Great writers and artists ought to take part in politics only so far as they protect themselves from politics.  — Anton Chekhov

By Stuart Mitchner

Almost exactly 80 years ago, November 21, 1937, the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra gave the premiere performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. According to Laurel Fay’s Shostakovich: A Life, the audience was aware that the 31-year-old composer’s “fate was at stake.” Two of his most recent works, an opera and music for a ballet, had been attacked at Stalin’s behest in Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party’s Central Committee; in effect, he had been “cast down overnight from the summit among the brightest stars of young Soviet composers to the abyss as pernicious purveyor of cultural depravity.” Meanwhile friends and colleagues were “disappearing.” Members of his family had been arrested, exiled, sent to labor camps. One of his foremost supporters had been charged with treason and executed. In case he doubted how dangerously close he was to being labeled an enemy of the state, the Fourth Symphony, his most ambitious work to date, was forcibly withdrawn on the eve of its debut performance because instead of following the party line, it appeared to be an even more extreme expression of his “depraved, difficult, formalist Western” values. 

On the night of November 21 the fallen artist emerged from the abyss a hero, the debut performance of Symphony No. 5 scoring “an absolute, unforgettable triumph,” people weeping openly during the slow movement, and as the finale progressed rising “to their feet, one by one, giving release at the end to a deafening ovation.” Called to the stage again and again, amid “wild applause,” Shostakovich appeared “white-faced, biting his lips, close to tears.” But then, as the ovation continued to the point where it “threatened to turn into a demonstration,” he had to be “removed from the provocative scene as quickly as possible.”

So much for the storybook redemption. After being magnificently vindicated, the composer was bundled off like a criminal. Worse yet, members of the Committee for Artistic Affairs investigating “how concert organizers had arranged such a commanding triumph” concluded “that the audience did not consist of ordinary concertgoers but of plants, hand-picked to assure the success of the work.”

Fortunately public knowledge of the magnitude of the event prevailed, leading Soviet authorities to reshape the narrative in line with the embattled composer’s own politically necessary presentation of the symphony as “a response to justified criticism.” Thus Shostakovich’s triumph became merely a subtext to the story of the State’s triumphant “rehabilitation” of a Soviet artist who had gone astray.

The Third Movement

The recording of Symphony No. 5 that I listened to in college featured Leopold Stokowski conducting the Stadium Symphony Orchestra of New York. The cover of the Everest LP showed Stokowski staring at a framed black and white photograph of Shostakovich. The image of the distinguished silver-haired conductor on that iconic LP was comically at odds with the frenzied pantomimes I engaged in while conducting imaginary performances of the Fifth. Picture a Peanuts cartoon of Charlie Brown in ecstasy, oh world! oh wonder! oh greatness!

What can I say? I was 19, it was spring, and I had no resistance to the wrenching beauty of the slow, soulful third movement that seemed a sublime requiem for all the sorrows of humanity. The windows of my room were open. I turned up the volume. There was no containing all that beauty. I was giving infusions of Shostakovich to the neighborhood, in particular to the woman sitting on the front porch of the house across the street. She was in her 30s, sang in the church choir, had two kids four or five years younger than me, and was dying of cancer. For me the hero of the life and death moment was a Russian composer, still alive, still at work on the other side of the so-called Iron Curtain. However silly, corny, sophomoric (in fact I was a sophomore), it was thrilling, to feel all that reflected glory, to think that I was a medium for the music pouring from my window.

Gorky’s Heroics

My attachment to Shostakovich’s symphony was tied to my fascination with Russian literature. While I knew nothing of the events that very nearly destroyed the composer in the mid-1930s, I could feel the drama of struggle and survival in music that resonated in the fiction of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and, especially, the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky, who had known Shostakovich, been his friend. At the time when the composer was out of favor, Gorky was “the chief literary conceptualizer of Socialist Realism,” and risked using his personal access to Stalin to counter the destructive campaign launched by the Pravda article that, as Gorky put it, authorized “hundreds of talentless people, hacks of all kinds, to persecute Shostakovich … the most talented of all contemporary Soviet musicians.”

According to Fay’s Shostakovich, Stalin never acknowledged Gorky’s appeal, which was made in March 1936. Fay says nothing about the ominous implications of Stalin’s silence, nor about the perils of defying a dictator, nor of the fact that Gorky died three months later “of heart disease.” While Stalin gave the author a lavish State funeral and even helped carry his coffin, it was eventually alleged that he had Gorky poisoned by the Soviet secret police.

“Party Guidance”

Six months after Gorky’s death the premiere of Symphony No. 4 was cancelled. The official story was that Shostakovich had “refused consent for the symphony’s performance himself.” Numerous excuses were given. The orchestra was poorly prepared or else simply “not putting forth their best efforts,” the conductor was incompetent, the symphony was “devilishly difficult.” Asked in a 1970 interview if he would have been different without “Party guidance,” Shostakovich said “Yes, almost certainly. No doubt the line I was pursuing when I wrote the Fourth Symphony would have been stronger and sharper in my work. I would have displayed more brilliance, used more sarcasm, I could have revealed my ideas openly instead of having to resort to camouflage.”

With Stalin dead in 1952, and the symphony “rehabilitated,” Shostakovich “no longer had to maintain the fiction that it had been ‘discarded’ by a dissatisfied composer.” Now he thought it “the very best thing he had ever written,” saying, “Here I wasn’t thinking about anything — not about the form, not about anything.” Given a chance to revise the score before the premiere, “he refused to change a single note.”

The Missing Symphony

Curious to hear a symphony that had been suppressed for 25 years — the debut with the Moscow Philharmonic came on December 30 1961 — I searched among the versions on YouTube and chose Semyon Bychkov conducting the WDR Symphony Orchestra of Cologne. At first I thought it would be preferable simply to hear the music without the distraction of a filmed performance, but the “distraction” proved to be totally compelling. I meant to sample it, get a taste of its quality; an hour and eight minutes later, I knew I would have to see it over again, if only for the stirring beauty of the human narrative being orchestrated (the perfect word for it) by an unnamed filmmaker, always with the mission of the music predominant amid close-ups of faces in a medley of expressions, or in mid-range views of sections, brass, strings, woodwinds, men and women, old and young performing with the polished intensity of professionals, artists at work, no idealogues, no prima donnas, even the obvious virtuousos submitting their talents to the labyrinthine cause. And in the midst of it all joyous Peter-and-the-Wolf moments where the bassoons call to the oboes and the oboes to flutes before the cellos come pounding under them like the earth moving below a dawn chorus of birdsongs. And for the moments of supreme grandeur, all hands rising to the occasion, the camera moves back and above to reveal the sheer mass of the orchestra, like an entire nation in microcosm. Then down into it you go again, each bright piece of the mosaic flashing into view, a close-up of hands pressing stops, flautists blowing as if their lives and the lives of everyone in the world depended on keeping the flame of their particular offering alive.

It’s impossible not to imagine metaphors of communistic and democratic ideals in this magnificent vision of unity, the German musicians all in black, like the Russian-born conductor. These are the children and grandchildren of Russia’s enemies, members of an orchestra founded in 1947 by Allied occupation authorities after World War II. Born in 1952, the year Stalin died, Bychkov left Russia in 1975, the year Shostakovich died. The son of Jewish parents who had suffered under Soviet antisemitism, he emigrated to the United States and became an American citizen. He conducts with warmth and muted passion right up to the last incredible moments where the orchestra seems to breath as one great being, as of a whole world hushed, alert to sounds of absolute simplicity, a call and answer of celesta and timpani; it’s beyond poetry, for the sounds are barely audible, and more powerful than a thousand cadenzas. Cellist Miroslav Rostropovich compared the sequence to “the letting down of a silken ladder to eternity.”

Bychkov delivers it all with prayerful grace. He’s fully in the moment. The silken ladder is in his hands.

To come down to earth from the land of national orchestral metaphors to the savage realities of November 2017, imagine the current leaders of Russia and the United States at the podium conducting the orchestras of their respective nations. The chaos and cacophony would be deafening.

Chekhov Knows Best

In 1955, during the official “rehabilitation” of a friend who had been murdered during the Stalinist terror, Shostakovich expressed his feelings through his literary alter ego, Anton Chekhov, whose short story “Gusev” was read to him by his wife on the day he died. The passage Shostakovich quoted is from a letter Chekhov wrote in 1898: “It is the duty of writers not to accuse, not to prosecute, but to champion even the guilty once they have been condemned and are enduring punishment …. Great writers and artists ought to take part in politics only so far as they protect themselves from politics. There are plenty of accusers, prosecutors, and gendarmes without them.”