XL cover story
The year of Shostakovich
Not familiar with the Soviet composer? Some Austin music ensembles will help you
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Spoon, James McMurtry, Eliza Gilkyson, the Greencards — these were just some of the musicians who topped local critics lists as the best of 2005.
So who might top the lists in 2006? How about Dmitri Shostakovich?
Sure, you know Shostakovich, the Russian composer, born in 1906 just as the repressive Czarist system gave way to communism, and then spent a lifetime falling in and out of favor with the Soviet government, alternately denounced and embraced by dictator Joseph Stalin.
The man whose music, while rooted in tradition and tonality, nevertheless was infused with dissonance and atonality and ultimately defied easy categorization. The guy who, before his death in 1975, wrote an astounding 15 symphonies, 15 string quartets, 36 film scores, six concertos, three ballets, incidental music for 11 plays and two operas, one of which, "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" virtually disappeared from the stage for three decades after Stalin declared it vile.
Yeah, that's him: Shostakovich.
And with 2006 marking the 100th anniversary of his birth, Austin arts organizations have put together the first citywide, yearlong festival celebrating the work of a single artist.
A composer who deserves his due
But why? After all, 2006 is also the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth. So why a festival on Shostakovich and not a citywide celebration of the ever-popular Mozart?
Perhaps Austin composer Graham Reynolds puts it most succinctly: "Everyone knows Mozart," he says, "everyone should know Shostakovich."
Credit Richard Buckley, Austin Lyric Opera's artistic director, for planting the Shostakovich seed. He's mulled over the idea of a festival almost from the moment he arrived in Austin two years ago.
"It's due," he says. "Shostakovich was an incredible genius, and it's time for us to investigate the richness his opus has to offer."
Also, Buckley had a hankering to mount a new production of "Lady Macbeth." Following upon the tradition established by ALO's previous artistic director, Joseph McClain, who staged ambitious productions of new and American operas to the stage, Buckley is committed to presenting more than just the usual operatic warhorses.
The Shostakovich spirit caught on. Now, nearly every major classical music group in the city is in on the festival, dubbed "Shostakovich 100."
The Austin Symphony Orchestra features the composer's music in a concert later this month, and again next fall. Throughout 2006, KMFA 89.5, Central Texas' primary classical music station, will broadcast the "Shostakovich Minute" every day at 2 p.m. with new weekly segments about the man and his music. Among the many events hosted next fall by the University of Texas' School of Music, the resident Miró Quartet will present four of Shostakovich's string quartets. Texas State University's Music School plans a daylong symposium on Sept. 23.
Even the Cedar Park High School marching band is getting in on the fun. They'll be stepping to several movements from Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10 at all their football games next fall.
Need more?
Ballet Austin will present Gina Patterson's newest dance, set to the music of the Russian composer, in April. The Austin Film Society will screen the 1988 biography "Testimony" and the 1997 documentary "The War Symphonies: Shostakovich Against Stalin." And the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at UT has developed a curriculum unit on the composer and his music for middle school students.
A window to our recent past
The manner in which Buckley and others put together the "Shostakovich 100" festival is nothing less than a do-it-yourself miracle. With no administrative apparatus, along with voluntary and open participation, the festival required no additional fundraising on anyone's part. Thewww.shostakovich100.org Web site comes pro bono. And as arts groups add Shostakovich-related events to their schedules, they, too, can claim participation in the festival.
So what do the organizers hope people will get out of it all? Why spend a year examining the life of a composer who has often been criticized for compromising his talents to fit the whims of the repressive Soviet regime?
Because it provides us with a window to our recent past.
Terry Klefstad, assistant professor at Southwestern University and author of the "Shostakovich Minute" series, says that it's better to think of the composer as a deeply complex and conflicted human being, trying his best to create art in a highly repressive society. "Once you begin to grasp the whole picture of his life, you begin to get the sense that our need to position him as pro-Soviet or anti-Soviet is naïve at best," she says. "It's important to remember that many people, even Americans, hoped that the communist government would eventually become a utopia for all people. Obviously, it didn't, but we owe it to Shostakovich and his contemporaries to try to understand them in the context of their time."
And then there's the musicological argument. Shostakovich makes for a prime entry into the sometimes misunderstood musical arc of the past century. Reynolds, who along with fellow composer Peter Stopschinski will offer a chamber music concert featuring rocked-out arrangements of Shostakovich themes, says that most general audiences are afraid of 20th-century classical music, often with perfectly good reasons.
"The musical language that evolved in the last century often became so focused and complex that few could, and can, understand it," he says. "But much of Shostakovich's music has it all — a melodic top layer that is an easy door for new listeners, while underneath is music complex enough for the most sophisticated of listeners."
Peter Bay, artistic director of the Austin Symphony Orchestra, says that first-time Shostakovich listeners will find his music has a little bit of everything. "It's an interesting cocktail of melody, traditional harmony, strong rhythm, brilliant orchestration and an intriguing dose of dissonance," he says. "Shostakovich writes music that is powerful, reflective, intense, sad, humorous, sarcastic, tragic and exhilarating."
Maybe that's because his life encompassed all of that — in spades.
'Tremendous appeal to the masses'
The second of three children, Shostakovich was born in St. Petersburg on Sept. 25, 1906. His father was an engineer; his mother began teaching him piano when he was 9. The 1917 revolution that finally overthrew the czarist regime pitched the already weakened country — stressed by World War I and the earlier democratic uprising of 1905 — into deep deprivation. Food and fuel were scarce. Within a short period, the already-frail Shostakovich contracted tuberculosis, his father died and the family slid into grinding poverty. Still, the future composer entered the Petrograd Conservatory in 1919 to study composition, earning a little money on the side playing piano for silent movies.
For his graduation piece in 1925, he wrote his first symphony. The clear, lively, witty symphony made Shostakovich, then only 19, into an overnight sensation. The Soviet government lauded him as the first true artistic child of the revolution.
Within a couple of years, orchestras across Europe and the United States performed the piece. In 1927, the government commissioned Shostakovich to write a symphony to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the revolution. Shortly thereafter, a prominent Russian conductor declared that "there has never been a composer since Beethoven with such tremendous appeal to the masses."
Shostakovich's place at the top the Soviet creative class was secure.
Or so it seemed.
Stalin? Not so big a fan
In the years immediately following the Revolution, and through the 1920s, the Soviets decreed that their brave new society needed a brave new style of art. Away with the old and in with the new.
Thus the Soviets heralded the kind of avant-garde artistic experimentation and individual self-expression that characterized emerging modernist movement in Europe and the United States. After all, the new Soviet state wanted to prove its sophistication to the rest of the world.
But by the early 1930s, Stalin, who had taken control of the Soviet Union in 1922 following the death of Vladimir Lenin, changed the country's creative course. Notoriously fearful of artists, Stalin decided that the avant garde was, in fact, the province of the elite and bourgeois. He invoked Lenin's famous dictum, "Art belongs to the people." The people, Stalin resolved, needed art they could understand.
Banished were the harmonic dissonances and visual abstractions that percolated through the modernist music and art of early Soviet art. In came folk-inspired melodies and the conventional yet heroic murals. Committees were established to judge artworks according to Soviet values. Art that glorified the socialist worker and the accomplishments of the Soviet state made the cut.
But it wasn't always easy for artists to follow the new mandate.
Peter Laki, a Hungarian-born musicologist for the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, points out that, for composers, what the Soviets approved of — or didn't approve of — was always a matter of second-guessing.
"When it came to music, officialdom's expectations were never made very clear," Laki says. "If composers wrote anything but folk song arrangements and Lenin cantatas, they could never be sure what would — or wouldn't — get them into trouble."
Kind of like Shostakovich's tragic opera, "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk." In 1934, the opera premiered almost simultaneously in Leningrad and Moscow. It was hit. Two years later, the opera had been performed more than 200 times throughout the world and was hailed as the first major Soviet opera.
Then, Stalin attended a performance. He walked out in disgust. Two days later Pravda, the government newspaper, published a now famous editorial titled "Chaos Instead of Music." The publication attacked Shostakovich's music, calling it "fidgety, screaming, neurotic." For 30 years after Pravda's denunciation, "Lady Macbeth" vanished from public view. Fearing arrest (Stalin was, after all, in the midst of what became known as the Great Purge, when accused dissenters were summarily executed or banished to Siberian labor camps), the composer shelved his Fourth Symphony right before its premiere. It would not be performed for another 25 years.
Thus began Shostakovich's ride on the Soviet seesaw.
Luckily, his Fifth Symphony — composed in honor of the 20th anniversary of the 1917 Revolution — was a hit with Stalin and his tastemakers. And by the end of World War II, Shostakovich was once again a favored Russian son. His Seventh Symphony, composed as tribute to his hometown of Leningrad and the devastating siege it underwent during the war, was put on microfilm and hastily flown by the military to the U.S., where renowned composer Arturo Toscanini conducted it with the NBC orchestra in a radio broadcast heard by millions. Shostakovich became a hero, appearing on a 1942 cover of Time magazine.
But by 1948, he again came under attack along with other Russian composers, accused by the Soviet machine of "bourgeois formalism." The death of Stalin in 1953 brought about a gradual — though by no means complete — relaxation of the fierce cultural control and Shostakovich's output was more or less accepted on its own terms until his death in 1975.
Well, not completely.
Since his death, musicians and music scholars have debated whether the composer compromised his creativity or was secretly a musical dissident, surreptitiously writing music that somehow opposed the Soviet regime.
That debate, say many experts, is not so relevant anymore.
"All too often, Shostakovich's entire life's work is discussed in an exclusively political context," says Laki. "He had to live in a terrible world, and he did what he had to do to adjust. The strength of his music is such that it transcends the immediate context in which it arose. It conveys a more general message that we can identify with in the 21st century."
Bay agrees and adds that by understanding the constraints of Shostakovich's world, new listeners might gain an important entrée into his music.
"It is clear from Shostakovich's writings and the many public humiliations he suffered that he was not able to compose as he wished," says Bay. "But I think everyone who has a taste of freedom can sympathize with his situation. He may have been writing behind the secretive Iron Curtain, but he managed to reach out to all of us on the other side."
jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699
