Preface and Acknowledgments

Preface and Acknowledgments Dmitrii Shostakovich needs no introduction. Widely recognized by the end of the twentieth century as the most poignant and "meaningful" musical chronicler of his appalling era and an inspirational symbol of the resilience of art, his music has never enjoyed greater popularity, his immense accomplishments greater esteem. And yet, despite a bur- geoning literature about the composer, a true-to-life, fully-dimensional portrait of the creative artist, the private man, and the public figure eludes our grasp. How could it be otherwise? It has been less than thirty years since Shostakovich's death. The Soviet Union, which both coddled and crippled him, has been gone less than fifteen. Much about Shostakovich and his music remains to be learned. Much remains buried in archives, public and private. To be sure, much is now finally surfacing, but those who do not read Russian are disad- vantaged by the dearth of translations. At this stage, no single volume can hope to fill all the gaps and answer all the questions. The format of the Bard Music Festival series, with its mixture of documentary materials and scholarly essays, offers a timely opportunity to address some of them. The documents selected for translation here offer key insights into different facets of Shostakovich's world, the personal, the professional, and the political. Throughout his life, Shostakovich was a prolific letter writer, yet only a small fraction of the letters known to survive has been translated into English. The letters young Mitia wrote to family and friends in the 1920s and early 1930s, before he recognized the imperative to guard his thoughts, are especially revealing. The volume opens with a selec- tion of letters written to his mother between the ages of seventeen and twenty, when Shostakovich began to travel away from home for the first time. The confidence and determination, triumphs and setbacks of the young musician at the outset of his career come across vividly, together with a sense of just how difficult the day-to-day struggle to survive must have been for his family after the sudden death of his father in 1922. IX PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Shostakovich's response to the questionnaire on the psychology of the creative process, a fascinating document only recently discovered in the archives, dates from shortly after the last letter to his mother included here. In the course of elaborating the working method and sources of inspiration of the young composer, the answers pin- point his tastes in music and the other arts at the moment when he had just embarked on the composition of his first opera, The Nose. This merits close study. Mahler, for instance, already figures in the list of Shostakovich's favorite composers, just a few months after he had made the acquaintance of Ivan Sollertinsky, which suggests that the credit he attributed in later life to Sollertinsky for having opened his eyes to Mahler may have been somewhat exaggerated. Similarly, the presence of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex in the list of his favorite works, only three months after it received its first performance in Paris, provides a striking illustration of how close the ties were between the new music communities of Leningrad and the rest of Europe. The contrast between the style of the four preserved letters written by Shostakovich to Stalin in the late 1940s and early 1950s and the letters written to his mother twenty years earlier could not be sharper. Analyzing these and other documents he has recently uncovered in Russian archives, Leonid Maximenkov sheds light on Shostakovich's position within the highest echelon of the Soviet artistic nomenklatura and offers provocative new interpretations of the artistic crises of 1936 and 1948. The post-World War II eclipse of Shostakovich's music in the West was an unfortunate by-product of the Cold War. Christopher Gibbs's documentary survey of the early reception of Shostakovich's Seventh ("Leningrad") Symphony in 1940s America recaptures what today seems like an inconceivable time when a piece of serious symphonic music by a composer from halfway around the globe could become the stuff of an all-out media blitz and the cover story of Time magazine, a fraught time when Shostakovich's music was propelled into virtually every American home. The essays in this volume, contributed by both established and young scholars from North America, England and Russia, deal pre- dominantly with aspects of the composer's legacy that have been neglected in the literature. It is hard to believe that there is a major, full-length stage work by Shostakovich that to this day has received only a single public performance. And yet, after its premiere in April 1931, Shostakovich's ballet on the theme of industrial sabotage, The Bolt, was never performed again, even though some of its most appealing music became popular PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS in a concert suite. (As I write, the Bolshoi Theatre has just announced plans to mount a production of this long-forgotten ballet in the coming season, following the success of their 2003 production of Shostakovich's third ballet, The Limpid Stream.) Employing a wide range of resources, Simon Morrison reconstructs the "scenario" behind the creation of the original ballet, how the music, dance, decor and cos- tumes were designed (and reimagined years later), and how they fell afoul of shifting political and cultural realities. The distance between Shostakovich's early and late works is more than just a matter of years. It is no secret that Shostakovich's evolution as a composer was anything but natural. This makes all the more paradoxical and intriguing the parallels Levon Hakobian draws between two masterpieces at opposite ends of Shostakovich's career, his manic first opera, The Nose, and his harrowing penultimate symphony, the Fourteenth. In her essay on four case studies from the Russian literary tradition— the composer's two completed operas and two of his song cycles—Caryl Emerson peels back the inherited layers of significance and illuminates how Shostakovich played on the expectations of his audience in deal- ing with familiar texts in unexpected ways. Shostakovich belonged to a culture that knew its literature well. His audience also knew its Russian musical heritage well, from the nineteenth-century classics to a rich array of folk and popular staples. In his essay on another lesser-known theatrical work, the 1959 operetta Moscow, Cheryomushki, Gerard McBurney homes in on the wide range of parodies, quotations, and allusions it contains and how its initial audiences might have appreciated them. Shostakovich was highly impressionable, a keen "student" of music, new and old. In his survey of Shostakovich's activity as a pedagogue and mentor, David Fanning finds instances of influence extending in both directions, from teacher to student and vice versa. The example of the next generation may also have played a role in the composer's unexpected adoption of twelve-tone techniques in a number of his late works. Profiling the spread of dodecaphony in both the official and unofficial spheres of Soviet music in the 1960s, Peter Schmelz provides indis- pensable context for understanding Shostakovich's personal approach. Issues of interpretation are inevitable in studies of Shostakovich; they inform the approaches of a number of the authors in this volume. In the concluding essay Leon Botstein confronts the pivotal issue of interpretation head-on, reflecting on the reasons listeners extract different meanings from his music and why it continues to captivate us. XI PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted, first and foremost, to the authors and translators who contributed to this volume. Without their enthusiasm and active coop- eration you would not be holding this book in your hands. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Caryl Emerson for her expert advice on questions of translation. Finally, I extend my heartfelt thanks to the members of the experienced editorial/production team with whom I have had the good fortune to collaborate: Paul De Angelis, Natalie Kelly, Irene Zedlacher, Don Giller, and Ginger Shore. Laurel E. Fay April 2004 xn.

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