It’s Leningrad, November 21, 1937, and as the final refrain of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony rings around the auditorium, the audience who witnessed its debut embarks upon a standing ovation said to last 40 minutes (the symphony itself only lasted 49 minutes). It was a work of art which affected two disparate factions of a nation in two utterly different ways. But how?
1937 was a dangerous time for Dmitri Shostakovich. The previous year had seen his latest opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, receive international success, but at the same time attract serious criticism from the government. This came in the form of a denouncement made via an anonymous article featured in the Communist-run newspaper Pravda. Worse still, it was an attack said to have originated from Stalin himself.
Criticism of this sort was less an inconvenience than an outright threat. A bad review, especially one predicated on political grounds, could easily lead to the Gulag, the party sought to bring Shostakovich’s work more in line with the optimistic rhetoric and heroic classicism typical of their propaganda. The composer’s success in the West was a clear irritation, and Stalin’s avowal to banish the ‘crudity’ he saw in expressionist art put pressure on the composer to simplify his music.
World-famous conductor prepares for his Emirates Palace date.
A number of Dmitri’s friends and family had either been arrested, or worse, disappeared; and his precarious position made a similar fate a constant fear for the artist. So in 1936, a meeting was held amongst the USSR Composers’ Union, which decided that he should be helped to ‘straighten himself out’. But Dmitri was defiant; when previewing his Fourth Symphony for friends, his reported response was: ‘I don’t write for Pravda’; or in other words: ‘I don’t write for Stalin.’
‘Dmitri Shostakovich fought for his music,’ says Maxim, who quotes his father with pride. ‘If the tyrant cuts off my hands, I will take the pen in my teeth and continue writing.’ Symphony No 4 was significant because it was a piece written before the Pravda criticism emerged and contained no compromises. Shostakovich was said to have prepared for its debut right up to December of that year, but amidst the increasingly brutal backdrop of the Great Terror, in which a number of Soviet citizens were either deported, imprisoned or killed in public shows of force, it was finally withdrawn with rehearsals barely under way (it later premiered in 1961).
The situation made it virtually impossible for the artist. The options were conspicuous by their absence: either to compromise his work, or face a similar fate to those around him. But there was a third option, an infinitely more perilous one: to write something in line with Shostakovich’s beliefs, but in a manner which would not displease the authorities. And so he began work on his immortal Symphony No 5.
Listening to the fifth, it is obvious that Shostakovich slimmed down his flamboyant style to create something new; but from its simple childlike introduction, it embarks upon a journey that is uplifting, sweeping and intrinsically complex. For Maxim: ‘He expresses in this music his protest to the brutal regime of Stalin,’ and it offered a release to an audience for whom the symphony embodied an expression of the suffering which they had been subjected to. Bizarrely, at the same time, for the authorities and their supporters, its heroic spirit amounted to a triumph of Communist might and the ability to bend an artist to their will.
Much historical debate followed as to whether Shostakovich was indeed a communist sympathiser. It is something which his son furiously protests: ‘Dmitri Shostakovich has never been pro-Stalinist! He fought with all his works against tyranny. But those pieces (oratorios) which could have been misinterpreted are his way of throwing the dog a bone.’
Throughout his life, Dmitri Shostakovich was either threatened, banned or revered, but his works, especially his Symphony No 5, remain a tribute to bravery and determination, and one man’s reluctance to both outwit and undermine a senseless, brutal regime in the only way he knew how: through beautiful music.
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Shostakovich Conducts Shostakovich is performed on January 10, 8pm at Emirates Palace. Tickets are priced from Dhs250-650, available at www.timeouttickets.com
