Before he was even twenty, his First Symphony premiered with the Leningrad Philharmonic. As might be imagined, a faction opposed the debut. Objections of immaturity and grotesquerie he met with his usual implacable courtesy.—A very original approach, said the conductor, N. Malko. From an instrumental point of view, it’s as compressed as chamber music. The Philharmonic would be honored to perform this, Mitya.—Our prodigy squirmed, staring rigidly down at the piano.—One small matter, however, Malko continued. Would you mind playing the finale for me again? . . . As I thought. You play very precisely, young man, with consideration for the notes. That’s good. But the tempo of the finale is impossibly rapid.—The boy smiled, rolling his owl-eyes.—So you agree to alter that much, at least, Mitya? You see, it’s rehearsal time, and . . .—Yes, comrade conductor, I promise to take your advice in my next symphony. . . .—Without difficulty, the musicians played the finale as written.
On the day of the premiere, Mitya did not show any nervousness whatsoever, aside from a tremor in his left leg. He went to the library and read about the sexual habits of insects. To his friend I. Sollertinsky, with that customary half-offensive mischievousness, he proposed orchestrating a “Dance of Shit.” At the Lion Bridge he flirted with a girl named Tatyana Glivenko. To be specific, he informed her that she was a pouting-faced lyre with crab-claws, and that he longed for her to pinch him while he tickled her strings—the correct approach, it would seem, for she kept him company all the way to Nevsky Prospect. After three kisses, he checked his watch. They kissed goodbye; then he permitted her to adjust his scarf for him and button his jacket all the way up to his throat. Then he had to run, and I do mean run, to the Great Hall of the Philharmonia (later to be named after him) in order to avoid being late, which would have hurt his dignity. Tatyana looked after him laughing, not quite forlorn. Needless to say, he arrived right down to the minute. Malko, to whom the boy already considered himself superior, now had to lend him his own belt, and whiten up his shoes with tooth powder. Then Mitya rushed to the mirror. He bulged his cheeks out just for fun. Twenty-seven minutes to spare! Malko kept telling him not to be nervous. Actually he was dwelling on Tatyana Glivenko, who was really, truly, you get the idea. Malko adjusted his tie. Twenty-six minutes. Satisfied with the impression he made, he tried to tease the orchestra by pretending that he wanted to speed up the finale even more. (Well, he certainly knows what he wants, remarked the conductor, smiling. I’d have to say that’s all to the good! Our rehearsals have confirmed the correctness of his conception.) Then it was time for them all to take their positions.—It’s going to be all right, said Malko, and Mitya, suddenly feeling sick to his stomach, nodded expressionlessly.
Ovation followed ovation! I don’t know what his mother said, but everybody else was rapturous; they had to encore the scherzo . . .
After that, Mitya’s harmonic experiments only grew more daring, almost obscene, as was the case with his first opera, “The Nose” (Opus 15)—“no accident” that that got denounced as a piece of formalist decadence. Boom! There’s the Nose himself, wearing a tophat, singing crossed-legged under a Modigliani-like nude.—Tatyana laughed so hard she almost threw up. Then she pulled Mitya into bed, calling him her little genius. Perhaps she wasn’t the only one. But he had to run away now; he had an interview with Proletarian Musician. Could he please explain his intentions to the public?—Well, giggled Mitya, but why shouldn’t I give them a little, you know? I mean, I, I, well, when you consider Rodchenko’s spatial constructions, they’re like, um, plywood robots! So why can’t I get wacky? He didn’t experience any repercussions. Those so-called “non-objective sculptures” are really . . . There’s one that raises its arm like a railroad signal, which for some reason gives me a, a, so to speak, a hard-on . . .—Long before dawn on a winter morning, Mitya spied them crowding excitedly beneath the stone awning of the Kirov Theater, although naturally it wasn’t called that yet; Kirov was still alive: old ladies hobbling on aching feet, tall men in fur caps, students, intellectuals. Gazing at the schedules in the glass boxes, they waited to buy their tickets to “The Nose.”—Please forgive me, he said to the activists who tried to point out his errors. “The Nose” was just a, let’s call it a mere prelude! Wait till you see my . . . I mean, now that you’ve enlightened me, I’ll follow the Party line more closely in all my subsequent operas . . .—The activists were satisfied. On the other hand, what if he were being sarcastic? Throughout Leningrad (a city riven into semiautonomous zones by its canals) it was said that he and his friends all belonged to that faction which fetishizes the so-called “freedom of the artist.” Those were Akhmatova’s half-wild days; even Mandelstam was still allowed to sing. But Mitya, permeated with restless vulnerability, appeared so unself-reliant, thanks to his awkwardness, that he must be docile. His well-wishers at the Conservatory continued to advise him for his own good, and thought they must be going crazy when each note remained nonetheless his own. Women committed similar errors. Because he loved so passionately, they were sure of bringing him round to fidelity. I’ve read that he often recollected with longing and regret his summer of free love with the nubile Tatyana Glivenko. Stretching out her arms like the double bars which lock ascending notes into a kindred beat, she called him Mitenka. In her orgasms he heard her moaning coloratura. She craved to take him brightly and forever, but, refusing to be trapped in only one key, he equivocated until she’d married somebody else. After that, he kept trying to coax her back. This phase ended only when her husband got her pregnant. Then Mitya tumbled into a confused darkness.
Let’s call him a soloist. If he’d only lived in ancient times (and, of course, been blueblooded), what a life he could have composed! Until the end of the eighteenth century, so I’ve read, any leading symphonist remained free to show off his virtuosity by improvising a cadenza near the end of the last movement. Beethoven became the first composer to abrogate this liberty. He wrote all the cadenzas himself. Lenin and Stalin composed still stricter rules; for in order to safeguard the Revolution, we needed to consolidate, not deviate. Comrade M. Kaganovich sounded the theme: The ground must tremble when the factory director enters the plant. Meanwhile, Proletarian Musician said that if Shostakovich failed to admit that he’d taken a wrong turn, then his work will infallibly reach a dead end. But he wouldn’t understand that, even though in his interviews with the press he dutifully recited: To be sure, I, I, obviously music cannot help possessing a political basis . . .—Dark hair curled down his brow in a sea-wave. The talent which bubbled so purely from his heart intoxicated him. It gave him such joy that he—poor boy!—thought himself entitled to exercise his genius in his own way. But the black court carriages of the old regime had fled, and their red lanterns were dimmed forever. No dissonance before the common chord!
2
Looking out the Conservatory window, he saw a troop of gleeful boys come running up Theater Square, flying a kite which some Komsomols had made for them out of Bible pages (confiscated perhaps from the Smolny Convent) whose illuminated majiscules and heavy dark characters in Old Church Slavonic took on a happy rather than ludicrous appearance in the air, larking about high over those young faces. To Mitya, who’d always considered religion a joke, there was something almost inexpressibly pleasing about this spectacle. He could almost imagine that it was one of his own orchestral scores soaring up there, which would have been quite, you know. Not that he wished to be torn, scattered, cut and then glued into diamond-shapes, not by any means! But why couldn’t he compose a diamond-shaped concerto or trio which already flew? Wasn’t this the Country of the Revolution, where not to innovate was to desecrate?
In the years when Stalin’s accolytes were busily exterminating Ukrainian kulaks by the millions, Shostakovich did his stint at the Leningrad Workers’ Youth Theater, trying to create proletarian art. Pale, boyish fingers flowed out of the dark sleeves, touched the piano, and made music happen. He really did mean well. Although he gazed steadily through his round glasses at the score, he never nee
ded it. The musicians around him with their violins wedged like rifle-stocks against their shoulders each gazed into a private pit of suffering, discovery or joy. As for him, he got lost in each world he made. His tuberculosis lasted for a decade, but nobody ever heard him complain. Slender, formal, almost elegant (although he never got the hang of bowing gravefully), he produced his flawless sounds. When others sought to help him, he listened politely.—Dmitri Dimitriyevich, pizzicato might be even more effective here, they’d say.—Yes, yes, yes! he replied with an ingratiating smile. You’re correct! Pizzicato would be a tremendous, um, improvement. But please keep it arco just this once . . .—Arco was the way he’d written it.
In 1929 they buried his score for the silent movie “New Babylon” after only a few performances—not for political or artistic reasons, they assured him, but because it had proved too difficult for the unskilled cinema orchestras to perform. Remembering his own unhappy career at the Bright Reel, he could well believe that the standards in the movie houses were low; moreover, his ego required only that he be able to make love to whatever Muse he liked, in whatever way he liked, not that the world adore his offspring. He didn’t care to sell himself. If they didn’t understand him, or even spread, how should I say, false impressions, well, Mitya was still free; Mitya was happy! If they rejected “New Babylon,” that didn’t put him out, because he could have written another score in two hours! Did they want him to do that?—Not exactly, my dear Dmitri Dmitriyevich, because in fact (we’re sorry to tell you this) there’ve been complaints; people prefer N. M. Strelnikov’s operetta “The Peasant Girl.”—Our boy genius didn’t care. To Sollertinsky, who rarely wore a necktie and who was now his best friend, he quipped: Overcoming the resistance of an orchestra is the work of born dictators!—Cocking his cap like a sailor from our Baltic Fleet, Sollertinsky clicked his heels and barked: Ja, mein Führer! and then they both got drunk. They agreed to be dictators together; they’d never let anybody change a single note! There was a fifteen-year-old whom Sollertinsky had heard about; she acted older; her name was Elena and she was a real secret weapon, I’m telling you, quiet on the outside and . . .—but just then A. Akhmatova passed by with her nose in the air, and (although they both admired her poems), they had such a fine time making fun of her behind her back that they completely forgot about this Elena.
It is, I am sure, no aspersion on Mitya to remark that for the sake of financial self-sufficiency, prestige, and above all, the leisure to whirl down within the secret well of his own mind’s ear, hunting for that Beauty which alone defined his life, he’d kept compromising with the world. For example, he now wrote program music on occasion. How was that any different from playing the accompaniments to silent movies at Bright Reel? Besides, as Sollertinsky loyally pointed out, the employment of a motif was not at all inconsistent with sophistication, or even with the outright obscurity which Mitya still found so hilarious. Even Wagner wasn’t bad at times, and if we could take his leitmotifs and run rings around them, maybe play a few ventriloquists’ tricks so that nobody else could even imagine that this could be Wagner, what a laugh! That was how Mitya looked at it. Although it might be irritating to him to do as others told him to do, as long as he could build secret trapdoors and escape hatches into every score, so that the world beneath the piano keys hadn’t been forgotten, he was still living on his own terms. Ancient masons used to wall up a live victim in each temple or bridge they built; when he was much older Mitya would immure himself in just this way in the cornerstone of his Opus 110; but for now there was no need to be as drastic as that. He might not enjoy his audience’s full comprehension; but he still enjoyed its indulgence, which, now that I think of it, is not such a bad thing to have. If I bow to Lenin’s memory and then create what I please, have I been any more constrained than a poet would be by the arbitrariness of rhyme? And so Mitya could still go on thinking rather well of himself. Moreover, pontificated Sollertinsky while he and Mitya stood drunkenly pissing into the Neva, consider M. Tsvetaeva’s “Poem of the End,” whose language wheels round and round variations of the word ruchka, hand. It was the wheeling-around which impressed him, not the ruchka. Didn’t Mitya himself believe that content was irrelevant? Hadn’t everything already been said? Our task was to say it in a new way, that’s all. Now listen! And Sollertinsky recited the first six stanzas, which recapitulated the writer’s feelings about getting jilted by some White Guardist in Prague. Forbidden fruit! thrilled Mitya, because if Tsvetaeva had slept with a class enemy then she was a class enemy, which made her poems all the more secret, illicit, exciting. Anytime she wanted, he’d certainly grant her a visa to come play with him beneath the piano keys . . . (By the way, she was supposed to be pretty, with half-lesbian tastes.) If it were therefore permissible (I’m speaking in the, the, you know, the highest aesthetic sense) for Tsetaeva to write program music, as Mussorgsky and probably even Shakespeare had also done, then why couldn’t our D. D. Shostakovich pick up a few kopeks composing the odd cinema score, or inject a few bars of the Marseillaise into some piece of orchestral hackwork, especially if during the premiere he whispered biting quips into Sollertinsky’s ear, to prove that he’d mutilated his creations in full knowledge, in which case it wasn’t mutilation at all? Oh, me, oh, dear!
Those nasty fellow pupils who’d baited him in the Conservatory’s hallways, Malko’s well-meaning, pompous obstructionism, these and other quantities which before now he’d only recognized in isolation now thrust themselves upon him as the warp and woof of society itself, weighing him down like so many sheets of fine muslin which kept falling over his face. He brushed them off, and more came swirling down. Had he allowed himself to dwell overmuch on where they came from, he might have panicked. I for one can only pity him. All he wanted was breathing-space. Nobody thinks it reprehensible to lose time in carrying out the excretory functions of the bodies in which our creativity is for the moment nested; nor do we protest the drudgery of breathing which is usually required to sustain our projects. Wasn’t it excusable, then, for Shostakovich to carry out the wishes of others in certain well-delineated respects (especially since he could write music so easily), in order to gain the wherewithal to please himself for the rest of the time? He still believed in himself; indeed, that undistinguished Second Symphony, and the public utterances which it had become advisable to make, testified to his belief: The end justifies the means. Just before he took his bow, he whispered in Sollertinsky’s ear: Ruchka, ruchka. He was really as pleased as could be. After every concert, there’d be a party in his flat on Nikolayevskaya Street, Shostakovich playing the piano, the guests dancing, shouting out toasts and flirting with his mother, breaking glass, arguing over what was truly Russian, how to salvage something from Mussorgsky (at the end of his life, Shostakovich would re-orchestrate that composer’s “Dances of Death”); and while the world whirled on around him, its citizens drinking until the very last tram, Shostakovich arranged a rendezvous with the latest girl, simultaneously trotting out Sollertinsky’s skill at creating trilingual puns on demand; Meyerhold dropped by so that his stuck-up wife Zinaida could show herself off; Rodchenko had an idea about a new photocollage; I. D. Glikman was there to offer his starstruck services in adjusting the composer’s necktie, and I think that Lev Lebedinsky might have been present, too; his sister Mariya cut up the last smoked fish and begged everybody to eat; Zinaida scolded Meyerhold for taking too big a fillet; Sollertinsky told another Akhmatova joke; Shostakovich cocked his head, blinking from behind his crystal-clean spectacles, and finally they were gone, his mother snoring happily in the armchair. He closed the piano silently. Then his long fingers, which unlike the rest of him remained sober, began to spider across the sheets of music paper. Someday he’d compose a passage that was even better than the “Fate” motif in Beethoven’s Fifth; he’d pull himself higher and higher! He didn’t know cold musical tricks in those days; music gushed out of his fingertips in orgasms of joy; what a young artist lacks in craftsmanship he often makes up for in si
ncerity; even when principle demands that he withhold, he can’t avoid giving of himself. That’s why the early cinema music of Shostakovich often evinces superiority to the later—no matter that neither one achieves parity with the “Fate” motif. In response to the Leninist slogan Fewer but better he infused all the major-keyed hum-alongs now upwelling from his grimaces and grins with over and over, louder and louder.
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