The Tragedy of Dmitri Shostakovich

Even as he undercut one of history's most brutal dictators, Shostakovich couldn't keep himself from collaborating with the Soviet regime late in his life.

Photo by Johanna Vogt on Unsplash

Dmitri Shostakovich is one of the most famous Russian composers of the 20th century. His music is so well-known that readers don’t even need to be familiar with his symphonies or string quartets. Waltz No. 2 is played every Christmas and has even made it into movies like Bad Santa.

His other compositions navigated the difficult balance between composing striking, original music and pleasing the censors Josef Stalin employed in his regime. At the beginning of his career, he managed to walk that tightrope. However, as Laurel Fay recounts in her biography Shostakovich: A Life, Shostakovich fell and almost lost his life.

Stalin’s Early and Lasting Threat

In 1936, Stalin attended a showing of one of Shostakovich’s operas, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Shostakovich was coming off a streak of praise from the official Soviet newspaper, Pravda, which was understood to be the word of Stalin himself.

So, Shostakovich knew to be afraid when Stalin left the production early and when an editorial called “Muddle Instead of Music” appeared in Pravda shortly after the performance:

“From the very first moment of the opera the listener is flabbergasted by the deliberately dissonant, muddled stream of sounds. Snatches of melody, embryos of a musical phrase drown, struggle free and disappear again in the din, the grinding, the squealing. To follow this “music” is difficult, to remember it is impossible…At the same time as our critics—including musical critics—swear by the name of Socialist Realism, in Shostakovich’s work the stage presents us with the coarsest naturalism.”

The characteristically Soviet jargon reflected the ideology that Stalin had imbibed since joining forces with Lenin and Trotsky. By now, Stalin had the sprawling state under his control, and no other official had the intelligence of the secret police, military, and other branches of intelligence.

Stalin’s word on matters of ideology was law, and Shostakovich had violated it. Now his life and freedom were at risk until he could return to Stalin’s good graces.

The Fifth Symphony’s Triumph

It took Shostakovich two symphonies to save his life. He composed his Fourth Symphony, shepherded it through rehearsals, then refused to have it performed live. Shostakovich wrote the Fourth Symphony partially in anger at Stalin’s criticisms and filled it with the kinds of dissonances that Stalin objected to.

So, when Shostakovich wrote his Fifth Symphony, he filled it with the kinds of traditional Soviet march style he thought Stalin would approve of. But Shostakovich’s discontent never disappeared. He still wanted to express the fear and paranoia that Soviet life instilled in its citizens.

Shostakovich had to help the audience feel the same things he was feeling while cloaking it in the sounds that Stalin would consider “accessible” to the working man.

“One witness recalled that men and women cried openly during the Largo, another that as the finale progressed, the listeners began to rise to their feet, one by one, giving release at the end to a deafening ovation as Mravinsky [the conductor] waved the score over his head.”

The finale begins with a menacing march that ends with triumphant blocks of major triads and timpani. Listeners can’t help but feel the victory that Shostakovich has achieved after struggling against the impossible sensibilities of Josef Stalin.

Many recountings of Shostakovich end there, with the triumph of his Fifth Symphony and his undercutting of a paranoid dictator. However, his legacy for artistic freedom is much more complicated.

Shostakovich Never Shook His Paranoia

In 1973, a full 20 years after Stalin died, the Soviet press launched a smear campaign against Andrey Sakharov, a famous physicist who made “alleged ‘anti-Soviet’ statements to Western press.” A letter titled “He Disgraces the Calling of Citizen” circulated, signed by 12 musicians. Shostakovich was among them.

Human rights activist Lidiya Chukovskaya concluded that “genius and villainy are compatible” in writing about the letter and its signatories. Fay noted that “At this late date, it was widely believed, there was no conceivable threat or risk to someone of Shostakovich’s stature that could have justified his signing such a document.”

The Soviet Union was crumbling, and figures like Shostakovich were no longer at serious risk for murder or a gulag sentence as they would have been only two or three decades earlier.

Fay identified an exchange Shostakovich had with a friend that painted a troubling picture of the composer at this late stage in his life:

“‘When I read in that story about Andrey Yefimovich Ragin, it seems to me I am reading memoirs about myself. This especially concerns the description of the receiving of patients, or when he signs ‘blatently falsified accounts,’ or when he ‘thinks’…and to a great deal else.’ Shostakovich’s identification with Chekhov’s Dr. Ragin, an anti-hero, a nonresister to evil by constitution and conviction, was far from flattering.”

Shostakovich’s greatest triumphs came from his resistance to Stalin’s regime. But at the end of his life, he couldn’t overcome the pressure to conform to the regime in the type of attack others had defended him from in much more dangerous circumstances.

Making brave choices may make future acts of bravery easier, but avoiding outright conflict with a regime can make collaboration more tempting in the future.