There are clues as to what these circumstances were. Little things that one doesn't recognize at first, such as the photographs of the Shostakovich family and friends one sees in biographies and musical reference books.
You look at them a dozen times, studying the faces, reading the captions. Then it dawns on you: No one is smiling.
In almost every picture, there is a collection of somber faces, usually staring away from the camera, as if diverted by some private sorrow. Last April he slipped quietly away from a banquet in his honor with his son, Dmitri, a young pianist now studying at Juilliard, and sought asylum in a West German police station.
After a lengthy, emotion-charged telephone conversation with a KGB operative and two of his compatriots in the orchestra, he permanently disconnected himself from his Soviet past. I feel completely different. On the podium in Symphony Hall here during rehearsal, he seemed to be enjoying both the considerable firepower of the orchestra and his own newly found ''emancipation.
Shostakovich is young, intense, dressed in casual Western slacks and open-collared shirt. He bears an unmistakable resemblance to his father; but the pervading expression is different. The defeat and despair so prominent in Dmitri Shostakovich's features are not evident in his son's.
During an interview, he talks freely about life in the Soviet Union, giving a picture of a system where artistic skills are identified and looked after from a very early age with ''training of a highly professional nature,'' but where ''the human and spiritual needs'' of an artist are given little nourishment. He never sat me down to learn, but he was my spiritual tutor, who formed my musical and world outlook.
But I think about it a lot. This thinking began long ago in the Soviet Union, where, he believes, many musical artists share his interests in religion but ''have been forced to become accustomed to'' life in an atheist country. He is also delving deeply into music; but the subjects of music and politics are closely joined in his mind. They are the twin reasons he has come to the West.
Despite a relaxation of musical censorship that began in the regime of Khrushchev, he was prevented from playing music with themes that have special significance to Russian religions.
He was also prevented from playing music with texts considered repugnant to Soviet ideologues, as well as much modern music. The net effect of these restrictions, he has said, is to create a wall of isolation around Soviet composers and conductors.
Today he is absorbed in the music of the West, learning as he goes. Some American musicians have found him incredibly adept at performing his father's work, but less accomplished in the classical Western repertory. But with his obvious drive, he is already acquiring a solid reputation around the country.
He denies that his father's talent was ''strangled'' by Stalin, as some musical scholars have concluded. Shostakovich fought with his music. This was his weapon. He was wounded very deeply and directly. But he was not broken. The First Symphony launched him as a modernist star of the new Soviet state, during that period of explosive creativity before the cultural freeze set in. Symphony No. In Stalin gave Shostakovich a country retreat and a Moscow flat.
Shostakovich composed his first film score for the silent movie, The New Babylon, set during the Paris Commune. Although he did little work in this post, it shielded him from ideological attack.
Much of this period was spent writing his opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District , which was first performed in It was immediately successful, on both popular and official levels. Shostakovich married his first wife, Nina Varzar, in Initial difficulties led to a divorce in , but the couple soon remarried when Nina became pregnant with their first child.
In , Shostakovich fell from official favour. Shostakovich was away on a concert tour in Arkhangelsk when he heard news of the first Pravda article. Two days before the article was published on the evening of 28 January, a friend had advised Shostakovich to attend the Bolshoi Theatre production of Lady Macbeth. When he arrived, he saw that Joseph Stalin and the Politburo were there. In letters written to his friend Ivan Sollertinsky, Shostakovich recounted the horror with which he watched as Stalin shuddered every time the brass and percussion played too loudly.
Equally horrifying was the way Stalin and his companions laughed at the love-making scene between Sergei and Katerina. Consequently, commissions began to fall off, and his income fell by about three quarters. However, Pravda criticized The Limpid Stream for incorrectly displaying peasant life on the collective farm. These included his patron Marshal Tukhachevsky shot months after his arrest ; his brother-in-law Vsevolod Frederiks a distinguished physicist, who was eventually released but died before he got home ; his close friend Nikolai Zhilyayev a musicologist who had taught Tukhachevsky; shot shortly after his arrest ; his mother-in-law, the astronomer Sofiya Mikhaylovna Varzar sent to a camp in Karaganda ; his friend the Marxist writer Galina Serebryakova 20 years in camps ; his uncle Maxim Kostrykin died ; and his colleagues Boris Kornilov and Adrian Piotrovsky executed.
His only consolation in this period was the birth of his daughter Galina in ; his son Maxim was born two years later. The work marked a great shift in style for the composer due to the substantial influence of Gustav Mahler and a number of Western-style elements. The symphony gave Shostakovich compositional trouble, as he attempted to reform his style into a new idiom.
The composer was well into the work when the fatal articles appeared. Despite this, Shostakovich continued to compose the symphony and planned a premiere at the end of Rehearsals began that December, but after a number of rehearsals Shostakovich, for reasons still debated today, decided to withdraw the symphony from the public.
A number of his friends and colleagues, such as Isaak Glikman, have suggested that it was in fact an official ban which Shostakovich was persuaded to present as a voluntary withdrawal. Yet Shostakovich did not repudiate the work; it retained its designation as his Fourth Symphony. During and , in order to maintain as low a profile as possible between the Fourth and Fifth symphonies, Shostakovich mainly composed film music, a genre favored by Stalin and lacking in dangerous personal expression.
Premiering on 21 November in Leningrad, it was a phenomenal success: many in the Leningrad audience had lost family or friends to the mass executions. The Fifth drove many to tears and welling emotions. Of course they understood, they understood what was happening around them and they understood what the Fifth was about.
The success put Shostakovich in good standing once again. Music critics and the authorities alike, including those who had earlier accused Shostakovich of formalism, claimed that he had learned from his mistakes and had become a true Soviet artist.
It was also at this time that Shostakovich composed the first of his string quartets. His chamber works allowed him to experiment and express ideas which would have been unacceptable in his more public symphonic pieces.
In September , he began to teach composition at the Leningrad Conservatory, which provided some financial security but interfered with his own creative work. In , before the Soviet forces attempted to invade Finland, the Party Secretary of Leningrad Andrei Zhdanov commissioned a celebratory piece from Shostakovich, entitled Suite on Finnish Themes to be performed as the marching bands of the Red Army would be parading through the Finnish capital Helsinki.
The Winter War was a bitter experience for the Red Army, the parade never happened, and Shostakovich would never lay claim to the authorship of this work. It was not performed until After the outbreak of war between the Soviet Union and Germany in , Shostakovich initially remained in Leningrad. He tried to enlist for the military but was turned away because of his poor eyesight. The photograph for which he posed was published in newspapers throughout the country.
But his greatest and most famous wartime contribution was the Seventh Symphony. The composer wrote the first three movements in Leningrad and completed the work in Kuibyshev now Samara where he and his family had been evacuated. The symphony was first premiered by the Bolshoi Theatre orchestra in Kuibyshev and was soon performed abroad in London and the United States.
0コメント