The English eighteenth-century diarist James Boswell tells a well-known story about Samuel Johnson that has particular resonance for contemporary notions of performance as research. Boswell writes: “We stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that everything in the universe is merely ideal. I observed that, although we were satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, “I refute it thus!”” / That instant of low drama as the foot makes contact with the stone is the moment of performance as research. Let us call it, just half-seriously, a dictionary-maker's creative practical experiment in energy exchange between his foot and a stone. One kind of knowledge - theory, philosophy, books, libraries, archives - is challenged profoundly by another. As such, twenty-first-century artist-scholars might consider this a quintessential practice-as-research experiment. But where were its results located? Were they in the stone, in Johnson's body, in the story told by Boswell, in this reflection on its significance, or in some relationship between all four and more?

Since the 1970s, we have marked the “linguistic turn” (emphasizing language's role in constructing perception), the “cultural turn” (tracking the everyday meanings of culture, and culture's formative effect on identities), and more recently the “performative turn” (acknowledging how individual behavior derives from collective, even unconscious, influences and is manifest as observable behavior, both overt and quotidian, individual and collective). Each “turn” has its principal philosophical inspirations, holding in common an oppositional stance toward more “orthodox” approaches. The “turns” were executed not strictly successively but certainly interrelationally. In league with widely influential social movements - notably feminism and antihomophobia - and the related activist-academic fields of gender studies, queer studies, and cultural studies, the “turns” have had a momentous impact on the arts, humanities, and humanistic social sciences in the West and Western-influenced universities. As important as the performative turn has been to fields as diverse as anthropology and English - and other erstwhile improbable pairings, including neuropsychology and dance, ecological science and theatre - not everyone acknowledges that performance studies is a discipline in its own right. Is it constituent of all disciplines, an emergent discipline, or an already established discipline undergoing change? One common refrain is the lack of two-way interaction between adherents of performance studies and academics in other disciplines who claim performative territory, making use of the power of “performance” as an explanatory metaphor without regard for the implications of such claims, especially any “limits” to the performative.

With the completion of his First Symphony on 1 July 1925, two months before his nineteenth birthday, Shostakovich had already travelled further in stylistic terms than many composers do in a lifetime. Yet such was the pace of his artistic development and his urge for self-realization that he ran headlong into a crisis of confidence, from which he emerged almost as precipitately:

And there was another change of direction that Shostakovich had to negotiate at this time. In January 1927 he took part in the first Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, where he was one of eight finalists but not a prizewinner (his Moscow-based friend Lev Oborin won first prize, and the now legendary Grigory Ginzburg came fourth). He put the outcome down to a combination of pain from appendicitis and chauvinism on the part of an all-Polish jury. Be that as it may, it was a disappointment that was to mark the end of his serious aspirations as a concert artist, and his solo appearances gradually reduced in number.

By the time Shostakovich's opera The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District was condemned in 1936, over half of his forty numbered opuses were dramatic works: two operas, three ballets, seven theatre scores, and nine film scores. His juvenilia include dramatic and programmatic pieces and throughout his career he continued to write such works. But after 1936, for a variety of reasons both political and practical, his dramatic output fell away, often leaving him collaborating on politically acceptable work with friends: he seems not to have enjoyed theatre work, his ballets had been negatively received, and after the mauling of Lady Macbeth he did not complete another opera (only the operetta Moscow, Cheryomushki). His film music was left as the only outlet for his dramatic talent.

His professional introduction to cinema came in 1924, as he helped support his family by becoming a cinema pianist. His enthusiasm soon waned: not only did this hackwork compete with his conservatoire studies, but there were few opportunities for him to develop new approaches to dramatic music. Happily, the First Symphony's success allowed him to drop the work in 1926, but he was lured back to the cinema when the Leningrad studio Sovkino commissioned a score to be performed live to New Babylon (1929), a film about the Paris Commune. The directors, Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, led FEKS (acronym for Factory of the Eccentric Actor) and, with their desire to shock and surprise the audience, they offered just the sort of freedom Shostakovich had craved in the cinema pit.

Symphonic debuts by teenage composers are dotted through the history of Western music from Mozart to Jay Greenberg. Occasionally such works hit the headlines – as in 1882 when the sixteen-year-old Glazunov was hailed as a renewer of the Russian nationalist symphonic tradition – but do not gain a foothold in the repertoire. Occasionally recognition comes belatedly but more firmly, as with Bizet's delectable Symphony in C, composed when he was an eighteen-year-old student in 1855 on the model of Gounod's First Symphony but only premiered eighty years later. It can happen that repertoire status is gradually and unsensationally achieved, as with the nineteen-year-old Schubert's Fifth Symphony, parts of which he closely modelled on Mozart's G minor, KV550. Rarely, however, does such a work both make an extraordinary initial impact and maintain unquestioned repertoire status. Such a case is undoubtedly Shostakovich's First, the work of an eighteen-year-old, and one for which no obvious model can be named, but which itself inspired successors not just among his Soviet elders and juniors but in realms as far-flung as Greece, Finland and Soviet Mongolia.

The piece scored a famous triumph at its premiere under Nikolay Malko on 12 May 1926 in the Great Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic, an event whose anniversary the composer would commemorate for the rest of his life. His teacher Maximilian Steinberg noted in his diary that evening: ‘A memorable concert. Tumultuous success for Mitya's symphony: they encored the scherzo.’ The symphony was taken up by Bruno Walter (Berlin, 5 May 1927), Leopold Stokowski (Philadelphia, 2 November 1928), Robert Hager (28 November 1928) and Arturo Toscanini (from 1931), inaugurating an international reputation that has dimmed only slightly as that of Shostakovich’s subsequent symphonies has flared. Congratulatory messages came from figures as geographically and artistically distant as Berg in Vienna and Milhaud in Paris.

The first English-language study to attempt a genre-focused overview of Shostakovich's music was published over a quarter of a century ago. Christopher Norris's Shostakovich: The Man and his Music was an early attempt to assess the major works (symphonies, operas, piano music and string quartets) by writers from a wide range of backgrounds: music critics, composers, performers, historians and literary theorists. Their retrospective of a composer who had died only seven years earlier captured a moment in time – British Shostakovich reception in the early 1980s – that is fascinating to look back upon. As with much intelligent critical writing about Shostakovich since the 1960s, the best chapters of this collection offered insights that are as valid and appealing now as they were in 1982, regardless of our enhanced knowledge of both Shostakovich and Soviet cultural history. Of particular interest is Robert Stradling's careful bypassing of the assumption that was to dog later popular writing on Shostakovich: namely that he was composing either ‘for’ or ‘against’ the Soviet system. In the case of Shostakovich, as of Richard Strauss, he noted, the ‘romantic ideology of doomed, suicidal genius is a potent but very partial myth’. Though Stradling's caution was typical for its time, it was soon to be swept away in a tide of startling critical self-confidence concerning Shostakovich's supposed anti-Soviet identity. This mythological dissident Shostakovich has enjoyed two decades of authority in music journalism, popular music writing and on the internet; and it is an accident of the different methodologies and publishing practices of journalism and scholarship that musicologists were apparently slow to counter it.

Dmitry Shostakovich wrote three ballets: The Golden Age, op. 22 (1929–30), The Bolt, op. 27 (1931) and The Bright Stream, op. 39 (1935). Despite the fact that Shostakovich, though young, was already well known and showing great promise, the brief initial stage life of these scores meant that they were for a long time not properly appreciated or studied. Officially, they were identified as ‘formalistic’ and alien to Soviet art, which is partly why they remained ‘the least explored part of his musical legacy’. However, a quarter of a century after these unsuccessful premieres, fragments of Shostakovich's ballet music began to be used quite widely. Three ballet suites for small symphony orchestra were often performed at concerts and individual numbers from the scores were included in ballets subsequently created from their music from them, as will be seen.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the former Imperial Ballet went through a period of transition. Its nineteenth-century repertoire, along with its content and aesthetics, was regarded as antiquated and inappropriate for a revolutionary era. To encourage the creation of new works, at the beginning of 1929 the Leningrad Theatre of Opera and Ballet (formerly the Mariinsky) announced a competition for a new ballet scenario, set in the present day. Its demands were typical of the late proletarian period: ‘Themes must be predominantly contemporary … subject matter could be the Civil War or socialist construction … [it must be] formed from everyday material and, in part, from ethnography … [from] the peoples of the SSSR … The spectacle must make use of mass movement.’ Among the genres envisaged were the lyrico-heroic poem, comedy, satire, the contemporary fairy tale, survey and even the Soviet revue.

The seven works to be considered here – Shostakovich's concertos and sonatas for violin and cello, and his sonata for viola – occupy a special place in his output. While the two Piano Concertos, despite their manifest differences in style and orientation, are essentially lightweight (if masterly) exercises in entertainment, the string concertos and sonatas all carry a very powerful expressive charge and speak to us with a distinctive eloquence. There is a sense in which they (the earliest-composed, the Cello Sonata, partly excepted) may be regarded as confessional works. The ability of the string soloists to sustain an immense melodic line, independent of the act of breathing, paradoxically lends their music a profoundly vocal quality, and whether their accompaniment is orchestra or piano, the opportunities for both dialogue and monologue are brilliantly exploited. Indeed all three sonatas possess ‘concerto-like’ elements, not least in the fact that they all contain ‘cadenza-like’ instrumental solos at crucial junctures of the argument.

Yet in these works' powerful emotional life what is ‘confessional’ is – perhaps even more than in Shostakovich's symphonies – far removed from any programmatic critique of external conditions. In so far as we seem to hear the composer's personal voice with a particular clarity, and in so far as that voice laments or protests, we may attribute such expressions to the political pressures and constraints that encompassed him. But the contrast of the individual against the collective is a condition of the concerto form itself, without necessary political implication.

The notion that after the 1948 Zhdanovshchina Shostakovich's output divided into two halves – official and non-official – is almost a truism in Shostakovich studies. Yet though it clearly drew considerable sustenance from Testimony, the idea that he had composed music to placate the Soviet authorities was mooted in the West as early as the 1960s – the decade when the West first began to be more widely aware of the growing wave of Soviet dissidence. Perhaps more surprising is the discovery that those works that were initially perceived as so compromised were not the choral pieces written soon after the events of 1948 – the cantata Song of the Forests, op. 81 and the oratorio The Sun Shines over our Motherland, op. 90 – but rather his symphonies, in particular the Eleventh and Twelfth. In fact, not one of the ‘official’ works to be discussed in this chapter was widely known in the West during Shostakovich's lifetime, for the obvious reason that they were not readily exportable. Since Western audiences rarely heard Shostakovich's more overtly political works – and since he was not generally regarded as a ‘dissident’ composer during his lifetime – they had to assume that works performed in the West such as the Fifth Symphony, the ‘Leningrad’ Symphony and the Eleventh and Twelfth Symphonies were all, to greater or lesser degrees, pleasing to Communist officialdom, as was in fact the case (that the Fourth and Thirteenth in particular had not been equally pleasing was acknowledged in the West too).

Shostakovich's magnificent cycle of string quartets has received an exceptionally diverse reception. Soviet commentaries are filled with rhetoric describing the quartets as chapters in the life of the ‘positive hero’ of Socialist Realist narratives, and writers in both Russia and the West have heard them as vivid narratives, whether confessional autobiography or chronicles of the composer's times. The quartets have also been interpreted as examining major ethical and philosophical issues, including war, death, love, the conflict of forces of good and evil, the nature of subjectivity, the power of creativity and the place of the individual – in particular the artist – in society. This chapter will examine some of the musical features – especially Shostakovich's dialogues with musical traditions both Russian and Western – that have provoked such vivid responses.

Among the most notable of these dialogues is with traditional forms. Non-resolving recapitulations and withholding of harmonic closure are characteristic of Shostakovich's quartets, creating a rhetoric of disintegration, as opposed to the fulfilment characteristic of eighteenth-century formal archetypes. Such strategies are, of course, far from unique to Shostakovich or, within his oeuvre, to his quartets. But they appear here in exceptionally salient and potent guises.

Points of origin

However diverse the influences on Shostakovich's idiosyncratic harmonic language, and however ambivalent his attitude to the tradition in which he was schooled, he was ineluctably a descendent of the Rimsky-Korsakov school. There is good reason therefore to launch this survey with a paradigmatic example from the master pedagogue, its symbolism forming as much a part of Shostakovich's inheritance as the technical aspect.

The first evidence for the existence of the Devil in Rimsky-Korsakov's Gogol opera Christmas Eve is to be found in bar 6 of the Prelude to Act 1. Here the preceding pattern of major triads descending by thirds (E–C sharp – A–F sharp – D–B–G) would suggest one last fall to E to close the circle of this D major diatonic collection of chord roots. Instead the G falls only to F, which forms a tritone with the still sounding B of the G triad (see Ex. 13.1).

Over the course of the next four acts, numerous tritones will follow as the Devil purloins the moon and stars, cavorts with the witch Solokha, and attempts to catch and then escape from his nemesis, the icon painter Vakula, who has confined him to a burlap sack and ordered that the Devil fly him from Dikanka to St Petersburg and back. In both nocturnal voyages (Act 3, 6th tableau; Act 4, 8th tableau) Rimsky-Korsakov expands the tritone count from one to four. From this he creates passages that evoke the disruptive, nihilistic influence of dark powers by means of rootless diminished- seventh chords and linear segments, in which the four tritones interlock to create the eight-note ‘octatonic’ scale (see Ex. 13.2, where all pitches belong to the scale of semitone–tone alternations upwards from E).

Irony is a key element in the music of Shostakovich. Its presence is so conspicuous and varied that it allows the creation of a taxonomy of subtypes: satire, parody, the grotesque, and even a new type that has been tentatively described as existential. Shostakovich used satirical irony to criticize; parody as a compositional device; the grotesque as a quasi-philosophical statement on human nature; and, possibly, existential irony to present an ethical approach to life, embracing the amalgam of both dysphoric and euphoric aspects of human existence as a source of our aesthetic experience. Although some of the composer's output has been interpreted as existentialist in other sources, no systematic analysis has been offered to explain how existential ideas, let alone existential irony, are correlated with the music itself.

Existentialism is a rather vague concept that includes literary, philosophical and psychological writings whose common denominator is a concern with human existence and the search for its significance. Its vagueness and the variety of approaches to it make the detection of its musical correlations problematic, because such correlations require a semantic correlative sufficiently characterized to allow a direct, reasonably undisputable interpretation. In spite of this difficulty, there are still several traits of existential thought that are agreed by most writers on the subject: above all, a generalized dysphoric approach to human existence and a strong feeling of its senselessness and lack of direction.

To the European mind, no less than fifteen symphonies from the pen of a single composer might seem excessive in the light of a tradition that has taken its bearings from the nine symphonies of Beethoven. But the revolutionary culture that nurtured Shostakovich experienced something of a rebirth of symphonic commitment, and in this connection the ideological climate of Socialist Realism (first proclaimed in 1934) was to prove a potent factor. Far from creatively inhibiting, the Beethoven canon, with its fresh post-revolutionary optimism, could be viewed as positively enabling. The Soviet symphony – a genre that Shostakovich's own Fifth Symphony served memorably to define – became for Shostakovich, as for his colleagues, a medium through which to appear to meet the sociopolitical expectations of Soviet ideology. At the same time, his symphonies, string quartets and concertos encoded a more personal vision that was to remain suspect in orthodox Soviet circles. As a captive yet independently minded artist working in a totalitarian regime, Shostakovich invented for himself a moral persona that would construct, Dostoyevskylike, a polyphonic discourse wherein, to quote Victor Terras on Bakhtin, ‘multiple individual voices, inner dialogue, parody, inter-textual echoes, irony, and ambiguity interact dialogically, independently of a controlling monologic narrative voice’.

Although not all of Shostakovich's symphonies sit comfortably within the traditional parameters of the genre, taken as a whole his symphonic oeuvre gravitates towards the four-movement sonata-cycle prototype, and embraces the several different types – instrumental/absolute, narrative/programmatic, cyclic, vocal-instrumental – that go to make up the main-stream repertoire of the genre in the post-Beethoven era. The content and form of these symphonies, as well as their social context, are linked to Shostakovich’s well-known dilemma as a Soviet composer: the conflictridden burden of responsibility he carried towards his genius, his public and, as a professional artist, the Soviet cultural bureaucracy.