187A. in SAURON's EYE Three Musical Geniuses Struggle To

1 187a. IN SAURON’S EYE 1920 – c. 1970, Soviet Russia Three musical geniuses struggle to survive1 Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) Vladimir Sofrinitsky (1901-1961) Maria Yudina (1899-1970) Few journeys better illustrate the perils of personal and artistic integrity in a police state than the careers of Vladimir Sofronitsky, Maria Yudina and Dmitri Shostakovich. At any moment, on the whim of a Party Secretary or Committee, they were lifted to dizzy heights or plunged to depths that threatened not only their lives but all evidence they had existed. Like Rebecca Burstein, who knew them well, the three began as students at the Petrograd Conservatory in the wake of the 1917 Revolution. They ended, deeply scarred, after the so- called Thaw. Mitya ‘Mitya’ Shostakovich entered the Conservatory in Fall 1919 at thirteen – a tubercular undersized boy who seemed so frail that Glazunov petitioned Maxim Gorky and Narkempros Commissar Lunacharsky for special rations to “build up his strength.” He was in the same piano class as Sofronitsky and Yudina, his seniors by six years. The next spring he witnessed with a thousand others their dueling graduation performances of Liszt’s C-minor Piano Sonata, and apparently was transfixed by envious admiration that lasted 50 years. The bar they set contributed to his decision to give up performing when he received only an honorable mention in his first international piano competition (Warsaw, 1927). But the frailty masked steel. By 1927 Shostakovich had been composing for a decade. His earliest known piece – a nonconforming ‘funeral march’ for Kadets murdered by Bolsheviks (1918) – was followed by a flurry of others during his seven years at the Conservatory. His © 2017 and proprietary information of Michael H. & Nora Jean Levin. All rights reserved. 2 graduation ‘exercise’ – the First Symphony – was conducted to acclaim in Petersburg (1926), then by Bruno Walter in Berlin (1928) and Leopold Stokowski in Philadelphia (1929). The ‘funeral march,’ however, was emblematic; it foreshadowed the attraction to forbidden works, themes and techniques that would put him in mortal danger despite efforts to paper them over with correct Soviet titles. After 1926 Shostakovich turned to modernist experimentation, driven by the Petersburg cultural ferment that produced constructivist art,2 Meyerhold’s stage works,3 and visions of the former capital as a carnival Crazy Ship sailing White Nights. His Second (“To October”) and Third (“First of May”) ‘patriotic’ Symphonies (1927-29) produced more official suspicion than applause. His satiric first opera The Nose 4 eventually staged by Meyerhold (1930), was attacked by the Russian Musicians’ Association as “un-proletarian.” Then came what many regard as an opera masterpiece, Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk (1934). Its erotic, driving score and electric libretto were a huge success with audiences and critics -- until Stalin and his Politburo attended a January 1936 performance and walked out. Composer and audience turned white. Two days later the ax fell. A front-page Pravda article, “Muddle Not Music” (approved, if not written, by Stalin), savaged Lady MacBeth not only as ‘coarse, primitive, perverted and vulgar” but as “formalist” – practically a death sentence as the Great Terror got underway.5 The composer was forced to withdraw his Fourth Mahler-like Symphony (1936) under threat of liquidation while it was in rehearsal. His commissions disappeared. Then his older sister, her husband, and other relatives and patrons vanished. Whole departments of physics, astronomy, languages, literature, Oriental studies (not to mention hundreds of stamp collectors, antiquities dealers, and archaeologists) were executed. One of his friends told her diary of recurring nausea when I hear how calmly people can say it: “he was shot, someone else was shot, shot shot. People said, “He was shot” as if they were saying “He went to the theatre.”6 Perhaps most depressing was the widespread belief that those murdered or deported and publicly vilified as “wreckers” must have done something terribly wrong. By mid-1937 the Crazy Ship was “The Ship of the Dead” and Shostakovich was eking a living from “safe” generic film scores. He spent nights on the landing outside his apartment so his family would not be disturbed when the NKVD came. © 2017 and proprietary information of Michael H. & Nora Jean Levin. All rights reserved. 3 They did not come. Instead he was ‘rehabilitated’ by his neoclassical Fifth Symphony, which after numerous vettings for ‘socialist propriety’ premiered at the end of 1937 in Leningrad’s Philharmonia Hall. Party loyalists saw in it heroic affirmation and an artist who had learned from “just criticism.” Ordinary Leningraders heard a tribute to their sufferings under the Terror and a promise that basic humanity would prevail -- “They knew what they were hearing,” the composer remarked much later. The performance received wild applause for a full half-hour.7 The Kremlin sent investigators who sought to prove that the Leningrad audience was “scandalously” hand-picked to fabricate success. The Symphony endured.8 Shostakovich was permitted to rejoin the Conservatory faculty as a salaried professor. After the global success of his Seventh (Leningrad Siege) Symphony (1941- 42) this new status seemed secure. But by 1946 Stalin no longer needed the popular support of a Great Patriotic War to withstand near-fatal invasion. As “normal” Soviet life resumed, oxygen was withdrawn again. Millions of Russians who fought for the Motherland were deemed contaminated by foreign contact and packed off to camps. Religion, individualism and ‘Western decadence’ were once more proscribed. In 1948, while purges of Jews and other “rootless cosmopolitans” geared up, Shostakovich, like Prokofiev, Khachaturian and hundreds of other composers, was denounced by Supreme Soviet decree and required to apologize for his work. He was dismissed once more from the Conservatory; his compositions mostly were banned..9 The “thaw” brought another crisis. In 1960, as Khrushchev sought support from artists against hard-liners, Shostakovich was ‘asked’ to head the Composers’ Union. To some degree the post would allow him to promote expression and protect dissent. But it also required him to join the Party and meant more patriotic music, plus Party-line articles under his name. The dilemma reduced him to tears. In declining health, he finally agreed. By 1970 he was “a mass of twitches and nervous tics,” suffering from polio that disabled his right hand plus other ailments. He died of lung cancer in 1975 in his native Leningrad, leaving 15 symphonies, 15 string quartets, and a mass of additional music – much of it anti-authoritarian, mostly composed at speed under unimaginable conditions.10 © 2017 and proprietary information of Michael H. & Nora Jean Levin. All rights reserved. 4 Vovochka Vladimir (“Vovochka”) Sofronistky was little known in the West. He was allowed to appear outside Russia only twice – a concert trip to Warsaw and Paris in the late Twenties before Stalin’s control consolidated, plus one day at the 1945Yalta Conference to perform at Stalin’s command for amateur pianist Harry Truman. But for decades he embodied to Russian music lovers the romantic mystique of the former Imperial capital -- and their secret hopes. This aura was not merely a matter of the heroic starving artist whom Rebecca Burstein fed in the desperate Petrograd winter of 1919-1920. Or the magnetic figure who repeatedly performed in gloves during the Siege. Or his fairytale Hamlet-Ophelia romance with Scriabin’s daughter. Or the astounding range of his repertoire, or the hypnotic power of his playing. It seems he appealed straight to the eccentricities and longings of the indefinable Russian soul. Tall, thin, pale and mysterious, Sofronitsky was considered one of the most handsome men in Leningrad. Women were said to have left their families and attempted suicide over this romantic musician. [He] was compared to Byron, and it was often said that he was ‘the ideal Hamlet.’ He played Chopin and Scriabin incomparably. The general opinion was that. [he] was the best interpreter of [Scriabin’s] works. Before the revolution Scriabin’s oeuvre was considered in Russia as the highest expression of creative genius; under the Bolsheviks, his music fell into disgrace. First he was called a mystic, then a decadent, and finally a formalist. Sofronitsky stubbornly continued to play Scriabin, even giving concerts consisting only of his works. [This] instantly made him more than just a pianist, even a great one.11 Sofronitsky apparently could not abide even ordinary convention, let alone rules imposed from above. He despised recording sessions, calling records “my corpses.” In 1948, as the post-War clampdown accelerated, he slammed closed his piano, exclaiming “I can’t play! I keep thinking that a policeman will come and say, ‘You’re not playing the right way!’” Then, despite official entreaties, he declined to tour Russia. Soon he refused even to play in public, limiting his appearances to invitation-only concerts at Moscow’s Scriabin Museum. Secret audience tapes of these sessions were replicated and passed around.12 By the mid-1950’s Sofronitsky’s compatriots thought him the best male pianist in Russia, though he was collapsing inside from stress and cocaine. He endured what has been called “a horrible death” from cancer in 1961. But even his refusal of morphine became part of the myth: “Do not spare me, do not lie to me, I should suffer it all.” © 2017 and proprietary information of Michael H. & Nora Jean Levin. All rights reserved. 5 On hearing the news Emil Gilels reportedly exclaimed: “The greatest pianist in the world has died.” 13 Yudina Unlike her colleagues, Maria Veniaminovna Yudina seems to have had no endearing nicknames; she was too fierce and wild for that. She also was less scarred: indifferent to poverty, homelessness, persecution, the threat of internal exile or execution, she resided within the forbidden Russian Orthodoxy that she had adopted and radiated like a shield.

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