jacko

Friday October 26, 2001
The Guardian
Shostakovich
When, in 1939, Winston Churchill called the Soviet Union a "riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma", he might just as well have been describing Dmitri Shostakovich. To this day, more than 25 years after his death, Shostakovich is still the most inscrutable of all the major Russian composers, and undoubtedly the most controversial.
When he was alive, Shostakovich was paraded, with what seemed to be varying degrees of willingness on his part, as the Soviet Union's greatest composer. As a result, although he was much admired, he was also widely seen in the west as a compromised genius. Since his death in 1975, all that has changed. Just as his music has become much more widely known than it was in his lifetime, Shostakovich has also increasingly been presented in the west as a political dissident, a claim that has triggered an argument among musicians and musicologists that shows no sign of dying down.
That is why the publication of Shostakovich's letters to Isaak Glikman is such an important event. They reveal the real, unadorned Shostakovich, a complicated and often contradictory man who simply wrote some of the greatest music of the 20th century in some of the 20th century's most difficult circumstances.
Glikman first met the composer in Leningrad in 1931, when Glikman was 20 and Shostakovich, who was already attracting worldwide attention, was 25. It was the start of a correspondence that was to continue almost without interruption for four decades, until Shostakovich's death aged 68, making the letters uniquely important for those who wish to unravel the mysteries that have kept the musicologists so busy. First published in Russian in 1993, they have never been available in English until now.

During the 1930s, Glikman worked for a time as the composer's secretary, and the two men established an understanding that shines through a series of letters that were all written under the shadow of censorship and authoritarian power. These are not letters in which Shostakovich gives vent to his innermost feelings, least of all on political topics. He writes a lot about football, and everyday topics, and as time goes on, about his health. There is plenty of feeling in the letters, but the political background can only be hinted at, often with irony, in allusions and metaphors, and in what Glikman calls "veiled" remarks.

The sheer danger of life in the Soviet Union goes part of the way to explaining why Shostakovich himself saved none of Glikman's side of the correspondence. "He did not keep letters that were sent to him, and urged others to follow his example," Glikman writes in his introduction. "I often heard him say: 'You keep letters? Why? What on earth's the point?' In saying this, Shostakovich plainly had in mind letters from himself, because he attached no importance to them."
The simple truth is that Shostakovich spoke more easily through his music than he spoke through writing. Nobody could make Shostakovich write letters or memoirs, and nobody could stop him from writing music. "Even if they cut off both my hands and I have to hold the pen in my teeth, I shall still go on writing music," he once told Glikman.
In private dealings Shostakovich was mostly much more cautious and restrained. Early in his book, Glikman recalls sitting with the composer in 1936 reading the often vicious published comments about his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. "Our reactions could hardly have been more different," Glikman writes. "I emphatically giving voice to my indignation; he reading without comment, in silence."

Sadly for posterity, all of Shostakovich's letters from this enormously significant period - in which the opera was officially denounced and banned and in which Shostakovich's cornerstone work, his fourth symphony, was withdrawn - have been lost. The extant correspondence begins in November 1941, when Shostakovich has been evacuated from the besieged city of Leningrad to Kuybishev (now Samara) on the Volga, and Glikman is in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, along with colleagues from the Leningrad Conservatoire.
For Shostakovich, these were weeks both of intense privation and of intense inspiration, as he makes clear in the earliest of all the letters to Glikman:

November 30 1941, Kuybishev
Dear Isaak Davidovich,
I received your letter of November 18 today; I don't need to tell you what tremendous pleasure it gave me...
I stayed in Leningrad until October 1. On September 3 I completed the first movement of my Seventh Symphony. I finished the second movement on September 17, and the third on September 29. I might have managed to finish the fourth movement as well, but as things have turned out it is not ready yet - worse than that, in fact - I have not yet even begun it. There are of course several reasons for this, but the main one is that the strain of concentrating all my efforts on the first three movements has completely exhausted me. As you have already observed, everything to do with composition puts me in a state of great nervous excitement.
On September 30 I had a telephone call at 11pm from Comrade Kalinnikova of the Leningrad Party Committee. She told me that I was to go by air to Moscow the following day, and so that very day I left our beloved home town with my wife and two children.
· Six weeks later, Shostakovich is still mixing domestic detail with announcements of high historic importance about progress on the Seventh Symphony. But he is also beginning to be cryptic. Note the reference in the next letter to Soso Begiashvili as a "friend". As Glikman explains, Begiashvili was a pushy chancer, whom Shostakovich mistrusted.

January 4 1942, Kuybishev
I am writing to you a lot these days, as much in fact as my supply of envelopes will allow - this particular product of the papermaking industry is extraordinarily hard to come by in Kuybishev. The same is true of postcards... We have moved to a new apartment and as far as space is concerned are living very well... My apartment consists of two rooms, and its chief advantage is that we are the only family living in it. I finished my Seventh Symphony here. Apart from this landmark distinction the apartment boasts a bathroom, a kitchen and a lavatory... Those who have heard the symphony find the first three movements very good. So far I have shown the fourth movement to only a few people. Those few generally like it, but there were some reservations... For instance, my friend Soso Begiashvili thinks it (the fourth movement) not optimistic enough. Samud Samosud thinks it is all very fine but not, in his opinion, a proper finale. For it to be so, he thinks I ought to bring in a choir and soloists. There were many more similarly valuable observations on the fourth movement, which I accept for purposes of information rather than for guidance, since I don't believe the movement needs either chorus or soloists and it has quite enough optimism as it is.

I didn't tell you that my Seventh Symphony has been nominated for a possible Stalin prize. There is a proposal to perform it here with the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra and Samosud. I worry that there are not enough orchestral forces here to cope, because the symphony does call for a very large orchestra. I should really like to hear Mravinsky perform this work, but at the moment this is difficult. I don't have great faith in Samosud as a symphonic conductor.
· This time, Shostakovich was to be denied his preference for the great Yevgeny Mravinsky, who was to become the central interpreter of the symphonies for the next four decades. The premiere of the "Leningrad" symphony was given by the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra under Samosud in Kuybishev and was broadcast nationwide and abroad. But Shostakovich was as much concerned about the fate of his relatives in Leningrad and by the news that his dog had been eaten.

February 6 1942, Kuybishev
Things are not good with me. Day and night I think of my family and loved ones, whom I had to leave behind in Leningrad. I seldom get news of them. There are no more cats and dogs left... Every day I try to do something about getting my loved ones away from Leningrad.
The saga continues. The Bolshoi Theatre orchestra is rehearsing my rather long Seventh Symphony outstandingly well. Yesterday was the first full orchestral play-through of the first and second movements. It made a great impression on me and for half a day I rejoiced over my baby.
· The Seventh Symphony made Shostakovich into a national and international hero. His picture appeared on the cover of Time magazine. For a while, he was the embodiment of Soviet determination to defeat the German invaders, but his capacity for irony was never far away.

November 6 1942, Kuybishev
My warmest congratulations and best wishes to you on the 25th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution.
I have just listened to the radio broadcast of the speech by Comrade Stalin. My dear friend! How sad it is that circumstances have forced us to hear this speech so far apart from one another.
· The irony was much darker a year later, when Shostakovich's next wartime symphony was premiered in Moscow. It had a more mixed reception, as a striking letter from that period illustrates.
December 31 1943, Moscow
This is to send you greetings for a Happy New Year and to wish you health, happiness and success. Pavel Serebryakov brought me your greetings; thank you for not forgetting me. Now it is 4 o'clock in the afternoon of the last day of 1943. A blizzard is raging outside the windows as 1944 approaches. It will be a year of happiness, of joy, of victory, a year that will bring us all much joy.
The freedom-loving peoples will at last throw off the yoke of Hitlerism, peace will reign over the whole world, and we shall live once more in peace under the sun of Stalin's Constitution. Of this I am convinced, and consequently experience feelings of unalloyed joy. At present you and I are far away from one another; if only I could be with you so that we might celebrate together the glorious victories of our Red Army under the supreme generalship of Comrade Stalin.
By the start of 1945, the end of the war was in sight, but life continued to be extremely tough for the composer.

January 2 1945, Moscow
I pray that during 1945 we shall plant the flag of victory in Berlin. My plans for the coming year are not clear. I am not composing at all at the moment, because the circumstances in which I am living are too awful. From six in the morning until six in the evening I am deprived of two essentials: water and light. It is particularly difficult between 3 o'clock and 6 o'clock in the afternoon, because it is already dark by then, the kerosene lamps hardly give any light, and my eyesight is not good enough for me to write by them. The lack of light brings on a state of nervous exhaustion, but there seems little hope of any improvement. I say this because I recently put my name to a petition to the local branch of the industry ministry humbly requesting that laureates of the Stalin prize, People's Artists, Honoured Artists, etc - in a word the country's leading composers - should receive an issue of kerosene, lamps, primus stoves etc, on the grounds that interruption in the supply of electrical energy might be deemed to have a deleterious effect on their creative productivity. This letter was crowned with brilliant success, because on December 31 I received coupons entitling me to six litres of kerosene."

· The arrival of peace proved only a temporary respite in Shostakovich's difficulties. Though he emerged from the war as a national figure, the onset of the cold war coincided with the reassertion of a strict new Soviet line in the arts headed by Andrei Zhdanov. This culminated in the so-called "Historic Decree" of February 1948, in which Shostakovich (along with Prokofiev and Khachaturian and others) was branded as a "formalist and cosmopolitan". The darkening atmosphere caused Shostakovich to keep secret some of his finest works, including the first violin concerto and the Songs from Jewish Folk Poetry. To make matters worse, Shostakovich's health was beginning to decline.
Shostakovich's inner attitude towards communist ideas, insofar as these can be meaningfully differentiated from the Soviet Communist party, remain a difficult subject to pin down. At various points in his life, the composer expressed left-wing political views in ways which cannot simply be dismissed as tactical. In 1952, Glikman reports a grim occasion on which Shostakovich consented to receive home tuition in the ruling ideology, a task on which Glikman helped out by providing a helpful précis of various books.
With the death of Stalin in 1953, things began to improve for Shostakovich. The so-called "thaw" under Khrushchev meant that some of his previously unplayed music began to be performed. The Songs from Jewish Folk Poetry were performed in 1955. Shostakovich agreed to redraft his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk under the title Katerina Izmailova, and it was performed in 1963. Meanwhile in 1961 the Fourth Symphony received its belated premiere, 25 years after being withdrawn. Shostakovich's output of symphonies and string quartets continued unabated, and he gave performances of his own music at home and, from time to time, abroad. Shostakovich's health became an increasingly major topic in his letters.

September 6 1958, Moscow
I have to stay in hospital at least until the beginning of October. The professors, those high priests of science, had a consultation yesterday, and that was their decision. My right hand is really weak. I have pins and needles all the time. I can't pick up anything heavy with it. I can grip a suitcase with my fingers, but it's difficult to hang my coat on a peg, or clean my teeth. When I write, the hand gets very tired. I can only play slowly and pianissimo - I noticed this in Paris, where I could hardly get through the concerts. I didn't pay any attention at the time.
When I asked the medical high priests to give me a name for whatever it is that is wrong with me, they did not answer but simply condemned me to stay in hospital until the beginning of October. In any case, I am exercising the hand. Every day I practise writing out the letters of the alphabet and the numbers, and phrases like "Masha eats kasha" and "vicar scratches knicker". But, my God, how difficult it is.

September 19 1958, Moscow
My stay in hospital is coming to an end. I should be home by about the 25th of the month. My hand is better, but I don't think I shall be able to undertake much concert activity in the near future. In my spare time, of which I have plenty at the moment, I think about Lady Macbeth and the Fourth Symphony. I should so much like to hear both of these works performed. I cannot say that I would expect much joy from the opera; the theatres are so full of untalented, incompetent people merely taking up space - singers, producers, designers and the like.
· Of all the letters that Shostakovich sent to Glikman, perhaps none is of greater historical importance than that of July 1960 describing the history - and the significance - of his Eighth String Quartet, one of the composer's indisputable works of genius. Not only does Shostakovich write with unusual personal urgency about the quartet, he also reveals the importance of musical allusion in his later works. In official commentaries at the time, Shostakovich's quartet was depicted as a commemoration of the victims of fascism, but the letter negates such a claim. The writing of the quartet coincides with a major crisis in Shostakovich's life, during which he finally agreed to join the Communist party and seriously contemplated suicide.

July 19 1960, Zhukovka
I am now back from my trip to Dresden... I stayed in the spa town of Gohrisch, about 40 kilometres from Dresden. A place of incredible beauty. The good working conditions justified themselves: I composed my Eighth Quartet. As hard as I tried to rough out the film scores which I am supposed to be doing, I still haven't managed to get anywhere; instead I started thinking that if some day I die, nobody is likely to write a work in memory of me, so I had better write one myself.

The basic theme of the quartet is the four notes D natural, E flat, C natural, B natural - that is, my initials, DSCH. The quartet also uses themes from some of my own compositions and the Revolutionary song "Zamuchen tyazholoy nevolyey" ("Tormented by grievous bondage"). The themes from my own works are as follows: from the First Symphony, the Eighth Symphony, the [Second Piano] Trio, the Cello Concerto, and Lady Macbeth. There are hints of Wagner, (the Funeral March from Götterdämmerung) and Tchaikovsky (the second subject of the first movement of the Sixth Symphony). Oh yes, I forgot to mention that there is something else of mine as well, from the Tenth Symphony. Quite a nice little hodge-podge, really. It is a pseudo-tragic quartet, so much so that while I was composing it I shed the same amount of tears as I would have had to pee after half-a-dozen beers. When I got home, I tried a few times to play it through, but always ended up in tears. This was of course a response not to the pseudo-tragedy so much as to my own wonder at its superlative unity of form. But here you may detect a touch of self-glorification, which no doubt will soon pass and leave in its place the usual self-critical hangover. The quartet is now with the copyists.
By 1962, Shostakovich had begun to move into a new and more experimental phase of his composing life. The central works of this period are the 13th and 14th Symphonies, both of which abandon traditional forms and set poetry that was close to the composer's heart. The key text in the 13th is Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poem Baby Yar, whose subject is anti-semitism, while the poems for the 14th Symphony, which is dominated by the theme of death, include settings of Lorca, Apollinaire and Rilke.

May 31 1962, Moscow
Thank you for your letter and for what you say about "Baby Yar"... And meanwhile I have had an idea that I could write something else along the same lines to words by Yevtushenko.
I have a collection of his poems and it has given me the idea of a symphony, the first or second movement of which would consist of Baby Yar... and I hope that Yevtushenko is going to write another poem I have asked for. So, the 13th Symphony is beginning to take shape. Will it work, do you think? Shostakovich's material circumstances improved at around this time, and his letters to Glikman increasingly mention other musicians.

August 1 1963, Zhukovka
I have been sent a recording of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem. I am playing it and am thrilled with the greatness of this work, which I place on a level with Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde and other great works of the human spirit. Hearing the War Requiem somehow cheers me up, makes me even more full of the joys of life.
· As Shostakovich's health declines - he had a heart attack in May 1966 - the letters to Glikman become increasingly reflective. Yet the characteristic satirical wit is rarely far away, amid the introspection, and the letter written on his 62nd birthday hints at a much more enduring personal pain.

January 24 1967, Moscow
How good it would be if you could come to Moscow. It is such a long time since I have seen you and I miss you.
I am feeling fine. I try to compose something every day but nothing seems to come of it, and I do not have very high hopes. On the other hand, I think of Sibelius, who wrote nothing at all for many years in the latter part of his life, but simply carried out his role as the Glory of the Finnish People... [He] swilled brandy and listened to music of all kinds on gramophone records. I wouldn't mind that at all. But I am loaded down with worries. Many of them. And I have no strength.

September 24 1968, Zhukovka
Tomorrow is my 62nd birthday. At such an age, people are apt to reply coquettishly to questions such as "If you could be born again, would you live your 62 years in the same way?" "Yes," they say, "not everything was perfect of course, there were some disappointments, but on the whole I would do much the same again."
If I were ever to be asked this question, my reply would be: No! A thousand times no!
· Shostakovich died on August 9 1975. In his notes, Glikman writes that on at date the "threads of gold" that bound him to Shostakovich for more than 40 years were irrevocably sundered. "In my heart," he writes, "I have treasured every word he let fall, from his pen or from his lips. And I believe that these words will resonate in the hearts of all who loved and to this day love the genius that was Shostakovich."