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‘There shall be no musical servitude’: Towards a Multitudinous Shostakovich in the West
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 November 2020
Extract
Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.
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References
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29 This is in line with the chronological model proposed by Katerina Clark, according to which there was in the first half of the 1930s a kind of Stalinist ‘Enlightenment’ characterized by the ‘Great Appropriation’ of Western culture. This ended in late 1935, around the time of Shostakovich’s denunciation in January 1936, when a push began towards ‘Great Russian chauvinism’ and cultural and political isolationism. The period that followed, up to the Soviet Union’s entry into the Second World War, is referred to as the ‘Imperial sublime’ − ‘a sublime that celebrated Soviet dominion over the lands and peoples the Russians had conquered earlier in forming their empire’. See Clark, Katerina, Moscow, the Fourth Rome (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 289 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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34 See, for example, Norman Lebrecht, ‘Shostakovich’s Secret Love Goes Under the Hammer’, Slipped Disc, 14 August 2019, <slippedisc.com/2019/08/shostakovichs-secret-love-goes-under-the-hammer/> (accessed 13 January 2020).
35 Pauline Fairclough, ‘Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time’, Music and Literature, <http://www.musicandliterature.org/reviews/2016/7/6/julian-barness-the-noise-of-time> (accessed 4 October 2019).
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38 This concept is borrowed from Bullivant’s pertinent study on Alan Bush: Alan Bush, Modern Music, and the Cold War.
39 Ibid. For an indication of the apparently ideologically motivated and reductive narratives that memorialize Skalkottas, who wrote politically engaged music, as a ‘politically naïve’ and enigmatic figure with a ‘remarkable creative ability to detach himself from his surroundings’, see John Thornley, ‘Skalkottas in Haidari’, Nikos Skalkottas: A Greek European, ed. Haris Vrondos (Athens: Benaki Museum, 2008), 370−95 (p. 370). The work of Assaf Shelleg, and particularly his paper ‘On the Notion of Peripherality (or, Comments from an Adjacent Ecosystem)’, presented at the Skalkottas Today conference in Athens on 1 December 2019, inspired me to consider the application of these binary musicological frameworks in this context.