The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  Shostakovich set to work on the finale of the Fourth shortly after “Muddle Instead of Music” appeared. Did he already have a tragic ending in mind? Or did the events of early 1936 send him into a spiral of despair? Either way, it was clear from the start that the Fourth would not suffice as a response to Pravda’s attack. The Leningrad Philharmonic began rehearsals for the premiere in the autumn of 1936, and word quickly spread through the music community that Shostakovich had rejected criticism and written music of “diabolical complexity.” Apparatchiks appeared and spoke to the director of the orchestra, who called Shostakovich into his office. The composer came out wearing a downcast look. After walking silently for a while, he told Isaak Glikman that the symphony would not be played. “I didn’t like the situation,” Shostakovich later recalled. “Fear was all around. So I withdrew it.”

  For nearly two years Shostakovich placed no major works before the public. Finally, on November 21, 1937, in the Great Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic, he unveiled his Fifth Symphony. The change in style was dramatic. The Fifth followed an ordinary four-movement pattern: Moderato, Allegretto, Largo, Allegro non troppo. Like Beethoven’s same-numbered symphony, it proceeded from tragic minor to exultant major. Here was a work that the ordinary music lover—Stalin, for example—could comprehend.

  A subsequent article, which appeared under Shostakovich’s signature, advertised the symphony as “My Creative Response” and described it as an apology for Lady Macbeth and the unperformed Fourth: “If I have really succeeded in embodying in musical images all that I have thought and felt since the critical articles in Pravda, if the demanding listener will detect in my music a turn toward greater clarity and simplicity, I will be satisfied.” Although Shostakovich may not have written these words, they contain ambiguities that are characteristic of his mental process. “All that I have thought and felt” might denote personal suffering and defiance. Musical simplicity does not rule out emotional complexity. And note the “if”: nothing about this great work is simple or clear.

  Beethoven’s “hero” symphonies, the Eroica and the Fifth, tell stories of conflict and resolution, of protagonists overcoming obstacles to win victory. Maxim Shostakovich, the composer’s son, indicates that his father’s Fifth follows much the same plan: “The Fifth Symphony is his ‘Heroic’ Symphony. [The novelist Alexander] Fadeyev once said that he was scolding someone in the finale. My father replied: it was not just scolding. The hero is saying: ‘I am right. I will follow the way I choose.’” The first movement sets out the grim landscape in which the hero will have to make his way. The second theme alludes, surprisingly, to a phrase from the Habanera in Bizet’s Carmen—the notes to which Carmen sings the phrase “Amour, amour.” The Russian musicologist Alexander Benditsky has discovered that the symphony is in fact riddled with references to Carmen, and they are probably connected to Shostakovich’s lingering love for the translator Elena Konstantinovskaya, who, after her time in prison, had gone to Spain and married the Soviet photographer and filmmaker Roman Karmen. As in Lady Macbeth, personal layers lie beneath the surface of what appears to be a public, political work.

  The heart of the symphony is the slow movement, the Largo. Sounds like sobs, lonely cries in the night, calls for help, even a kind of insistent begging for mercy—four loud repeated notes high on the violins—fill the air. Over a bank of tremolo violins, one woodwind instrument after another comes forward to sing a plaintive song, which falls a fourth and then a major second, as the sorrow chorus in Jerome Kern’s “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Aroun’.” (The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp has investigated the phenomenon of the “musical chill,” a tremor that runs down the body and raises the hairs on the skin. A passage in which a solo instrument steps in front of a softer background is especially prone to cause this effect; Panksepp compares it to “the separation call of young animals, the primal cry of despair to signal caretakers to exhibit social care and attention.”) Adding to the funereal tone is an apparent allusion to Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, the ultimate pageant of Russian suffering. The first five notes of Mussorgsky’s setting of the words “Flow, flow, bitter tears, weep, weep, O soul of the Orthodox faithful” overlap with the last five notes of Shostakovich’s main Largo theme. They are heard again at the end of the movement, plucked out on harp and celesta, like a music box winding down. The two final chords are a kind of “Amen”—a significant gesture from an atheist composer.

  A brassy blast of D minor shoves us into the finale. The change is so wrenching that listeners may learn to dread its arrival. The pivotal notes D and A, which sounded pensively in the first movement, now thunder on the drums, setting the stage for a martial, declamatory theme in the trumpets, trombones, and tuba. The barreling energy of this theme and the motorized quality of its accompaniment nearly replicate the opening of the Fourth Symphony. The possibility that Shostakovich may in some way be rewriting his earlier work gives added meaning to a self-quotation that appears in the quiet contrasting section of the movement. Just before he set to work on the Fifth, Shostakovich made a setting of Pushkin’s poem “Regeneration,” which reads as follows:

  An artist-barbarian with a drowsy brush

  Blackens over the painting of a genius

  And senselessly draws on top of it

  His own illegitimate designs.

  But over the years the foreign paint

  Flakes away like old scales,

  And the genius’s work appears again

  Before us in its former beauty.

  Thus do delusions vanish

  From my worried soul,

  And in their place visions arise

  Of pure, original days.

  In the Fifth’s finale, a yearning phrase from this song appears high in the strings and in the harp, suggestive of some luminous, angelic sphere. It floats up until it is out of reach, and a tapping of the timpani marks the return of the martial mood. There may be a whole series of repaintings going on here: motifs from the Fourth reworked, a song for voice and piano orchestrated but stripped of the voice, the song itself blotted out by a drumbeat. From here on, the symphony is all crescendo. The timpani pound relentlessly. Trumpets turn the main theme into a fanfare-like statement, an emblem of power.

  The question arises: Who or what is triumphing? Is this the work of the artist-barbarian—the blackening of the work of genius that was the Fourth? Or, by the end, has the illicit drawing been erased, revealing Shostakovich’s intentions in their original purity?

  Even before the reference to “Regeneration” became known, the brutalism of the finale caused confusion and consternation among listeners. Some opponents of Stalin’s regime took it as a sign that Shostakovich had joined the ranks of the conformists. Vladimir Shcherbachev, who had spoken up for the composer during the Pravda crisis, called the Fifth “remarkable, but sickeningly depressing.” Nikolai Miaskovsky, himself a composer of turbulent, pessimistic symphonies, said the ending was “bad,” a “D-major formal reply”; Osip Mandelstam called it “tedious intimidation.” On the other side, some officials believed that Shostakovich was defying Pravda’s wise counsel. The well-connected critic Georgiy Khubov complained that the Largo was “an expressionist etching depicting ‘numb horror,’” the finale “severe and threatening.”

  But the better part of the audience seemed to identify strongly with the symphony’s assertion of will—what Maxim Shostakovich 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 your 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. Others began rising from their seats. During the long ovation that followed, Yevgeny Mravinsky, the conductor, held the score above his head.<
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  Shaporina wrote in her diary: “Everyone kept saying: ‘That was his answer, and it was a good one.’ D.D. came out white as a sheet, biting his lips. I think he was close to tears.”

  Prokofiev Returns

  Shostakovich and Prokofiev, the two giants of Soviet music, never understood each other particularly well. They met only occasionally, and often traded criticisms in front of colleagues and in haphazard correspondence: Prokofiev would comment on Shostakovich’s supposed melodic deficiency, while Shostakovich would chide Prokofiev for his habit of farming out orchestration to colleagues.

  In some ways their relationship recapitulates, in a cooler key, the rivalry between Mahler and Strauss, with similar psychological motifs in play. Like Mahler, Shostakovich pictured himself as a perennial victim of fate, yet he had total confidence in his abilities. For both men, the attitude of martyrdom may have been something of a pose. Prokofiev, like Strauss, presented a phlegmatic, devil-may-care exterior. Where Shostakovich was cagey, Prokofiev was forthright, even blatant in his opinions—“a kind of big baby who must tell the truth on all occasions,” said his friend Nicolas Nabokov. A colleague overheard the following historic exchange between them:

  PROKOFIEV: You know, I’m really going to get down to work on my Sixth Symphony. I’ve written the first movement…and now I’m writing the second, with three themes: the third movement will probably be in sonata form. I feel the need to compensate for the absence of sonata form in the previous movements.

  SHOSTAKOVICH: So, is the weather here always like this?

  Shostakovich, like Mahler, had an exceptional ability to dramatize his inner life; he saw no difference between his own fate and the fate of his country and the world. Prokofiev and Strauss, by contrast, were “Selfians,” struggling to maintain their poise as the world spun around them. They had a more practical, pragmatic relationship with the craft of composition, and both have been underrated as a result.

  Prokofiev was a tall, imposing man. One American critic, on first viewing him, described him as a blond Russian football guard; another claimed that he was made entirely of steel. Born in the Ukraine in 1891, Prokofiev became the prodigy and enfant terrible of the St. Petersburg Conservatory in his teens. On December 18, 1908, three days before the premiere of Schoenberg’s Second Quartet in Vienna, he caused a sensation with a recital of his piano music at the Evenings of Contemporary Music in Petersburg; the highlight of the program was a brief, savagely dis-sonant piece titled Suggestion diabolique. He would also show a knack for sensuous, Rachmaninov-like lyricism (the opera Maddalena); brooding chromatic fantasies at the outer edges of the tonal (the piano piece “Despair”); and a pioneering essay in neoclassical, back-to-Mozart style (the Sinfonietta). In all, Prokofiev had a gift for what the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin called the “carnivalesque”—farce, parody, irresponsible merrymaking, mock grandeur.

  The ten days that shook the world did not shake Prokofiev. In February 1917 he was anticipating the first performance of The Gambler—a ferociously effective adaptation of Dostoevsky’s novella about a young man riding the roulette wheel to ruin—and much of his correspondence in the following months concerned his fruitless attempts to have the premiere rescheduled. Springtime found him on a leisurely trip up the Kama River, in the Volga region. In the summer he put the finishing touches on two works of untroubled lyricism, the First Violin Concerto and the Classical Symphony. Sviatoslav Richter compared the concerto to “the sensation you get when you first open your window in spring and are assailed by the sounds rising up from the street.”

  By the time of the Bolshevik takeover, in October, Prokofiev was on a hiking expedition in the Caucasus. (That aristocratic excursion had to be edited out of Soviet-era histories, as David Nice notes in the first volume of his Prokofiev biography.) Later that fall Prokofiev composed the apocalyptically noisy cantata Seven, They Are Seven, based on ancient Akkadian incantations as adapted by Konstantin Balmont. Again the composer seemed peculiarly disconnected:

  They bring us sorrows. They bring us hatred.

  They are heralds proclaiming the plague.

  Seven gods of infinite worlds!

  One day Prokofiev showed up at the Commissariat of Enlightenment, saying that he needed fresh air to develop his art. Lunacharsky protested that “in Russia we also have a lot of fresh air,” but sent him away cordially, with a Soviet passport in case he wished to return. Prokofiev’s subsequent adventures played out like a picaresque tale along the lines of Around the World in Eighty Days. He set off on the Trans-Siberian Express toward Japan, intending eventually to go to Buenos Aires. Instead, he wound up in San Francisco. When the American authorities detained him as a suspect alien, he claimed to hate the Bolsheviks because they had taken all his money.

  The better part of the years 1918 to 1922 was spent in America, where audiences applauded Prokofiev’s virtuosic piano playing but struggled to make sense of his compositions. During the Pacific Ocean voyage, Prokofiev had begun writing an opera libretto based on Carlo Gozzi’s deliciously absurd commedia dell’arte play The Love of Three Oranges, using an adaptation that Meyerhold had made for his experimental studio in the years before the revolution. This was “estrangement” in a lighthearted vein: in the Prologue, Tragedians, Comedians, Romantics, Eccentrics, and Empty-Heads debate among themselves what genre of entertainment should be performed, and as the fairy-tale plot plays out, they periodically intrude to offer observations and criticisms. The soprano Mary Garden, a famous exponent of the roles of Mélisande and Salome, arranged a successful staging of The Love of Three Oranges at the Chicago Opera Company in 1921, but a subsequent New York run flopped, curtailing dreams of American fame. The country left one major mark on Prokofiev, though; he fell under the influence of Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science movement, according to which people can overcome sickness, sin, evil, even death itself if they achieve the right spiritual understanding.

  By 1923, the adventurer had settled in Paris, where he had to contend with the politics of style. For all his compositional virtuosity, Prokofiev could not rival Stravinsky and Les Six in their rapid invention and assimilation of musical trends. Stravinsky, Prokofiev commented, “frightfully desires his creativity to adhere to modernity. If I want anything, it’s that modernity should adhere to my creativity.” Circa 1908 the teenage Prokofiev would have been perceived as the more modern of the two; Stravinsky, at that time, had barely made a mark on the Petersburg scene. In the twenties it was Prokofiev who was struggling to keep up, and after several years of frustration he decided to go his own way.

  Although composers in the Diaghilev circle went around proclaiming that opera was defunct, Prokofiev devoted much of the twenties to the composition of The Fiery Angel, a comparatively old-fashioned drama of sexual obsession and demonic possession in which Faust and Mephistopheles have supporting roles. It was an extravagant, alluring, floor-rattling affair, recalling the Symbolist door-to-the-beyond mentality that prevailed before the war, and, not surprisingly, it failed to arouse interest in Stravinsky’s Paris. Prokofiev then turned his attention to Berlin, where, he hoped, one of Leo Kestenberg’s state-supported theaters would stage the opera. A production of The Fiery Angel was scheduled for 1927, but the conductor Bruno Walter peremptorily canceled it when the orchestral parts arrived late. Prokofiev’s biggest work to date was effectively dead.

  Prokofiev had no trouble satisfying Diaghilev’s demand for propulsive, percussive, machine-age ballets—in the mid-twenties he produced The Step of Steel, an aestheticized and eroticized Ballets Russes fantasy of life in the Soviet Union—but he was tiring of the bludgeoning, dissonant manner that he had perfected in his youth. Instead, he wished to give free rein to his melodic gift—one area in which Stravinsky could not rival him. He drew on a seemingly inexhaustible supply of long-breathed melodies that start with a voluptuous upward reach and then graciously sink down. As in Shostakovich, the diatonic scale is so richly ornamented with added tones—the lowered f
ifth, the lowered second, and so on—that the harmonies constantly float away from their home key. In the harshest passages of early Prokofiev scores such as The Gambler, those extra tones are like symptoms of spreading infection. The same air of corruption, of a world gone wrong, floats through much of Shostakovich’s music. But the mature Prokofiev is striving for lyrical release, and “wrong notes” become a play of light and shadow around a shapely form.

  By the early thirties, Prokofiev had committed himself to what he called, in an interview with the Los Angeles Evening Express, a “new simplicity”—a conservative modernism rooted in Classical and Romantic tradition. Since socialist-realist ideology was demanding the same, Prokofiev concluded that the Soviet worldview magically coincided with his own. In fact, he had been carefully primed to think so. Stalin placed a priority on bringing illustrious cultural exiles back into the fold, and the project of seducing Prokofiev was supervised by the OGPU, as the secret police were known at the time.