The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  “I was with him”: Theodor W. Adorno, Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link, trans. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Cambridge UP, 1991), p. 10.

  “Schoenberg envied Berg”: Ibid., p. 29.

  new kinds of tonality: Theodor W. Adorno, Alban Berg: Briefwechsel, 1925–1935, ed. Henri Lonitz (Suhrkamp, 1997), p. 108.

  “Alban invented”: George Perle, The Operas of Alban Berg, Vol. 2: Lulu (University of California Press, 1985), p. 28.

  get his orchestration right: Hall, A View of Berg’s “Lulu,” pp. 39 and 167.

  Berg saw in Vienna: David Drew, Kurt Weill: A Handbook (University of California Press, 1987), p. 184.

  noting the triads: Hall, A View of Berg’s “Lulu,” pp. 120–21. For more on Lulu’s row technique, see Douglas Jarman, Alban Berg, “Lulu” (Cambridge UP, 1991), pp. 67–71.

  “I always had the impression”: Willi Reich, Alban Berg, trans. Cornelius Cardew (Harcourt, Brace and World), p. 30.

  “We saw tears”: TMDF, p. 527.

  Mann thought often of Berg: Mann seems to have read Willi Reich’s book Alban Berg (Reichner, 1937) as a source. See Thomas Mann, Tagebücher, 1944–1.4.1946 (Fischer, 1986), p. 14; and Thomas Mann, The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus (Knopf, 1961), p. 72. Only one Berg book existed in 1944. The Mann library in Zurich does not have Reich’s book in its collection; perhaps Mann returned the volume to Adorno when he was done with it. For the Lulu premiere, see Thomas Mann, Diaries, 1918–1939, ed. Hermann Kesten, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (Abrams, 1982), p. 278. For the inclusion of the final scene in the 1937 performance, see Perle, Operas of Alban Berg, Vol. 2, p. 266.

  “One instrument after another”: Adorno, Alban Berg, p. 113. The original German, from Reich, Alban Berg (1937), p. 101: “Ein Instrument schweigt nach dem anderen.” Compare Doktor Faustus (Fischer, 1971), p. 490: “Eine Instrumentengruppe nach der anderen tritt zurück.”

  “One instrumental group”: TMDF, p. 515.

  7. The Art of Fear

  “Along the legendary”: The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, ed. Roberta Reeder, trans. Judith Hemschemeyer (Zephyr, 1997), p. 562.

  Box A: Details of Stalin’s visit to Lady Macbeth are drawn from Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (Forum, 1996), p. 148; Galina Vishnevskaya, Galina: A Russian Story, trans. Guy Daniels (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p. 94; Krzysztof Meyer, Dimitri Chostakovitch (Fayard, 1994), pp. 201–202; and LFS, pp. 84–85.

  “make use of all”: Boris Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 1917–1970 (Norton, 1972), p. 144.

  “sick at heart”: EWS, p. 129.

  “From the first moment”: LFS, pp. 84–85.

  New Year’s Eve: Harlow Robinson, Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography (Northeastern UP, 2002), pp. 309–10.

  “official” or dissident: The main controversy around Shostakovich is the debate set off by Solomon Volkov’s book Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich (Harper and Row, 1979), which purports to be the composer’s autobiography and portrays him as a dissident or “holy fool.” That thesis was expanded in Ian MacDonald, The New Shostakovich (Northeastern UP, 1990); and in Allan B. Ho and Dmitry Feofanov, Shostakovich Reconsidered (Toccata, 1998). But two essays by Laurel E. Fay—“Shostakovich Versus Volkov: Whose Testimony?” (1980), reprinted in A Shostakovich Casebook, ed. Malcolm Hamrick Brown (Indiana UP, 2004), pp. 11–21; and “Volkov’s Testimony Reconsidered,” also in Shostakovich Casebook, pp. 22–66—have established that Testimony is a fraudulent document. For more information, see www.therestisnoise.com/2004/07/the_case_of_the.html.

  “There are those”: Brecht wrote these lines in 1930 for G. W. Pabst’s film of The Threepenny Opera.

  May Day colors: Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts Under Lunacharsky, October 1917–1921 (Cambridge UP, 1970), p. 126.

  “I can’t listen”: Robert Payne, The Life and Death of Lenin (Simon and Schuster, 1964), p. 249.

  “old aesthetic junk”: Fitzpatrick, Commissariat of Enlightenment, p. 121.

  “Spit on rhymes”: Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Order No. 2 to the Army of the Arts”(1921), in The Bedbug and Selected Poetry, trans. Max Hayward and George Reavey (Indiana UP, 1975), pp. 147–48.

  Symphony for Factory Whistles: Amy Nelson, Music for the Revolution: Musicians and Power in Early Soviet Russia (Penn State UP, 2004), pp. 27–28.

  “Let the worker hear”: Fitzpatrick, Commissariat of Enlightenment, p. 134. Said in 1918.

  Bulgakov and Zoshchenko: See Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin, trans. H. T. Willetts (Doubleday, 1996), pp. 261 and 524.

  fine tenor voice: Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003), p. 73.

  “good,” “so-so”: Roy A. Medvedev and Zhores A. Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin: His Life, Death, and Legacy, trans. Ellen Dahrendorf (Tauris, 2003), p. 92.

  “sharp, unbearably explicit”: Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir, trans. Max Hayward (Atheneum, 1970), p. 4.

  “Our mysterious awe”: Ibid., p. 85.

  “It seemed to you”: LFS, p. 121.

  Glazunov: Ibid., p. 292.

  Funeral March: Ibid., p. 12.

  burst out laughing: Ibid., p. 36.

  “‘Art belongs’”: Michael Ardov, Memories of Shostakovich, trans. Rosanna Kelly and Michael Meylac (Short, 2004), pp. 88–89.

  poison gas: See Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton UP, 2000), p. 395; and Alexander Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, trans. Anthony Austin (Yale UP, 2002), p. 90.

  “a man of great”: IGSF, p. 216.

  Moscow offer: “Shostakovich: Letters to His Mother,” trans. Rolanda Norton, in Shostakovich and His World, ed. Laurel E. Fay (Princeton UP, 2004), p. 16.

  Yavorsky: See Gordon D. McQuere, “The Theories of Boleslav Yavorsky,” in Russian Theoretical Thought in Music, ed. Gordon D. McQuere (UMI Research Press, 1983), pp. 109–64.

  Berg letter: LFS, p. 39.

  commission of Second Symphony: Ibid., pp. 39–40.

  Berlin influence: In “Responses of Shostakovich to a Questionnaire on the Psychology of the Creative Process” (1927), trans. Malcolm Hamrick Brown, in Fay, Shostakovich and His World, pp. 29–30, Shostakovich mentions the influence of Schoenberg, Bartók, Hindemith, and Krenek.

  New Babylon: See Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema (Routledge, 1991), p. 180.

  “The first experiments”: Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Aleksandrov, “Statement on Sound,” in The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896–1939, ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (Harvard UP, 1988), pp. 234–35.

  “The Song of the Counterplan”: For more on Shostakovich’s film music, see John Riley, Dmitri Shostakovich: A Life in Film (Tauris, 2005).

  flute to his buttocks: EWS, p. 93.

  Union of Soviet Composers: Ibid., pp. 79–81, and LFS, p. 65.225 “engineers of human souls”: Tovah Yedlin, Maxim Gorky: A Political Biography (Praeger, 1999), p. 199.

  “tragedies and conflicts”: Pauline Fairclough, “The ‘Perestroyka’ of Soviet Symphonism: Shostakovich in 1935,” Music & Letters 83:2 (May 2002), p. 262.

  “typical master kulak,” “future kulak”: Dmitri Shostakovich, “About My Opera,” in Victor Seroff, Dmitri Shostakovich: The Life and Background of a Soviet Composer (Knopf, 1943), pp. 254 and 253.

  “In Lady Macbeth I wanted”: David Fanning, notes to Myung Whun-Chung’s recording of Lady Macbeth (DG 437 511–2), p. 15.

  “petty,” “vulgar”: Shostakovich, “About My Opera,” pp. 250–55.

  three million people: Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (Oxford UP, 1986), pp. 305–306.

  Katerina and Nina: Vishnevskaya, Galina, p. 351.

  “[Shostakovich] was t
hirsting”: EWS, p. 110.

  Gavriil Popov: Laurel E. Fay, “Found: Shostakovich’s Long-Lost Twin Brother,” New York Times, April 6, 2003; Pauline Fairclough, A Soviet Credo: Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony (Ashgate, 2006), pp. 43–45; and Victor Tsaritsyn, “This Strong, Brilliant Gift…,” Neva, September 2004. The author is grateful to Chris Lovett for bringing Tsaritsyn’s article to his attention and for making a translation.

  “rebuses and riddles”: Leonid Maximenkov, “Stalin and Shostakovich: Letters to a ‘Friend,’” in Fay, Shostakovich and His World, p. 48.

  “We had to begin”: Joshua Kunitz, “The Shostakovich ‘Affair,’” New Masse, June 9, 1936, p. 18.

  “It has to be there”: LFS, p. 87; IGSF, p. 214.

  “There’s no need”: Andrei Artizov and Oleg Naumov, eds., Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia: Dokumenty TsK RKP(b) VKP(b), VChK-OGPU-NKVD o kul’turnoi politike, 1917–1953 gg. (Demokratiia, 1999), pp. 290–95. Translation by Alex Abramovich. Abram Lezhnev was the penname of Abram Garelik.

  Meyerhold’s defense: LFS, p. 91. For Meyerhold attending Lady Macbeth, see Meyer, Dimitri Chostakovitch, p. 201.

  “All that the Pravda ”: Maxim Gorky: Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Andrew Barratt and Barry P. Scherr (Clarendon, 1997), p. 366.

  “as a gardener cultivates”: Joseph Stalin et al., Soviet Union, 1935 (Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., 1935), p. 13.

  “To my question”: Memo from Kerzhentsev to Stalin and Molotov, Feb. 7, 1936, in Artizov and Naumov, Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia, p. 289. Translation by Alex Abramovich.

  waiting by the phone: LFS, p. 91.

  “I am living”: Lyudmila Mikheyeva-Sollertinskaya, “Shostakovich As Reflected in His Letters to Sollertinsky,” in Shostakovich in Context, ed. Rosamund Bartlett (Oxford UP, 2000), p. 76.

  Tukhachevsky sweating: IGSF, p. 215.

  other relatives: LFS, p. 98; EWS, pp. 145–46.

  bloodstains on several pages: Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford UP, 1990), p. 200.

  “enemies of the people”: For the use of this phrase in connection with Shostakovich, see Henry Orlov, “A Link in the Chain,” in Brown, Shostakovich Casebook, p. 197.

  “The authorities tried”: IGSF, p. 194.

  Bukharin: For more on the Fourth’s relationship with the less restrictive, Gorky-Bukharin definition of socialist realism, see Fairclough, “‘Perestroyka’ of Soviet Symphonism,” p. 262.

  Fairclough hears: Fairclough, Soviet Credo, p. 205.

  Taruskin points out: Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton UP, 1997), p. 493.

  set to work on the finale: LFS, p. 93; second movement is finished on Jan. 6, 1936.

  “I didn’t like the situation”: Ibid., p. 96. For “diabolical complexity,” see IGSF, p. xxiii.

  “If I have really succeeded”: Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, pp. 523–24.

  “‘Heroic’ Symphony”: Maxim Shostakovich, “Six Lectures on the Shostakovich Symphonies,” trans. John-Michael Albert, in Ho and Feofanov, Shostakovich Reconsidered, p. 408.

  Benditsky: EWS, p. 153.

  “separation call”: Jaak Panksepp and Günther Bernatzky, “Emotional Sounds and the Brain: The Neuroaffective Foundations of Musical Appreciation,” Behavioural Processes 60 (2002), p. 143.

  “An artist-barbarian”: Translation by Alex Abramovich. Ironically, the quotation was first pointed out by the Soviet writer David Rabinovich, who cited the final lines as evidence that Shostakovich was depicting his own rebirth in the arms of Soviet society. See David Rabinovich, Dmitry Shostakovich (Lawrence and Wishart, 1959), p. 49.

  “remarkable,” “bad,” “D-major,” “tedious”: LFS, pp. 99 and 103.

  “expressionist etching”: Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, pp. 527–28.

  “determination of a strong man”: Shostakovich, “Six Lectures on the Shostakovich Symphonies,” p. 409.

  Lyubov Shaporina: For Shaporina’s diary, see Véronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen, eds., Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s, trans. Carol A. Flath (New Press, 1995), p. 356; for other details, see EWS, p. 126.

  “You know”: Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, p. 482.

  football guard: Robinson, Sergei Prokofiev, p. 145.

  St. Petersburg Conservatory: For more, see Prokofiev by Prokofiev, ed. David H. Appel, trans. Guy Daniels (Doubleday, 1979), pp. 99–318.

  “sensation you get”: Bruno Monsaingeon, Sviatoslav Richter: Notebooks and Conversations, trans. Stewart Spencer (Princeton UP, 2001), p. 71.

  David Nice notes: See David Nice, Prokofiev: From Russia to the West, 1891–1935 (Yale UP, 2003), p. 135.

  “in Russia we also”: Stephen Press, “Prokofiev’s Vexing Entry into the USA,” Three Oranges Journal 6 (Nov. 2003), pp. 22–26.

  Christian Science: Nice, Prokofiev, pp. 206–207.

  “frightfully desires”: Ibid., p. 200.

  “new simplicity”: Interview with Los Angeles Evening Express, Feb. 19, 1930, quoted by Alexander Ivashkin in his notes to Valeri Polyansky’s recording of On the Dnieper (Chandos 10044), p. 5.

  OGPU and Prokofiev: Radzinsky, Stalin, pp. 229–30.

  signs of surveillance: See Sergei Prokofiev, Soviet Diary 1927 and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Oleg Prokofiev (Northeastern UP, 1992), pp. 43–44.

  five main lines: Ibid., pp. 248–49.

  Songs of Our Days: Robinson, Sergei Prokofiev, p. 341.

  the opening melody: Philip Taylor, liner notes to Valeri Polyansky’s recording of On the Dnieper and other works (Chandos 10056).

  “Daddy!”: Robinson, Sergei Prokofiev, p. 370.

  Working with Eisenstein: See Yon Barna, Eisenstein (Indiana UP, 1973), p. 215; Léon Moussinac, Sergei Eisenstein (Crown, 1970), p. 99; Marie Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein (Dennis Dobson, 1978), p. 385.

  346 death sentences: Montefiore, Stalin, p. 287.

  “behind this mask”: Nabokov, Old Friends and New Music, p. 180.

  “That’s nice bait”: Vernon Duke, Passport to Paris (Little, Brown, 1955), p. 367.

  “I ought to have gone”: Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler, trans. Constance Garnett, in Great Short Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky (HarperCollins, 2004), p. 400.

  “Should I forget”: Prokofiev, Soviet Diary, pp. 8 and 9.

  “A blizzard is raging”: IGSF, p. 23. See also Pis’ma k drugu: Dmitrii Shostakovich—Isaaku Glikmanu (DSCH/Kompositor, 1993), p. 62.

  means the opposite: IGSF, p. 249.

  “Everything is so fine”: Ibid., p. 39.

  “I’m feeling fine”: Ibid., p. 293.

  fire brigade: Dmitri Sollertinsky and Ludmilla Sollertinsky, Pages from the Life of Dmitri Shostakovich, trans. Graham Hobbs and Charles Midgley (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 98; Manashir Yakubov, preface to Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No. 7, “Leningrad,” Op. 60 (1941): Facsimile Edition of the Manuscript (Zen-On Music Company, 1992), pp. 7–8; Seroff, Dmitri Shostakovich, p. 236.

  staging of the photo: LFS, p. 123.

  “Our art is threatened”: Harrison E. Salisbury, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad (Pan, 2000), pp. 283–84; and LFS, p. 125.

  For several composer friends: Salisbury, 900 Days, p. 298.

  Talk of the Town: “Symphony,” New Yorker, July 18, 1942.

  “Amid bombs”: “Fireman Shostakovich,” Time, July 20, 1942.

  August 9, 1942: Details drawn from LFS, pp. 132–33; Galina Stolyarova, “Remembering an Orchestra That Played on Through the Horrific Siege of Leningrad,” St. Petersburg Times, Feb. 5, 2004; and Ed Vulliamy, “Orchestral Manoeuvres,” Observer, Nov. 25, 2001.

  “The exposition”: Yakubov, preface to Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No. 7, pp. 8–9, dated Oct. 9, 1941. See also “Leningrad Calling,” New Masses, Oct. 28, 1941.

  “all forms of terror”: EWS, p. 185.

  “invasion episode”: Yakubov
, preface to Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No. 7, p. 81.

  “One had the feeling”: Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Devils, trans. David Magarshack (Penguin, 1971), pp. 326–27.

  “Surely it is”: Beyond the Stars: The Memoirs of Sergei Eisenstein, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. William Powell (Seagull, 1995), pp. 345–46. Some time later the literary critic Abram Gozenpud asked Shostakovich whether he had the Dostoevsky episode in mind in writing the Leningrad, and the composer answered that he was not thinking of it consciously but did not reject the possibility. See EWS, p. 520.

  “And over forests”: Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, pp. 575–76. See also explanatory notes on pp. 580 and 847. Although Akhmatova’s notes can be taken as saying that the poet herself carried out a manuscript of the symphony—“the first part [movement] of the symphony was taken by the author in a plane from the besieged city(1.X.1941)”—Laurel Fay doubts that such a thing happened (communication to author). It seems more likely that the “author” is Shostakovich.

  “Ivan…was very cruel”: Montefiore, Stalin, p. 483.

  “When Prokofiev stood up”: Monsaingeon, Sviatoslav Richter, p. 89. See also “Composer, Soviet-Style,” Time, Nov. 19, 1945.

  “A very pleasant place”: Harrison E. Salisbury, “Visit with Dmitri Shostakovich,” New York Times, Aug. 8, 1954.

  “All of this made me”: Maximenkov, Stalin and Shostakovich,” p. 43.

  anthem: Ibid., p. 51.

  Order of Lenin: See LFS, p. 153, for some of these other posts and prizes. For the conservatory, see David Fanning, “Shostakovich and His Pupils,” in Fay, Shostakovich and His World, p. 278.

  plush lifestyle: For more on the economic roots of the 1948 campaign, see Maximenkov, “Stalin and Shostakovich,” pp. 51–52; and Kiril Tomoff, Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953 (Cornell UP, 2006), pp. 97–151.

  gone on vacation: LFS, p. 152; and IGSF, pp. 241–42.

  “The Pianist”: Montefiore, Stalin, pp. 122 and 482. But Shostakovich denied the story that Zhdanov played the piano for the composers.

  Quotations from Zakharov, Khrennikov, and others: Alexander Werth, Musical Uproar in Moscow (Turnstile, 1949), pp. 54, 57, 55, 73, 69.