On the evening of January 26, 1936, Joseph Stalin and several other Soviet leaders went to the Bolshoi Theatre, in Moscow, to see a performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.” Shostakovich, only twenty-nine years old, was a rising star among Soviet composers, and his show was a hit; when Stalin came to see it, it was enjoying its eighty-fourth performance at the Bolshoi, after a successful première in Leningrad in 1934, and appearances in several European and American cities. A portrait of the desperate life of the Russian lower-middle class, the opera was sardonic, nervy, and violent, veering constantly between satire and vaudeville and naturalism.
The plot, based on a short story by the nineteenth-century Russian writer Nikolai Leskov, tells of a bored and frustrated housewife, Katerina Ismailova, who begins an affair with a clerk, Sergey, when her merchant husband leaves on a business trip. When her overbearing father-in-law discovers her transgression, she murders him; when her husband returns, she murders him, too. Controversially, Shostakovich portrayed Katerina’s murders and sexual liberation as justifiable responses to the awful environment of Tsarist Russia. The music is often more scandalous than the moral it points to: at one point, the orchestra whips itself into a mechanistic, pounding fury to accompany the lovemaking of Katerina and Sergey, before declining over a long trombone glissando, mimicking a post-coital comedown.
Though the opera had pleased audiences, it did not please Stalin. Somewhere during the third act, he and his comrades conspicuously departed the theatre. Two days later, Stalin’s displeasure was made manifest in an unsigned editorial in Pravda, titled “Muddle Instead of Music”—possibly the most chilling document of philistinism in music history. The author of the review begins by lambasting Shostakovich’s opera for its obscenity, both musical and dramatic (“The music croaks and hoots and snorts and pants in order to represent love scenes as naturally as possible”), and suggests that its success abroad came from the fact that “it titillates the depraved tastes of bourgeois audiences with its witching, clamorous, neurasthenic music.”
After detailing Shostakovich’s musical sins, the article proceeds to make political threats. “Left deviationism in opera grows out of the same source as left deviationism in painting, in poetry, in pedagogy, in science,” the critic writes, finally denouncing Shostakovich for “trifling with difficult matters.” If he continued to play this “dangerous game,” the critic concludes—in what can only be imagined as an icy whisper—“it might end very badly.” It was the beginning of a season of terror for Shostakovich, as well as for other artists and composers. His works were no longer performed, and he lived under the threat of arrest, and possibly murder, for nearly a year. Only after a wildly successful performance of his Fifth Symphony, in 1937, did he undergo a partial rehabilitation, eventually resuming his path toward becoming the U.S.S.R.’s favorite musician. Still, he never fully escaped the shadow of persecution, and suffered criticisms and official bans in the following decades.
Julian Barnes’s new novel, “The Noise of Time,” is about Shostakovich, and it begins with the composer enduring the humiliation and misery of his exclusion from musical life, in 1936. “All that he knew was that this was the worst time,” the first part opens. Barnes has Shostakovich repeat it twice more, at the beginnings of the novel’s two other sections, in response to fresh sources of persecution in 1948 and 1960, bringing to mind Edgar from “King Lear”: “The worst is not / So long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.’ ” The novel’s title comes from the nineteenth-century poet Alexander Blok, who used the phrase to describe history. The Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam chose it for the title of his memoir, published in 1923—Mandelstam, who would indeed suffer Stalin’s worst. For Barnes’s Shostakovich, “the noise of time” is counterposed to “that music which is inside ourselves—the music of our being—which is transformed by some into real music.” Real artists, Barnes has Shostakovich say, protect that private part of themselves against history, but if the music “is strong and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time” it is “transformed into the whisper of history.” So we watch as Shostakovich struggles to live a life devoted to music, with history constantly intervening.
What Shostakovich’s music had to do with history has been one of the most fraught questions in the history of music. He lived through the most terrifying decades of the Soviet Union to become its most celebrated composer. Despite his transgression with “Lady Macbeth,” many of his compositions—such as the Seventh Symphony (“Leningrad”), performed in 1942 in the midst of the devastating siege and broadcast over loudspeakers into no man’s land—served the purposes of official propaganda (though the music itself was more multilayered than its use would suggest). The result of Shostakovich’s confrontation with the apparatus of Stalinism, and of his subsequent reassumption, was that his music has become impossible to interpret outside of historical circumstances. Debates over the actual meaning of his pieces have taken on the quality of titanic political arguments; they have even been dubbed the Shostakovich Wars.
In 1979, a book purporting to be Shostakovich’s memoir, entitled “Testimony,” appeared in the West, depicting a frustrated composer who despised Communism and hid veiled critiques of the Soviet regime in his music. Scholars such as Laurel Fay, Shostakovich’s biographer, eventually discredited the book as a forgery, but not before it had given license to somewhat crude allegorical readings of the music, showing how this or that musical cue clearly represented a parody or critique of some aspect of life under Stalin. The late Ian McDonald, in his book “The New Shostakovich,” became an exemplar of the form, writing about a passage in the Fifth Symphony in which, over a “thrumming rhythm, flute and horn now converse in a major-key transposition of the second subject: two dazed delegates agreeing that the rally had been splendid and the leader marvelous”; elsewhere, writing about the first movement of the Fourth Symphony, he claims that an ascending scale depicts the secret police “audibly climbing the stairs . . . and bursting through the door on a triumphant crescendo.” Shostakovich is known to have derided the Soviet form of this criticism. Speaking before the Union of Soviet Composers in 1933, he complained, “When a critic . . . writes that in such-and-such a symphony Soviet civil servants are represented by the oboe and the clarinet, and Red Army men by the brass section, you want to scream!”
Barnes, who acknowledges “Testimony” as one of his major sources, gives us a mournfully sarcastic, frustrated Shostakovich, at once mocking of his Soviet patrons and stymied by his inability to break with them fully. In a sort of third-person monologue of impressions, vignettes, and diaristic reflections, he comes off as neither heroic nor craven, though he exhibits both traits on occasion. A trip with the Soviet delegation to the United States is a “public success,” attended by huge audiences, during which he feels “nothing but self-disgust and self-contempt” for having to give canned speeches and warmly praise Stalin. He is given to dry aphorisms (“He lit another cigarette. Between art and love, between oppressors and oppressed, there were always cigarettes”), and he reflects with gallows humor on how Hitler’s invasion led to a period of unprecedented security for him (“A disaster to the rescue”). In one anecdote, his plane is diverted by bad weather from Frankfurt, forcing him to go to Stockholm. Swedish musicians enjoy the sudden visit, but then embarrass Shostakovich by asking him to name his favorite Swedish composer. “He was about to cite Svendsen when he remembered that Svendsen was Norwegian.” His humiliations and sense of injury are at once more tense and miserable than any we can imagine, but also, as Barnes handles them, similar to a kind of high-toned grumbling that one associates with artists forced to do things that they feel are beneath them.
This being a novel mostly about life under Stalin, there are also moments of hair-raising terror. At one point, Shostakovich appears to be implicated, along with his musical patron, the military hero Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevksy, in a plot to assassinate Stalin. Barnes, borrowing liberally from an account in Elizabeth Wilson’s collection “Shostakovich: A Life Remembered,” shows the composer’s interrogator, Zakrevksy, questioning him in the time-honored Socratic manner that suggests no need for evidence, since the case is already closed. Asking about social gatherings at Tukhachevksy’s house, Zakrevksy wonders whether any politicians attended. “No, no politicians,” Shostakovich assures him. Zakrevksy pointedly replies, “You are quite sure about that?” Shostakovich, with unmarked but somehow palpable trembling, returns,
Before long, Zakrevsky is asking Shostakovich to “shake” his memory and “think a little harder,” especially when it comes to “the plot against Comrade Stalin,” of which he was “one of the chief witnesses.” Shostakovich prepares himself for arrest and execution. Then, like something out of Dostoyevsky, he is spared: Zakrevsky himself is taken in. “His interrogator interrogated. His arrester arrested.”
The murderous carnivalesque of Stalin’s Russia, as captured in novels like Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita”—the atmosphere of fear mixed with proliferating ironies and sudden plot twists, the island on the Gulag archipelago reserved entirely for jokes about the Gulags—gets reanimated in “The Noise of Time,” and it is also a culture long associated by some critics with Shostakovich’s music. Beyond the lurid “Lady Macbeth,” critics have come to see even Shostakovich’s most triumphal musical gestures as mere surface, hiding the cunning silences of a dissident. Thanks to much post-“Testimony” writing, Shostakovich’s Fifth has become a privileged point of contention. Perhaps more than any other piece of his, it has been subjected to critical debate and revision, and it is a staple even of symphony-hall program notes to wonder whether the march of its shrill, hectoring last movement isn’t, in fact, ironizing: undermining Stalinism even as it seemed to blare it. This is the version of the Fifth that Barnes has Shostakovich describe when he mockingly refers to the audience, “those with asses’ ears,” as having “missed the screeching irony of the final movement, that mockery of triumph.” In fact, Soviet listeners, writing in approved publications, did notice something off about the symphony’s ending. Writing in the nineteen-forties, the Russian critic Ivan Martïnov described the march as “tragic grotesque. . . . In this transformation of the main theme there is something incongruous. It is like a monstrous mask, a deformed grimace frozen on one’s face.” Decades later, after the release of “Testimony,” there would be the almost comic literalism of MacDonald:
If it were that obvious, the musicologist Richard Taruskin has argued in his book “Defining Russia Musically,” it is unlikely that Shostakovich would have lived; other Soviet writers and thinkers did considerably less than mock triumph, and suffered accordingly. “There were no dissidents in Stalin’s Russia,” Taruskin writes. What one does hear, particularly in the coda, are dissonances, but less in the spirit of mockery than of disquiet, a sort of cry of pain that nonetheless resolves and dissipates. The mixed feelings register as private pain more than political protest.
The last humiliation that Barnes has Shostakovich endure is his joining the Communist Party, in 1960. It is also the most difficult to sympathize with, since, in those years of the post-Stalin “thaw,” it seems likely that the composer more or less voluntarily applied to join. This is one of the great biographical mysteries of Shostakovich’s life: he had failed to join during the Stalin decades, when it might have helped him most, and he discussed the move with neither his family nor friends, who apparently discovered the news when the Party circular arrived with the mail. According to Isaac Glikman, one of the composer’s friends and among the most reliable sources about his life, Premier Nikita Khrushchev wanted him to become the head of the new Union of Composers of the Russian Federation, which came with the requirement that he be a Party member. Another friend, Lev Lebedinsky, suggests that low-level functionaries simply wanted it to advance their careers, and forced Shostakovich to capitulate under the influence of alcohol.
Barnes goes largely with Glikman’s account, dramatizing an attempt by Pyotr Nikolayevich Pospelov, a high-ranking apparatchik, to wheedlingly (and forcefully) ingratiate himself to the composer. Barnes allows Shostakovich a moment of courage: “I have always said, and it has been one of the fundamental principles of my life, that I would never join a party which kills.” Pospelov replies, swiftly and smoothly, “But that is precisely my point, Dmitri Dmitrievich. We—the Party—have changed. No one is being killed nowadays. . . . The names of those who were purged are being rehabilitated. We need such work to continue.” Following Lebedinsky, Barnes insinuates that Shostakovich, worn down by being hounded, began drinking heavily. When he gives in, Barnes writes that “he submitted to Pospelov, as a dying man submits to a priest. Or as a traitor, his mind numb with vodka, submits to a firing squad.” Barnes omits the bathetic moments, confirmed by both friends, when the composer wept and lost control. Lebedinsky: “I will never forget some of the things he said that night, sobbing hysterically: ‘I am scared to death of them.’ ‘You don’t know the whole truth.’ ‘From childhood I have been doing things that I wanted not to do.’ ‘I’m a wretched alcoholic.’ ‘I’ve been a whore, I am and always will be a whore.’ (He often lashed at himself with strong words.)” Barnes’s Shostakovich is less emotionally violent, more lightly sarcastic: “Being a coward required pertinacity, persistence, a refusal to change—which made it, in a way, a kind of courage.” Here he sounds, for better or for worse, less like a Soviet composer and more like a British novelist.
Shostakovich missed the Party convocation. He then travelled to East Germany and saw Dresden, whose destruction was the subject of a forthcoming film for which he was slated to write the score. Instead, in the resort of Gorlits, in Saxony, he composed his Eighth String Quartet in the course of three days. This piece goes undiscussed by Barnes, though it is easily Shostakovich’s most nakedly autobiographical, personal piece of writing. (In another novel in which Shostakovich plays a major part, William T. Vollman’s mammoth “Europe Central,” the quartet’s composition is detailed extensively—and Shostakovich’s neurotic, lacerating style more closely imitated.) Described by the composer in a letter to Glikman as “ideologically flawed and of no use to anybody,” it consists largely of variations on four notes—D, D-sharp, C, and B. In German, these notes have different lettering—D, S, C, H—which form the initials of the German spelling of Shostakovich’s name (Dmitri Schostakowitch). It was a motif he would use many times, if never again so obsessively.
Worked over in a mournful, reflective, nearly fugue-like largo in the first movement, the motif becomes hysterically repeated in the second movement, as if the composer were relentlessly interrogating himself. Quotations of Shostakovich’s own previous music abound—including, in the final movement with the name motif, a counterpoint from the last scene of “Lady Macbeth,” in which prisoners are transported to Siberia. One non-Shostakovich quotation, of the late-nineteenth-century revolutionary song “Tormented by a Lack of Freedom,” breaks through the fourth movement. Despite the title, it did not necessarily signify Shostakovich’s protest against his condition: the song was widely known to Soviet audiences as one of Lenin’s favorites. Glikman writes that Shostakovich called the piece a “pseudo-tragedy,” and that he wept through its composition. Lebedinsky reports having found Shostakovich suicidal after finishing it.
Barnes skips these highly novelistic scenes from Shostakovich’s life. The final part of the novel finds Shostakovich in the Brezhnev years, at the height of his prestige, being driven by a chauffeur like a paid member of the nomenklatura and confronting the costs of his own cowardice. This is the era of dissidents and samizdat, and so there is an especially acute sting when he recalls signing critical reviews of other composers that he did not write, or putting his name to a petition condemning Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose exposé of the Gulags, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” he actually admired. He must confront, too, the costs of using irony as a coping mechanism: of being able “to parrot the jargon of Power, to read out meaningless speeches written in your name, to gravely lament the absence of Stalin’s portrait in your study while behind a half-open door your wife is holding herself in against forbidden laughter.” Barnes’s Shostakovich concludes the novel a sort of rueful postmodernist, worried whether the game of codes and doublespeak he has been playing all his life has shielded him from true political or artistic commitment.
But with this drily self-chastising, depressed, and exhausted composer, Barnes is also shielding himself from other Shostakoviches, such as the one who fiercely criticized an avant-garde young composer, whose work he had hitherto supported, when he discovered the deputy culture minister sitting in the audience and became frightened. This Shostakovich is a bundle of nerves, anxious to please authorities less out of an ironist’s sense of the game than out of deep and irremediable fear, built up over decades. At the same time, in the last fifteen years of his life, there were moments of bravery left to him. In his Thirteenth Symphony, composed shortly after his accession to the Communist Party, he set to music some poetry detailing the murder of Jews in Ukraine by the Nazis. This was material that rarely appeared in official culture, because it supposedly deëmphasized the suffering of “true” Russians. Afraid of banning the symphony outright, authorities allowed it to première to hysterical applause—before insuring that it went unreviewed and unperformed thereafter.
As he suffered from illness in his later years, Shostakovich composed his three last quartets: exquisite, tragic masterpieces, projections less of an individual beaten by a regime than of a frail man cornered at last by death. His music was at once more constrained and more free than Barnes acknowledges. Fearful but implacably talented, the references and allusions that ran through it were to the deepest conflicts within himself. As he sought his place in music history, he asked what, after everything, the sound of his own name might mean. It remains a question of an insistent, unanswerable kind.
