Facts, Fantasies, and Fictions: Recent Shostakovich Studies

Composer mythologies are not a new phenomenon. We need only a moment's reflection to think of several figures who have caught the public imagination: Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky among the most obvious ones. Almost as soon as each of these composers died (in Beethoven's case, even before his death) the mythologizing process swung into action; in each case, the results were so successful that it is only comparatively recently that we have felt the need to begin challenging them. And, in the main, the long and painstaking process of dismantling them occurs within the confines of academe, where scholars with the necessary expertise in languages, music, and historiography can read and interpret old documents. Imagine, then, a scenario where a scholar at work on the first ever—in any language—documentary biography of such a composer is repeatedly reviled in public: wilfully misrepresented in radio broadcasts, in a popular journal devoted to that composer, on websites, in major broadsheet newspapers, and in a book (Allan Ho and Dmitri Feofanov, Shostakovich Reconsidered (London, 1998)). The torrent of vilification that was levelled at Laurel Fay during the late 1990s by a small but vitriolic band of music journalists (mainly based in the UK, but boosted by the American lawyer Dmitri Feofanov and the American musicologist Allan Ho) is absolutely unprecedented in the history of Western musicology.

Since his death in 1975, Shostakovich has been in the invidious position of being the twentieth century's most mythologized composer. Until the publication of Testimony: The Memoirs of Dimitri Shostakovich as Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov (New York, 1979), Western observers and music-lovers were, to greater or lesser degrees, familiar with his 'Soviet persona'. They had read extracts from his official speeches; his interview with the American journalist Rose Lee in the New York Times in 1931 was widely quoted in programme notes throughout the Western world, as was—naturally enough—the famous subtitle of his Fifth Symphony, 'A Soviet Artist's Practical Creative Response to Just Criticism'. They knew him as the composer of the 'Leningrad' Symphony; as the composer who was publicly rebuked in 1948 (Alexander Werth's 1949 book Musical Uproar in Moscow, which printed generous chunks of the transcript from those infamous proceedings, was also widely known and cited); and as the composer of several other symphonies and of quartets and concertos. After the onset of the Cold War, suspicion that all was not entirely straightforward in the world of Soviet music was freely voiced, and Werth's book was a key document of that period. It was not unusual to find cautionary words applied to reports of Shostakovich's official statements, and even to read that he composed some of his music to please the Soviet authorities. Certainly, no writer on music I have been able to trace ever claimed that Shostakovich was a loyal Stalinist. But at the same time, the notion that he was actually a dissident was never mooted. The fact that he might personally have been unhappy with some aspects of Soviet cultural policy was conceded; but his high status within that system excluded him from the ranks of dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Boris Schwarz's Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 1917–1970 (London and New York, 1972) played an invaluable role in increasing Western understanding of Soviet cultural politics and of Shostakovich's extraordinary career. Ambivalent about the Soviet status quo he may have been; hugely successful within it he certainly was.

UK-based writers about music between about 1940 (when Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony was first performed in London) and 1979 tended to take the line of greatest neutrality, with sometimes comically impassive results. If Shostakovich used a monogram in his Tenth Symphony, there was no reason to get overexcited about it and start delving for secret programmes—after all, Bach and Schumann had done this first. His Fourth Symphony was withdrawn on the eve of its premiere, it is true—but then, one could hardly deny that the Fifth was a vast improvement on the Second and Third, so...