Music: The Two Dmitrys

Day after day, the small, drab figure in the dark suit hunched forward in the front row of the gallery listening tensely. Sometimes he tapped his fingers nervously against his cheek; occasionally he nodded his head rhythmically in time with the music. In the whole of his productive career, remarked Soviet Composer Dmitry Shostakovich, he had “never heard so many of my works performed in so short a period.” This year’s Edinburgh Festival was offering no fewer than 25 of his works in three weeks, including six of the symphonies, eight quartets, two concertos. Western observers got their best chance yet to re-evaluate the achievement of the man who remains one of the most patently gifted and persistently disappointing of modern composers.

Persuasive Speech. The festival was organized as a salute to Soviet music in general: along with Shostakovich came Conductor Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, Violinist David Oistrakh, Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, Singer Galina Vishnevskaya. (After Pianist Sviatoslav Richter failed to show up, forcing the refund of $11,200 worth of tickets, the Russians tersely announced that their great virtuoso was resting at home with a mild stroke.) But for all the heavy concentration of glamorous box office names, the center of attention remained Shostakovich, who often could be seen sprinting from one concert hall to another to keep up with the myriad performances of his own works.

At first, Shosty’s works were treated kindly by both audiences and critics. The London Times had “little doubt that his large output includes feeble pieces as well as masterpieces” but decided that “for most of us he still speaks persuasively.” The Eighth Symphony won a standing ovation (“Moments of true greatness,” wrote the Daily Telegraph), and some listeners found the string quartets—particularly Nos. 5 and 7—to be as fine as any of the orchestral music. But with the Western Premiere of the massive, bombastic Twelfth Symphony, the response changed—as if a totally different composer had appeared on the scene. The Twelfth, said the Daily Herald, was a “crash dive into banality.” Wrote Critic Noel Goodwin of the Daily Express, noting that the symphony celebrates the October Revolution of 1917: “It is an exhibition of blatant Red flag waving in musical terms. I hope I need never be exposed to it again.”

Old Complaint. What obviously incensed many a critic was that a composer of such talent would permit himself to be so bad. It is an old complaint about Shostakovich. In an unusually talkative mood last week, he did his best to scotch one explanation—that having been rapped by the government for “decadence,” he now strenuously zigs and zags with the party line. “I was criticized extensively and I hope I will be criticized in the future. In my country I was praised and criticized quite a lot, and criticism was always meant to help me, not to destroy me. Every artist in the Soviet Union,” he insisted, “writes the way he wants. Sometimes it seems to me that the definition of revolutionary music is not quite understood in the West. It seems to be thought that the more unusual the sounds you produce the more revolutionary you are. I believe that the content of music does not lie in making some effective sounds but in conveying ideas.”

Those ideas, he explained wryly, are often in the mind of the listener, rather than in the music of the composer. Take the religious music of Bach, Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, which is often played in Russia. “To me, they are wonderful creations, though they do not evoke religious feeling. Religious music contains great compositions, such as the requiems of Mozart and Verdi, but I do not take it as religious music—I take it as secular music.” Asked how he now feels about his opera, A Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which was denounced by Pravda in 1936 (reportedly because Stalin did not like it), Shostakovich revealed that he was rewriting it: “I did not like the old version; in vocal parts I abused high and low registers. This has been corrected.”

Shostakovich said that he was an admirer of the earlier works of that old Russian revolutionary Igor Stravinsky, who will visit Moscow this month: “I like his Petrouchka, Rite of Spring, the symphonies, and all the ballets except the last. His latest works do not seem to belong to him.” As for his own works in progress, to which Shostakovich would they belong? The composer gave a hint when he announced that he is about to begin his 14th Symphony (the 13th is all but complete). It will be dedicated to Soviet achievements in space.