How Shostakovich Changed My Mind by Stephen Johnson

Author:Stephen Johnson [Stephen Johnson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912559060
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2018-06-05T16:00:00+00:00

It’s hard to believe now, but the Soviet authorities took grave exception to all this back in the 1940s, when the Eighth Symphony was still new. The response to the Symphony’s premiere in 1943 was largely muted. But when its successor, the Ninth, turned out not to be the monumental ‘Victory Symphony’ everyone was anticipating, the political tide began to turn against Shostakovich once again. Only, now it was the Eighth Symphony that was increasingly held up as an example of all that had gone wrong. After the infamous ‘Zhdanov decree’ of 1948, when Andrei Zhdanov, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, denounced Shostakovich as a ‘bourgeois formalist’, the Eighth Symphony was singled out as an example of ‘unhealthy individualism’ and ‘anti-people pessimism’. Zhdanov compared the Symphony to ‘a piercing road drill, or a musical gas-chamber’. The critical feeding-frenzy reached its peak in comments like that of the composer Vladimir Zakharov, who insisted that the Eighth could ‘in no way be called a musical composition; it is a “composition” which has absolutely no connection with the art of music.’ The Symphony remained under an unofficial ban until well after Stalin’s death.

In the year following Zhdanov’s decree, Shostakovich wrote another revealing letter to his friend Isaak Glikman. After giving the vinegar bottle of self-mockery a quick shake, he gets down to business. He knows that even to refer to the disgraced Eighth Symphony in anything other than terms of the strongest disapprobation would be dangerous, but he also knows Glikman will understand which of his ‘compositions’ he’s talking about:

During my bout of illness, or rather illnesses, I picked up the score of one of my compositions and read it through from beginning to end. I was astounded by its qualities, and thought that I should be proud and happy that I had created such a work. I could hardly believe that it was I who had written it.

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