Béla Bartók 1881-1945

Few composers have had to suffer so much torment in their lives as Shostakovich; there were times when arrest and possible death were real, and not imagined possibilities, causing him to spend his nights, suitcase packed, on the landing outside his apartment, so that when 'they' came for him they wouldn't disturb his wife and baby daughter.
    His genius both as a pianist and composer were visible from an early age, but in his teenage years he had to suffer the death of his father, as well as illness and near starvation. These early troubles were compensated, it seemed, by the accolades and attendant fame resulting from his First Symphony. At a time when many icons of Russian music (Prokofiev, Rachmaninov etc.) had chosen exile here was a young, 'Soviet' composer, tempered by the harshness of revolution, civil war and privation.
    Such a star could not last long unyoked and untrained, especially in the 1930s when revolutionary idealism was replaced by the cult of personality. His second opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, had been a runaway success, produced across the Union... that was until The Great Leader, Comrade Stalin, attended a performance. Its innovative musical language, combined with a libretto telling of adultery, appalled Stalin, who was nothing more intellectually than a poorly educated yet shrewd Georgian cobbler's son who had once trained for the priesthood. He registered his distaste by storming out, and a few day's later a leading article, entitled: 'Chaos Instead of Music' appeared in Pravda. Both the music and the composer were condemned for their 'anti-Soviet' nature and manifest hostility to 'the working class'.  This was 1936, when more important people than Shostakovich were disappearing. He survived, though as he related in later years, only by the skin of his teeth. It was as if Stalin (and his heirs) saw him as having potential value as the regime's trained canary singing sweetly (and tonally) of the 'successes' of  Communism. It was a role he accepted and fulfilled for the rest of his life, though not unquestioningly. Perhaps he saw that the regime's fool could, like Lear's, quietly but effectively subvert the relationship of jester and patron. It is seldom difficult to fool imbeciles through flattery, by 'having more than thou showest, speaking less than thou knowest'. It was no coincidence that he set the 'Songs of the Fool' to music for a production of King Lear in Leningrad in 1941 or that almost three decades later his final cinema score was for a film of the play.
     Shostakovich seemed adept at speaking with two voices; one spouting or parroting official claptrap, the other more subtle, less pervasive. It has to be sought but it seldom demands great effort to discern some of it. For example, in 1967 he wrote a song-cycle to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. His texts were poems by the symbolist Aleksandr Blok. His selection from Blok was unusual. One was the poem 'Hamayun, the Bird of Prophecy', which had been inspired, in turn, by a painting. The poet looks into the face of the bird and sees there the prophecy of '... bloody executions, earthquakes, hunger and fire, the power of evil and the death of the just...' Two years later came his Fourteenth Symphony, a masterpiece. In truth it is not a symphony at all but a song-cycle. The poems he chose have a common theme - death, but not 'natural' death, but death through disease, suicide, war, oppression and execution. One poem, Guillaume Apollinaire's 'A la Santé', tells of the living death of imprisonment. Although Shostakovich did not read French the irony of the poem's title (and the name of the Parisian prison which inspired it) was not lost on him. Two years before his death Shostakovich produced settings of six poems by the beautiful Marina Tsvetaeva, a gorgeous poetess driven to suicide in the dump of a town of Yelabuga, now the site of a huge car plant owned by one of the American automobile giants. One poem is a sarcastic epigramme about Tsar Nicholas I, the poet-slayer, a man who was responsible for the death of Aleksandr Pushkin. The message behind Pushkin's death was that Nicholas could not deal with the genius of the poet, and the only way the tsar could cope with the problem was by destroying him. This message was understood by those who heard Shostakovich's music. Perhaps it was also understood by 'the authorities', but he knew that they knew he was dying. What could they do to harm him now? It was better to allow the farce to run its course towards its ultimate and inevitable denouement. This fate inspired recklessness was particularly evident in his penultimate song-cycle, settings of sonnets by Michelangelo. One is entitled 'The Exile', and although dealing with Dante it is an obvious reflection of the expulsion of his dear friends Mstislav Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya from the Soviet Union.
      His music, though reflecting the harshness of his life, also contains great wit, often self-deprecatory, as if he were laughing in praise of the fool who fools others and who attains the rare freedom of the clown to mock those who believe they control his fate.