The Phoenix Song

by John Sinclair

  Do I begin in the winter of 1948? No, that is too late. I must begin in 1936 with my opera, ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtensk’. Pravda published an enthusiastic review. But then only two months later the same paper printed a second, anonymous review, describing the work as ‘chaos instead of music’, ‘din, gnash and screech’, ‘cacophony’, ‘pornophany’, and ‘musical noise’. I do not believe these words, and will defend my opera as I would defend my children. But that was not the point. So I was found guilty of the sin of formalism, of writing music for the sake of music alone, of creating a cloud of notes that did not yield any rain, of failing once more to serve Soviet Man. I had suffered these accusations before, but this time there were legions ready to lay siege to our paper city the moment Pravda issued the war-cry.

  For my part I cancelled all further performances of the opera, and withdrew my Fourth Symphony from rehearsal. I accepted without dissent a ban on performances of much of my work. I wrote my penitential Fifth Symphony, and made it grand because they wanted grandeur, and noble because they wanted nobility; gave it marching tunes because they wanted the people to march, and sweet harmonies because they wanted euphony. And I gave it a by-line: ‘A Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism’. At its first performance many in the audience wept openly during the slow movement, and the applause at the end lasted longer than the whole of the final movement. (These tears, this applause, were the greatest triumph of my life thus far. The apparatchiks still don’t understand what kind of a ‘reply’ it was.)

  But of course nothing could stop what had already been unleashed. I watched many who were dear to me suffer. Vsevolod Frederiks was imprisoned, and Musya herself was exiled to Frunze for a while. Also imprisoned were my mother-in-law (released before the war) and my uncle Maxim (an old Bolshevik, no less). And then there were my friends, many of them your friends too: the poet Mikhail Zoshchenko, my long time opponent at cards (a terribly inept bluffer, but a man whose work still makes me laugh despite the memory of his pauper’s grave); the librettist Yevgeny Zamyatin (my own collaborator); my dear patron, Vsevolod Meyerhold, who saved me from a life of playing piano in a darkened cinema; his wife Zinaida Raikh (brutally murdered); my dear friend Elena Konstantinovskaya; the poet Osip Mandelstam, who has now died in Vladivostok; poor Marina Tsvetaeva, who hanged herself in despair after her husband and daughter were taken (‘To you, insane world, only one reply – I refuse’). My breath stops in my throat when I consider that some of these were perhaps chosen not for their own misdeeds, but to teach me a lesson, because I was myself too well known or too useful to imprison, but nevertheless in need of ‘instruction’.

  During that time it was not safe to be one who earned his keep by thinking. Nor was it safe to be Jewish, especially after the pact with Hitler. Many Jewish Communists have been liquidated, and all Yiddish schools and cultural associations have been closed. In my view the war saved the Russian Jews from a fate as extreme as that to which it condemned the Jews of Germany, the Ukraine and Poland. Indeed the war saved us all, since, at least for those years, there was an enemy outside the gate so terrifying as to make them forget about rat-catching within it.

  I come now to 1948, for here your Vitja enters the picture. He had made a small contribution to the libretto for an opera by a Georgian composer, Vano Muradeli, an opera that was banned after its first performance. In January of that year we were all summoned by Andrei Zhdanov (the heir apparent to Stalin, and merciless persecutor of my friend, Zoschenko, and of Anna Akhmatova and Sergei Eisenstein, the film-maker) to attend the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Composers, at which Muradeli’s opera and its errors would be discussed.

  I myself attended with a great sense of foreboding, since in the previous October my ‘Poem of the Motherland’ – a perfunctory offering for the thirtieth anniversary of the Revolution – had been rejected as politically inadequate, and the film Simple Folk, for which I wrote the score, was banned. ‘Un-Soviet, anti-patriotic and anti-People,’ they said. We were subjected to the bullying vulgarity of Comrade Zhdanov for several days, during which it became apparent to me that the criticism of Muradeli’s opera was simply the tiger’s first lick of blood. We delegates behaved like nervous schoolboys, laughing at the jokes of our overbearing teacher. Perhaps this emboldened Zhdanov to come after me, and Prokofiev, and Myaskovsky, and Khachaturian, for our alleged leadership in deviations from the tenets of Socialist Realism.

  I have learned in these situations that there is nothing to be done. They are prepared for all our familiar ways of being brave, so one must be brave in ways that are too subtle for them. I took Vitja aside one day and explained this to him. He was walking around the Congress white as a sheet, his hands trembling. So I took him to a cafeteria and fed him cabbage and vodka and meat pies that were like stones. I was barely keeping my own nerves under control, but I sat him down and told him how I survive. ‘I always carry one end of the banner in the processions,’ I said. ‘I always look cheerful, and if any task is given to me I do not shirk it. Instead, I do it with all my heart. When the crowd yells, I yell. When they turn, I turn. It is the only way to be safe.’

  He was shaking his head from side to side, and I could not tell if it was just nerves or if he was disagreeing with me. In the end I had to take hold of his chin, and catch his eye and tell him, ‘Vitja, remember that we are sparrows. All of us. We rise, we fall, we are crushed by the side of the road. But we have one thing. We have talent. I compose. You write. If they crush us, that talent is gone. If we endure, it endures. If there is a vindication, so be it. If not, so be it.’

  He gave me no answer, but I was encouraged by the fact that he ate some pie and drank some vodka. I made him sit beside me during the next session, at which a young man trampled on the scores of my Eighth and Ninth Symphonies. I then rose to speak and thanked Comrade Zhdanov for his criticism. I reproached Muradeli for his blindness to his failures. I called upon our musical organisations to engage in rigorous self-criticism, and I acknowledged that much of my own work had been in error – though I had striven throughout my compositional career to make my music accessible to the people – and begged the Congress for instruction so that I could do better in the future.

  Throughout my speech I kept my eyes fixed upon Vitja. I made the speech directly to him, as if there was no one else in the hall. I sat back down beside him afterwards and glanced across at him. He was looking at his hands in astonishment, as if he had noticed for the first time what a miracle they were; the architecture of bones and sinews and skin that we carry with us in our pockets and use to write and to eat and to make music and love. At that moment I had hope for him, thinking to myself what better thing to do at such a moment than to marvel at one’s own being.

  As we stood to leave, a note was slipped into my hand. It said simply: ‘Solomon Mikhoels murdered. Please come.’ It was signed by Moishe Weinberg, the composer, who is Mikhoels’ son-in-law. Another sparrow falls, I thought.

  I had been friends with Mikhoels even before he founded the Moscow Jewish Theatre. Vitja knew him too. He was at that time the chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and had publicly supported my Eighth Symphony (to no avail) against charges of recidivism and pessimism. Immediately I took Vitja to visit the grieving family, and we arrived at the same time as the body, which had been carried to Moscow that day on the train from Minsk, where the murder had occurred. We all stood shoulder to shoulder in a small room – at least twenty family and friends – as the men put the coffin on the table and unscrewed the lid. You can imagine the scene as we uncovered this great man, naked, tufts of his beard cut off for some reason, his rib-cage pierced, and his legs bent, Christ-like, to fit him into the cheap coffin. Someone quickly placed a black hat over his bloated testicles, and this made him look even more ridiculous, reduced by a couple of incisions to a jumble of limbs in a box, like a marionette laid aside after a performance. Vitja whispered in my ear, ‘Don’t you envy him?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied, louder than I had intended, ‘
I envy him.’

  The last I saw of Vitja was when I dropped him at his apartment. He seemed well. That is all I can say, and I believe that is something; to be well, if only for an instant. I myself went home, kissed my wife and my children, ate my supper with a smile, and started work on the third movement of my violin concerto. What else can one do? What else should one do? This concerto is a first for me. I have written string quartets, but nothing with a violin as the solo instrument. For the time being I have no more symphonies in me, and of course no more operas. The concerto is a companion to a set of short songs based on Jewish folk-tunes. I began these in response to the instruction to the Composers’ Union to write new works celebrating the ethnic cultures of the Soviet Union so that they would feel included within Soviet Man.

  I chose to celebrate the music of the Russian Jews. This music has made a most powerful impression on me. It can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It is always the laughter of desperation. All of man’s defencelessness is concentrated in that brittle musical cloth. This quality of Jewish folk music is close to my ideas of what music should be. There should always be these two layers in music. This is music that has passed through music, and cannot find its way back. It is a spectator upon itself. It presses its nose to the window and watches its own happier self, dancing in the parlour, waiting for the soldiers to come.

  The first movement of the concerto is a nocturne – an insomniac one. It is a soliloquy of foreboding and then of panic, as unknown fears play across the mind’s dark curtain. The second movement is a scherzo, based upon a lively Jewish folk dance, one of those ones that are played faster and faster until the dancers begin to fly out of the doors and windows. And the third, which I worked on through that night, is a passacaglia andante, which, if I have any talent, mourns the dead of the Patriotic War and scourges the leaders who rewarded their sacrifice with a return to repression. But more than that, it mourns Vitja and all the others, for I started work on the violin part for that movement after I heard the news of Vitja’s illness and as I applied what influence I could to secure his care.

  As soon as I finished the concerto I called my friend Dodik (who carries this letter and Vitja’s violin and letters to you) and I sat at the piano and we played the entire piece through without stopping. At the end he was weeping and advised me that it was another one ‘for the drawer’, as we say here. I can only agree with him. And so it may never be heard, at least not in my lifetime.

  I send to you as a gift the original manuscript of the third movement, in the version for piano and violin. I hope the two of you can some day sit down, as Dodik and I did, and play it for each other. (But put aside your measured tones when you play it, Kasimir, for my mother always said your playing was the most delicate and harmonious she had ever heard. This piece requires playing that is at times strained and guttural, with a barely concealed taste of bile.)

  You may if you wish listen for Vitja in the music. He is there, most definitely. He is imprisoned in the opening bars, the first rotation of the passacaglia – play these bars fortissimo on the piano, for in the full score they belong to the kettle drum and the brass and the double basses – but then as the violin begins to play his soul slips through his chest with a sob. It rises above the earth, surprised to find itself capable of flight. In the orchestrated version I have inserted a line for the cor anglais (for your English horn, Piroshka). It twines itself around the violin, and they dance their grief together for several bars; but then the violin flies off, and although the oboe pursues it, calling to it, the violin can no longer hear, for it is engrossed in its own rage and its tears, and it plays on alone until it finds eventually a refuge in music of quiet and fragile purity.

  I have imagined the violin like a soul from Greek antiquity, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. She dies and then awakens to discover herself immortal. She is hesitant at first, because she is naked; but then she begins to marvel at herself because she realises that in death she is more beautiful than she ever thought possible in life. This new goddess awakens in turn to her form, to her power, and then to her memories and her anger.

  Look also for my little signature, my secret code: DSCH (in the German notation D – E-flat – C – B). It is a piece of myself that I put into my music whenever I can. If you tear aside the skin of this piece you will find it too; you will see me, a crazy, bespectacled old man playing the organ at the cinema, working the levers of my grand sound machine, the great war machine that is my music. I have buried it very deeply in this piece; elsewhere it is more prominent. One day they will notice it, but by then I will have another coded message, and another and another, until I am dead, and I am resolved that my death will be a code they will never unravel.

  I must close soon. My hand is shaking as I write, and I have once more that sense of vertigo, for if this letter should fall into hands other than yours . . . well, I cannot contemplate it. Thank God for my great friend, the pianist Sviatoslav Richter, who will be here shortly to uplift this small package for you. He and Dodik leave for China tonight. (Richter is a brilliant young man, and is married to Nina Dorliak, the soprano for whom I wrote the cycle of Jewish folk songs, also destined ‘for the drawer’. Her mother was the soprano Xenia Dorliak, who remembers travelling with you on the train from St Petersburg to Irinovka to visit my family. It must have been the summer of 1915. Vitja was such a handsome young man, she recalls.)

  My wife Nina says there is a knock at the door. I convey to you the love of my sister, Musya, and of course my own. I clasp your hands.

  D.D.S.

  When I had finished the letter, I handed it to Piroshka, who carefully folded it into a small square, the paper emitting crackles that echoed around the room. ‘It is late,’ she said. ‘It is time for you to go.’ I gathered up my things and, as I was leaving, caught Kasimir’s eye. He smiled and nodded, but said nothing.

  *

  The performance of Shostakovich’s passacaglia took place in the parlour of an old dacha by the Technological Institute. I remember the crunch of the gravel on the empty road and the diagonal fall of aspen leaves as I walked to the dacha with Kasimir and Piroshka, and with Vitja’s violin in its case held to my chest. The air was still and cool, and the sky was the washed out blue of late autumn, hazy with long parallel streaks of high cloud like the wispy beards of celestial sages.

  Inside the house there were kisses from our host – the widow of a former rabbi – and her hand lay across my shoulder as she guided me into the warmth of the parlour. There were perhaps twenty people there, former members of the orchestra, the remnants of the Jewish community and the old violin maker whose body was bent almost shut with arthritis. Tea was brewing in a large china samovar by the door. Full cups of the hot black liquid, rattling on their saucers, passed precariously from hand to hand, guided over shoulders and around elbows, until they reached their intended recipients. There was a brief silence as we appeared in the doorway, then everyone came forward to greet us. I was kissed on the cheek, the forehead, the top of the head and – by a dapper old man with a stiff, military bearing – on the back of the hand. A cup of tea veered towards me, and someone took Vitja’s violin from my grasp so I could take the saucer with both hands. It was Russian tea, sharply scented, spiced and sweet.

  After a while Piroshka summoned me to her side by the piano at the far end of the room. As we arranged our music and tuned our instruments, Kasimir called for silence and invited the older members of the audience to take what seats were available. He explained that we were about to play a new piece by the contemporary Russian composer Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich, and that it was a single movement from a larger work, a concerto for violin. As he spoke a woman in a wheelchair, whom I had seen from afar many times at concerts, was pushed forward so close that she was under my nose. I could now see from her eyes, rolling independently in puckered sockets, that she was blind, and, since she paid no attention to what Kasimir was saying, it occurred to me that she might perhaps be deaf as well.

/>   The piece was inspired by the composer’s study of Jewish folk music, Kasimir went on. And today’s performance, he said, was the first ever outside of Russia, and, if it were not for the fact that we had only one movement and had a piano rather than an orchestra, it would constitute the premiere performance. The audience looked suitably impressed. One young woman, with wavy hair and a studious look, began to scribble notes in a tiny leather-bound notebook, like a physician noting down symptoms or a policeman recording evidence. Kasimir did not explain how the score came to be in his hands, but he did mention his and Piroshka’s connection to the Shostakovich family, and his memories of the young Dmitri and his sister Marusya. He said nothing about the origins of the violin I was playing. (On the way to the dacha he had warned me not to tell anyone of its history either. It was our secret, he said.)

  The room fell silent, and I stood to play, nestling the violin into the hollow above my collarbone. I cannot say that I felt at one with the instrument, or that the soul of Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume or of the lunatic Vitja flowed into mine. It did not happen. I felt only that the instrument I was holding was, like Kasimir had said, the strange carcass of a beautiful insect, until I brought it to life. Piroshka played the opening chords – louder and sharper than she had ever played them before, and I felt the audience take a sudden breath. Then the energy of the fanfare was spent, and the piano sounded more sombre tones, enclosing itself in its dance of seventeen steps, pointing beyond itself, clearing the ground for my entry. My cue arrived. I raised my bow and the edge of the taut horsehair touched the first string, a long, sustained note that I felt would never end, and then more notes followed, tumbling from the violin, gathering at my feet and then spreading out into the room.