The magic of Shostakovich
Two recent events were held in honor of the birth centenary of Dmitry Shostakovich. The National Musical Academy of Ukraine hosted an international workshop and the Embassy of Russia held a musical soiree. Both events had a special guest and active participant: the great composer’s widow Irina Shostakovich. Her kindhearted sincerity and exquisite manner instantly draw people to her. Mrs. Shostakovich last visited Kyiv 30 years ago to watch the premiere of Shostakovich’s opera Katerina Izmailova. The composer never missed any productions of his works and always took part in the preparations.
Mrs. Shostakovich treated the audience to some reminiscences. Asked in a private conversation if it was difficult to live with a genius, she said, “It was very easy with him. He was an extremely tactful person. He never thought of himself as a genius. He considered himself to be like everyone else. He wrote what everybody feels.”
The composer probably knew the Truth. But fidelity to this truth cost him dearly in the conditions of the totalitarian regime and its ideology. He lived and composed in difficult conditions, “encoding” his ideas in messages to his descendants. Shostakovich’s oeuvre contains a large number of musical idioms, a kaleidoscope of masks in which one rarely sees the serious face of the musician. His favorite method is parody, alarm, grotesque, caricature, and sarcasm.
The reception at the Russian Embassy, organized by Viktor Chernomyrdin, was marked by a warm and sincere atmosphere. Tellingly, the program began with a performance by teachers from Kyiv’s Shostakovich Children’s Musical School No. 4. The audience heard the composer’s vocal cycles to the lyrics of Yevgenii Dolmatovsky performed by Svitlana Dobronravova and Taras Shtonda, soloists at the Ukrainian National Opera, and two parts of Trio No. 2 for violin, cello, and piano (Anatolii Bazhenov, Ivan Kucher, and Naida Mohomedbekova).
As the soiree was drawing to a close, the Solo Plus ensemble performed Concerto No. 1 Do Minor for piano with orchestra (in Anton Kushnir’s rearrangement for string septet, trumpet, and piano).
Today, when Shostakovich is the subject of so many articles and speeches, he remains a tragic “thing in itself.” To a certain extent, he is both encoded and unexpressed. The composer wrote no more operas after Katerina Izmailova was censured. Following the notorious Communist Party instructions, he had to shelve some works for dozens of years. Although textbooks have long defined Shostakovich as classic, his works are still a source of never-ending disputes. Some music specialists continue to criticize his works in a manner that is not usually applied to classics. While these critics “allow” Giuseppe Verdi and Georges Bizet to loosely interpret literary sources in their operas, they deny this right to Shostakovich.
Some say that masterpieces of genius cannot be a matter for debate. In reality, only works of genius can really stir up heated discussions, which is the case with Shostakovich’s oeuvre. These masterpieces are true, but everyone has his own understanding of the truth.
