On Dmitri Shostakovich’s birthday, here’s some footage of the fleet-fingered composer knocking out a passage from his opera “Lady Macbeth from Mtsenk.”
This of course is the work that was lambasted in Pravda, following its premiere in 1936, as “muddle instead of music” – an assessment, said to have been Stalin’s own, that would have been enough to have given any Soviet artist the night sweats.
Sensing that he was walking on very thin Siberian ice, Shostakovich wisely suppressed his angry, dissonant, and frankly weird Fourth Symphony and launched into writing a Fifth, which he described as “a composer’s response to just criticism.” A good performance still has the power to exhilarate audiences, with its sense of hard-won triumph and the over-the-top grandiosity of its finale. But many have found in it a kind of shadow program that is rather more subversive.
In Solomon Volkov’s controversial “Testimony,” a memoir of challenged authenticity, assembled by Volkov from conversations with the composer, Shostakovich allegedly states, “I think it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in ‘Boris Godunov.’ It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,’ and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, ‘Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.’”
How much of “Testimony” is Shostakovich, and how much is Volkov? The original manuscript, in which the composer signed off on the first page of each of the chapters, was sold to an anonymous collector and never made available for scholarly investigation. Furthermore, Volkov maintains his original notes are lost. (He is still living, at 79 years-old.) Whether or not the book is everything Volkov and his publishers claim it to be, it does have the ring of truth.
From the rollicking nature of the piano excerpt, one would never guess at the inflammatory nature of the opera, a provocative tale of sexual violence, adultery, and (multiple) murder. The video does remind one that Shostakovich once supplemented his income by accompanying films at the cinema.
The Symphony No. 4 did not receive its first performance until 1961, eight years after Stalin’s death.
Happy (?) birthday, Dmitri Shostakovich!
The clip, by the way, has been circulating on YouTube for quite some time as part of other compilations, like this one, in which Shostakovich plays, speaks, and smokes!
PHOTO: In America, people talk about news. In Soviet Russia, news talks about you!
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