by Alex Ross
When the composer came back to Russia in 1927, he saw a panorama of Soviet life that was controlled in every detail. Hardly blind to the OGPU’s presence, he noted in his diary the shady characters lurking in restaurants, the mysterious clicks on the phone line, the personal searches, and other signs of surveillance. Hearing that a cousin had “taken ill,” he understood at once that she had been arrested. Nonetheless, he chose to focus on the improvements that the regime had brought about in some sectors of society—the increase of literacy in the rural population, the shiny new high-rises in the cities, the nationwide project of electrification, the paving of roads, and so on. As a Christian Scientist, he may have believed that he could will the evil away—although there was certainly also personal calculation in his decision to return, a sense that the Soviet Union would give him due attention and support.
The final stage of Sovietization was accomplished by a simple trick: Prokofiev didn’t need to “become” a Soviet composer, because he had been one all along. He still had his Soviet passport; his works had been published by the official Soviet house; many of his recent premieres had taken place on Soviet soil; and his style already fulfilled the mandate for simplicity. All that remained was a bureaucratic matter of changing his address.
Prokofiev’s first “official” Soviet work, the dance epic Romeo and Juliet, showed him at his optimistic peak. In his autobiography he identified five main lines in his writing: the classical, the modern, the motoric, the lyric, and the grotesque. In Romeo these modes find equilibrium, with the lyric at the center. Prokofiev’s extended tonal language achieves maximum sophistication: the lovely opening melody of the work is interspersed with just enough passing semitone clashes and lowered or raised pitches that it acquires a grainy, acidic finish, avoiding sentimentality or kitsch. The ballet was written at high speed in the summer of 1935, in the last months before the onslaught of the Terror. It had the makings of an instant classic, yet inexplicable obstacles appeared in the way of the first performance. Members of the Bolshoi Ballet declared the music undanceable. Soviet officials, reversing their usual stance on the inadvisability of tragic endings, said that Prokofiev had betrayed Shakespeare by letting the lovers live happily ever after. Even with a new ending of ardent heartbreak, Romeo did not reach a Russian stage until 1940. What Prokofiev could never understand was that these difficulties had nothing to do with the notes he put on paper; they were the ritual of humiliation that every Soviet composer had to undergo.
Perplexed by the indifferent reception of Romeo, Prokofiev now tried his hand at propaganda. In contrast to Shostakovich, who dispatched his official duties as efficiently and soullessly as possible, Prokofiev worked painfully hard at such projects as the Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of October, Songs of Our Days, and Zdravitsa (Toast to Stalin). The ten-part Cantata, with its two large choruses and four distinct orchestras, including an ensemble of accordions, was too raucous to gain approval. Songs of Our Days, in which a mother reassures her child,
There is a man behind the Kremlin walls
And the entire land knows and loves him
Your joy and happiness come from him
Stalin! That is his great name!
also failed to please, this time on the grounds that Prokofiev had simplified too much and ceased to be himself—the same mind game that commentators had played with Shostakovich in the reviews of The Limpid Stream.
With Zdravitsa, Prokofiev finally hit the mark. The text is a paean to the loving attentions of the man in the Kremlin, who, it is claimed, brings sunshine, nourishes meadows, and whitens the cherry orchards. Prokofiev took the idea of Stalin’s love at face value, writing surreally beautiful music in the vein of Romeo and Juliet. Indeed, as Philip Taylor points out, the opening melody has more or less the same lilting accompaniment as in the ballet’s balcony scene. Zdravitsa was considered sufficiently true to life that it was broadcast from loudspeakers on the Moscow streets. Oleg, the composer’s younger son, ran into the house one day and said, “Daddy! They’re playing you outside!”
Official applause also greeted Prokofiev’s score for Sergei Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevsky, a celebration of the thirteenth-century prince who routed the Teutonic Knights on the ice of Lake Peipus. Few experiences in Prokofiev’s checkered career gave him more satisfaction than his collaboration with Eisenstein, who treated his composers not as hired hands but as creative equals. The tour-de-force scene in Nevsky, the battle on the ice, was filmed only after the music had been sketched out, and the resulting integration of sound and image rivals anything in the animated creations of Walt Disney, whom both director and composer admired. In other scenes Eisenstein implied rhythm in the sequence of images. Watching in the screening room, Prokofiev would tap his fingers in time to the footage. He would deliver a finished piece by noon the following day, and Eisenstein would use the music to finalize his edit. This almost unprecedented vision of film as spoken-word opera was one that Stalin did not fail to appreciate. When, in 1941, the first Stalin prizes were handed out, Alexander Nevsky was among the winners.
By the time Eisenstein’s film received that honor, however, Prokofiev had begun to understand the dimensions of his velvet prison. In 1938 and 1939, the composer labored away on his first Soviet opera, Semyon Kotko, which told of a young man’s transformation into a socialist hero and his concomitant defeat of various class enemies. The libretto is alternately fatuous and vicious, but Prokofiev lavished on it some of the strongest dramatic music of his career, including a German invasion sequence of malevolent splendor. What most excited him was the opportunity to work with Meyerhold, whom he had long idolized.
Meyerhold was readying Semyon Kotko for rehearsal at the Stanislavsky Opera Theater when, on June 15, 1939, he made some ill-advised remarks on Soviet arts policy, the precise nature of which remains a matter of debate. On June 20, he was arrested, his fate probably having been sealed long before. Meyerhold’s wife was later found stabbed to death. The opera’s premiere was, of course, postponed. Prokofiev was still recovering from these events when a change in Soviet foreign policy forced a revision of the opera’s libretto. The signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact in August 1939 meant that Germans could no longer be depicted as villains. Hasty cosmetic changes failed to save Semyon Kotko from obsolescence, and it disappeared from Soviet stages soon after its premiere. On January 16, 1940, Stalin signed 346 death sentences, Meyerhold’s and Babel’s among them.
Throughout the late thirties Prokofiev continued to make trips to the West, waving his passport at the border. Talking to his friends outside Russia, he kept to a pro-Soviet line, but close acquaintances thought they could see the strain. Nicolas Nabokov, in his book Old Friends and New Music, reported that “behind this mask of optimism and official praise, one could detect a feeling totally contradictory to the very nature of Prokofiev’s character: the feeling of profound and terrible insecurity.” According to the Russian-American composer Vernon Duke, a Hollywood studio offered Prokofiev the huge salary of twenty-five hundred dollars a week. Duke himself conveyed the offer and watched the reaction—momentary excitement turning to truculent dismissal. “That’s nice bait,” Prokofiev said, “but I won’t swallow it. I’ve got to go back to Moscow, to my music and my children.”
Dostoevsky’s story The Gambler, which formed the basis for Prokofiev’s great early opera, has a line that may pinpoint the major weakness in the composer’s personality. Alexei, the protagonist, is looking back at the moment when he might have turned away from the roulette wheel and overcome his compulsion. “I ought to have gone away,” he says, “but a strange sensation rose up in me, a sort of defiance of fate, a desire to challenge it, to put out my tongue at it.” Prokofiev’s diary of his first Soviet tour records a similar turning point. “Should I forget the whole thing and stay here?” the composer asked himself as he boarded the train to Moscow. “Can I count on coming back or will they stop me?” Again, during a change of locomotives at the Latvian border, he said to hims
elf: “This is our last chance, it’s still not too late to turn back.” But he brushed aside his misgivings and stayed on the train. A little over ten years later, upon returning from his 1938 American tour, Prokofiev handed in his foreign-travel passport, as per Soviet procedure. He never got it back, and never set foot outside the Soviet Union again.
The Great Patriotic War
“A blizzard is raging outside the windows as 1944 approaches,” Shostakovich wrote to Isaak Glikman on New Year’s Eve. “It will be a year of happiness, of joy, of victory, a year that will bring us all much joy. The freedom-loving Peoples will at last throw off the yoke of Hitlerism, peace will reign over the whole world, and we shall live once more in peace under the sun of Stalin’s Constitution. Of this I am convinced, and consequently experience feelings of unalloyed joy.” This quintessentially Shostakovichian utterance exemplifies the composer’s penchant for talking through a mask of Soviet doublespeak. Indeed, he appears to be echoing, for comic effect, Stalin’s own wearyingly repetitive prose style; the threefold use of the word “joy” (radost’) is a typical Stalinist tic. Yet the repetition is also a private code. Glikman informs us that whenever Shostakovich repeats himself unnecessarily, or emphasizes some stale phrase, he means the opposite of what he appears to be saying. Thus, when he writes, “Everything is so fine, so perfectly excellent, that I can find almost nothing to write about,” he is in fact saying that things are too awful to be described in correspondence that is being monitored by the NKVD. Glikman says that Shostakovich used this code even in conversation. “I’m feeling fine” had a variety of implications.
But did Shostakovich always mean the opposite of what he said? Did he take no joy at all in the prospect that “freedom-loving Peoples will at last throw off the yoke of Hitlerism”? Even in the grip of totalitarian terror, life goes on. People are able to feel joy, rage, sorrow, love. Music is, in fact, better at communicating these primal emotions that it is at managing anything as tricky as irony. Irony, in the standard definition, is saying something other than what one appears to be saying. To talk about musical irony, we first have to agree on what the music appears to be saying, and then we have to agree on what the music is really saying. This is invariably difficult to do. We can, however, learn to be wary of any interpretation that displays too much certitude about what the music is “really saying,” and stay alert to multiple levels of meaning. Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony becomes a rich experience when heard in this way. So does his Seventh Symphony, or Leningrad, which for many years was dismissed as an exercise in wartime propaganda.
Shostakovich displayed patriotic fervor from the start of the war. In late June 1941, immediately after the Nazi invasion began, he reported to the civil defense headquarters with his pupil Veniamin Fleishman and volunteered for duty. Rejected on account of his poor eyesight, he joined the Leningrad Conservatory fire brigade and moved into a barracks in the building. A famous photo shows him wearing a fireman’s helmet on the conservatory roof. The image was staged for propaganda purposes; colleagues made sure to keep the prize of Soviet music out of harm’s way.
In July, Shostakovich set to work on the Seventh Symphony, in which he planned to record, in almost stenographic fashion, the emotions of battle. In mid-September he announced on Leningrad radio that he had finished the first two movements. “Our art is threatened with great danger,” he said. “We will defend our music.” German artillery shells were by then landing in the city, marking the onset of the nine-hundred-day siege. For several composer friends Shostakovich played through at the piano what he had written so far, and continued playing even as the air-raid sirens went off and anti-aircraft fire all but drowned him out. Against his own wishes, he was evacuated from the city on October 1, and spent the winter in Kuybyshev, formerly Samara, in the Volga region.
The Leningrad had its premiere in Kuybyshev in March 1942. It then made its way around the world, its progress complicated by wartime. As The New Yorker reported in a Talk of the Town item, the score was transferred to microfilm, put in a tin can, flown to Tehran, driven by car to Cairo, flown to South America, and finally flown to New York. Toscanini beat out Koussevitzky and Stokowski for the rights to conduct the Western premiere, which took place on July 19, 1942. Time magazine put Shostakovich on the cover, in his firefighting regalia, with the caption “Amid bombs bursting in Leningrad he heard the chords of victory.” The composer became a propaganda symbol for the Allied cause, a profile in courage.
Besieged Leningrad heard the symphony on August 9, 1942, under the most dramatic circumstances imaginable. The score was flown in by military aircraft in June, and a severely depleted Leningrad Radio Orchestra began learning it. After a mere fifteen musicians showed up for the initial rehearsal, the commanding general ordered all competent musicians to report from the front lines. The players would break from the rehearsals to return to their duties, which sometimes included the digging of mass graves for victims of the siege. Three members of the orchestra died of starvation before the premiere took place. The opposing German general heard about the performance in advance and planned to disrupt it, but the Soviets preempted him by launching a bombardment of German positions—Operation Squall, it was called. An array of loudspeakers then broadcast the Leningrad into the silence of no-man’s-land. Never in history had a musical composition entered the thick of battle in quite this way: the symphony become a tactical strike against German morale.
For the benefit of his vast international audience, Shostakovich drew up a program for the first three movements of the Seventh. “The exposition of the first movement tells of the happy, peaceful life of people sure of themselves and their future,” the composer wrote. “This is the simple, peaceful life lived before the war…In the development, war bursts into the peaceful life of these people. I am not aiming for the naturalistic depiction of war, the depiction of the clatter of arms, the explosion of shells, and so on. I am trying to convey the image of war emotionally.” Later, in conversations with friends, Shostakovich hinted that he was not thinking only of German Fascism; he had in mind “all forms of terror, slavery, the bondage of the spirit.”
As official, unofficial, and rumored meanings multiply, the music itself grows elusive, even as it invites decoding with its charged musical signals. The attention-getting event in the first movement is the “invasion episode,” as Shostakovich himself called it. It falls where one would expect to find a development section in a sonata-form movement. In place of elaboration and variation of the first and second themes, the orchestra begins repeating one rather simpleminded idea over a span of 350 bars, with a snare-drum rhythm rapping continuously underneath. If this music is meant to suggest the Germans marching in, it does not sound particularly Teutonic. The tune is based on the operetta aria “Da geh’ ich zu Maxim,” from Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow, known to have been one of Hitler’s favorites. The snare-drum ostinato is inspired by Ravel’s Bolero, as is the structure of unending crescendo. It begins as a kind of Pied Piper march, a picaresque procession. It ends as a gargantuan, vulgar rant, with one figure sounding like a child’s chant of “nyah-nyah.”
What to make of this Austrian-French-Spanish mishmash? One of the keener interpretations comes from Eisenstein, who was reminded of a scene in Dostoevsky’s antirevolutionary masterpiece The Demons. At one point in the novel, the leftist agitator Lyamshin, who is also a pianist and composer, entertains his friends by improvising a piano piece titled The Franco-Prussian War, in which “La Marseillaise” is overrun by the German folk song “Ach, du lieber Augustin.” That famous tune—which haunted both Mahler and Schoenberg—enters “somewhere on one side, from below, from some corner,” Dostoevsky writes, then grows in power until it sweeps “La Marseillaise” aside. “One had a feeling of countless barrels of beer, the frenzy of self-glorification, demands for milliards, expensive cigars, champagne and hostages: Augustin passed into a wild roar.” Eisenstein adds, “Surely it is this page of the great Russian writer’s work that lies at
the heart of [the Leningrad].”
Anna Akhmatova, too, heard the Leningrad as a kind of mad carnival. At the end of the original version of her wartime cycle Poem Without a Hero, she presents a complex of images to conjure up her flight from Leningrad under siege. One inspiration is Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, written in secret in the 1930s and not published until 1966. In that Russian-Soviet version of the old Faustian tale, the devil and his anarchic-surrealist retinue expose the madness of Stalin’s society by way of violent farce. In particular, Akhmatova has in mind a scene Margarita, after discovering that she possesses witchlike powers, flies to a Walpurgis Nacht ball. The fact that Shostakovich flew out of Leningrad on a small plane shortly after Akhmatova did, taking with him the manuscript of the first three movements of the Leningrad, leads the poet to picture the symphony as a witch’s broomstick, carrying the spirit of Petersburg through the night:
And over forests full of the enemy
Like that one , possessed by the devil,
Flying to the Brocken at night, I soared.
And after me, sparkling with a mystery
And having named herself the Seventh
She rushed to an unprecedented feast…
