Dmitri Shostakovich

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) was a Russian composer and pianist, widely regarded as one of the most important figures in 20th-century classical music. Born in Saint Petersburg, he entered the Petrograd Conservatory at just 13 and his First Symphony, completed at 19, brought him international acclaim.

Shostakovich’s career was deeply affected by Soviet politics. His opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1934) led to his first denunciation corresponding to the Terror (Yezhovshchina) and indicating the fraught relationship Shostakovich would have with the Soviet state his entire career. His Fifth Symphony was considered a successful responsive work to this criticism (1937), but much of Shostakovich’s career remained a delicate balancing act between artistic liberty and Soviet musical prescriptions. Despite periodic denunciations, he remained a crucial Soviet composer, producing 15 symphonies, 15 string quartets, numerous piano works, and film scores.

One possible problem for Shostakovich was his association with Jewish musicians and inclusion of Jewish themes in his works. Most notably, his 13^th symphony “Babi Yar” (1962) was repeatedly delayed in the premiere due to the references to the Nazi atrocities at Babi Yar, inclusion of Yevgenii Yevtushenko’s eponymous text, and the historical references to antisemitism including the Dreyfus Affair. However, Shostakovich’s commitment to Jewish music and musicians was not only a post-war reaction. In 1948, during the peak of artistic denunciations from Andrei Zhdanov, Shostakovich wrote the song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry and also dedicated his first titan of a violin concerto to the Jewish violinist David Oistrakh. In both cases, the premieres were delayed until 1955 after the death of Stalin. These works with explicit textual associations accompany works with oblique musical gestures in Shostakovich’s music which have been codified as a certain “Jewish” idiom in his music. These gestures include things like parodic dances as in the 2^nd piano trio, or “Burlesque” movement of the Violin concerto which mimic Freylichs and other Yiddish dancing, and the incorporation of ornamentation and intervals like the rising 7^th which evoke Jewish ritual song. As the pianist Alexander Tentser has argued, Shostakovich’s engagement with Jewish music was a larger, more philosophical endeavour including magnifying Jewish elements as symbols against genocidal and racial persecution.^[1]

Personally, Shostakovich was also an advisor and friend to Jewish musicians including sitting on the committee of Moisei Beregovski in 1944 at Moscow Conservatory, and maintaining close relationships with prominent musicians like Mieczyslaw Weinberg and David Oistrakh, even advocating for Weinberg when he was imprisoned during Zhdanovshchina (1948).   

Beyond explicitly commemorative works such as the 13th "Babi Yar" Symphony, what can we say about Shostakovich's experience of war and his artistic unravelling of the complex traumas of World War II in the USSR? The most emblematic destruction of civilian life in the USSR, not directly related to the Holocaust, was the blockade of the city of Leningrad for 872 days in 1941-1944. In the horror of the blockade, frost and hunger became the main concerns of the citizens. To understand the siege is to understand an intense physical trauma. As Lidiia Ginzburg's memoir of the "besieged man" shows, it was the body, the individual, that was under attack as much as the city.^[2] Sound is a common element in the testimonies of the blockade, along with the embodied experiences of hunger and cold. The sonic language of the state, of both the Soviet and Nazi war machines, was the relentless sound of artillery, bombing and the clicking of loudspeakers. Alexandra Birch sees Shostakovich's E minor Piano Trio as the antithesis of this sonic language, rather than the more aptly named and performed 7th 'Leningrad' Symphony, partly because it's impossible to capture an accurate contemporary soundscape. This introspective work provides a link between Shostakovich's personal experiences during the war, a private memorial to a friend, and one of the earliest artistic acknowledgments of the Holocaust.

At the outbreak of WWII, Shostakovich attempted to enlist in the Red Army, but was declined due to his poor eyesight. He remained in Leningrad even through the beginning of the siege and volunteered with the fire brigade of the Conservatory before being evacuated to Samara (Kuybyshev).^[3] The Seventh Symphony, subtitled “Leningrad” is Shostakovich’s most emblematic wartime composition, with the first two movements composed in Leningrad and the remainder of the piece finished in evacuation. Shostakovich returned to a besieged Leningrad on the 9^th of August, 1942 to premiere the work, with German guns less than 10 kilometers from the conservatory hall and tremendous duress for the performers who had remained in Leningrad.^[4] For Shostakovich, Leningrad wasn’t only associated with the terror of the siege and evacuation, the terror of war, but also the terror of Yezhov and the 1930s. Shostakovich was from Leningrad, and completed his formal education at the Leningrad (Petrograd) Conservatory under Alexander Glazunov.^[5] Shostakovich lived through the terror of the 1930s in Leningrad, and his denunciation for the fourth symphony and “redemptive” fifth symphony was part of the artistic climate of negotiation with an unpredictable and censorious Soviet government. The climate of the 1930s for Shostakovich was echoed by Akhmatova in her Requiem, a mood of torpidity (otsepeneniye) where relatives would gather outside of the prison gates to learn the fate of loved ones arrested.^[6] In scholarship on Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, there is a similarly revisionist and uncomplicated narrative of a powerful composer returning to the besieged Leningrad to conduct a heroic symphony against all odds. Even in contemporary sentiment, the poet Berggolts said about Shostakovich, “this man is more powerful than Hitler!”^[7] Shostakovich’s 7^th Symphony was part of the resilience of culture in the city, of maintaining norms like sharing meals or maintaining connections to a pre-famine, pre-blockade self. Cultural performances continued in order to maintain civilization.^[8] Rather than another reading of the symphony, the E minor Piano Trio offers a contrasting view of Shostakovich and his reaction to the war as a Leningrader and as a Soviet citizen who had already lived through two decades of terror. As McCreless suggests, the extra-musical content of the Trio is "virtually undeniable" and it is a work that is fundamentally about death: both a private experience and understanding and a more universalising commentary[9] More importantly, an affective rendering such as Shostakovich's Trio, suggesting elements of tragedy, nocturne and Jewishness, is an imagined dream compared to the real sounds of bombs and death in Leningrad. Here, Shostakovich's Trio, which is not even as fundamentally linked to the blockade as the 7th Symphony, is a resistance to the overpowering and obliterating sonic language of violence and bombardment, and is an elegant and poignant work of art. In the Seventh Symphony, the slow and introspective Largo sections, even of the longest third movement, are immediately contrasted with sections marked unabashedly 'risoluto' or resolute. The colossal ninety-minute work closes with a defiant and triumphant march to the end, marked by a slight fatigue for the exhausted performers and audience, with a moderate tempo and a relentless emphasis on the tonic key by the martial brass and percussion.

The Trio is an emotional opposite to the glorious symphony of Shostakovich. Composed initially for the private commemoration and funeral of Shostakovich’s friend Ivan Sollertinsky in 1944, Shostakovich then expanded the commemorative meaning of the work to include the victims of the Nazi death camps about which he learned in the same year.^[10] The Trio links Shostakovich’s personal anguish to the anguish of the war and the Holocaust. In the “Leningrad” symphony, there are glimpses into Shostakovich’s calm and concern like the plaintive violin writing of the first movement, but the overall sentiment is a prescription for Soviet triumph.^[11] By contrast, the trio is a musical synthesis of private commemoration, war commemoration, and a discussion of Jewish victimization. Not addressed in other analyses, Shostakovich was one of the first composers or intellectuals including Vasily Grossman (Treblinskii Ad, 1946) to commemorate the horrors of the Holocaust specifically for Jews in a Soviet political climate of the Soviet Extraordinary Commission and a desire to claim retribution for all “peaceful Soviet Citizens.”^[12] Shostakovich articulated in the Trio, the wartime horror of the Holocaust decades before it was possible to discuss the Holocaust in the USSR, and even before his explicitly commemorative works like the 13^th Babi Yar Symphony. In 1944, Shostakovich also advised the PhD thesis of Moisei Beregovskii, the folklorist and ethnomusicologist from Ukraine.^[13] The incorporation of Jewish themes in the trio was not an abstract or imagined borrowing, but rather an intentional and informed inclusion from Shostakovich’s personal associations with Jewish musicians including Beregovskii and his closeness to the tragedy of the Holocaust. As a wartime composition, the Trio is more of an artistic negotiation than the 7^th Symphony. Rather than a large-scale and extremely public address of the Great Patriotic War, the trio is a private commemoration, and thusly can address topics not yet suitable for Soviet public performance, like the Holocaust.

To read more about Shostakovich and his contemporaries’ reactions to the Second World War in the USSR please see: Alexandra Birch’s Sonic Shatterzones: The Intertwined Spaces, Sounds, and Music of Nazi and Soviet Atrocity, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, due 2027.

Notes 

[1] Alexander Tentser, The Jewish Experience in Classical Music: Shostakovich and Asia, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014.

[2] Lidiia Ginzburg, Zapiski blokadnogo cheloveka (Moscow: Eksmo, 2014).

[3] Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (London, UK: Faber and Faber, 2006), 171.

[4] Brian Moynahan, Leningrad: Siege and Symphony: The Story of the Great City Terrorized by Stalin, Starved by Hitler, Immortalized by Shostakovich (New York, NY: Grove/Atlantic, 2014), Overture.

[5] Laurel E. Fay, Shostakovich: A life (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000), 17-20.

[6] Richard Taruskin discusses the reception and contemporary lionization of Shostakovich in “Public Lies and Unspeakable Truth: Interpreting Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony,” in Shostakovich Studies, ed. David Fanning (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 39.

[7] Moynahan, Leningrad Siege and Symphony, overture.

[8] Adamovich and Granin, Blokadnaia kniga, 288-91.

[9] Patrick McCreless, “The cycle of Structure and the Cycle of Meaning: The Piano Trio in E minor op. 67,” in Shostakovich Studies, 113-137, here: 120-121.

[10] McCreless, “The cycle of Structure and the Cycle of Meaning,” 128.

[11] Consider the solitude and sentimentality of the concertmaster solos as well as the difficulty of the delicate wind solos for performers who physically had their lungs taxed by months of starvation and cold.

[12] The Soviet Extraordinary Commission, or the Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Atrocities of the German Fascist Invaders and Their Accomplices and the Damage They Caused to Citizens, Collective Farms, Public Organizations, State Enterprises and Institutions of the USSR began collecting data on the destruction of the USSR in hopes of material claims for restitution in 1942. The language used on these documents as well as early Holocaust memorials, like at Treblinka, was the murder of “peaceful Soviet citizens” obfuscating Jewish and Polish victimization and focusing on a larger grand narrative of Soviet destruction at the hands of Hitlerite fascists. Consider: Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, 541–2.

[13] Lyudmila Sholokhova, “Moisei Iakovlevich Beregovskii,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, accessed March 25^th, 2024: yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Beregovskii_Moisei_Iakovlevich;