Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues: Context, Style, Performance (review)

The past decade has seen a burgeoning interest in the music and life of Shostakovich. Mark Mazullo here proffers an attractive if also slightly out-of-the-ordinary monograph to contribute to this growing body of scholarship. What is unusual is that this book is not intended primarily for musicologists, theorists, or scholars per se (p. xii). Mazullo wants it to have a wider readership and hence has collated his insights, gained through considerable experience studying, playing, listening, and teaching Shostakovich’s op. 87 cycle of preludes and fugues for piano into a book designed for Shostakovich enthusiasts—musicians and non-musicians alike—with a basic understanding of music theory. Arousing further curiosity is the book’s explicitly stated “non-thesis”: to use the author’s words, “it does not . . . purport to prove anything about Shostakovich or his music” (p. xii). As such, this is a work of criticism written in a style similar to Donald Francis Tovey’s memorable Essays in Musical Analysis (6 vols. [London: Oxford University Press, 1935–1939]).

Composed in 1950–51 in under five months, the Preludes and Fugues initially encountered the hostile reception of a Soviet state under the influence of Zhdanovism, which accused Shostakovich and notable contemporaries such as Myaskovsky, Prokofiev, and Khachaturian of formalism and anti-Soviet tendencies. This gave way to a more favorable reaction thanks to the advocacy of the work’s dedicatee, Tatiana Nikolayeva, who premiered it in December of 1952. Since that time, and more unreservedly since the composer’s formal rehabilitation by state decree in 1958, Shostakovich’s op. 87 has assumed a significant, almost legendary status in the Russian canon and the pianist’s repertoire alongside Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier upon which it was modelled. The work took much longer to be accorded any recognition in the West, however, and has received little air time until fairly recently. Indeed, it was less than a decade after its composition that Western scholars, no doubt also reflecting some cultural and politically-motivated bias, condemned the work. Read for instance the comments of T. G. Edridge, who extolled the virtues of Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis, Reger’s op. 99, and even Franz Reizenstein’s contribution to the prelude-and-fugue genre, but derided Shostakovich’s op. 87 with the statement that “although they may flicker into life occasionally, they remain on the whole an obdurately dull if impressive testimony of the skill of the most fugally minded of Russian composers” (T. G. Edridge, “Prelude and Fugue Relationships,” The Musical Times 101, no. 1407 [May 1960]: 299).

Mazullo calls for a circumvention of politics in the assessment of Shostakovich’s music and tries valiantly to evade the revisionist and counter-revisionist polemics that have plagued assessments of Shostakovich. Yet for Mazullo, this music is “political strictly by virtue of being personal” (p. 8). He also finds its challenging to conceal his sympathy for the revisionists’ viewpoints (see pp. 57–58, 97, and 133 for examples). He also finds it tricky to reconcile what he believes is an invitation from the composer to “listen for the plot” (p. 196)—the rationale behind his support for performers to add expressive gestures not necessarily marked in the score but perhaps implied through their own programmatic readings of it)—with the fact that the preludes and fugues “possess neither an official nor a ‘sub-textual’ program” (p. 212). He attempts to reinforce the latter point through a rather vacuous exhortation “we need to focus on the ‘whats’ and the not the ‘what ifs’ ” (p. 243), but one wonders if he believes that op. 87 can be considered prima facie a work of absolute music.

Mazullo does a commendable job in surveying each prelude and fugue, describing its sounding surface, phraseology, harmonic, rhythmic, and textural profiles, relationships between prelude and fugue, and narrative associations; and provides useful performance suggestions. In introducing the cycle, however, Mazullo neglects to consider it against...