Dmitri Shostakovich’s posthumous star has been steadily brightening during the past 35 years. I’ve been able to observe that process up close, given that for me Shostakovich is very much a living composer. I was within shouting distance of my Bachelor’s degree the year he passed on, so for my entire childhood through very early adulthood, he was still alive, albeit living what seemed like a million miles away in the Soviet Union. I vividly remember getting the premiere recording of the “Babi Yar” (No. 13), with Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia.
I started getting to know Shostakovich’s larger works around the time I was in the ninth grade. My Christmas present that year was a Sony T-230 open-reel tape deck, and in those days you could buy open-reel versions of certain LPs. Not many, to be sure (open-reel was already on its way out in 1970) but they remained available nonetheless. They offered significantly better fidelity than LPs, and they weren’t particularly to pops, clicks, and the like.
Among my precious, tiny horde of tapes was the Shostakovich Fifth, with Istvan Kertesz conducting the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande on London (Decca). For an odd combination of reasons, I still have those half-dozen pre-recorded tapes, as well as the Sony T-230, although the tape deck doesn’t work any more. I got out the Kertesz recording anyway, to remind myself of the cover art, a photo of the Kremlin at night during a fireworks display. There is no reason for me to have the tape transferred to CD; I can buy a nicely remastered version of it on Australian Eloquence for $10, if I want. But I have a lot of recordings of the Fifth now, and I doubt that I would find Kertesz and the Suisse Romande group all that compelling.
Back in the LP days, many of the major labels had a budget line for re-releases; RCA had Victrola, Columbia had Odyssey. London (Decca) offered a particularly felicitous product called “London Stereo Treasury.” LST had become the repository for all of those many Ernest Ansermet recordings with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, as well as a good resource for lesser-known groups. The album jacket designs were very simple, featuring a simple cover-art painting and consistent type styles. (LST was similar to today’s Naxos, except that LST was exclusively reprints.) Unlike some of the other budget issues, however, LST provided high-quality vinyl pressings.
The combination of my extremely limited budget and suburban Denver’s even more limited selection meant that LST records were often my staples. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise because I wound up exploring areas of the repertory I might not have otherwise. LST wasn’t big on Beethoven symphony recordings, but the catalog included reissued Ansermet recordings of Dukas, Debussy, Fauré, and Stravinsky.
The record selection in my stores was so threadbare that typically I would buy whatever LST releases were on the rack, unless I already had them. The LSTs were so cheap that even I could buy just about all I wanted. This explains why a Denver teenager who didn’t know the late Mozart symphonies was familiar with the late Shostakovich string quartets, thanks to LST’s reissue of the Borodin Quartet’s renditions. I didn’t buy those records because I was particularly interested in the quartets, mind you: I got them because they were there and they were really, really cheap. (They’re iconic recordings, by the way, now available on a gorgeously remastered edition on Chandos.)
I was a teenager, devoid of subtlety or discernment. I liked the loud, flashy stuff. It was the finale of the Shostakovich Fifth that mostly interested me, right along with Petrushka, An American in Paris, or the Khachaturian Piano Concerto. At first Shostakovich was little more to me than just a purveyor of really cool orchestral spectacle. It was via the quartets, the slow movement of the Fifth, and the “Babi Yar” symphony that I started to realize, albeit slowly, that there was a lot more to Shostakovich.
I wasn’t all that sure I liked it. Certainly the pizzazz-free world of “Babi Yar” wasn’t to my taste, although I got to know it well anyway. (Typically I played my LPs down to the nub.) Thanks to the Columbia Record Club, the “Leningrad” Symphony entered my life; I was both fascinated and repelled by its combination of crassness, mournfulness, beauty, and over-the-top Hollywood flash.
I’ve continued to explore Shostakovich, but to this day I’m not all that sure I understand him. There are so many paradoxes, so many contradictions. The music itself is typically very clear and unambiguous, but the emotional world is another matter. Even passages I used to consider trouble-free have been revealing themselves to me as tantalizingly distant. Consider the very end of the Fifth; there is something horrifying about its big-band bluster, as though we’re viewing concentration camp victims dancing for the cameras, under threat of death for non-compliance. (Think Theresienstadt.)
Even the “Leningrad” symphony has changed its spots. For years I was content to classify it as Shostakovich’s nod to the rubes, a brassy blustery boom-fest capped off by an unabashedly slam-bang ending. But that was only because I skipped over the 2nd and 3rd movements, or ignored the lion’s share of the first movement. And even the faux-Boléro march in the first movement isn’t so simple any more. Shostakovich did not write it as a portrayal of the Nazi invasion — in fact, the composition pre-dated the invasion. The association of the symphony with the seige of Leningrad came after the fact, not before. If anything, the Boléro passage is meant to be somewhat offensive, and if some writers are to believed, its very faint resemblance to Count Danilo’s entrance number in The Merry Widow is not an accident. Thus Bartók’s burlesque in the Concerto for Orchestra may well be a parody of a parody.
And then there is the Eighth Symphony. I’m speaking on the work in early April at the San Francisco Symphony. To that end I’ve been drenching myself in it, and if you know the Eighth, then you know that this is no trivial task. Not only is the Eighth Mahlerian in length, but its emotional world is relentless in its grimness, violence, and despair. It has no Cinerama ending that wraps up everything in a blaze of C Major chords. The last thing you hear is the quiet figure C-D-C, which is the inversion of C-B-flat-C, the main motive that runs throughout the work’s hour-long span. If that constitutes comfort, it’s awfully cold.
But Shostakovich himself remains slippery. I’ve re-read Testimony and Volkov’s companion book about Shostakovich’s relationship with Stalin. I’ve gone through the competent, if somewhat dull, Laurel Fay biography. I’ve revisited the Shostakovich chapter in Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise and Richard Taruskin’s fascinating coverage in the Oxford History of Western Music. I’ve read various scholarly essays via JSTOR. I’ve read liner notes and web pages and online program notes. But he’s still a blurred figure in the background of a grainy newspaper photo. The music might be the best place to seek Shostakovich up close and personal, but even there misdirection lurks. The Shostakovich of the later symphonies and string quartets had become accustomed to swathing his musical meaning in layers of coded gestures. You had to do that around Stalin and his apparachiks unless you had a yen for life in Siberia. So sometimes yin means yang, black means white, Tweedledum means Tweedledee. He may remain forever distant. But like the flirt playing hard-to-get, that makes him all the more irresistable.
Easy composer? Oh, no. But worth it and then some, even in his bleakest moments.