D.D. Shostakovich: in memoriam
by planetparker
On August 9th 1975, the heart of Dmitrii Dmitrievich Shostakovich stopped beating, With his demise the world was not only robbed of one of the greatest composers of his time, but also of a unique yet complex witness to the history he had lived through.
He was a survivor. Sometimes people who have not known suffering or fear appear to criticise him because of this. It is as if by surviving he had made some sort of Faustian compact.
There are two photographs which anybody familiar with Shostakovich will know. The first dates from c. 1929. It shows four people, of whom the youthful and 
energetic Shostakovich seated at the piano is a clear exemplar of his precocious genius. The three other people in the photograph are the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, armed with a cigarette; the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, who appears to be attempting to communicate or at least argue a point with the young Shostakovich; while the fourth personage, standing avuncularly over the rest is none other than Marshal of the Soviet Union Mikhail Tukhachevskii: like many leading communists he had sought to advance his prestige by “collecting” artists, whose patronage he could use in a protective way, though as a gifted amateur violinist he was no mere dilettante. Of the four Shostakovich alone did not die a violent or horrible death. Mayakovsky, perhaps armed with a prescient intelligence as biting and as sharp as his verse realised that time would eventually catch up with him, and ever an egoist. opted to end his own life by suicide in 1930. Tukhachevskii “fell from grace” in 1937 when he was accused of being a German double agent, on the basis of information leaked by Stalin (anonymously) to the Czechs, and then shot after a secret trial. As for Meyerhold, he was shot in February 1940.
There is another photograph which I have not included. It was taken of Shostakovich in his casket, which, according to Russian Orthodox custom, remained open during the funeral ceremony of 1975. I believe that his face is governed by what appears to me to be a smile. It is the smile of the survivor, the person who has defied history, fate, the brutality of the state, the firing squad. It is the defiant smile of the survivor. To do this he had been compelled to offer numerous hostages to fortune. Perhaps that is why the first movement of his Symphony no.15 is peppered with references to Rossini’s “Wilhelm Tell” overture (though I think a more personal reason relating to his son Maksim exists for the quotation).
His true nature is to be found in his musical work, especially though not exclusively the works from the latter decade and a half of his life, including the late string quartets, the song cycles, and the enigmatic symphonies no. 14 and 15.
Shostakovich the atheist
Shostakovich was apparently an atheist. He admitted this in the controversial memoirs published under the title Testimony, in which he had no need to differ from the then current official ideology. It is possible to see signs of questioning of one’s existence in his work, doubts which not even the most fervent atheist can eschew when faced with the approaching unknowability of life’s extinction. This is evident in his penultimate song cycle, the settings of sonnets by Michelangelo. For me, at least, the final setting entitled “Immortality”” is like the “In Paradisum” of a requiem with its naive, even childish piano accompaniment. “…I am not dead, though buried in the earth … I live on in the hearts of all loving people, for I am not dust: mortal decay cannot touch me”.
The composer smiles
Most of the surviving photographs show Shostakovich bathed in thought, either with his hand holding his jaw as if suffering from tooth ache, or holding his hand close to his mouth, almost biting his nails. Images of the composer smiling are very rare, but here is an excerpt of his attendance at rehearsals in the year of his death, 1975 of his brilliant opera The Nose, bristling with the anarchy of youth. We can see the influence it has on him as he hears his music performed after four and a half decades. He is ecstatic as he clearly recalls every note and sings along with the chorus. I find the first part of this film truly moving. Towards the end he talks about his music, but in is in an “official” way; he seems to be reading from a carefully censored script. His nervousness evident from the constant movement in his hands.
Ciaran's Peculier [sic] Blog 