Chekhov's Mistress
August 5th, 2008: On Shostakovich
From time to time I’m reminded of the day I fell in love with (so-called) classical music. Before that day I was a curious bystander. The music was Shostakovich’s 5th, a symphony said to have been written to bring the composer back into the good graces, to put it more summarily than the situation deserves, of Stalin, which it did. That idea made me uneasy. I bought a ticket to the NY Phil at the last minute from a women outside Avery Fisher Hall and settled in to a well situated orchestra level seat. The slow movement is what swept me away and by the time the last note sounded I was so visibly moved that the woman I had bought the ticket from (she had sold the ticket of a friend who would have been sitting next to her) told me she had overcharged me and gave me half my money back.
At play in my psyche then was the recent death of my mother at an early age from a brain tumor and Shostakovich’s music sent me to a nearly untouchable place where I could envision a middle ground between life and death. Beyond my sympathetic response I found in Shostakovich a musical and human response to the world of the twentieth century that remains compelling to me today. His music tells a story more resonantly than can be told in any other medium. His bravery subversive.
I’ve been slowing reading (on the train, where I frustratingly can’t listen to the music he’s writing about) Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise (the title perhaps refuting Hamlet’s dying words, “the rest is silence”). He writes of the premier of Shostakovich’s 5th:
“But the better part of the audience seemed to identify strongly with the symphony’s assertion of will – what Maxim Shostakovich [the composer’s son] called ‘the determination of a strong man to BE.’ Many listeners had already lost friends and relatives to the Terror, and were in a numbed, terrified state. Gavriil Popov said to Lyubov Shaporina, the founder of the Puppet Theater: ‘You know, I’ve turned into a coward. I’m a coward, I’m afraid of everything. I even burned you letters.’ The fifth had the effect of taking away, for a little while, that primitive fear. One listener was so gripped by the music that he stood up, as if royalty had walked into the room. Other began rising from their seats. During the long ovation that followed, Yevgeny Mravinsky, the conductor, held the score above his head.”
I think Maxim Shostakovich’s words, “determination” “Strong”, “to BE” sum up everything that I’ve found to be true of Shostakovich, particularly since his bravery wasn’t always clear to those around him or the public. While I don’t find myself listening to the 5th very much these days, his Cello Sonata op.40 is a piece I listen to all the time and easily one of my favorites.
Here’s an interesting video on the 5th:comments
When I heard of the death of Solzhenitsyn this week, I wrote about it on my blog. At one point, I said “For me, there are two great chroniclers of the cruelty of life in the Soviet Union. Shostakovich showed us how it felt, and Solzhenitsyn told us how it was.”
I think our understanding of the Twentieth Century will one day be better served by Shostakovich’s music than by any historian. And to this day, I am unable to listen to the 8th Symphony without feeling total devastation and emotional exhaustion at the end.
Thanks for writing about this today. It was a nice surprise to see my favorite composer profiled in an unexpected place like this.
– Robert Rummel-Hudson (08/05 at 05:38 PM)
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