Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Shostakovich - Ciphers, anyone?

I'm not big into my musicological interpretation, but there are some interesting theories knocking around about subversive/depressive messages in Shostakovich's works.

One that springs to mind: An analysis I read of the Op. 87 Prelude and Fugue in D flat major suggested that it deals with censorship. The prelude's melody is idiotically cheerful throughout, grounded on a bass full of 'wrong' notes which casts doubt on the purity/genuity/honesty of the piece's happiness. The fugue's subject is almost a tone row, which the author compared to 'a dance in a madhouse'. Then, there's this completely ridiculous cadence á la Bach/Mozart/Haydn. It's conventional, perfunctory, and it feels completely insincere. It feels like all the mad tension of the piece has just been ignored, like the inhabitants of the madhouse have been shut up. Very soviet altogether.

Got me interested, and I was thinking along those lines when I listened to the 8th String Quartet for the first time today.
I know they played it at poor old Shosty's funeral, and that kinda makes sense to me. The way the first Largo is filled with his D S C H motif, it felt like he was reflecting on who he was. The changing harmony underneath it gives it a subtly different inflection each time; it made me think of the chequered response to his music, and how he never seemed to put a foot right without a misunderstanding to balance it out. I haven't looked at the score, so it's possible that each iteration of the theme is in C minor; but a nice idea which occurred to me is that the repetitions of D S C H in another key are emblematic of the various faces Shostakovich was forced to adopt as a composer to avoid disgrace.

Anyone got thoughts of their own on my favourite russian?

A very contentious issue, continually debated by critics in London and New York.

It boils down to this:

1. Shostakovich's music is a secretly coded criticism of the Soviet State and all it represented to him.

OR:

2. Shostakovich was scarred sh*tless of the Soviet regime and simply wanted to be left alone, just to write music without fear for his life.

#1 is very fashionable -particularly in New York- but I've plowed through a lot of bilge in the press, and IMO #2 is closer to the truth.

Shostakovich was a man of integrity -no doubt there- but he simply wasn't the Christ figure that some want to believe.

I generally don't subscribe to this kind of analysis either. There might be something to it in some of Shostakovitch's more public works, like the last movement of the 5th symphony. But for a more private work, like the Db major fugue, the idea that it's somehow "about" censorship makes me think: blech. I like the likening of the fugue to a madhouse, but I don't hear a note of insincerity or repression in the entire maddening, writhing, cathartic beautiful mess.


-Jason

Nor I. We should recognize the limitation of our knowledge on Shostokovich’s politics. It’s very easy to read any narrative we choose into a complicated piece of music.

He was a musician, after all, and as such left very little explicit information about his attitude towards communism, or his attitude to the soviet authorities. Those same authorities faced a very difficult task in censuring him because of the very ambiguity of music. We, who are living in the latter days of the cold war, face the same difficulty of ambiguity. We may feel a need to have a certain attitude expressed in the life of such a prominent soviet citizen. Bor me, it's a little too easy.

I’m reminded of the 70’s, when Alexander Solzhenitzen occupied a similar niche in the western mind. It was easy to regard him so, as his explicit writing revealed that he hated the soviet system with everything he had. But it soon became more complicated. Knowing full well he could only end up somewhere in the west, the soviets deported him. We should have known. It was a dirty trick. Far better to leave him in Russia where we could put words in his mouth. Solzhenitzen was a Trojan horse.

Once he got here, and he opened his mouth for a few interviews, it became crystal clear that he was no lover of the west, of freedom, of capitalism, or of all the things we can buy in our stores. In many ways, he seemed to deplore us. He thought that it would be better for Russia to return to the feudal system of the medieval period, rather than to reform towards a capitalistic system, and no one expected him to say such a foolish thing, and were quite alarmed when he did; he further seems to have been a bit of an anti-semite and regarded the United States as a colony of Israel, and no one expected that either; he deplored the spiritual stupor of the west which he maintained came from watching too much television and listening to repugnant and vapid popular music. This last part about "vapid popular music" was easily forgiven, but "Spiritual stupor?" How could he say such a dumb thing? Everyone knows we in the west go to church more than the soviets. He had become something of an embarrassment to the purveyors of western conventional wisdom, and was summarily taken down from his position of chief authority of all things soviet in the pages and on the television screens of the western media. He was henceforth regarded with a wry grin.

So we should be careful with our understanding of Shostokovich, and recognize the limitations of our knowledge. We don’t know, and have very little to go on, but it’s nearly irresistable to think we do.

Tomasino