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Shostakovich With Strings
| Article
# : |
17797 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1990 |
1,715 Words |
| Author
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Philip Kennicott
Philip Kennicott, based in New York, is a writer on
performance arts. |
Composer Dmitri Shostakovich remains an immensely public and politicized figure, despite the fact that his supposed transgressions -such as his public readings of prepared pro-Stalinist speeches in the Soviet Union - have long been forgiven, dismissed, or forgotten. Though his integrity is no longer attacked, innumerable apologists still leap to defend him as a maligned cultural martyr. This year marks the fifteenth anniversary of his death, and it seems, even now, that he retains a mysterious hold on the Western imagination.
Last autumn the Manhattan String Quartet offered New York a fascinating and rare traversal of all fifteen of Shostakovich's string quartets. It was, apparently, the first such complete cycle performed by an American quartet in New York City. For a string quartet cycle devoted to twentieth century music, the concerts were surprisingly popular. People not only attended the preconcert lectures by such figures as former ambassador to the Soviet Union Arthur Hartman, but remained loyal to the series, sitting through all five concerts. One wonders why the general public, which in New York has such a wide variety of cultural options, found this rather esoteric musical form so captivating. It seems Shostokovich's intense and often harrowing music struck a common nerve in the dwellers of Gotham.
Shostakovich was born in 1906, in the midst of one of the most tumultuous periods of Russian history. His family was progressive to the point of having leanings toward one of the major nineteenth-century radical Russian political movements. Despite a revolutionary fervor that expressed itself in his first two symphonies and other early works, Shostakovich did not long remain in favor with the Soviet government. His artistic integrity, which resisted the usual nationalistic banalities, and his abhorrence of Stalin’s atrocities, led him into a life-long musical debate with the Soviet cultural establishment.
On January 28, 1936 Pravda published an article expressing Stalin's confused, philistine objections to Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The complexity of the music and the darkness of the opera’s libretto offended the Socialist Realist sensibilities of the Soviet leader, and his opinions were expressed in an unsigned editorial that was so overtly critical of Shostakovich that the composer assumed it was the beginning of a persecution unto death. Entitled "Muddle instead of Music," this article marked the beginning of one of several long periods in Shostakovich's career during which he lived in constant fear of exile, imprisonment, or
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