to lay it on too thick at this point. It’s only in fine literature that a person stops eating and sleeping because he’s so overwrought. In reality, life is much simpler, and as Zoshchenko noted, life gives little material to fiction writers.
Zoshchenko had a firm philosophy on the matter – a beggar stops worrying as soon as he becomes a beggar, and a roach isn’t terribly upset about being a roach. I wholeheartedly agree. After all, life goes on, I had to live and feed my family. I had an infant daughter who cried and demanded food and I had to guarantee food for her as best I could.
“The author’s feelings before the grandeur of Nature are indescribable.” Naturally, without sparing color and in broad strokes, I could describe my depressed condition, my moral torment, my constant strong fear, not only for my own life but for the lives of my mother, sisters, wife and daughter, and later my son. And so on. I don’t want to deny that I went through a bad period. Perhaps the careful reader will understand that or perhaps he’ll just skip all this drivel and think, munching a piece of candy, “Whatever made me read this book? It’s just upsetting me before bedtime.”
When I picture an idiot like that, I don’t even want to go on reminiscing. I just sit with a feeling of guilt, when there isn’t anything really that I’m guilty of.
The greatest specialist in depression, despair, melancholy, and such, of all the people I’ve met in my life, was Zoshchenko. I think I’m talking too much about myself, and these memoirs are not about me, they’re about others. I want to talk about others first and about me only tangentially.
So, about Zoshchenko. It’s a fact that cobblers go about without shoes, and there’s no better confirmation of the truism than Zoshchenko. He was the most popular humorist of my youth and he’s just as popular now, despite all the bans and persecution. Millions of people laughed over his stories. Perhaps they weren’t very aware or cultured readers, maybe they laughed when they should have cried. They laughed over those works of Zoshchenko’s that I personally consider tragic. But my opinion isn’t important here. Zoshchenko was considered a great humorist, but in fact he was a man thoroughly riddled by depression and melancholy.
I’m not referring now to his tragic literary fate or to the fact that he was forced to write more and more poorly, so that I can’t read his last works without a feeling of bitterness and disillusionment.
No, Zoshchenko was dying of depression when there was nothing to foreshadow his sad fate, when he had fame and money. Zoshchenko’s ennui wasn’t a literary affectation. He really did nearly die of depression he couldn’t leave the house and he couldn’t eat. They gave him medicine and injections, but to no avail. Zoshchenko was still a young man, just twenty-seven, and he decided to battle his illness on his own, without the help of doctors, because the doctors, he was sure, didn’t understand the cause of his terrible and extraordinary depression.
Laughing sadly, Zoshchenko told me about his visit to a psychiatrist. Zoshchenko described his dreams, in which he saw tigers and a hand reaching out toward him. The doctor was a specialist in psychoanalysis and immediately replied that the meaning of these dreams was very obvious to him. In his opinion, little Zoshchenko had been taken to the zoo at too tender an age and an elephant frightened the child with his huge trunk. The hand was the trunk, and the trunk was a phallic symbol. And therefore Zoshchenko had a sexual trauma.
Zoshchenko was certain that the doctor was mistaken. His fear of life stemmed from other causes, he felt, because not all our impulses can be reduced to sexual attraction. Fear can take root in a man’s heart for social reasons too.
Zoshchenko maintained that fear based on social causes could be even more powerful and could take over the subconscious. I agree with him completely. It’s true that sex plays an important part in this world and no one is free of its effect. But illness can spring from other causes and fear can be produced by other forces.
Fear arises from cruder and more substantial causes-fear of losing food, or fear of death, or fear before a horrible punishment. Zoshchenko said that a man ill with this kind of fear can remain basically normal and reveal his illness in just a few bizarre actions, that is, a few eccentricities. He felt that these eccentricities were a better guide to the cause of the illness than dreams, because the bizarre behavior was almost always infantile. The adult behaved like a child, or rather, he tried to be one. This playing at being a child seems to help the adult avoid danger, helps him avoid contact with dangerous objects and dangerous forces.
The patient begins to maneuver every which way, and when the disease takes this turn everything hinges on the strength of the patient’s psyche as against the strength of the illness. Because if the fear grows, it can lead to a total collapse of the personality.
The person tries to avoid dangerous phenomena and that leads to thought of suicide. What is suicide? Zoshchenko explained it to me. He explained that death can look like salvation. The point is that a child doesn’t understand what death is, he only sees that death is absence. He sees that you can escape danger, can get away and hide from danger. And that escape the child calls death, because death is not frightening to him.
When a man is sick, his feelings are the feelings of a child. That’s the lowest level of his psyche, and a child fears danger much more than death. Suicide is a hurried escape from danger. It is the act of a child who has been scared by life.
In my unhappy life there were many sad events, but there were periods when danger gathered ominously, when it was particularly palpable, and then my fear augmented. In the period about which we were talking just now, I was near suicide. The danger horrified me and I saw no other way out.
I was completely in the thrall of fear. I was no longer the master of my life, my past was crossed out, my work, my abilities, turned out to be worthless to everyone. The future didn’t look any less bleak. At that moment I desperately wanted to disappear, it was the only possible way out. I thought of the possibility with relish.
And in that critical period my familiarity with Zoshchenko’s ideas helped me greatly. He didn’t say that suicide was a whim but he did say that suicide was a purely infantile act. It was the mutiny of the lower level against the higher level of the psyche. Actually, it’s not a mutiny, it is the victory of the lower level, complete and final victory.
Naturally, it wasn’t only Zoshchenko’s thoughts that helped me in that desperate hour. But these and similar considerations kept me from making extreme decisions. I came out of the crisis stronger than I went in, more confident of my own strength. The hostile forces didn’t seem so omnipotent any more and even the shameful treachery of friends and acquaintances didn’t cause me as much pain as before.
The mass treachery did not concern me personally. I managed to separate myself from other people, and in that period it was my salvation.
Some of these thoughts you can find, if you wish, in my Fourth Symphony. In the last pages, it’s all set out rather precisely. These thoughts were also present in my mind later, when I was writing the first part of the Sixth Symphony. But the Sixth in a way had a much happier fate than the Fourth. It was played right away and criticized moderately. The Fourth was played twenty-five years after it was written. Maybe that was for the best, I don’t know. I’m not a great adherent of the theory that musical compositions should lie in the ground waiting their time. Symphonies aren’t Chinese eggs, you know.
In general, music should be played right away, and that way the audience gets pleasure in time and it’s easier for the composer to tell what’s what. And if he has made mistakes, he can try to correct them in the next work. Otherwise it’s just nonsense, like the business with the Fourth.
Now some people say that I was to blame for the whole incident, that I stopped the performance of my symphony, that I whipped myself, like the sergeant’s widow, and that I have no right to point at others. It’s easy to judge from afar. But if you had been in my shoes, you’d sing a different tune.
It seemed then as if every performance of my works caused nothing but trouble. The Malyi Opera Theater brought Lady Macbeth to Moscow – and there was “Muddle Instead of Music.” The Bolshoi Theater staged my ballet-and there was another Pravda editorial, “Balletic Falsity.” And what would have happened if the Fourth had been performed then too? Who knows, perhaps no one would have said a word, and my song would have been sung for good.
The conditions were grave, fatal. There’s no point in thinking about it. Besides, Stiedry’s rehearsals weren’t merely bad-they were outrageous. First of all, he was scared to death, because no one would have spared him either. In general, conductors aren’t the bravest men on earth. I’ve had many opportunities to confirm this opinion. They’re brave when it comes to yelling at an orchestra, but when someone yells at them, their knees shake.
Secondly, Stiedry didn’t know or understand the score, and he expressed no desire to grapple with it. He said so straight out. And why be shy? The composer was an exposed formalist. Why bother digging around in his score?
This wasn’t the only time Stiedry behaved this way, and it wasn’t only my music he treated carelessly. In his time, Stiedry truly upset Glazunov. He was supposed to conduct Glazunov’s Eighth Symphony. He came to Leningrad and then it became clear that he was confusing the Eighth with Glazunov’s Fourth quite literally, probably because they are both in the key of E flat.
This didn’t embarrass Stiedry in the least. He didn’t give a damn. As long as Glazunov sat in the auditorium, he rehearsed a little. But Glazunov had to leave, because he was called to court. He was having an argument with the tenants’ committee of his building and not paying his rent. As soon as Glazunov left the auditorium, Stiedry perked up and ended the rehearsal. He said, “It’ll do like this.”
Someone could say to me: Why are you complaining about others? What about you? Weren’t you afraid too? I answer honestly that I was afraid. Fear was a common feeling for everyone then, and I didn’t miss my share.
Then he might say: What were you afraid of? They didn’t touch musicians. I’ll reply: That’s not true, they did touch them-and how. The story that the musicians weren’t touched is being spread by Khrennikov and his henchmen and since men of the arts have short memories, they believe him. They’ve already forgotten Nikolai Sergeevich Zhilaev, a man I consider one of my teachers.
- Tikhon Nikolaevich Khrennikov (b. 1913), composer, head of the Composers’ Union of the USSR from the time of its First Congress (1948). He was appointed to the post by Stalin (as were leaders of the analogous unions of writers, artists, etc.). In the Stalinist years the duties of the head included approval of lists of the union’s members marked for repression. Khrennikov is the only original union leader of the “creative” unions to retain his post to this day. For many years he attacked Shostakovich and Prokofiev viciously. He has received all the highest Soviet orders and prizes.
I met Zhilaev at Tukhachevskii’s; the two were friends. Zhilaev taught at the Moscow Conservatory, but most of the lessons were given in his home. Whenever I was in Moscow, I dropped in on him and showed him my latest works. Zhilaev never made a comment merely to say something. By that time there was no point in showing my work to Steinberg, my teacher at the Conservatory, for he simply didn’t understand the kind of music I was writing then. Zhilaev replaced my teacher as much as possible.
He had a large picture of Tukhachevskii in his room, and after the announcement that Tukhachevskii had been shot as a traitor to the homeland, Zhilaev did not take the picture down. I don’t know if I can explain how heroic a deed that was. How did people behave then? As soon as the next poor soul was declared an enemy of the people, everyone destroyed in a panic everything connected with that person. If the enemy of the people wrote books, they threw away his books, if they had letters from him, they burned the letters. The mind can’t grasp the number of letters and papers burned in that period, no war could ever clean out domestic archives like that. And naturally, photographs flew into the flames first, because if someone informed on you, reported that you had a picture of an enemy of the people, it meant certain death.
Zhilaev wasn’t afraid. When they came for him, Tukhachevskii prominently hung portrait amazed even the executioners. “What, it’s still up?” they asked. Zhilaev replied, “The time will come when they’ll erect a monument to him.”
We forgot about Zhilaev too quickly, and the others. Sergei Popov died, a very talented man. Shebalin introduced us. He recreated Chaikovskii’s opera Voevode, which the composer had burned in a fit of despair. When they took Popov away, the score was destroyed a second time. Lamm resurrected it once more.
Or Nikolai Vygodskii, a talented organist. The same story. And they’ve forgotten Boleslav Przebyszewski, the director of the Moscow Conservatory. He was the son of the famous writer. And they’ve forgotten Dima Gachev.
Gachev was a good musicologist, and after completing some difficult work he decided to take a rest and went to a sanatorium, where he shared a room with several others. Someone found an old French newspaper. To his misfortune, Gachev read French, He opened the paper and began reading aloud, just a few sentences, and stopped-it was something negative about Stalin. “Ali, what nonsense!” But it was too late. He was arrested in the morning. Someone from the room turned him in, or perhaps they all did.
Before his arrest, Gachev had corresponded with Romain Rolland, who liked the work Gachev had written on him. Rolland praised Gachev. I wonder, did the great French humanist ever inquire what happened to his admirer and researcher? Where he suddenly disappeared to?
I think Gachev got five years. He was a strong man and he got through the five years of hard labor, naively hoping that he would be released when his term was up. A few days before the end Gachev was told that he had got an additional ten years. It broke him and he died soon after.
Everyone wrote denunciations then. Composers probably used music paper and musicologists used plain. And as far as I know, not 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.
Of course, one of the victims didn’t turn out to be so polite. He publicly slapped the informer. But everything sorted itself out, the informer turned out to be a decent sort and didn’t file a complaint with the police. The former prisoner died a free man, for his health had been seriously undermined by camp life. The informer is alive and thriving to day.He’s my biographer, you might say, a Shostakovich specialist.
I was lucky then, I wasn’t sent to the camps, but it’s never too late.
Source: Dmitry Shostakovich, Testimony. The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 106-22.