Symphony for the City of the Dead

by M. T. Anderson

  We are still arguing about that a whole human lifetime later. Audiences are still trying to decipher the codes in Shostakovich’s symphonies, trying to see under the masks he wore to the true face we expect to find beneath. “It’s very difficult to speak through a mask,” as the writer Viktor Shklovsky said, but “only a few can play themselves without it.”

  Was the symphony hopeful or tragic? Was the symphony a protest? Or was it exactly what Socialist Realism demanded: a work that ends in triumph, delighted in the faith that life is getting better, that life is getting merrier?

  A couple of months after the Leningrad premiere, Shostakovich spoke up. He broke the long silence he had kept since “A Mess Instead of Music.” He published several articles describing what the Fifth Symphony was “about.” What could be clearer than that?

  In an article called “My Creative Response,” he laid out exactly what he’d been picturing while he wrote the symphony: “I saw man with all his sufferings as the central idea of the work. . . . The finale resolves the tragedy and tension of the earlier movements on a joyous, optimistic note.” The article even implied that the symphony was perhaps about his own turmoil after being criticized by Pravda. It was about the spiritual victory when government criticism led him to repent of his doubts, his formalism, and his neurosis in favor of a new faith, a new hope. He wrote that of all the reviews, “one that particularly gratified me said that ‘the Fifth Symphony is a Soviet artist’s practical creative answer to just criticism.’”

  This phrase —“a Soviet artist’s practical creative answer to just criticism”— was repeated again and again when the symphony made its way across the oceans to America.

  So there we are. Our answer.

  Except we don’t know if Shostakovich actually meant what he said in this article. We don’t even know if it was by him. Especially later in his life, the regime would send Shostakovich articles already written and tell him just to sign his name at the bottom.

  Soviet literature and cinema were full of stories of anti-people individualists who, after healthy contact with the Communist cadres around them, repent, join the masses, and are joyful. It was a trope, a cliché, a well-known path. Shostakovich had just spent years writing film music for movies that featured characters who went through precisely this transformation. So in these articles, was Shostakovich just playing this familiar role? Putting on a smiling mask to avoid government censorship?

  Certainly, some of his friends believed this. “He described his music to the Party as joyous and optimistic, and the entire pack dashed off, satisfied,” said soprano Galina Vishnevskaya. “Yes, he had found a way to live and create in that country. . . . But he learned to put on a mask he would wear for the rest of his life.”

  Many in the audiences at the time did not think the finale was optimistic at all. For example, a writer who attended the premiere of the symphony in Moscow wrote in his diary: “A work of astonishing strength. The third movement is beautiful. But the ending does not sound like a resolution (still less like a triumph or victory), but rather like a punishment or vengeance on someone. A terrible emotional force, but a tragic force.”

  At a meeting of the Moscow Composers’ Union in February 1938, one critic complained that Shostakovich had failed in his symphony because of the finale’s sudden blast of hope. It “breaks in upon the symphony from without, like some terrible, shattering force.” He was confused. The end was supposed to sound celebratory, but for some reason, it didn’t. That bothered him. “The general impression of this symphony’s finale is not so much bright and optimistic as it is severe and threatening.”

  The poet Pasternak, who had cautioned his friend Mandelstam for speaking too openly, even in a whisper on the middle of a bridge, clearly felt that the Fifth Symphony was about Stalin’s purges and the Great Terror. “Just think,” he groused jealously. Shostakovich “went and said everything, and no one did anything to him for it.”

  Many years later, when a young musicologist talked to Shostakovich about the finale, the composer supposedly said: “I think that it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat. . . . It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,’ and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, ‘Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.’ . . . You have to be a complete oaf not to hear that.”

  That seems very clear. This must be what he really meant.

  But though the statement is very convincing, it is taken from a difficult source. In 1976, a young Soviet scholar, Solomon Volkov, emigrated to the West. He brought with him what he claimed were Shostakovich’s memoirs. They were published under the name Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich. He claimed that he had interviewed Shostakovich, taken notes on everything that was said, and written it all out as a narrative. This new, bitter Shostakovich was very different from the one who appeared in Soviet newspapers.

  The problem is, it is not clear that these are Shostakovich’s memoirs at all. Solomon Volkov was never able to produce the notes from which he supposedly wrote down these stories. The most likely scenario is that Volkov just wrote things down largely from memory, trying to capture Shostakovich’s style of speech and way of telling stories. That means that we never know if any particular detail from Testimony is accurate or not, if Shostakovich ever truly said it or not. So this passage, for example, about the finale of the Fifth: Is it Shostakovich? Or is it Solomon Volkov trying to make Shostakovich into a particular kind of hero? And even if these “memoirs” were totally accurate records of things the aging, dying composer said, can we understand them as the “true” Shostakovich? The composer at sixty was not the same as the composer at thirty. Would he tell the truth about himself? Or would he revise his own past?

  Which Shostakovich do we believe? The early Shostakovich or the late Shostakovich?

  We can trust no one. In a regime where words are watched, lies are rewarded, and silence is survival, there is no truth.

  There is no way to write a biography of Shostakovich without relying on hearsay and relaying the memories of people who have many private reasons to fabricate, mislead, and revise.

  So what about the finale of the Fifth Symphony? Optimistic or tragic?

  No one would disagree that there is struggle in the last movement. At one point, the whole orchestral mechanism breaks down and shudders to a halt. The question instead is: Who wins that struggle? Does Shostakovich end by offering genuine hope?

  Perhaps it became whatever the individual listener needed it to be. That’s the miracle of music. For the Communist Party officials, it was the perfect Socialist Realist ending, ablaze in glory. But for those sitting there that night who had lost friends and family members and who still had been told that life was getting merrier — for those who had not been allowed to cry, because this, of course, was a time of victory — for them, the finale’s brutal undertones were clearer. They heard the menacing growl: “Your business is rejoicing. Your business is rejoicing.”

  For them, this was the symphony’s triumph, the reason they rose from their seats in captivated astonishment: Here, at last, was someone avowing this in public, shouting the thing they all had been wanting to say. And here he was, doing it in such a way that his tracks were covered. He was masked.

  It meant different things to different people, but somehow it meant them all intensely. Shostakovich’s words just confuse the issue. His symphony itself is what remains.

  Listen to it.

  It is your symphony to write with him.

  Let us allow ourselves to be buoyed up by the hope some hear in the finale for a moment and allow Shostakovich to finish the 1930s in peace. Let’s overlook the fact that the Great Terror still ground on. For the moment, let us say that Shostakovich seemed to be safe. Let’s allow him some joy.

  On May 10, 1938, Nina Shostakovich gave birth to their son, Maxim. The couple loved their children despe
rately. Perhaps under the happy influence of family life, Shostakovich wrote a relaxed and youthful string quartet. He wrote to a friend, “I would call it ‘spring-like.’” He started it the month Maxim was born — on Galina’s second birthday.

  He wrote a Sixth Symphony, which, though it began dark-hued and somber, ended in two fast, playful movements. Certainly, on the one hand, he found his plans for a new opera interrupted when the regime banned the libretto, the script. On the other hand, they granted him an award, the Red Banner of Labor, for his work in the movies.

  In 1939, he was elected as a representative to the Leningrad City Council. Perhaps this was a way for him to give something back to the city of his birth. He was also teaching at the Leningrad Conservatory, where he had studied in the years following the Revolution. He had applied for a job there during his long silence after the suppression of the Fourth Symphony, explaining meekly that composing was “not working out.”

  He became a beloved teacher. Though his manner was distant and sometimes strange, he was kind and generous with his students. They were amazed at his prodigious memory. In the course of a class, he could sit down at a piano without any sheet music and play through not only, it seemed, 150 years’ worth of works from the past, but also the music his students had recently written and showed him for critique. “No matter how many musicians approached him, whether they were from Central Asia or Russia or amateurs, he would always give them time and never criticized anyone,” a student remembered. He may have been secretive about his criticisms, but those who knew him well could tell when he didn’t like something: He would maintain “an eloquent silence” (as he had done during the “Mess Instead of Music” flap); he would blandly praise the high quality of the paper the student had written on; or he would disappear to smoke a cigarette. When he was able, he supported several of his students financially. Many of them became his lifelong friends.

  Sometimes there were parties at his apartment. People would drink and jabber to one another while, in the background, Shostakovich banged out songs on the piano. Occasionally, they played drunk soccer in his living room.

  Shostakovich still loved soccer. He thought about taking a course to become a referee. “He said the stadium was the only place you could express yourself openly. When a player scores, you can cheer, ‘Hurray!’ because you’re happy, not because you’re forced. You can’t lie all the time!”

  He bought season tickets and never missed a game. Once, when Nina was away, Shostakovich invited the whole Zenith team over to dinner. His friend Glikman came, too. They ate their grub, then they all sat around in Shostakovich’s study. One of the players strummed a guitar while Shostakovich played the piano. According to Glikman, “When the last guest had departed, Shostakovich stretched out on the sofa with the air of a man who knows he has done a good day’s work, and said: ‘Well, now we’ve actually got to know some of our heroes. Up till now we’ve only been able to see them from far off at the top of the stands.’”

  Shostakovich’s family life was deeply important to him. He doted on his children. Galina now was a little girl with two blond braids, and tiny Maxim was a toddler. Their aunt Maria, Shostakovich’s sister, had returned to Leningrad from exile in Central Asia. She now had a little boy, too. The effervescent Zoya had finally given up the arts altogether to become a veterinarian in distant Samarkand. Shostakovich would brag that he had a little sister who “could cure elephants.”

  The composer’s daily schedule was extraordinarily regular. He got up at six in the morning and dressed in a suit. He liked formality of dress, though he and Nina didn’t care much otherwise about clothing. (She often bought the same bolt of fabric for the whole family’s outfits.) Dressed in his suit, Shostakovich would go into his study and begin to compose. He came out for meals at precisely nine a.m., two p.m., and seven p.m. His concentration was incredible. “If it isn’t singing or shouting, noises don’t affect him at all,” Nina wrote. “The door of the room where he works is usually open, and often the children romp around in his room. Sometimes Galya [Galina] climbs onto his knees while he is composing, but in such cases she sits quietly.” Young Galina knew not to touch her father’s pens or add anything to his newly composed pieces.

  When Shostakovich finished a piece, he would quietly pour himself a glass of rowanberry vodka and invite over a few colleagues. After the premieres of pieces, he would take everyone out to a restaurant.

  As Maxim grew, it became clear that both he and his sister had a mischievous streak. They would stand under the window of one of their nation’s other foremost composers, Sergei Prokofiev, and chant, “Sergei Sergeich, tra-tra-tra! Sergei Sergeich, tra-tra-tra!” until the master of Russian ballet started screaming, “I’ll box your ears!” and hurled everything on his desk at them, including his paperweight.

  Once, little Maxim thought it would be funny if he pretended he was dead. Galina hid in the bushes. When Maxim saw his parents coming along the road, he lay down on the tarmac next to his bicycle as if he had been hit by a car and killed.

  The children could not understand why their parents were so angry.

  Shostakovich loved his children, a friend said, “with a kind of abnormal, morbid love, and lived in constant fear that some misfortune would befall them.”

  The “Mess Instead of Music” crisis had left its mark on him. One of his dearest friends in later life, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, said, “The hatchet job done on him in that 1936 Pravda article had, like a public slap in the face, left an imprint on his whole life. He had reacted in an agonizing, physical way, as if his skin were searing from the brand that had been put on him.”

  Yet this time of trouble was in many ways the moment he reached his full maturity. Vishnevskaya claimed, “The Fifth Symphony was a turning point not only in his creative life but in his outlook as a Russian. He became the chronicler of our country; the history of Soviet Russia is nowhere better described than in his compositions.”

  In the descriptions that remain of him, he is often remembered for his kindness and generosity, for his gentleness, and for “the childlike, vulnerable smile.” But perhaps he survived because there was another side to him.

  When the writer Zoshchenko — a poker partner of the composer — was confronted by one of these descriptions, he responded sharply,

  It seemed to you that he is “frail, fragile, withdrawn, an infinitely direct, pure child.” That is so. But if it were only so, then great art . . . would never be obtained. He is exactly what you say he is, plus something else — he is hard, acid, extremely intelligent, strong perhaps, despotic and not altogether good-natured (although cerebrally good-natured). . . .

  In him, there are great contradictions. In him, one quality obliterates the other. It is conflict in the highest degree. It is almost a catastrophe.

  The Great Terror continued unabated. The loss is incalculable. Roughly eight million people had been arrested in the space of a few years. Around a million of them were shot; seven million more were sent to prison camps. Of those sent to the camps, about two million died in 1937 and 1938, the height of the Terror, from starvation, exposure, disease, and exhaustion. It was a full assault on the nation by its own government. It hit hardest many of the regions the Germans would attack a few years later.

  Stalin’s purges had begun in Leningrad. They were devastating. They were that city’s first siege. Then, like an invasion, they had spread the length and width of the Soviet Union. They had hit the intelligentsia, the military, and the Communist Party itself particularly hard, just as the deaths and imprisonments during the Five-Year Plan of the early thirties had decimated the ranks of the peasantry.

  How had Shostakovich avoided arrest? We don’t know precisely, though it may have had something to do with his international celebrity. News of the Great Terror was leaked to the West, but Stalin made efforts to conceal its unimaginable scope. The disappearance of one of the USSR’s most famous citizens would have made the global community suspicious. On the other
hand, the NKVD was clearly collecting materials with an eye to building a case against the composer at some point. It may be that their attention was simply diverted by the onset of the Second World War in 1939.

  Regardless, Shostakovich, like everyone who lived in the cities, felt the cold breath of the Great Terror daily for several years. As Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote, “Anybody who breathes the air of terror is doomed, even if nominally he manages to save his life. Everybody is a victim — not only those who die, but also all the killers, ideologists, accomplices and sycophants who close their eyes or wash their hands — even if they are secretly consumed with remorse at night. Every section of the population has been through the terrible sickness caused by terror, and none has so far recovered, or become fit again for normal civic life.” A whole society was traumatized and brutalized, trained up against compassion. Terror “is an illness that is passed on to the next generation, so that the sons pay for the sins of the fathers and perhaps only the grandchildren begin to get over it — or at least it takes on a different form with them.”

  To get away from it all in the spring of 1941, Dmitri and Nina Shostakovich went on vacation in the Crimea. Nina went hiking in the mountains. Her husband wandered around the volleyball courts, climbed up in the referee’s chair, and began to score matches between the other guests.

  Shostakovich was relaxed, or as relaxed as the twitchy man got. He had just received a Stalin Prize, First Class, for his new Piano Quintet.

  Perhaps there, where the mountains met the sea, he actually felt joy.

  It is a shame that, to the west, Hitler had turned his malevolent gaze on the Soviet Union. He believed the Russians were an inferior race, and moreover, he knew that their own leader had just spent six years systematically destroying their armed forces, their industry, and their economy.

  And so, on a summer night when the sun never went down, Adolf Hitler launched a surprise attack on Russia, and the second siege of Leningrad began.