Shostakovich Studies 2 ed. by Pauline Fairclough, and: Contemplating Shostakovich: Life, Music and Film ed. by Alexander Ivashkin, Andrew Kirkman (review)

The ghost of Stalin still clings to Shostakovich, whose association with the most perverse decades of the Soviet regime continues to fascinate European and American audiences. Indeed, his music is now more popular in the West than in Russia. But in recent years, Russian scholars have ceased telling stories and started writing history, offering a more complete account of the composer’s life and works based on archival sources. They deserve credit for providing a detailed understanding of Shostakovich’s career under not just Stalin, but also Lenin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev. Their work proves the question of Shostakovich’s political affinities moot, insofar as he did not have political control over his major works. The fates of his ballet The Bright Stream, his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, and his Fifth and Seventh Symphonies were determined—indeed overdetermined—by bureaucrats and bureaucracies. The political stock of these works, and others, rose and fell in accord with the regime’s needs.

Responding to these recent developments, Pauline Fairclough notes that Shostakovich needs to be ‘understood in [his] culture’s own terms’ and describes the composer as ‘no longer a fixed entity’ (p. 1). In her introduction to Shostakovich Studies 2, she praises the Moscow-based political historian Leonid Maximenkov for his explication of Soviet culture, and highlights the ‘stunning results’ of Olga Dombrovskaya’s and Olga Digonskaya’s patient archival research—research that has been slow to appear in English. Maximenkov, who did not write for Fairclough’s collection, can claim unparalleled knowledge of the Central Committee, especially under Stalin; his most recent gathering of documents, which relies chiefly on the holdings of the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, is Muzïka vmesto sumbura: Kompozitorï i muzïkantï v strane sovetov 1917–1991 (Moscow, 2013). Dombrovskaya is a biographer who published an annotated album of Shostakovich photographs, Dmitriy Shostakovich: Stranitsï zhizhni v fotografiyakh (Moscow, 2006), and a listing of the composer’s whereabouts between 1945 and 1975, ‘Geokhronograf D. D. Shostakovicha (1945– 1975)’, in L. Kovnatskaya and M. Yakubov (eds.), Dmitriy Shostakovich: Issledovaniya i materialï (Moscow, 2005), 178–208. Digonskaya is a no-nonsense musicologist, concerned with documents and documents alone; she is also the author of the finest essay in Fairclough’s otherwise uneven collection.

It is entitled ‘Interrupted Masterpiece’ and contains some big news. Digonskaya has uncovered the surviving manuscripts of an abandoned Shostakovich comic opera titled Orango. (An expanded version of Digonskaya’s essay appears in her edition of Orango (Moscow, 2010). The unfinished opera, as orchestrated by Gerard McBurney, was premiered in 2011 at Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles.) The title of the opera references a half-human, half-ape hybrid. It was commissioned for the Bolshoi Theatre in 1932, to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, but Shostakovich did not get beyond stitching together a piano-vocal score for the eleven numbers of the prologue. It is clear from Digonskaya’s account that he had his doubts about it, or did not have his heart in it, though she takes great pains to explain that he took a significant part in the crafting of the scenario and partial libretto—noting, for example, Shostakovich’s interest in primates and the deeply macabre experiments to which Soviet scientists were busy subjecting them.

The prologue lasts thirty-two minutes—too long, the emcee tells us, for its performers, and too long for Shostakovich, who abandoned it after just a couple of weeks of work. The surviving music recycles passages from two works from 1931: Shostakovich’s ballet The Bolt and a revue called Conditionally Killed (this is the usual translation of the Russian title of the revue, Uslovno ubitïy, but...