The case of Dmitri Shostakovitch, por Nicolas Nabokov (3 de 6)

(Tercera parte del artículo sobre Shostakovich escrito por Nicolas Nabokov en 1943 para la revista Harpers).

First let us have a brief glance at the man’s biography. It is commonly known that Shostakovitch was born in St. Petersburg, September 25, 1906; what is perhaps less commonly known is that the family of the future proletarian composer had no affinities with either the worker class or peasant class of old Russia. His father, an engineer by education, was, according to official biographers, an employee of the Department of Weights and Measures–a civil servant of the imperial regime, whose position in the community might be compared with that of a modest middle-class American business man. However his professional training and the cultural background and artistic aspirations of his wife provided the family with a more intellectual atmosphere than that of the average bourgeois family of either Russia or America. In Russian terms the Shostakovitch family typified that admirable element in Russian society–the intelligentsia–which comprised in its ranks all that was vital, imaginative, and creative in the nation: Particularly in those dark and dreary years of decay of the imperial regime, the intelligentsia carried a double burden: first, the complex tradition of the cultural past of the people, and second, the responsibility for Russia’s future regeneration when liberated from the ossified forms of tzarism.

Of his early days Shostakovitch says: “I became a musician by pure accident. If it had not been for my mother, I should probably never have become one. I had no particular inclination for music. I cannot recall a single instance when I evinced any interest in, or listened to, music when someone was playing at home. My mother was quite anxious that her children…at the age of nine should each start studying the piano….After a few months of study I practiced Haydn and Mozart.” From other sources we hear that the child showed “extraordinary and perfect memory” and at an early age “knew how to read fairly difficult pieces of music at sight.” (Both of Shostakovitch’s sisters likewise received a thorough musical training as a result of their mother’s enthusiasm and determination, and the elder of the two is now a teacher at the Conservatory.) Clearly the boy’s unusual natural musical gift was at first inactive and dormant and needed the insistent encouragement of his mother to bring it to the fore.

Otherwise Shostakovitch’s childhood was probably very much like that of any other child of his milieu. He went to school through the milky fogs and drizzly rains of St. Petersburg; he was a pale, frail boy coddled and adored by his parents, and surrounded at home by a studious and serious atmosphere. In the summer, as was customary among the Russian bourgeoisie and intelligentsia, the Shostakovitch family would probably go to a suburban villa, the Russian datcha, and there the same industrious and happy life would continue amid the lovely pine forests and quiet lakes surrounding the city of St. Petersburg.

Meanwhile the Russian scene was rapidly changing. First came the war, then the March Revolution of 1917, and its logical outcome (in October, 1917), the assumption of power by Lenin and the establishment of the Soviet government in Russia. It is said that young Dmitri Shostakovitch witnessed the storming of the Winter Palace by the Red Guards on October 23rd–an event which must have made an ineffaceable mark on a youthful, sensitive mind. No one who spent those days in Petrograd can forget them; and they must have played an enormous part in shaping Shostakovitch’s convictions and his career.

In 1919 he entered the Petrograd Conservatory. The St. Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad Conservatory (founded in 1867 by Anton Rubinstein) has produced a phenomenal crop of great instrumentalists and great composers. It is an exemplary school where excellent technical traditions do not impede the individual development of the student, but supply him with a solid and manifold technical training–a fact which makes most modern Russian music look better “written” than the contemporary music of other countries.

At the Conservatory, under its best teachers, Shostakovitch received a well-balanced training in theory (harmony, composition, counterpoint, fugue, history, orchestration) and piano. When he graduated in 1926 he was already known in the musical circles of Leningrad as the promising young composer, and the composition he presented for his graduation was the First Symphony. By this time his political and artistic opinions were well formed, but already he had presumably gone through a series of influences, attractions, and enthusiasms. Like most music-loving Russian youths, he had probably started with a great attachment to the Mozart and Haydn sonatas which he practiced with his mother on the piano; at some point he probably was swept by an ardent passion for the esoteric music of Scriabin (some tendencies in the direction of Scriabin are still detectable in his music, particularly certain inflections of his melodic outline). He began early to love Tchaikovsky with a love often inexplicable to foreigners but natural to every Russian. With approaching maturity he began to understand the great “polyphonic miracle” of Bach and at the same time rejected as evil the Teutonic Wagnerian brew. But the great, the most powerful discovery he made, one which became a deep unshakable devotion with him, was that of Beethoven–Beethoven the revolutionary, the apostle of humanism, the prophet of “things to come.”

The developments in the music of “bourgeois” Europe during this period of time were little known to the citizens of the U.S.S.R., but whatever news came from abroad, whatever score or bit of information could be obtained, was avidly read. Shostakovitch’s friends and colleagues testify that the works of such men as Stravinsky, Ravel, Hindemith, Bartok, and Milhaud were fairly well known to him, and that he greedily absorbed all musical news arriving from the West. Several years later, speaking at a meeting of the Leningrad association of composers, he urged a closer acquaintance with the scores of contemporary western European composers, whose achievements, he said, “might be very useful to the music of Soviet Russia.”

As for his convictions about the nature of his art, the mission of the creative musician, and his relation to politics and the state, these seem to have crystallized around 1927, not without a preceding period of doubt and a kind of creative prostration. In an autobiographical statement given in 1936 to the Revue Musicale, Shostakovitch wrote: “At the Conservatory I absorbed with enthusiasm but without critical judgment all the knowledge and all the kinds of refinement which I was being taught….” But somewhat later, “I understood that music is not only a combination of sounds arranged in this or that order [an idea quite fashionable at that time among several western European composers; see Stravinsky’s autobiography] but an art which is capable of expressing by its means, ideas or sentiments of a most diverse kind….I did not, however, acquire this conviction without pains. It suffices to say that during the whole year 1926 [the year of his graduation from the Conservatory] I did not write a single note, but from 1927 on I have never ceased to compose.”

Thus, at the beginning of his career, the question which has troubled many creative musicians–is music a language capable of expressing only emotions and feelings or is it also a vehicle for the expression of ideas?–was answered for him. From then on he had unshakable conviction that it could express ideas. From this point it was only a short step to the belief that the composer, like any other intellectual worker; has an educational obligation to fulfill and a political responsibility to bear.

Shostakovitch states it very clearly. “Working without interruption to acquire control over my art,” he says, “I applied myself in order to create my own musical style which I sought to render simple and expressive….I cannot conceive of my future creative program outside of our socialist enterprise (construction socialiste), and the aim which I assign to my work is that of helping in every way to enlighten our remarkable country.” Near the end of this autobiographical statement he completes this idea of the composer’s mission in the new socialist state by saying: “There cannot be greater joy for a composer than to be conscious that through his work he contributes to the great impetus of the Soviet musical culture, which is called upon to play a role of the first importance in remolding the human conscience.”

From 1927 on and until now, all through the turbulent years of the middle thirties and through the agony of this war, this conviction has grown, become more rooted in him. The repudiation which his work received from the political leaders of his country in 1937, and which seemed for a time to eclipse his career, actually only spurred him on to work harder in order that he might redeem himself in the eyes of these leaders and regain his people’s esteem. Any doubt as to the sincerity of this devotion, any suspicion as to the honesty of his intentions, should be definitely put aside.

Thus the little bourgeois boy, Mitya Shostakovitch, has gone through the tough school of the revolution and emerged completely transformed. He has become an “intellectual worker” of the Proletarian Republic, one hundred per cent Stalinist-Communist, whose chief apostolate is to serve his government (and through it his people) according to this government’s wishes and advices. He is honored when they praise him; he tries to see his errors when he is rebuffed. Individual, personal feelings matter only in so far as they are part of the people’s fortune, their aspirations and their tragedies. “Music,” he contends, “cannot help having a political basis, an idea that the bourgeoisie are slow to comprehend….There can be no music without ideology…” (meaning of course political ideology). “The old composers whether they knew it or not were upholding a political theory.” He goes on to explain that most of the old masters “were bolstering the rule of the upper classes,” that Beethoven was “the forerunner of the revolutionary movement,” and that Wagner, “the renegade,” was” a revolutionary turned reactionary, to whom we listen in the same spirit as when we visit a museum to study the forms of the old regime.” All art thus becomes classified according to a Marxian theory of values in which the intrinsic quality of a work of art depends upon its importance to the revolutionary progress of mankind.

The language of music becomes a vehicle for the statement of political ideologies; musical techniques are relegated to a subservient position; they are important only in so far as they render those ideologies intelligible. Concern with “personal” emotions, “individual” style or technique becomes irrelevant and unacceptable. Even to consider the proposition that transformation of musical techniques or an expression of individualistic emotions could be an end in itself becomes completely heretical. Shostakovitch condemns all such “foolishness” emphatically in his profoundly moving statement published on the eve of the first anniversary of the Russo-German War. “My energies,” he writes, “are wholly engaged in the service of my country. Like everything and everyone to-day, my ideas are closely bound up with the emotions born of this war. They must serve with all the power at my command in the cause of art for victory over savage Hitlerism, that fiercest and bitterest enemy of human civilization. This is the aim to which I have dedicated my creative work since the morning of June 22, 1941.”

Such complete devotion to the just cause of his country and its people necessarily commands respect and admiration. The philosophy upon which it is based is morally far more solid than many other contemporary theories. True enough, the Soviet artistic theory does not leave much room for the independent development of the individual musician; but on the other hand it is free from that pernicious and amoral egocentricism from which so much music of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries suffers. It is strangely akin to the noble morality of the artisan-musician of the Middle Ages, who, like Shostakovitch, worked with zeal and self-sacrifice as a servant of a cause he considered higher than himself and his art. The intention is the same and so is the fervor of the devotion, the difference in this case being that where the medieval musician read the words “glory of God” and “service of His church,” Shostakovitch reads “glory of the state” and “service of the people.”

Yet as a permanent principle it has its dangers for the artist, as the case of Dmitri Shostakovitch demonstrates.