Comply, oppose or flee
At times in Russia, culture has been a matter of life and death. Words have exploded from the pages of novels, poems have carried death sentences, symphonies or operas have been cited as proof of treason. The arts have always been Russia’s other world, a flourishing garden of creativity when political discourse has been choked by intolerant autocracy. They have defied repression, triumphed over censorship and offered Russians an alternative, better vision of themselves. But it has made them dangerous, a threat to power, and at times they have suffered for it.

After the stifling conservatism of fin de siècle Tsarism, 1917 promised a new beginning. Painters, writers and composers seized on the revolutionaries’ talk of freedom with febrile intensity. At first the regime was tolerant—the Bolsheviks were preoccupied with other more pressing matters, including a raging civil war—but by the mid-1920s, the leadership was looking disapprovingly at the radicalism and the abstraction, beginning to shape the doctrine that would subjugate art to the aims of socialism.

In 1934, the First Congress of Soviet Writers adopted the doctrine of Socialist Realism. From now on, it decreed, all art must depict man’s struggle for socialist progress towards a better life. The creative artist would serve the proletariat by being realistic, optimistic and heroic. Experimentalism was confusing, degenerate, probably un-Soviet. Only official art—and official artists—would be tolerated.

The insistence on art serving the state was not new in Russia. But the Stalinist regime exercised a stranglehold on society tighter than any in the past, and it left writers, composers and artists with stark choices. They could stay and do the tyrant’s bidding, they could stay and oppose, or they could flee. There was to be no neutrality, no withdrawal from the political world; in the new Soviet reality, the ivory tower was no longer an option.

As a schoolboy in 1917, Dmitri Shostakovich welcomed the revolution. He went to Petrograd’s Finland Station to witness Lenin’s return from exile; and he was horrified by the spectacle of Tsarist Cossack detachments mowing down civilians with their sabres. In the twenty years that followed, he produced both undemanding 'official' music and highly innovatory works that were the true measure of his genius. His most adventurous piece, the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1934) was to become the touchstone of the regime’s first attempt to bring composers and musicians to heel. The opera had been running for nearly two years when, in 1936, Stalin decided to go and see it. So appalled was he by the modernity of the music and the sexually charged nature of the action that he stormed out of the auditorium. Two days later, Pravda, the official newspaper of the Soviet regime, published a withering condemnation of the work under the headline ‘Muddle instead of Music’, an article that signalled the end of artistic freedom in musical life. Shostakovich was certain it had been written by Stalin himself, and the conviction that his days were numbered never left him.

In the wake of the scandal over Lady Macbeth, Shostakovich withdrew his fourth symphony (1935-36), which had been in rehearsal for its premiere. Nowadays, the fourth is acclaimed as one of his most ground-breaking, masterful works. But to have it performed in the poisoned atmosphere of 1936 could have been the final nail in the composer’s coffin. Shostakovich made a show of atonement by writing a new symphony—his fifth (1937)—that would be tuneful and uplifting, in line with the Party’s demands. He gave it the subtitle ‘A Soviet artist’s response to just criticism’ and it seems to have calmed Stalin’s rage. The work’s finale, with its bombastic D major fanfares is, on the face of it, upbeat and optimistic, a very Soviet moment of triumph. But listen again and you hear the hollowness and stifled anger within. The composer is not cheering, but screaming against the system.

By the time the tenth symphony was premiered in December 1953, Stalin had been dead for eight months, and it is tempting to read the music as a message of triumph and vindication. Shostakovich’s biographer, Solomon Volkov, claims he wrote the second movement, a whirling, demonic scherzo, as a musical portrait of Stalin, and the insistent repetitions of the composer’s DSCH motif in the last movement certainly sound like a celebration of personal survival against the odds.
Martin Sixsmith

Symphony No 10 in E minor Op 93
Many composers knew they couldn’t return to Russia after the Revolution of 1917. Things were rather different for Dmitri Shostakovich, whose life and music are defined by his complicated relationship with the Soviet authorities who kept a watchful eye over his every creative move. Composers under Stalin were supposed to write music that chimed with the dictator’s view of the world. For an artist like Shostakovich who naturally opposed Stalin’s oppression and killing, that made for a living hell.

Shostakovich experienced two major run-ins with Stalin. The first came in 1936, when the dictator decided to attend the composer’s satirical opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk District and was enraged by what he decreed ‘muddle instead of music’—an affront to the regime’s ‘good vibes only’ insistence that music be uplifting, aggrandizing and easily understandable.

The next altercation, in 1948, was far worse. Following the defeat of the Nazis three years earlier, Shostakovich got to work on a Ninth Symphony that Stalin expected to be a hymn of praise directed at himself, along the lines of Beethoven’s Ninth. Instead, the composer delivered an introverted work that Stalin took as a direct insult. The score was promptly banned and Shostakovich didn’t go near another symphony for five years.

In 1953, Stalin died. Immediately, the situation for artists was easier. Within months Shostakovich had formally started work on his next symphony—the Tenth. Some of the music, allegedly, existed already. The pianist Tatyana Nikolaeva has suggested parts of the work were written in 1951, at the same time as Shostakovich’s austere Preludes and Fugues for piano, and withheld until Stalin died. That chimes with Shostakovich’s own confession to Solomon Volkov that the symphony was ‘all about Stalin and the Stalin years.’

Certainly, the symphony can be heard as a depiction of life in a suppressed society. David Oistrakh cited the work’s inner conflicts, its dramatic effect and even its use of intense beauty to point up the tragedy of Soviet life. John Mangum, CEO of the Houston Symphony Orchestra, has memorably described it as ’48 minutes of tragedy, despair, terror and violence and two minutes of triumph’.

Others have noted the symphony’s innovative design in an age when symphonic architecture was deemed old hat: its conjuring of huge arch forms punctuated by eruptive climaxes inflated apparently from the smallest motifs. One contemporary Soviet composer, Aram Khachaturian, claimed the Tenth represented an affirmation of the highest principles of realism in the context of the Soviet symphony. Shostakovich himself said he wanted simply ‘to convey human feelings and passions.’

Despite the doom and gloom, this appears to be a symphony in which Shostakovich asserts himself and his individualism—not least in the prevalence of his own musical initials, D-S-C-H (according to the German notation system, the notes D, E flat, C and B) and the similar notational encoding of his love for a student, Elmira Nazirova.

The symphony’s colossal first movement erupts in climaxes described by the composer as ‘dramatic, heroic and tragic’. Musical themes are introduced by treading cellos and basses, wistful clarinet and a jittery flute whose pressurised little waltz foreshadows nightmares to come. At its peak, the movement erupts with shrieking woodwinds, ominous military drum and apocalyptic tam-tam (a suspended cymbal).

‘Music illuminates a person through and through,’ commented Shostakovich in relation to the symphony’s second movement, which he admitted was a scherzo depicting Stalin. This is music of unremitting fear and violence—wild, furious and unpredictable.

Next, the music appears to turn inward. In the Allegretto the composer’s initial motif is entwined with the horn calls derived from Elmira’s name with a sense of Romantic longing. The finale visits the nightmarish territory of the opening Moderato, introduces a coarse Russian dance native to Stalin’s locale on woodwinds (a ‘Gopak’), and builds to a colossal climax during which Shostakovich appears to claim a personal victory (via his initials) over evil and oppression.
Andrew Mellor

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