by Alex Ross
Pretending to be a musical score,
The famous Leningrader
Returned to her native ether.
All this amends the image of the Leningrad as a bluntly propagandistic exercise. The score has a countervailing element of fantasy, which resurfaces from time to time as the massive four-movement structure unfolds. A hint of the snare-drum rhythm slices through the symphony’s final bars, beneath mechanized sonorities of Soviet glory. Another demonic procession might be ready to begin.
Prokofiev responded to the Nazi invasion with a characteristically idiosyncratic gesture: he made an opera out of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Up to a point, the project seemed relevant to the historical situation: Tolstoy’s scenes of the Napoleonic invasion of 1812—the Battle of Borodino, the occupation of Moscow, Marshal Kutuzov’s crafty turning of the tide, the downfall of the French army during the long Russian winter—resonated with the ongoing struggle against Hitler. Prokofiev was careful to end the opera not with Tolstoy’s meditations on man’s insignificance before the forces of history but with a rousing nationalist pageant. Yet the composer was at his best in sketching portraits of the old Russian aristocracy—in particular, the character of young Natasha Rostova, the pure-hearted but woefully unfocused daughter of an impoverished landowning family. The centerpiece of Part I of the opera is a grand ballroom scene, drenched in longing for a lost world. “Valse! Valse! Valse! Mesdames!” cries the host of the ball, over a sinister vamp in the bass. It is a heartbreaking mirage of splendor, with the pistons of modernity churning in the background.
Then came a second film collaboration with Eisenstein, whose montage style may have influenced the innovative flow of semi-independent scenes in War and Peace. Eisenstein had undertaken the tricky task of making a multipart film about the life of Tsar Ivan IV, otherwise known as Ivan the Terrible, Stalin’s idol. If Eisenstein produced a hagiography of Ivan, he would be issuing an apologia for the worst of Stalin’s Terror; if he offered a “warts and all” portrait, he would offend the leader. He split the difference by making Part I more festive in tone and Part II more critical. Prokofiev’s music, likewise, played both sides. The swordlike motto theme—four horns and two trumpets in B-flat major, grazed by G-flat major in the lower brass—creates a nimbus of dark glory around Ivan, a kind of super-major harmony. But the music for the “orgy scene” in Part II, where the Oprichniks are shown wallowing in blood and drunkenness, has a mocking tone, oompah notes in the tuba rendering Ivan’s henchmen ridiculous rather than fearsome. Stalin reacted predictably. Part I received a Stalin prize, shared by Eisenstein and Prokofiev. Part II never made it to the theaters. “Ivan the Terrible was very cruel,” Stalin said to Eisenstein, after viewing the second part. “You can show he was cruel. But you must show why he needed to be cruel.”
Prokofiev faced no such problems when he worked in instrumental forms, at least for the time being. A trio of vehement, hard-driving piano sonatas—Nos. 6, 7, and 8—drew praise for their evocation of the Soviet war effort, although they had been conceived in peacetime, in the summer of 1939. His Fifth Symphony, likewise, was hailed as an inspirational “war symphony,” though it lacked a program along the lines of the Leningrad. This was Prokofiev’s first attempt at a large-scale, Beethovenian utterance, his previous symphonies having been more in the nature of orchestral suites. Shostakovich almost certainly served as a model. The plan follows that of Shostakovich’s Fifth: a measured, somber opening movement, hinting at massive forces in motion; a diverting, lightly acerbic Scherzo; a slow movement with funereal overtones; and an up-tempo, faintly militaristic finale.
As in the case of Shostakovich’s Fifth, a question mark hangs over the ending. The final movement is marked Allegro giocoso, and seems determined to marshal its energies into a jocular, brassy close. In the coda, however, a bitingly dissonant kind of machine music takes over, harking back to the insolent, diabolique manner of Prokofiev’s youth. Eleven bars before the end, there is a sudden diminuendo, followed by a sound like the whirring of gears. Possibly this passage was meant to echo Stalin’s image of Soviet citizens as cogs in a great machine, but it makes for a strangely icy close to an ostensible victory narrative.
The Fifth Symphony gave Prokofiev perhaps his finest hour as a Soviet composer. He conducted the premiere himself, in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, on January 13, 1945. As at the first Leningrad performance of Shostakovich’s Seventh, the sound of cannons shook the hall beforehand, but this time the guns were being fired in ceremonial salute, to mark the Red Army’s advance across the Vistula River in Poland. Sviatoslav Richter, who was in the audience that night, basked in the composer’s aura of power: “When Prokofiev stood up, it seemed as though the light poured down on him from on high. He stood there, like a monument on a pedestal.” Later that month, the composer had an attack of dizziness, fell to the ground, and suffered a severe concussion. He never recovered fully from the consequences of the injury. The last stage of his misfortune was beginning.
The Zhdanov Affair
“A very pleasant place, indeed,” the American newspaperman Harrison Salisbury wrote in 1954, when he visited Shostakovich in his dacha in Bolshevo, outside Moscow. “There is a big garden. There is room to play volleyball, and the Klyazma River is convenient for swimming.” Shostakovich was given his first country retreat in 1946. In the same year he received a new five-room apartment in Moscow, one equipped with no fewer than three pianos—two for the composer in his study and one for his son. Shostakovich promptly wrote a thank-you note to Stalin: “All of this made me extraordinarily happy. I ask you to accept my most heartfelt gratitude for the attention and concern. I wish you happiness, health, and many years of life for the good of our beloved Motherland, our great people.”
In the wake of the Leningrad, then, Shostakovich had recovered his standing as the chief composer of the Soviet Union. One positive sign from above came in 1943, when he and Aram Khachaturian jointly submitted a draft of a new Soviet national anthem, as part of a composers’ competition that Stalin personally supervised. Although their entry failed to win, Shostakovich somehow wound up with the largest monetary reward. He also received the Order of Lenin, became a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation, became the head of the Leningrad composers’ group, served on the Stalin Prize committee, advised the Ministry of Cinematography, and most notably, took over Maximilian Steinberg’s composition class at the Leningrad Conservatory. He therefore occupied the podium at which Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky’s teacher, once had stood.
A new round of muttering began. The rank and file of the Composers’ Union, especially the former members of the proletarian-music movement, had grown envious of the dachas, prizes, posts, interest-free loans, complimentary automobiles, and other perks that the elite composers were arranging for one another. Meanwhile, indications of a new wave of repression could be seen in all the Soviet arts; a campaign against “art for art’s sake,” “formalist,” and “individualist” tendencies in the writings of Akhmatova and Zoshchenko set the stage.
All through 1946 and 1947, independent-minded Soviet composers received sharper criticism, from which Shostakovich was not immune. He had already lost a little ground with his Eighth Symphony, which had appeared in 1943 and struck some listeners as excessively gloomy and harrowing. Officialdom expected him to respond to the defeat of Hitler with a great Soviet “Victory Symphony,” replete with chorus and soloists, à la Beethoven’s Ninth. Shostakovich promised to write such a work and made a start on the first movement in the last winter of the war. But he broke off in the middle, for reasons that remain unclear. In its place he dashed off a kind of anti-Ninth, an alternately satiric and melancholic five-movement suite, which occasioned intense debate after its November 1945 premiere. Shostakovich had gone on vacation from his great duties, one critic proposed the following year.
Prokofiev, too, came under renewed scrutiny. On October 11, 1947, thirty years to the day after the Central Committee of the Bolsh
evik Party resolved to overthrow Kerensky’s Provisional Government, Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony had its premiere, and it failed to strike the affirmative note that the occasion demanded. As in the composer’s previous symphony, a kind of malfunction seems to happen in the finale. The movement begins in deceptively buoyant, up-tempo fashion, with vaudeville-like ditties prevailing. The brass kick in with Sousa-esque march music, replete with baton-twirling piccolos. Then a grinding, machinelike noise is heard, and the merrymaking mood vanishes into a slow procession of towering dissonant chords and cruelly blaring major triads. This unambiguously tragic ending was an apt prelude to what happened next.
The second nightmare began in earnest on January 5, 1948, with another trip to the opera. This time Stalin and other members of the Central Committee went to the Bolshoi to see The Great Friendship, a saga of the postrevolutionary Caucacus by the undistinguished Georgian composer Vano Muradeli. Again the members of the committee failed to enjoy themselves, and various reasons were given for their displeasure—something to do with the incorrect representation of the political orientation of the Northern Caucasian peoples, something to do with the improper use of a folk dance. But that was all pretext. Muradeli took the heat because he could be trusted to grovel in public and shift the blame to more significant targets—namely, the bigwigs in the Union of Soviet Composers, who had been consuming excessive state resources in pursuit of self-indulgent ends.
The driving force behind the campaign was Andrei Zhdanov, the Leningrad Communist Party chief, who had risen to become Stalin’s apparent second-in-command. “The Pianist,” Zhdanov was called, in honor of his modest abilities on that instrument.
In mid-January, Zhdanov called a number of composers to the Central Committee offices for a three-day conference. He criticized Muradeli’s hapless opera, recited from the Pravda editorial of 1936, and stated that “muddle instead of music” was alive and well. Several yes-men got up to say no to formalism. “Shostakovich’s Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth symphonies are supposed to be considered as works of genius abroad,” said the song composer Vladimir Zakharov. “But who considers them as such?” Tikhon Khrennikov, a younger composer of minor abilities and major political gifts, delivered a carefully calibrated critique of Shostakovich, aimed not so much at the composer himself as at the supposed cult around him. The Leningrad, Khrennikov said, “was described as a work of stupendous genius besides which Beethoven was a mere pup.”
Some of the composers were not afraid to fight back. “You don’t know what you are talking about,” someone called out in the middle of Zakharov’s disquisition. Lev Knipper protested, “You can’t start standardizing everything.” Vissarion Shebalin warned that sweeping statements about cacophony in Soviet music were creating an atmosphere of panic in which “servile idiots…might cause a lot of trouble.”
Prokofiev is said to have walked in late and shown obvious disdain for what Zhdanov was saying. Depending on which story you believe, he either chatted away loudly with his neighbors or fell asleep, and eventually got into an argument with a high-ranking Party official who accused him of not paying proper attention. These stories may be apocryphal; voluminous lore has accumulated around Soviet composers over the decades, and scholars are still trying to sift out the truth. What is certain is that Prokofiev did not address the gathering, by way of either self-justification or apology.
Shostakovich swallowed his pride. Although he complained about the more extreme criticism—“Comrade Zakharov was not very thoughtful in what he said about Soviet symphonies,” he said—he took a generally selfabasing tone, admitting that some of his works may have been defective. Old fears probably caused him to act in this way: the situation must have stirred memories of the late thirties, when so many people near him disappeared. Another death got Shostakovich’s attention. On the last day of the conference he learned of the sudden passing of the actor Solomon Mikhoels, the founder of the Moscow Jewish Theatre. Although the cause of death was not yet known, Mikhoels had been killed at Stalin’s behest. Shostakovich went directly from the meeting at the Kremlin to the Mikhoels household. “I envy him,” he said.
On February 10, 1948, the Central Committee issued what became known as the “Historic Decree.” Four days later, forty-two works by “formalists”—including Shostakovich’s Sixth, Eighth, and Ninth symphonies, Prokofiev’s Sixth and Eighth sonatas, and Popov’s unlucky First Symphony—were banned. Another conference, a General Assembly of composers, followed, at which Khrennikov delivered a stem-winder of a speech denouncing half the major works of the early twentieth century.
This time Prokofiev claimed to be too sick to attend, and sent a seemingly apologetic letter whose insincerity was obvious to many observers, Shostakovich included. Prokofiev essentially congratulated Soviet aestheticians for having arrived at a concept of musical simplicity that he had formed independently, even if he had “unwittingly” diverged from his chosen path and occasionally indulged in the “mannerism” of atonality.
Behind the nonchalant facade lay a shattered spirit. Despite years of effort, Prokofiev had been unable to bring about a complete performance of his masterpiece, War and Peace. Part I was staged in Leningrad in 1946, but a production of Part II the following year was halted after a dress rehearsal, its libretto disparaged for supposed historical errors. “I am prepared to accept the failure of any of my works,” Prokofiev said to a colleague, “but if only you knew how much I want War and Peace to see the light of day!” He never saw the entire opera performed.
More bad news followed in the days after the Historic Decree. On February 11, one day after the decree came down, Eisenstein, Prokofiev’s favorite collaborator, died of a heart attack at the age of fifty. On February 20, Lina Prokofiev, the composer’s first wife, was arrested on trumped-up charges of spying against the state and sent into the camp system, from which she would not return for eight years. Because Prokofiev had recently entered into a second marriage, with his longtime lover, Mira Mendelson, he might have concluded that Lina’s arrest was some sort of sadistic manipulation, although documents recently unearthed in the Soviet Union suggest that it was nothing more than a chilling coincidence.
Shostakovich’s conduct in the wake of the decree should come as no surprise. He addressed the General Assembly in the following terms:
All the resolutions of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) regarding the art of recent years, and particularly the Resolution of 10 February 1948 in regard to the opera Great Friendship, point out to Soviet artists that a tremendous national uplift is now taking place in our country, our great Soviet nation. Some Soviet artists, and among them myself, attempted to give expression in their works to this great national uplift. But between my subjective intentions and objective results there was an appalling gap. The absence, in my works, of the interpretation of folk art, that great spirit by which our people lives, has been with utmost clarity and definiteness pointed out by the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik). I am deeply grateful for it and for all the criticism contained in the Resolution. All the directives of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik), and in particular those that concern me personally, I accept as a stern but paternal solicitude for us, Soviet artists. Work—arduous, creative, joyous work on new compositions which will find their path to the heart of the Soviet people, which will be understandable to the people, loved by them, and which will be organically connected with the people’s art, developed and enriched by the great traditions of Russian classicism—this will be a fitting response to the Resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik).
We know Shostakovich to have been a fluent speaker of Soviet officialese, with its ponderous jargon, empty clichés, and numbing repetition. If he wrote this speech himself, he produced a masterpiece of the genre—prose so awful that it now has a comic effect when read aloud. No one, of course, was laughing at the time.
By April
1948, the wily Khrennikov had assumed the post of general secretary of the Composers’ Union. The formalists were invited to deliver their apologies at the First All-Union Congress of Composers. Most failed to show up; the sickness that allegedly overcame Prokofiev in February had spread. It was a “conspiracy of silence,” one participant said. Shostakovich, alas, went to the podium to deliver one more mea culpa, which, he later claimed, a Party operative had thrust into his hands at the last moment. Afterward, his colleagues avoided looking him in the eye. In his own words: “I read like the most paltry wretch, a parasite, a puppet, a cut-out paper doll on a string!” He is said to have shrieked the last phrase and repeated it maniacally. The novelist Boris Pasternak, among others, was crestfallen at Shostakovich’s show of acquiescence. “O Lord, if only they knew at least how to keep silent!” the novelist exclaimed. “Even that would be a feat of courage!”
All the while, Shostakovich continued to work. In early 1948 he was writing his First Violin Concerto, and after attending each day of the musicological inquisition he would pick up where he had left off the previous night. The second movement marks the first appearance of what would become his signature motif—the notes D, E-flat, C, and B, which in German notation spell out D S C H, or Dmitri SCHostakowitsch. When the Zhdanov affair commenced, Shostakovich was working on the third movement, in which a furiously sorrowing Passacaglia is joined to a scalding solo cadenza. Once, he showed the composer Mikhail Meyerovich what point in the score he had reached when the “Historic Decree” was published. “The violin played semiquavers before and after it,” Meyerovich recalled. “There was no change evident in the music.”
Dance of Death