Shostakovich defends, accuses
Continued from Page 1
Volkov arrived in New York in 1976 speakng not a word of English. He taught himself he language by reading the New York Times and has had articles published in musical jourals here. His wife, who left Russia with him, is photographer and pianist.
He intends to continue working on the life tory of the great composer who was his friend nd confidante. Eventually, he wants to produce full-length scholarly biography. "I have a lot of unpublished letters and documents," he says. It will be a sensation."
Naturally, leaving Russia was a major ecision for Volkov and his wife. When a Rusian leaves his homeland, he says, it signifies The ultimate loss of hope that things will somelow change for the better there.
"Without hope, you cannot live there," he jays. Russia is my country. It was difficult to eave it."
He points out that Russian literature is full f great writers who did their most important york while living abroad, and of writers who Stayed home but had major works published abroad. Thus the West has played a major part in preserving something truly essential in Russia's culture.
*Testimony" contains some startling explanations of what lies behind some of Dmitri Shostakovich's best-known works, the fifth and seventh symphonies, for example. These works are not at all what we have believed them to be.
The finale of the fifth symphony, for instance, has been regarded in the West as an exuberant, even vulgar expression of popular rejoicing. It has not escaped the charge of banality from some critics.
What Shostakovich was really expressing, says Volkov, was a mood of "forced rejoicing" of a people forced by higher authority to act out a scene of public happiness which is a total sham. He compares it to the first scene of "Boris Godounov."
"Perhaps the importance of words to explain such things in his music was one reason Shostakovich agreed to do this book with me,” Volkov says.
A true understanding of the real meaning of Shostakovich's music is quite common today amon Russian musicians, he says. "They knew very well what he meant. That is why people wept at the premiere of the fifth symphony. These things are sometimes referred to in Aesopian (veiled) language in contemporary Russian reviews."
:
The composer was at first reluctant to cooperate on the book, but Volkov got him to talk by asking him to reminisce about other people teachers, friends, composer colleagues. A description of this working method forms part of Volkov's preface to “Testimony."
Nowadays, the official Soviet line is that Shostakovich was a loyal Communist; hence, something of a saint — a picture that is rudely shattered by Volkov's memoir.
Peculiar to the way the Russians handle such things, Volkov says, is the idea that when a person is in official favor, no slightest hint of anything derogatory about him must ever appear in public.
The Russian gods of the moment never have personal problems, never have difficulties with drink or with sex. ("That is why you can-
not say to this day in Russia, for example, that Tchaikovsky was a homosexual.")
Volkov also expanded in an interview on a mysterious matter mentioned in the book the affair of the opera, "Rothschild's Fiddle," allegedly written by a young Shostakovich pupil named Veniamin Fleischman and "orchestrated" by Shostakovich himself.
Volkov is convinced that the opera is, for all practical purposes, the work of Shostakovich himself. Fleischman was killed during the Nazi seige of Leningrad, and no one has ever seen his original score.
The Soviet authorities suppressed the work as part of their campaign against “Zionist tendencies." Volkov laughs bitterly at this.
"They felt an opera with the name Rothschild in its title must be about wealthy Jews. If they had taken the trouble even to listen to it or to read the Chekhov story on which it is based, they would know that the character named Rothschild is dirt poor."
Volkov hears that the political climate in Russia today is swinging back again toward glorification of Stalin and attacks on "formalism" in the arts, that being the all-purpose code word for anything the regime does not like.
Volkov's comment is almost worthy of Shostakovich himself: "It is so stupid. Nothing new the old words, the old cliches. They will all suffer."
Volkov is saddened (as was Shostakovich) by the Western world's tendency to react "only to political sensations in the arts."
He thinks our musicians should take an interest in the really good Russian composers
now active instead of "only in the ones who sign protests and are expelled."
He names a Shostakovich pupil, Boris Tishchenko, then Gyorgy Sviridov and Alfred Schnittke as worth investigating.
"In "Testimony,'" says Solomon Volkov, “I tried to have the mood of a monolog. My main pupose was to present Shostakovich's voice." On the day of our interview, the front
"In "Testimony," I tried to have the mood of a monolog. My
main pupose was to present Shostakovich's voice.'
pages of the New York papers carried news that the Moscow State Symphony had canceled its American tour, apparently out of fear of defections from its ranks.
Volkov had another explanation. He feels that Maxim Shostakovich, the composer's son, who was to have conducted most of the tour concerts, did not wish to be in the United States when his father's bitter memories were published.