Shostakovich (center) with the Beethoven Quartet |
...it is asked whether this lyrical composition is typical of our music, whether it is connected with its basic tasks. Such doubts call forth a protest from me. Could it be that the embodiment of high ethical qualities, the creation of an image of a full-grown human being with strong, finely-honed, noble yet uncomplicated feelings--could it be that all this is not one of the chief tasks of socialist art? [op. cit. p. 351]
It is important to recall that 1940-41 was a window of relative openness in Soviet aesthetic control. The Cold War was not yet and in fact, neither the USA nor the Soviet Union was yet in the Second World War--the Soviets were still allies of Nazi Germany! The denunciation of Shostakovich in 1936 was past and he had executed a change of course to return to the favor of the authorities. The second denunciation of 1948 was in the future and at this moment in time, Shostakovich took the opportunity to reinvent the role of chamber music in the Soviet Union--all of his string quartets except the first, slight, example, will follow the Quintet. Shostakovich judged the moment well and Taruskin points out the case of Prokofiev who did just the opposite (though he did make some interesting critical comments on the Quintet).
Taruskin observes that
Shostakovich was a better chooser than Prokofieff; his life achieved a better synthesis of personal integrity and necessary adaptation. The Quintet is a beautiful example of such adaptation--adaptation to the demands of Socialist Realism, grand style, life-affirmation, and all, and an adaptation to new affordances vouchsafed by a particularly "German" moment in Soviet Culture.
This makes me reconsider my own choices and adaptation--or rather, lack of it--to a career in music over the last fifty years. Like Prokofiev, my choices were often poor. I tended to avoid adaptation and competition. This was partly because of poor socialization and lack of confidence. I think you need a deep well of confidence to sustain any career in music! If I had it to do over, I think I would try to take the bull by the horns and dive into competition instead of avoiding it.
Let's end by listening to a recording of Shostakovich with the Beethoven Quartet playing the Piano Quintet:
alternately, wasn't it Bartok who quipped that "prizes are for horses"?
ReplyDeleteBut then I've been a lifelong hobbyist myself as a guitarist and a composer. The hobbyist with a day job thing worked out tolerably for Charles Ives.
Someone certainly did, though it is not easy to search for!
ReplyDeleteBartok however, is an example of someone who struggled with managing his career.
Gotta love flinty Charles Ives comment from Essays Before a Sonata: “…. he suspected three weeks in a Kansas cornfield would do a budding composer more good than three weeks at a prestigious academy in Rome.”
ReplyDeleteFlinty indeed! The way composers present themselves through speech and writing is often underrated. Ives was always telling us to stand up and use our ears like a man!
ReplyDeleteIves quotations are such fun. I think Ives shouted that comment ('use your ears like a man!') during a performance of Ruggle's Men and Mountains, and at an audience member who was booing. I'm also pretty sure he also called an audience member near him a 'goddamn sissy'. Must have been some concert.
ReplyDeleteIves adapted superbly and with humility to popular music, and had a prophetic sense of the high musical aesthetic that was to come, which is partly why his music has had so much success in the decades since his death. But he also adapted very badly to the social-cultural expectation of the American early twentieth-century classical music world. (Both the conservative 'old women of both sexes' who apparently organised the concerts, and even modernists like Elliot Carter who were baffled by Ives's frequent use of musical quotations.) In his time the combination was fatal professionally; in our time it's perhaps much more viable, even advantageous.
Charles Ives, our earliest post-modernist and youngest reactionary. They just don't make 'em like that any more.
ReplyDelete