Post on 01-Jun-2018
8/9/2019 schostakovich estudies
1/4
Shostakovich Studies by David FanningReview by: John JoubertMusic & Letters, Vol. 79, No. 2 (May, 1998), pp. 304-306Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/854972.
Accessed: 14/09/2012 15:45
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at.http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
.
Oxford University Pressis collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toMusic &
Letters.
http://www.jstor.org
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ouphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/854972?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/854972?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oup8/9/2019 schostakovich estudies
2/4
Shostakovich
tudies.Ed.
by
David
Fanning. pp.
ix
+
280.
(Cambridge
University
Press,
1995. ?37.50.
ISBN
0-521-45239-2.)
During
Shostakovich's ifetime
it
was
customary
in the West to see him as the
tragic
victim
of
the
Soviet system's tyrannically interventionist
approach
to the
arts.
After the
publication
of
Testimony
nd
Ian
MacDonald's
The
New Shostako-
vich
t
became fashionable
to hail him as a heroic
dissident whose
work contained encoded
messages
designed
to
subvert the totalitarian excesses
of
Stalinism. Richard
Taruskin,
whose
essay
on
the
Fifth
Symphony begins
this
important
collection
of
Shostakovich
tudies,
proposes
a
new,
post-glasnost'
interpretation,
ocated somewhere
between
the two
previous
extremesbut
containing
elements of both.
Taruskin's title-'Public
Lies
and Unspeakable
Truth:
Interpreting
Shostakovich's
Fifth
Sym-
phony'-boldly
maps
the
parameters
to be tra-
versed,
and
in his
telling
use of
quotations
from
Soviet sources of
this
period
he
gives
his
essay
an
authentically
Russian
perspective.
He
very
prop-
erly pours
scorn on
the crude literalism
('vile
trivialisation',
aruskin
calls
it)
of
Ian MacDonald's
approach:
no
'decoding'
was
necessary
for the
work's
irst
audience,
who
recognized
immediately
that the
powerful expression
of emotions
hitherto
thought privately-let
alone
publicly-inexpress-
ible
had made
both Soviet
and musical
history.
Their
rapturousresponse
to a work
by
a
composer
known
in advance
to
be
in bad odour
with the
authorities
must
have
given
its
reception
the
char-
acter
of
a
demonstration
against
the
regime,
and
there was
little the
regime
could
do about
it
except
to
concede,
officially
and
reluctantly,
hat the work
was
indeed
a success and
its
composer,
for
the
moment
anyway,
a reformed
character.
In
the
confusion
of claim
and
counter-claim
we cannot
even be sure
whether it was
Shostakovich
or some
Soviet
ghost-writer
who coined the
phrase
'a Soviet
artist's
practical
and
creative
answer to
just
criti-
cism',
which has
now almost
acquired
the
status
of
subtitle
to the
symphony;
nor does
Taruskin
accept
the
explanation
offered
in
Testimony
y
Shostako-
vich
himself
('Volkov's
ittle
puppet
Mitya')
of the
much-disputed
significance
of its
closing
bars.
No
wonder
myths
have accumulated
around
the cir-
cumstances
of the
work's first
performance,
myths
which continue
to
arouse
speculation
about
its
programmatic
ignificance
and,
despite (or
because
of?) its huge popularity, to cloud criticaljudge-
ment.
We turn
with relief to
the relative
certainties
of
the music
itself,
just
as
Wagner
did
when
quizzed
about the
ending
of the
Ring.
Here
Taruskin,
supported
by
music
examples,
also
has
interesting
things
to
say
about
the work's
antecedents,
namely,
Beethoven
(the
Ninth
Symphony
in
particular),
Mahler,
and
a
song
from
Shostakovich's
own col-
lection
of Pushkin
settings, Op.
46.
Mahler has
often been mentioned as a
symphonic
exemplar
for
Shostakovich, and it is of Mahler that we are
reminded in
the fusion of
song
and
symphony,
a
topic
covered
later in the
volume
by
Dorothea
Redepenning (see
below).
But
it is Beethoven
who
provides
the most
fertile
ground
for
compar-
ison,
not
only
musically
but
ideologically
too.
There was much
in common between
Beethoven's
situation
in
Metterich's
Vienna and
Shostakovich
in Stalin's Moscow.
Neither
could
entirely
avoid
being implicated
n a social
system
which
provided
them
with
both
the demand
and
the
necessary
infrastructure or
their
work,
while both
developed
strategies
for
survival
n a world
with which
they
could not
wholly identify
by
keeping
it unobtru-
sively
at
bay.
Taruskin's
opening
essay
is
perhaps
the
most
significant
n
the
collection,
but those
that
follow,
focusing
as most of
them
do
on matters
more
purely
musical,
also have
much
to offer. One
of
the most
searching
of these
is
Patrick
McCreless's
'The
Cycle
of Structure
and
the
Cycle
of
Meaning:
the
Piano Trio
in
E
minor,
Op.
67'.
The
precise
application
of the word
'cycle'
to musical
form
is
difficultto
pin
down,
but it is one that is crucialto
any
analytical
commentary
on
Shostakovich's
instrumental
works.
Like
'modernism',
it can be
used to
cover a
multitude of technical
procedures.
Those
that are
appropriate
o the work
in
question
are identified
and
closely
scrutinized
by
the
author
in an
analysis
which
sensitively
explores
the
con-
nections
between
its structure
and its
emotional
message.
The result
confirms
one's
original
mpres-
sion of
the
work as one
of Shostakovich's
inest.
A
welcome
aspect
of the
collection
is
the
amount of
space
devoted to the vocal music,
including
two
essays
on
Katerina smailova
and
one
on the
song
cycles.
Laurel
E.
Fay's
'From
Lady
Macbeth
o
Katerina:
hostakovich's
Versions
and Revisions'
s a
fascinating
study
of
the
opera's
evolution from
its earliest-if
short-lived-success
to
its
eventual incarnation
as Katerina
smailova.
Fay
makes a
convincing
case
for
the
view that
the
revisions were
motivated
by
artistic
rather
than
political
considerations
and
also
by
Shostakovich's
desire
to
reduce
the sexual
explicitness
of
the
original. It is worth noting that the process of
revision
had started
well before
the notorious
Pravda
article
which
effectively
banned
the
opera
from
further
performance
in
the
Soviet
Union.
Fay's
discoveries
deserve
attention
not
only
from
304
8/9/2019 schostakovich estudies
3/4
scholars but also from
opera managements
con-
templating
a
production.
As
in the case of
Fidelio
(whose place
in Beethoven's
oeuvre
s
comparable
with that
of
Lady
Macbeth
in
Shostakovich's),
returning
to
first versions
is
not
necessarily
going
to
do
the
composer
a
service. The
operatic
con-
tributionby the volume's editor, David Fanning,
'Leitmotif
n
Lady
Macbeth',
s more
speculative
n
approach
and
seems to have been
intended
as
such
(I
would endorse
the
question-mark
the
author
apparentlythought
of
adding
to
the
title).
Motifs
in
the
opera
there
certainly
are,
but
they
are the stuff of
symphonic
discourse,
pointing up
a
further ink
between
Fidelioand
Lady
Macbeth:
he
pre-eminence
as
symphonists
of
their
respective
composers.
Any
comparison
with
the
Wagnerian
leitmotiv,
however,
s
invalidated
by
the
associative
function
of the
latter. I would strenuouslycontest
the
statement
by
Carolyn
Abbate,
quoted by
Fanning
from
the
Cambridge
OperaJournal,
in
which
she
states
that
'Wagner's
motifs have
no
referential
meaning'. Surely
the
fact
that
they
have
both
referential
and
symphonic
meaning
is
what
differentiates
hem from
Shostakovich's?
Dorothea
Redepenning's essay,
' And
art
made
tongue-tied by
authority :
Shostakovich's
Song
Cycles',
convincingly
demonstrates the
increasing
significance
hat
text-based
works
came
to
have for
the
composer
n
his
later
years(her
title
quotes
from
Shakespeare's
onnet
No.
66,
set
by
Shostakovich n
Pasternak's
ranslation s the
fifth
of
his Six
Romances
on
Verses
by English
Poets
(1942)
and
popular
with
Moscow
audiences of
the
time
through
Pasternak's
own
public
reading
of
it).
Like
Taruskin,
Redepen-
ning
discusses
the
interpenetration
of
symphony
and
song,
particularly
vident in
the
Suite
on Verses
of
Michelangelo
uonarroti,
hich
she
amply
illus-
trates
by
means
of
music
examples.
The
Mahlerian
precedent
is
enhanced
by
Shostakovich's
wish,
as
reported
by
his
son
Maxim,
for
the
suite to
be
regarded
as his Sixteenth
Symphony.
The choice
of
texts in
this
cycle-as
in
his
other
song
cycles-
invests
hem
with
what
Redepenning
describes
as a
'moral-ethical'
message,
suggesting
an
autobio-
graphical
dimension
already
implicit
in
his
purely
instrumental
works
(for
instance
the
Piano
Trio so
ably
dealt with
by
McCreless).
Two
essays
on
the
grammar
and
syntax
of
Shostakovich's
musical
language
make for
the
toughest
reading
in
the
book.
One
can
only
applaud
Ellen
D.
Carpenter
for
the
assiduous
comprehensivenessdemonstratedin her 'Russian
Theorists
on
Modality
in
Shostakovich's
Music',
but
the
resulting prose,
in
spite
of
the
presence
of
elucidatory
tables
and
diagrams,
verges
on
the
impenetrable.
In
search
of
enlightenment
on how
(or whether)
Russian
theorists
explained
Shostako-
vich's use of
twelve-note ows
as
melodic
material,
I
was
rewarded
by
the
following:
'In
addition,
she
[V.
V.
Burda]
has
found in
the Second
CelloConcerto
a
twelve-note
bitonal
system ,
a
lowered
mode
with
different
tonics,
occurring,
as in
Bobrovsky's
approach but with more independent results,
either
simultaneously
resulting
n a
bitonal
struc-
ture)
or
consecutively
resulting
n a
permanent
modulation)'.
What
one
suspects
is
going
on
here-so
far
as one can
understand it
at all-is
an
attempt
to
interpret
one
phenomenon (serial-
ism)
in
terms of
another
(modality),
when the
two
are
really
irreconcilable.
Rather less
arduous,
and
conveying
a
similar
message,
is
Yuriy
Kholopov's
'Form
n
Shostakovich's
nstrumental
Works'.
That
Shostakovich
modelled his
structureson
Classical
prototypes s scarcelynews, but it is interestingto
learn
that
Russian
composers
still
acquired
their
early
training
in
musical form
from a
venerable,
century-old
textbook
by
Adolf
Bernhard
Marx,
no
less.
There is
no
doubt
that the
Classical
forms
were still
relevant,
ndeed a
source of
inspiration,
o
Shostakovich,
and
his
profound
respect
for
their
authority
could
account,
among
other
things,
for
his
habit of
always
punctiliously
ending
a
workin
the
key
with
which it
began-a practice
ong
since
abandoned
by
Mahler,
for
example.
In
this
way-if
in no
other-one could
compare
him
with
Cezanne,
who
strove to
attain his
intensely
per-
sonal vision
by
cultivating
he
traditional
genres
of
landscape,
portraiture
nd still
life.
The full
power
of
totalitarianism
to
suppress
truth and rewrite
history
is
particularly
well
demonstrated
n
Manashir
Yakubov's
The
Golden
Age:
the
True
Story
of the
Premiere'.
Initially
a
popular
success,
the
ballet
became victim
of
gov-
ernment
repression
in
the
early
1930s
and
was
officially
pronounced
a failure.
Yakubov
brings
plentiful
evidence to
bear
on the
enthusiastic
public
reception
of the
ballet before
it
fell
victim
to the ruthless
war
that
dictatorshipsalways
wage
on
their
hapless
subjects
in
order to
maintain
themselves
n
power.
One of
the
benefits
ofglasnost'
is that the
new
availability
of
hitherto
inaccessible
archivalmaterial
now
enables
scholars
like
Yaku-
bov to
rectify
what he calls
this
'distortion
of
the
historical
truth'.
As he
points
out,
Shostakovich's
three
ballets
(the
other two
are The
Bolt,
Op.
27,
and
The
Limpid
Stream,
Op.
39)
remain
among
his
least-known
works. The
supreme irony
surround-
ing the suppressionof The Golden
Age
is that the
scenario,
a
high-spirited
satire on
contemporary
urban
life with
a
strongly
anti-Fascist
bias,
could
hardly
have
been
more
'politically
correct'
for
its
time
and
place.
305
8/9/2019 schostakovich estudies
4/4