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Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (Second Edition)

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Although not as thorough on the music of the great composer itself, this book is a must read for anyone interested in Shostakovich, or music and Soviet history in general.

Wilson lucidly supports her interviews and articles from colleagues, friends, and family of the composer with a curious detachment that serves to clarify rather than alienate the subject matter. The articles and interviews themselves are priceless artifacts, and presented here in an intelligent fashion.

Shostakovich's life is portrayed here with startling intimacy. The reader will find him or herself able to visualize the genius composer and his quirks, and those who listen to the relevant works of music will find their messages so much more meaningful.

In 1936 Stalin walked out of Dmitri Shostakovich's opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Soon an article in Pravda appeared: "Muddle Instead of Music" - inept criticism, but devastating effect. The political war for Shostakovich's soul had begun.

Performance of his Fourth Symphony was canceled. Friends avoided him. Musicians supporting him were persecuted. And as Shostakovich, one of the 20th century's greatest composers, would acknowledge much later, had it not been for the totalitarian regime under which he lived, "I would have written more pure music."

Yet this same man who suffered under Soviet communism also joined the Communist Party in 1960, even spoke or signed statements against Soviet dissidents. What are we to make of him?

In Elizabeth Wilson's artfully woven collection of reminiscences, Shostakovich (1906-75) emerges three-dimensional, fascinating, yet still enigmatic - neither Soviet cheerleader nor covert subversive, as some would have him. First published in 1994, the book is freshly augmented with new material for his centenary. The voices of family, friends, composers, conductors and other musicians make riveting reading; they document Shostakovich's struggle to balance the demands of musical genius with those of a repressive state.

Wilson's credentials are first-rate: She studied cello with the great Mstislav Rostropovich, a close friend of Shostakovich's, and attended several premieres of the composer's late work. She documents in chilling detail the fears under which Shostakovich worked, the subterfuges he used to make his music pass in a hostile climate while still mining his soul's depths.

For 1936 wasn't his last run-in with the state. His heroic Seventh Symphony, performed during the World War II siege of Leningrad, bought him credit with Stalinist authorities up to a point. But with war's end came new decrees denouncing artistic "formalism" - excess attention to aesthetics at the expense of socialist realism.

Rostropovich recalls: "For him it was a calamity that the people for whom he had written his works with his very blood, to whom he had exposed his very soul, did not understand him."

One decree came in 1948 as Shostakovich wrote his Concerto for Violin in A minor. The work could not be performed publicly till 1955, after Stalin's death. Musically, it's no proletarian picnic: a "relentlessly hard, intense piece for the soloist," Russian composer Venyamin Basner calls it. Violinist David Oistrakh even asked Shostakovich for the mercy of "letting the orchestra take over the first eight bars in the Finale so ... I can wipe the sweat off my brow."

Though her book doesn't move in a straight-line narrative, Wilson's analyses frame the oral histories - many of them from interviews she conducted - and for the most part provide adequate context. At times she fails to referee discrepancies between speakers. Laurel Fay's 2000 Shostakovich: A Life, a more traditional biography, clears up some confusions.

With Shostakovich, some matters may never be entirely clear. He gave communism lip service, but did speak out powerfully in his music. He helped innumerable repressed artists behind the scenes. Though not Jewish, he defended the Jews, affirming their culture musically.

As another composer said, the perpetually nervous, agitated Shostakovich was "pain personified," but in his music "was able to transform the pain ... into something exalted and full of light."

Elizabeth Wilson did a great job writing this book.It must be difficult to write a balanced biography on a deceased artist which lived under a different political-cultural regime compared to modern western regimes. Only recently I have read several biographies of Musicans which were very disappointing. Wilson collected lots of personal information supplied by friends, collaborators and other world known Musicans. This information provided an excellent picture of Shostakowich the giant Musican his outstanding work and personal difficulties. I heartily recommend this book to every Music lover.

For anyone interested in Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) the man and his music, *Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (Second Edition)* is a compelling book. In a carefully researched and organized work, cellist and author Elizabeth Wilson presents a biography of Shostakovich comprising collated reminiscences and value judgments of his contemporaries that form the bulk of 537 pages of main text, along with her own input and documentary evidence where available. The prevailing political and cultural environment of the Soviet Union at the time looms large in the background. So many names familiar and unfamiliar appear throughout the text, that 30 pages of Biographical Notes come in handy for identification and as reminders of who's who in the world of Shostakovich. The detailed Index will prove useful to the serious reader of such a large, wide-ranging book. The Acknowledgements and the Annotated List of Sources give an idea of the vast amount of study, consultation and interviews carried out by Wilson mostly in Russia, but also Switzerland, Germany, UK and USA, in what must be termed a labor of love.

His parents wanted to name him Jaroslav, but the priest who baptized him insisted on Dmitri. So begins the story of the boy prodigy, who matured into one of the most significant composers of the twentieth century. Testimonies by more than 60 contributors authenticate some of Shostakovich's personal attributes, details of his life, and the way he went about composing music under often taxing circumstances and the shadow of a political system that sought to regulate the arts -- indeed all aspects of life -- to conform to "socialist reality."

In focusing on Shostakovich's difficulties with the Soviet authorities and on his musical output, sometimes forgotten are three strong women in his life who stood by him and helped him cope: his mother, who took charge of his early musical education; first wife, whose early death devastated him; and third (much younger) wife, whose support was indispensable during his later ailing years. (A second marriage did not work out.) Wilson's research and compilation of testimonies give them their due.

Almost from the start, the young Dmitri (Mitya to his friends) did not have an easy life; but he was highly disciplined and determined to succeed. Perfect pitch and a phenomenal memory helped to distinguish him among his fellow students at the Petrograd (renamed Leningrad) Conservatoire. His graduation piece, the First Symphony, brought him quick fame. Already he was demonstrating an independent bent of mind and going his own way in music, to the displeasure of the Soviet authorities who eventually subjected him to harassment and humiliation. Shostakovich's sharp contradictions of character affected his behavior. He had a sense of humor and high spirits; he loved his vodka, card games -- a "poker fiend" according to one friend -- and football (soccer); yet pianist Mikhail Druskin says, "It was Shostakovich's vocation to realize the concept of tragedy, for that was how he perceived the world." His paradoxical character became painfully obvious when he joined the Communist Party in 1960, even as he detested what the system stood for and opposed it in his music. Worse yet, occasionally he appeared to be supporting official policies. In the words of soprano Galina Vishnevskaya (wife of cellist Mstislav Rostropovich), "He [Shostakovich] felt we were all participants in the farce. ... He made statements in the press and at meetings; he signed 'letters of protest' that, as he himself said, he never read. He didn't worry about what people would say of him, because he knew the time would come when the verbiage would fade away, when only his music would remain. And his music would speak more vividly than any words." It's also true that, living in fear of the authorities, he was not one to say no under pressure.

Accounts of the war on "formalism" during Stalin's regime provide real drama. According to doctrinaire officials, notably Andrei Zhdanov (infamous for his role in the 1946-1948 campaign of terror against the intelligentsia), Soviet realism dictated that music should be tuneful, uplifting, and meaningful to the masses. In their view, abstract or Western-influenced "modern" music was not. Tragic music was pessimism, not in the spirit of the Nation. The consequences on formalist composers (as they called them), such as Shostakovich and Prokofiev, were grave. They lost their positions and main means of livelihood. Much of their works was no longer performed. Rostropovich relates that the time came when Prokofiev did not have money left to buy breakfast. Actually, Shostakovich fell from grace earlier, when his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District was viciously attacked by Pravda as chaos. After that, he found it prudent to suppress his innovative Fourth Symphony and several other works until after Stalin died. The Fifth Symphony, wildly acclaimed by the public, won official if somewhat grudging acceptance. The war years offered him the opportunity to write the Seventh Symphony, on which he started working during the German siege of Leningrad. The response to it was universally electric. Luckily for him, the authorities did not suspect that Shostakovich intended the music to signify the ultimate defeat not only of fascism but of all forms of tyranny, by implication including Stalinism. For now, Shostakovich was a hero again. Yet when he wrote the Eighth Symphony, a tragic masterpiece portraying the horror of war, the authorities predictably criticized it; it was not the heroic, victorious music they expected. Shostakovich had an acerbic comment to depict the system: "Our duty is to rejoice!"

Of course, the book has more to say about the music of Shostakovich, much of which I listen to and esteem. Here's a brief selection. A good part of the material covers the circumstances of the composition, rehearsals and premieres of major works, where fascinating insights into the ways and genius of the composer emerge. In a few cases Wilson includes a description of the music and some issues of interpretation. Rightly, she allocates more space to some works than others -- for example, the Tenth Symphony that many critics consider to be Shostakovich's central symphonic masterpiece, and the Fourteenth Symphony (really a song cycle based on several poems) that Shostakovich regarded as a landmark composition in his work. Not successful was the Twelfth Symphony, dedicated to the memory of Lenin. Shostakovich himself fretted that it was awful, terrible (his words). He was at his most personal in the string quartets. We get a view of the emotion behind the great autobiographical Eighth and the tragic Thirteenth and sublime Fifteenth Quartets. His admiration for Bach led to composing his own masterful Twenty Four Preludes and Fugues. Some testimonies speak of his conceiving works from beginning to end and working out the details of composition in his head before beginning to set the notes to paper. After that, the actual writing would proceed at a very fast pace. Here and there we get glimpses that tell us something of his attitude toward music. One of the best concerns a passage in his score for the film King Lear: "There may be few notes," he said, "but there's lots of music."

Toward the end, the seriously ill Shostakovich was preoccupied with themes of death and parting, as in the Fourteenth Symphony and the late string quartets. His last work was the Viola Sonata opus 147, of which Wilson writes, "The Viola Sonata can be regarded as a fitting requiem for a man who had lived through and chronicled the scourges of a cruel age." In and out of treatment clinics for years, his failing health finally denied him reprieve. He died in hospital on 9 August, 1975. The book ends bleakly with an extract from the diary of violinist Mark Lubotsky, describing the burial: "Hammers banged. They were nailing down the lid of the coffin. Then they moved. Then they stopped. The Soviet anthem was played. It was cold and it started to drizzle."

Why did Wilson use this ending? A few pages before, she supplies what I think would stand as a more optimistic conclusion to the book: "Undoubtedly, as the debates and arguments recede into the mists of time, the single greatest testament to Shostakovich's indomitable spirit and powers of mental discipline will remain the body of music." Very much as Shostakovich had hoped.

The author was born in London, England but as a music student under Rostropovich she attended many Shostakovich premieres in Russia in the 1960's and 1970's. Her credentials are admirable being a professional musician, having lived and studied in Russia and having absorbed the culture and language. She did the the translation from the Russian. The author is fully aware of her responsibility in presenting the authentic Shostakovich, and one of her goals has been to "build up the atmosphere and psychological outlook of the times in which Shostakovich lived and worked."

Friends and associates of Shostakovich state their recollections of the man, the music and the times in which they lived. Most westerners have little comprehension of the fear and terror that existed in Stalinist Russia before and after the war, not to mention the Nazi siege of Leningrad where Shostakovich was living. He was composing his 7th Symphony when artillery shells and bombs were being dropped over his head. Most of us don't understand the monster challenges Shostakovich faced over decades, particularly from his government, to his creative idealism and imagination. These challenges are like a jagged rock thrown at the reader.

The biographical notes at the end, which number almost 300, is indispensable for knowing who these people were who came in and out of Shostakovich's life. The annotated bibliography and detailed index is a joy for the serious student. In the preface the author agrees with Laurel Fay's demolition of Volkov's Testimony as Shostakovich's dictated memoirs.

It may appear boorish of me to mention the absence of a table to outline when the major compositions came out and a chronology of the composer's life. And I would hope an abridged version might come out for young adults (but mainly for adults like myself who want a faster read).

A serious work, skilfully edited and beautifully translated with well chosen photos.

Book arrived as quickly as advertised, which was great because I needed it to write my New York Times antiques column (published today). THanks!
Wendy Moonan