A few weeks ago Charley Nims, a socialist in Portland, Oregon, called to ask me to write "something" about music for a socialist magazine there. He also wanted Quinn Brisben (former Socialist Party Presidential candidate) to write "something" about cinema. I'd send this to Charley by email, but he hasn't got an account (which, in this day and age, makes me wonder if he really exists). So I will print this out and send it to him - but I find writing something on Word Perfect more intimidating than just jotting these notes on email. It is cheating, and if I had a blog, I suspect that is where this belongs. There won't be spelling errors, but when I re-read these posts later I'm always irritated at obvious errors of grammar.
I send this out a bit nervously since on the "receiving end" are musicians and singers. If I'm going to write about music, why not start with them? But they are alive and well and can take care of themselves. Bessie and Dimitri are dead.
It was close to fifty years ago that I encountered the music of Bessie Smith. A friend had told me the songs were pretty raunchy. I listened, but monaural blues from the 1920's and 1930's was a world of its own, closed to me. The songs may have been raunchy but I wasn't impressed.
Until a party one night in Altadena, California, at the home of the late Ben Jackson. I got drunk. I wasn't yet a real drinker, so getting drunk meant getting poisoned and desperately sick. In addition, I was smoking. I left Ben's apt. and tried walking around the block, throwing up on every other front lawn, so sick that the only thing keeping me alive was the hope I might die. I made it back to my car, passed out there, and was rescued by one of the guys at the party, who managed to get me to his place and to a cot in his basement.
I woke in the morning, with a god-awful hangover, my mouth and nose reeking for vomit and stale cigarette smoke, to hear the music of Bessie Smith, which the guy was playing on a little 45 player (remember those 45's?). I heard Bessie, truly, for the first time. A middle class young white guy had entered the world of Bessie Smith and her blues.
There are times when, asked for my religion on government forms, I want to put down "Bessie Smith". James Baldwin took her records with him to Switzerland, when he was recovering from a nervous breakdown, playing them over and over. When things are really bad for me, I haul out my CD's of Bessie. I was later to learn more about jazz, not just Bessie. (One night my friends took me to a little jazz club in Westwood to hear Gerry Mulligan, then a new name. Chet Baker - young and stunningly good looking - dipped his reed in my glass of water!). But my door to jazz was through the New Orleans blues of Bessie Smith. If you have never heard her, try. It may be necessary to smoke a joint, or listen to her when you've got a hangover. Bessie died in 1937, not that long after I was born. That would be my first musical note.
The other is to shift gears entirely to Dimitri Shostakovitch. There are those who believe Shostakovitch was the greatest composer of the 20th Century. I don't know enough about music to go there. I do know that his music is "of his time and place" and almost all the Western commentary on him misses that point. I probably have everything of his that has been recorded - I was a fan before he became "rehabilitated" in the West. The story of Shostakovitch tells us a great deal not only about how politics affected Soviet artists, but how politics affected US perception, and therefore is suitable for discussion in a socialist magazine.
The man was born in 1906, and died in 1975. He was only 11 when the Russian Revolution broke out. More than almost any other composer in the Soviet Union, his music reflected the hopes and the trajectory of the Revolution. He wrote fifteen symphonies, fifteen string quartets, concertos, operas, music for ballet, and, because as a "Soviet artist" he worked for the State, he produced music for films. Before World War II broke out, he had already found himself in serious trouble with the Party. To be "in trouble with the Party" was to be in very serious trouble - more than one major artist vanished into the Gulag or the grave. His trouble centered on the opera "Lady Macbeth", which had received great reviews in Leningrad, and was well received in Moscow until - or so the rumor goes - Stalin attended a performance and walked out in disgust. Pravda published scathing attacks. Shostakovitch put aside his Fourth Symphony, fearful it would result in his arrest (it was not performed until after Stalin's death) and, in 1937, in an effort to rehabilitate himself, wrote his Fifth Symphony, subtitled "A Soviet Artist's Reply To Just Criticism".
The Symphony was a success. Then came World War II. Caught in Leningrad by the Nazi advance (the siege of Leningrad is a terrible story - so terrible that I could not rejoice it was renamed "St. Petersburg" after the fall of the USSR. The horror of the three year siege had, I believe, meant the city should have kept the name). Shostakovitch began work on his Seventh Symphony. Moscow ordered his evacuation from Leningrad, and he completed the symphony elsewhere. The music was flown from the USSR, on a perilous war-time route, to the US where it had its premier. Shostakovitch was featured on the cover of Time magazine, fighting the fires in Leningrad during the Nazi attack.
We were, during the short period of 1942 to 1945, allies of the Soviet Union. This was the first time the West really heard his music. It was "approved" by our own State authorities. Because we live in a "free society" (no society, anywhere, at any time, is "free" of the pulse of events around it) we tend to think that the various lists of "great composers" or "One Hundred Essential Classical Works" are the product of thoughtful, unbiased critics. Not so. After the end of World War II, the great German conductor, Wilhelm Furtwangler, was essentially banned, becoming a kind of non-person until the early 1950's. Why? He never joined the Nazi party (unlike Herbert Van Karajan, who did join). Furtwangler was helpful to Jews in the orchestra. His crime was that he worked as a conductor under the Nazis. What was he supposed to have done? How many Americans left the US during Vietnam? How many of our critics and artists are leaving it now under Bush? Where are the Israelis who oppose the Occupation supposed to go? People live in a country, they speak its language, their family is there. They are "lodged by history" in the wrong place. We make a great mistake to judge individuals because they are caught up in the wrong country at the wrong time.
So with Shostakovitch. He lent his name to various "peace offensives" by the Soviet Union, in 1949 traveling to the US to take part in such an event. Late in life, after Stalin's death, he joined the Communist Party. He was first and foremost a composer, one who sometimes took extraordinary risks as seen in the context of Soviet society. Shostakovitch was not Jewish, but his music returned again and again to Jewish themes (his Piano Trio #2, the Babi Yar Symphony, etc.).
But in the West, once World War II was over and the Cold War began, it is interesting to see how critics suddenly found his symphonies bombastic, propagandistic, shallow, worthy of derision. If you looked at a list of "100 essential classical recordings" you would find Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, etc. - but usually just one of Shostakovitch's symphonies (his Fifth). Then in 1979 Solomon Volkov published "Testimony", allegedly authorized by Shostakovitch. Volkov gave us a new picture of the composer as a dissident, a bitter opponent of Stalin and the entire Soviet system. Thus Shostakovitch goes goes from largely unknown (up to World War II), a great composer (World War II period), to sycophant of Stalinism (after World War II, up to his death), to being a kind of secret dissident.
Volkov's work has since been largely dismissed by critics. Shostakovitch's own links with the book are now sharply questioned. Perhaps only a truly great composer is worth so much fuss, on one side or the other, to make him "fit" some political framework. Shostakovitch fit no political framework - he was a child of the hopes and tragedies of the Soviet Union. Just as one cannot easily capture the chilling nature of Soviet totalitarianism (several of Shostakovitch's friends and relatives were killed during the first "great terror"), and it is this aspect of Soviet life which most Western observers see, there is the other aspect of the Soviet Union - the hopes it held out, the utopia it had sought to build, even the freedom which many artists felt early in the life of the Soviet Union, the freedom to create along new lines. Soviet film, paintings, literature, and music in the 1920's were wonderfully inventive, at least as much as anything being done in the West. The revolution was genuine. The repressions didn't begin until the 1930's. Shostakovitch was a man of those times, exposed both to the freedom of the revolution, and then to the terror.
But missing from almost all the discussion about Shostakovitch, missing from the questions about why his later music seems "darker" than his earlier works, is the war. This was a man who was in Leningrad during the siege, in Moscow when Nazi tanks rolled within sight of the Kremlin. A war which took the lives of more than twenty million Soviet citizens, and did not take them "neatly", but like carving lives out of the flesh of a society, leaving orphans, widows, ruined buildings, terrible wounds, bleeding.
About the time he had come under sharp attack for his opera "Lady Macbeth", and felt compelled to write the Fifth Symphony, Shostakovitch began to write string quartets. These were largely overlooked in the West, but if one is looking for the "real" Shostakovitch, I'd search these quartets. There are fifteen of them, and they "deepen" as they approach the final two quartets. Some have linked them with Beethoven's last quartets - music of a man at the end of his own time, haunted by the tragedies of a lifetime. I doubt anything sadder than his Sonata for Viola, Opus 147, can be found in music. The final Symphony, the 15th, still baffles critics who wonder if it was a "joke". The last movement of the symphony, in which all gives way to a chilling series of drum beats, and bells, is hardly the end of a symphony to which we are accustomed. I think I do understand the 15th Symphony - it is Shostakovitch at the edge of death, looking back, as he does in the final quartets, with memories of great joy, of loss, and of the closing of life.
But listen for yourself. Start with the Piano Trio #2, or the String Quartets. By no means is all of Shostakovitch's music "great" or even good. But listen by yourself to the Seventh Symphony and you can hear the advance of the Nazis troops. Or in the Eighth Symphony, you can hear the howling of pain and anguish about what humanity does to itself - not just Stalin's repressions, as Volkov would have us believe, but war. Most important, listen. This was a man who lived in the midst of revolution, war, and terror such as none of his Western critics have endured.
He speaks for our time. His residence was Moscow - his music is universal.
David McReynolds
NYC June 16, 2005
This article originally appeared in Oregon Socialist, Summer 2005.