Shostakovich and the Privilege of Protest

My legs were tired, I was hungry, and the arena temperature had gone up a few degrees.  It was a muggy Monday evening after a full day at work, and I was seriously considering calling it a night and missing the second half of Prom 5.  What made me stay? 

The Royal Albert Hall

Sibelius's Symphony No.7 had been intense and mysterious, its single movement gliding past with just an occasional hint of thunder.  And then there had been a show-stopping performance of Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No.2 - not the one featured in the film Shine, but the one that Eric Carmen had pilfered from when writing 'All By Myself'.  The Rach II, with its occasional crescendos combining with a sentimentality that never quite feels too sickly, had been captured by the young pianist Behzod Abduraimov: laidback and gently caressing the keys, and then suddenly, as his body lurched then hunched, hammering away at the piano like a hungry Uzbeki woodpecker.  That in itself was quite the programme and more than worth the paltry six pounds that I had paid to stand a few metres away from the musicians in the bosom of the Royal Albert Hall.  

Behzod Abduraimov - not a woodpecker

This was also my second Prom in three days and I was certainly flagging.  But then the recollection of our foolish faux pas at Prom 2, walking out halfway through Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin's second curtain call, in order to beat the rush and catch the No.10 bus home, and therefore missing Barenboim’s wonderful and heartfelt speech followed by a glorious encore of 'Land of Hope and Glory', helped me reconsider.  

Julian Barnes also helped swing it.  Last year I had read his excellent novel The Noise of Time, the story of the great Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich.  I was all too aware of my self-dramatization, but thinking of the travails that Shostakovich had been through, the sickening anxiety, often rising to terror, that came with attempting to write music and maintain artistic integrity in the shadow of the deadly whims of a monster like Stalin, made me feel somewhat ashamed of succumbing to aching legs and a rumbling tummy.

Books and Beer

Barnes novel is, indeed, a story about chronic fear and anxiety, the tale of a genius who wrote music under the critical gaze of a leader who was responsible for more deaths than anyone else in the 20th Century.  Maybe there is an argument that classical music is different.  A symphony, you would think, allows you to draw your own conclusions.  Freed from the shackles of language, without those directly incriminating words, surely means that it is largely subjective.  But therein lies the problem.  It is not the subjectivity of the interpreter that is the issue, but rather the subjectivity of one interpreter, Joseph Stalin.  If he decides that Shostakovich's Symphony No.5 is an attack on him, then there will be trouble.  But Shostakovich played the game; he took on the regime and the man as best he could, finding an answer, albeit an imperfect and very troubling one, in irony.  In Barnes' interpretation:

‘You write a final movement to your Fifth Symphony which is the equivalent of painting a clown's grin on a corpse, then listen with a straight face to Power's response: "Look, you can see he died happy, certain of the righteous and inevitable triumph of the Revolution."  And part of you believed that as long as you could rely on irony you would survive.'

That last movement of the Fifth certainly laps it up, boisterous and stirring.  And it does follow on from a variety of moods: sombre and elegiac, loud and dissonant.  Maybe the key to social realism is how you end a piece?  To paraphrase Walter Pater, does all irony in a totalitarian regime aspire to the condition of music?  

Shostakovich and the shadow of Stalin

Of course the Shostakovich that I was about to hear was Symphony No 10.  Shostakovich had this to say about the symphony which was first performed after the death of Stalin:

"… I did depict Stalin in music in my next symphony, the Tenth. I wrote it right after Stalin's death, and no one has yet guessed what the symphony is about. It's about Stalin and the Stalin years. The second part, the scherzo, is a musical portrait of Stalin, roughly speaking. Of course, there are many other things in it, but that is the basis."

As an aside, I should mention that these comments are not without controversy.  Although they are taken from Shostakovich's memoirs, they were transcribed by the Soviet musicologist Solomon Volkov, of whom there is a substantial school of thought which deems him an unreliable fantasist.  That said, the violence of that second movement, which contains over fifty crescendos, is not the portrayal of an innocent wallflower.  Indeed, after the meandering calm of the first movement, the energy that suddenly explodes, filling the vast dome of the Royal Albert Hall, can only be described as frightening.  If Shostakovich did compose this after Stalin's demise, undercutting its unparalleled power with the brilliant irony of labelling the movement a scherzo (a joke), then it is perfect.  The four minutes or so that this movement lasts were as rapt as I have ever been by music.

Shostakovich after Stalin

It should go without saying, that to listen to music – or indeed to engage with any form of art – outside of the shackles of a totalitarian regime is a privilege that we all too easily take for granted.  My own anxieties – about Brexit, about a country that appears to be flirting with an isolating nationalism – are miniscule compared to the fear of citizens living their lives under the all-encompassing shadow of a dictator, where even the most delicate irony is a dangerous tool to wield.  But there are messages in music that should make us anxious.  Like the one in Daniel Barenboim's speech, the one that I had missed in my hurry for the bus after Prom 3.

"When I look at the world with so many isolationist tendencies, I get very worried  ....  The main problem of today is that there is not enough education. That there is not enough education for music, we've known for a long time.  But now there is not enough education about whom we are, about what is a human being, and how he is to relate with others of the same kind."

That these words were attacked by many as contravening some unwritten rule that the Proms are meant to be 'politically neutral' is patently absurd.  And even more so after listening to Shostakovich's glorious and utterly sobering Symphony.  Indeed, the Proms often cannot help being political.  To listen to any of Dmitry Shostakovich's masterpieces and to ignore the brutal knowledge of what gave them their life, is to miss the point entirely.  You might as well have called it a night after the Rachmaninov.

Postscript: Barenboim's 'political' speech is only my second favourite that has found its way into the Albert Hall.  My favourite?  Danny Duggan's, of course, (as played by the much missed Pete Postlethwaite) in the wonderful film Brassed Off.  

Symphony No.10 or the No 10 bus?