1 Note to academia.edu readers: This article was published in Music and Letters, 2007, vol. 88 No. 2, pp. 266-296. This is a final draft. The "Old Shostakovich": Reception in the British Press Perhaps uniquely in biographical history, the British and American reception of Dmitri Shostakovich has been divided into two parts: the 'old' and 'new', with the 'new' Shostakovich still popularly perceived in websites, chat lists and occasional articles as the 'real' composer and the 'old' allegedly perceived as a faithful Communist. 1 The key document in this change of image was, of course, Solomon Volkov's Testimony, published as Shostakovich's dictated memoirs but now authoritatively discredited as dishonest. 2 The other, possibly even more overtly I would like to thank all those working in orchestral archives who have kindly helped me in researching this article: David Harman of the BBC Proms, Libby Rice of the London Symphony Orchestra, Sarah Hirons of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Beresford King-Smith of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Frances Cook of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Eleanor Roberts of the Hallé. I would also like to thank Derek Hulme for kindly sending me his tapes of radio broadcasts, Jean Turner and John Cunningham of the SCRSS archive and the staff of the BBC Written Archive at Caversham, Reading for their generous assistance. I am extremely grateful to Laurel Fay and Richard Taruskin for their comments on an early version of this article. 1 For anyone wishing to gain an overall picture of popular writing on this subject, the DSCH-list (http://listserv.uh.edu/archives/dsch-l.html) has archives covering the worst excesses of the late 1990s, C.H.Loh's website has a collection of other tendentious articles (http://www.geocities.com/kuala_bear/ds.html). 2 Solomon Volkov, Testimony: The Memoirs of Dimitri Shostakovich as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov, New York: Harper and Row, 1979 and London: Faber, 1981. The literature on this book and its claims to authenticity, is now extensive. Much of it is reprinted, along with important new research, in Malcolm Hamrick Brown, ed., A Shostakovich Casebook, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana
Transcript
1
Note to academia.edu readers:
This article was published in Music and Letters, 2007, vol. 88 No. 2, pp. 266-296.
This is a final draft.
The "Old Shostakovich": Reception in the British Press
Perhaps uniquely in biographical history, the British and American reception of
Dmitri Shostakovich has been divided into two parts: the 'old' and 'new', with the
'new' Shostakovich still popularly perceived in websites, chat lists and occasional
articles as the 'real' composer and the 'old' allegedly perceived as a faithful
Communist.1 The key document in this change of image was, of course, Solomon
Volkov's Testimony, published as Shostakovich's dictated memoirs but now
authoritatively discredited as dishonest.2 The other, possibly even more overtly
I would like to thank all those working in orchestral archives who have kindly helped me in researching
this article: David Harman of the BBC Proms, Libby Rice of the London Symphony Orchestra, Sarah
Hirons of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Beresford King-Smith of the City of Birmingham Symphony
Orchestra, Frances Cook of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Eleanor Roberts of the Hallé. I
would also like to thank Derek Hulme for kindly sending me his tapes of radio broadcasts, Jean Turner
and John Cunningham of the SCRSS archive and the staff of the BBC Written Archive at Caversham,
Reading for their generous assistance. I am extremely grateful to Laurel Fay and Richard Taruskin for
their comments on an early version of this article.
1 For anyone wishing to gain an overall picture of popular writing on this subject, the DSCH-list
(http://listserv.uh.edu/archives/dsch-l.html) has archives covering the worst excesses of the late 1990s,
C.H.Loh's website has a collection of other tendentious articles
(http://www.geocities.com/kuala_bear/ds.html).
2 Solomon Volkov, Testimony: The Memoirs of Dimitri Shostakovich as related to and edited by
Solomon Volkov, New York: Harper and Row, 1979 and London: Faber, 1981. The literature on this
book and its claims to authenticity, is now extensive. Much of it is reprinted, along with important new
research, in Malcolm Hamrick Brown, ed., A Shostakovich Casebook, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana
2
polemical, was Ian MacDonald's The New Shostakovich, first published in 1990, and
re-issued in 2006.3 The impact of both books has undeniably been substantial, and
there is no doubt that MacDonald's 'new' Shostakovich was intended as a
corroboration of Volkov's portrayal of the aging composer. But the very notion that a
composer's reception history can be divided into a 'before' and 'after' on the strength
of one or two books is clearly problematic. It is certainly tempting to writers who
wish to insist on a new position to attempt to discredit the 'opposition', and for sheer
aggressive polemics, the so-called Shostakovich 'debates' of the 1990s are
unparalleled in the history of modern musicology. Scholars who have questioned the
authenticity of Testimony have been reviled on websites, in books, magazines and
newspaper articles as the equivalent of Holocaust deniers and proponents of a
Shostakovich who was little more than a Stalinist stooge.4 Like all such
University Press, 2004. Any reader wishing to gain an overview of the so-called 'Shostakovich debates'
should consult this volume.
3 Ian MacDonald, The New Shostakovich, London: Fourth Estate: 1990; Boston: Northeastern
University Press, 1990, and MacDonald, ed. Raymond Clarke, The New Shostakovich , London:
Pimlico, 2006. Readers new to this subject should approach the new edition with caution, since it was
edited (with numerous misquotations and musical errors corrected) and revised after MacDonald's
death by Clarke, and is therefore not fully representative either of the author's actual views or of his
ability to read Shostakovich's scores, which can be more fully appreciated by reading his posthumously
maintained website at: http://www.siue.edu/~aho/musov/deb/deb.html or by reading the original 1990
edition.
4 See Norman Lebrecht, 'Shostakovich: Dissident Notes', Daily Telegraph, January 19, 2000, p. 25, also
available on http://www.scena.org/columns/lebrecht/000119-NL-Dissident.htm. We have probably not
seen the last of this mud-slinging: as late as 2004 Lebrecht ludicrously described Laurel Fay's
biography of Shostakovich as a book that seeks to portray him as 'slavishly obedient to Stalin’s whim'
Lebrecht, 'The Fight for Shostakovich', http://www.scena.org/columns/lebrecht/040324-NL-
3
reconstructions of famous figures, the 'new' Shostakovich was advanced in reaction to
an assumed 'old': Shostakovich the dutiful communist. Without an old, there can be no
new; without a body of opinion to which to ascribe one set of views, opposition to it is
pointless. But who the 'old Shostakovich' really was – his pre-Testimony image in the
West – has been largely forgotten.5
Clearly, a comprehensive reception survey taking account of all published and
broadcast materials lies well beyond the remit of a journal article. But by
reconstructing Shostakovich's image in British mainstream musical life (chiefly
through orchestral programmes and reviews in the broadsheet press), I focus instead
on what may be seen as the 'establishment' view of Shostakovich: that espoused by
non-specialists whose knowledge of Soviet history was more likely to have been
acquired incidentally than by conscious effort. Their writings are a far more accurate
barometer of general musical opinion – inasmuch as any such thing exists – than those
of the handful of Shostakovich specialists active in Britain from the 1930s on, though
some discussion of their work has been essential for gauging its effect on music
journalism. Since the Fifth Symphony has accrued more layers of interpretation than
shostakovich.html). That there is no truth in such a claim can easily be verified by reading Fay's book
and one is left wondering exactly what the motivation could really be for such blatant mendacity. For
an overall discussion of this episode, see the introduction to Richard Taruskin, On Russian Music,
Berkeley and Los Angeles: 2007, forthcoming. I am grateful to Professor Taruskin for allowing me to
read a draft version of this chapter.
5 Some research has already been carried out in America on Shostakovich's reception history. See in
Terry Wait Klefstadt, 'The Reception in America of Dmitri Shostakovich, 1928-1946', PhD. diss.,
University of Texas, Austin, 2003, and Christopher H. Gibbs, '"The Phenomenon of the Seventh": A
Documentary Essay on Shostakovich's "War" Symphony' in Laurel Fay, ed., Shostakovich and his
World, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004, pp. 59-113.
4
any other piece by Shostakovich, and since its reception history is an especially rich
source of professional musical opinion regarding Shostakovich, I have focussed
mainly (though not exclusively) on that work. Materials I have been able to collect –
radio scripts, performance data and programme notes - trace the impact of political
events on Shostakovich programmes in Britain such as the Second World War, the
Cold War, the death of Stalin and Khrushchev's 'thaw', and lastly, the publication of
Testimony.6
Shostakovich in pre-war Britain
The first fully documented British performance of Shostakovich's music was a BBC
studio broadcast on 5 February 1932 of the First Symphony conducted by the Russian
emigré Nikolai Mal'ko (who had given the Leningrad première in May 1926) and the
BBC Orchestra, alongside Aleksandr Mosolov's Piano Concerto played by Solomon.7
6 The orchestral archives I have been able to examine are: the BBC Proms, BBC Symphony Orchestra
(BBCSO), The Hallé, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO), London Symphony
Orchestra (LSO) and London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO). The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic
Orchestra (RLPO) archive was not accessible at the time of researching this article; nor were those of
the Philharmonia or regional BBC orchestras such as the BBC Philharmonic. As a result, all the figures
presented in this article are incomplete and should be understood as giving a general picture of British
Shostakovich programmes only.
7 A programme note (by D.M.C.) for the London concert première of the First Symphony at the Proms,
(19 September 1935) claims that Mal'ko conducted it in a studio concert in December 1929. However,
if this concert date is accurate, it does not appear to have been broadcast. A concert of Russian music
including Miaskovsky's Ninth Symphony conducted by Mal'ko was broadcast on 20 December 1929;
but neither the Radio Times, The Listener nor The Times has any record of Shostakovich's First
Symphony being publicly performed or broadcast in December 1929. It is possible that some confusion
5
Mal'ko was responsible for most of the pre-war Shostakovich performances in Britain,
championing the First and Third Symphonies and the suite from The Nose alongside
works by Mosolov, Nikolai Miaskovsky and Prokofiev. British conductors took an
interest in the First Symphony, though not in the Second or Third: Hamilton Harty
and the Hallé gave the UK concert première of the First Symphony in Manchester on
21 January 1931, and Henry Wood gave the London première in the 1935 Proms, with
Mosolov's Zavod and Oda Slobodskaya singing Katerina's Act One aria from Lady
Macbeth. In spite of Wood's interest and Mal'ko's continuing work with the Wireless
Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra (BBCSO) and the London Symphony
Orchestra (LSO), British pre-war Shostakovich programmes were few: from those
records examined, it seems that the First Symphony had only received five public
performances by 1940, the First Piano Concerto two and Lady Macbeth (complete
concert performance) one; while the suite from The Nose and the Third Symphony
had been recorded by Mal'ko and broadcast once, in 1934 and 1936 respectively.8 Of
Shostakovich himself, music critics and musicologists knew very little. By 1939, they
knew that his rise to fame at the age of just nineteen had been meteoric; that he was an
avowed loyal communist (as declared in his 1931 New York Times interview9), and
that he had been reprimanded by the Soviet authorities over his opera Lady Macbeth.
arose here over two Mal'ko concerts, and the performance D.M.C remembered may have been that of 5
February 1932.
8 The broadcast dates are as follows: Suite from The Nose, 26 January 1934; Third Symphony, 23
February 1936.
9 Rose Lee, 'Dmitri Szostakovich: Young Russian Composer Tells of Linking Politics with Creative
Work', The New York Times, 20 December, 1931, Section 8, p. 8. The young Shostakovich's remark
'There can be no music without ideology' was frequently quoted in British programme notes throughout
the 1930s and 40s, generally without drawing adverse comment.
6
They also largely regarded Shostakovich as a brilliant imitator who had not yet found
his own voice and as a composer of deliberately vulgar, crass music. Not surprisingly,
it was Lady Macbeth that had raised the most hackles in this respect. It was performed
in a concert version in the Queen's Hall on 18 March 1936, to decidedly lukewarm
acclaim. Benjamin Britten's diary entry from 18 March is especially revealing with
regard to the 'establishment' sneers at Shostakovich's opera:
I will defend it through thick and thin against these charges of 'lack of
style'...The 'eminent English Renaissance' composers sniggering in the stalls
was typical. There is more music in a page of MacBeth [sic] than in the whole
of their 'elegant' output! 10
The accusation of 'lack of style' certainly sounds vague enough to cover a multitude of
perceived sins, but it is likely that it referred to Shostakovich's penchant for stylistic
parody to comic, ironic and dramatic effect. Lady Macbeth is rich in pastiche,
especially of Italian operetta. Under the headings 'Composer With Gift for Comedy'
and 'Merry Flogging Scene', Richard Capell's Daily Telegraph review of the London
concert performance of Lady Macbeth in March 1936 outlines the stylistic quirks that
British critics found the most disturbing:
Shostakovitch's Lady Macbeth is an adultress and murderess of quite the most
vulgar kind. To give him his due, the composer does not profess to treat her
misadventure tragically. What has interested him is the opportunities for
boisterous episodes and the characteristic scenes like the bullying of the
housekeeper, the flogging of Sergei – a merry page of 'Taming of the Shrew'
10 Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten 1913-1976 ed. Donald
Mitchell, London: Faber and Faber, 1991, Volume 1, p. 409.
7
music – and the drunkard's song at the beginning of the 3rd act, which the
audience would have liked encored.... it must be said that the young composer is
not, like so many of his contemporaries in the West, paralysed by self-
consciousness. He is healthily capable of the most unblushing commonplaces....
The programme excused these as being intended parodistically. It will not quite
do. If Shostakovitch wants his use of waltz rhythms to be taken as parody, he
must do more than say so.... As a parodist, this composer is a babe compared
with Stravinsky.11
This review neatly sums up the commonest British criticisms of Shostakovich's early
style. The vulgarities are not adequately balanced by 'serious' music; the notion that
they could be construed as parody does not in itself surprise, but the parody seems too
crude to be convincing. Though harsh, Capell's critique pales by comparison with
Ernest Newman's enraged review of the opera. Scolding the BBC for squandering its
cash on an opera by a 'boy' when the music of real geniuses like Ernest Bloch is
overlooked in London, Newman adds his voice to Capell's in finding Lady Macbeth
crass. In a sneer that was to be echoed in later British writing on Shostakovich,
Newman put the success of the opera in Russia down to inferior musical judgement:
'The supposed irony of some passages, the social criticism of others, may go down in
Soviet Russia but are very thin stuff for sophisticated Western ears and minds.'12
Immediately striking to the post-Testimony reader is the absence of any
mention of Pravda's notorious condemnation of the opera and of Shostakovich's
subsequent political disgrace. Though the British première of Lady Macbeth was well
11 Richard Capell, The Daily Telegraph, 19 March, 1936, p. 10.
12 Ernest Newman, The Sunday Times, 22 March, 1936, p. 7.
8
covered in the press, including Michel D. Calvocoressi's article in the BBC highbrow
magazine The Listener (he also wrote the Queen's Hall programme booklet for the
performance and translated the libretto), no mention of these events, nor of the opera's
withdrawal from the Soviet stage, is to be found.13 There seems to be no clear reason
for this; the Manchester Guardian had reported the Pravda attacks and the opera's
immediate withdrawal about three weeks after the second editorial, 'Baletnaya fal'sh'
[Balletic Falseness] had appeared.14 Yet not even the Guardian critic mentioned this
in his own review;15 nor were these events subsequently discussed in any detail in the
musical press until the mid-1950s. The basic facts of the opera's condemnation,
however, became well known through the efforts of the British composer and member
of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Alan Bush, as will be seen.
'Muddle Instead of Music' and the Fifth Symphony
In 1939, at the behest of the Society for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Socialist
Republics (SCRSS), Shostakovich's Fifth was first played to a curious audience of
invited guests and music critics. At the tiny Celluloid cinema in Wardour Street,
13 M.D. Calvocoressi, 'Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk', The Listener, 11 March 1936, pp. 513-514.
14 'Shostakovich out of Favour: A Moscow Controversy', The Manchester Guardian, 26 February 1936,
p. 20.
15 See The Manchester Guardian, 19 March 1936, p. 3. The critic, anonymous as was the Guardian's
custom at this time, may have been Neville Cardus, who wrote music reviews from 1926, or William
McNaught, who later reviewed the Fifth Symphony in London.
9
London, this select group heard the symphony conducted by Yevgeniy Mravinsky on
sound-film.16
What is immediately striking about the numerous reviews of this recorded
concert is the sense of disappointment.17 The symphony was felt to be overly
conventional, Germanic in spirit rather than Russian – still less revolutionary – cheap
and clichéd in its Mahlerian popular dance references, sagging under the weight of a
dull, sentimental Largo and ending with an unspeakably vulgar, bombastic finale.
Two reviews stand out as particularly perceptive: W.J.Turner's in the New Statesman
and Nation and William McNaught's in the Musical Times. What seems to irritate
Turner most of all is that this symphony is supposed to be the prime representative of
the Soviet's cultural experimentation in music: to be the fruit of their massive State
subsidies as well as their attempt to make classical music comprehensible to the
masses. To those writing in the cash-starved and earnestly educational cultural climate
of 1930s Britain, this seemed a genuinely admirable state of affairs. The fact that the
Fifth Symphony seemed so derivative and lacking in originality to his ears was a
grave disappointment:
The third movement, Largo, is very weak and is rather like thin and sentimental
Tchaikovsky in his worst moments. … The finale Allegro non troppo is no
better; it is made of rubbishy musical material and is thoroughly eclectic with
echoes of both Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss. […] it is very depressing to
16 According to William McNaught's review, the first performance was for invited guests and critics
only, while the second (on November 26) was for the public, and held at the Academy Theatre, Oxford
Street. See McNaught, 'Shostakovich by Sound-Film', The Musical Times, December 1939, p. 822.
17 The SCRSS archive contains reviews from The Times, The Sketch, The New Statesman and Nation,
The Manchester Guardian, The Glasgow Herald, The Daily Mail, The Scotsman, Liverpool Daily Post,
The Musical Times, The Tribune, The Yorkshire Post, The Daily Worker, and The Eastern Daily Press.
10
find that Russia, in spite of all its munificent State aid to musicians and
composers, cannot produce anything better than this after a generation of
subsidised effort.18
Rather more sympathetically, McNaught's review notes that the official approval of
the Fifth due to its appeal to the proletariat might be viewed with suspicion:
Either the Russian workers are far in advance of our own musical public in
skilled and educated appreciation, or there has been some confusion of theory
and practice... To a 'promenade' audience this work would come as a tough
proposition. Moreover, to our surprise, it expresses little of the joy of life as
lived in a workers' paradise. Its emotional atmosphere is overcast; spiritually it
exists in a dim cavern full of looming shapes.19
The film concert was preceded by a talk in which the speaker (unnamed in the
reviews) tactfully explained that, since the Soviet authorities had expressed 'concern'
over aspects of Shostakovich's musical language in his ill-fated opera The Lady
Macbeth of Mtsensk, the composer had succeeded in overcoming his former formalist
errors and begun to compose in a style intelligible to the Soviet people. In fact, this
talk repeated and elaborated upon the news of Pravda's reprimand of Shostakovich
that had appeared in the Manchester Guardian in February 1936, but, insofar as it is
possible to gather from the reviews, it omitted completely the grimmer details given
18 The New Statesman and Nation, 2 December 1939, p. 787, reproduced by kind permission of the
SCRSS archive, London.
19 McNaught, 'Shostakovich by Sound-Film', p. 823. McNaught's comments on the companion work,
Veprik's Song of Jubilation, bear repeating for comparison: '[it] had more in it of objective belief in
Utopia, but was of little value as music' (ibid.).
11
in the Guardian. Written by the Guardian's Moscow correspondent, this short article
had reproduced substantial extracts from the 28 January Pravda editorial, gave exact
details of the opera's withdrawal from the stage after Stalin saw it and disliked it, and
even repeated the 'Moscow gossip' that Stalin himself had directly intervened in
having the opera removed from repertoire. It also darkly stated that the charge of
'Leftism' levelled at Shostakovich was a dangerous one, since all such '"Leftist"
tendencies in Russia today are being ruthlessly stamped out'.20 Although the 'Muddle
Instead of Music' story was covered in the New York Times and elsewhere in
America,21 it was reported in Britain only in a few papers, including the Manchester
Guardian, News Chronicle and (very briefly) The Daily Telegraph.22 As a result,
many of those who attended the sound-film concert would have been hearing the story
for the first time in the watered-down form that typified most pro-Soviet British
explications of Stalinist policy. The person responsible for disseminating this
information was the composer and conductor Alan Bush, who had visited the Soviet
Union the previous year. Given Bush's political views (he was a member of the
Communist Party of Great Britain and a lifelong supporter of Stalin), it is not
surprising to find him acting as an apologist for Pravda's denunciation of
20 See 'Shostakovich Out of Favour: A Moscow Controversy', The Manchester Guardian, 26 February
1936, p. 20.
21 See Harold Denny, 'Soviet Denounces "Leftism" in Music, The New York Times, 15 February, 1936,
p. 17, Joseph Philips, 'Moscow Critics Find Fault with Shostakovich', The New York Herald Tribune,
16 February, 1936, p. 8, Sergei Radamsky, 'Soviet Direction in Music', The New York Times, April 5,
1936, p. 5. Cited in Klefstadt, 'The Reception in America of Dmitri Shostakovich, pp. 140-141, nn. 94-
96.
22 'Stalin: Music Critic', The Daily Telegraph, 4 March 1936, p. 14; 'Stalin Throws Down Musical Idol',
News Chronicle, 15 February 1936 p. 24.
12
Shostakovich in his programme note for the first concert performance of the Fifth
Symphony in 1940:
in consequence of this decision [to withdraw Lady Macbeth] Shostakovich has
modified his style which is now free of that research of effect for its own sake,
of which complaint had been made, and he has returned to the deeper sources of
inspiration that characterised the first symphony.23
Such approval of the change wrought in Shostakovich's style allegedly as a result of
Pravda's censure was to become a staple of British (and occasionally American)
music criticism. But at the time of the Fifth's concert première, Bush's approval of
Shostakovich's new style was not widely shared. When the SCRSS organised its first
concert performance, it was played in the Queen's Hall, London, in 1940, with Bush
conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra in an all-Soviet concert that included
Khachaturian's recent Piano Concerto and Miaskovsky's Sixteenth Symphony. In part,
the unfriendliness of the critics on this occasion may have been exacerbated by
irritation with the rest of the programme; its afternoon scheduling probably further
increased critical languor. On the face of it, their disappointment seems strange.
Certainly, London critics were not hostile to the conservative wing of modern music;
Sibelius and Vaughan Williams had powerful champions, while Berg's music was
widely preferred to the less 'romantic' Schoenberg's. By 1940, Bartok had only quite
recently won broad acceptance in Britain; Webern's music was treated with extreme
caution, and even Berg's Lulu suite drew only lukewarm applause at its première in
23 Alan Bush, programme note for the UK première of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, 13 April, 1940.
Reproduced by kind permission of the SCRSS archive, London.
13
1935.24 The pendulum of British critical opinion was not to swing in a more overtly
'modernist' direction until the beginning of William Glock's reign as Controller of
Music at the BBC in 1959, and in any case this was arguably not the dominant trend
in British musical life outside the confines of the BBC even in the 1960s and 70s.25 In
this earlier climate, it would be reasonable to expect Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony
to have been bracketed with those of Sibelius or Nielsen. In fact, those very aspects of
Shostakovich's style that critics ranging from the conservative Richard Capell to the
Russian specialist (and early Bartok supporter) Calvocoressi had disliked in Lady
Macbeth (indiscriminate selection of styles, use of cheap and vulgar music, clumsy
parody), should have been conspicuous in the Fifth Symphony by their relative
absence. To some extent, this was the case: Edwin Evans and the Times critic
(possibly H.C. Colles) liked the Khachaturian and Miaskovsky works and found
Shostakovich's symphony talented, if not actually enjoyable. But another aspect of
Shostakovich's style now drew fresh criticism: his penchant for austere, even gloomy
music and bombastic finales. Obvious remnants of his parodistic Lady Macbeth style
also went down badly, though their presence is now put down to political opportunism
on Shostakovich's part.
The Observer critic (possibly William Glock) was the harshest, complaining of
a 'surge of sixth-rate music'; the Spectator critic (Dyneley Hussey) found it 'dull and
24 For further information on critical attitudes in the 1930s, see Stephen Banfield, ed., Music in Britain:
The Twentieth Century, Blackwells's History of Music in Britain, vol. 6, London: 1995; Jennifer
Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922-1936. Cambridge: 1999, and Malcolm Gillies,
Bartok in Britain. A Guided Tour. Oxford: 1989.
25 As noted below, Boulez in his capacity as conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra (1971-77) did
not programme a single Shostakovich work, but he was easily outnumbered by those conductors who
actively supported Shostakovich's music in the 1960s and 70s.
14
pretentious' and cheaply derivative (chiefly of Mahler, the 'tea-shop' and Boris
Godunov); the Manchester Guardian critic (McNaught) judged Shostakovich to have
hardly matured since his First Symphony:
In the allegro movement, the composer, remembering his duty to the proletariat,
indulges in tunes and rhythms of a popular band, but succeeds only in making a
mock of them and in reminding the musical listener that Mahler did the same
kind of thing with greater conviction.26
Shostakovich's transformation from comedian to tragedian had failed to convince,
while the bombastic ending raised several inquiring eyebrows. The Spectator critic
Dyneley Hussey put it bluntly:
The [First] Symphony had... a youthful vitality and a rather engaging
impudence that made up for its complete lack of style.… In his fifth [sic]
Symphony, … I see no signs that the lessons have been learned..... The result is
a dull and pretentious work. And I would respectfully ask the young men who
cannot bear the reiterated tonic and dominant with which Beethoven approaches
his cadences, how they can patiently endure the ending of the symphony with its
reiterated scream of the tonic for what seemed at least five minutes.27
The patronising tone of this review shows how ready some British critics were to
scorn a style of music with which they were not familiar. Of all the reviews of this
concert, this is the one most obviously influenced by political and cultural prejudice:
Hussey makes no attempt to conceal his personal hostility to the Soviet Union
26 The Manchester Guardian, 15 April, 1940, p. 8.
27 The Spectator, 19 April, 1940, p. 556. Reproduced by kind permission of the SCRSS archive.
15
('everyone wanted to be fair to an artistic product of the new civilisation, if the word
may be stretched to cover it, that was being created in Russia') and was evidently
happy to describe Khachaturian's Piano Concerto as 'rude, untutored clatter about
some Oriental Russian tunes' and a 'hotch-potch of crude and disjected [sic] ideas.'
Edwin Evans's staunchly pragmatic response in The Sketch was more
representative of mainstream musical opinion. But even here there is a hint of political
defensiveness; evidently in part a reaction against Bush's well-known radical politics
(and as such a defence of 'traditional' British musical values), his review is virtually a
credo of pre-war British music critics' political views:
In this country not only do we regard politics and the arts as separate worlds,
but it does not even occur to us to connect them, however remotely, in our
minds. If a composer gives us good music, we do not care two hoots to what
political creed he may owe allegiance. We simply cannot conceive any music as
being politically tainted.28
Despite his rather patronising tone, Evans was doing his best to establish a politically
neutral platform for discussing Shostakovich's music. In Britain, this could only have
served Shostakovich well, drawing attention away from his Soviet background and
focusing on the qualities of his music purely from the point of view of the listener: the
only aesthetic principle that British critics at this time acknowledged as relevant to
musical discussion. While from a 21st-century standpoint Evans's claim to an
apolitical position may seem not only deluded but also insensitive, it was at least free
from deliberate political posturing, of either a pro- or anti-communist nature. It did
not occur to anyone to hear the Fifth Symphony 'against' itself – as insincere - or to
28 Edwin Evans, 'The Food of Love', The Sketch, 24 April, 1940, p. 50. Reproduced by kind permission
of the SCRSS archive, London.
16
read political messages into it any more than it occurred to most of Shostakovich's
Russian contemporaries to hear it in that way in 1937. Those interpretations would
come much later, and only after Stalin's death had allowed a flood of new, more
reliable information about Soviet life in the 1930s to reach the West.
More strange is the fact that, though by 1940 details of the purges that had
formed the background to this work were well known, neither Evans nor any other
critic mentions them even in passing. Information about Stalin's purges had been
disseminated chiefly in The Times and The Manchester Guardian, and despite the
popularity of the Communist Party of Great Britain at that time (which aggressively
countered the 'anti-Soviet propaganda' supposedly advanced by the broadsheet press
in their own paper, The Daily Worker), the plain fact that life in Stalin's Russia was
dominated by fear and oppression was widely accepted.29 Yet no mention of this can
be found in pre-war music reviews, and it is worth pausing for a moment to consider
why this was. First, there is the obvious possibility that music writers did not know
anything about Soviet socio-politics because it did not interest them; or that they
made no connection between music and media reports that seemed to concern mainly
public figures (members of the Politburo, military, etc). While details of the major
political showtrials were attended by Western journalists and thus fairly well
disseminated in Britain, the fact that the Stalinist purge between 1936-38 swept artists
as well as millions of ordinary Soviet citizens into its vortex was less widely
29 This can be seen in the tone of editorials chronicling mass arrests and show trials in both the
conservative The Times and left-liberal The Manchester Guardian, where, despite the political
differences between the papers, both editors have no doubts about the veracity of reports on the purges,
and express complete agreement as to the corrupted nature of the Stalinist regime. See for example,
'The Terror in Russia', The Manchester Guardian, 10 February 1936, p. 8 and 'Pink Dawn', The Times,
18 March 1936, p. 15 and 'Malaise in Moscow', 29 September 1937 p. 13.
17
acknowledged. Second, the British cultural media did not hold any fixed position with
regard to Stalinist Russia, and during the 1930s it is possible to find pro-communist
articles, books and letters published alongside more critical writing even in the
highbrow BBC magazine The Listener.30 Third, as will be seen, music writers of that
era were strongly resistant to linking music with any concrete events: a position that
probably stemmed from the desire to avoid the lavish programmaticism of much 19th-
century music writing. Last, it must be remembered that no one would have
considered hearing Shostakovich's music as negatively engaging with the realities of
Soviet life or being 'dissident' in any way, simply because the notion of Soviet
dissidence was then barely acknowledged in the West, and even then not remotely in
the way that it was after Stalin's death.31 If politics crept into a music review at all, it
was only to note that Shostakovich may have been composing in a more 'Soviet' style
(using popular idioms, simple diatonic writing, ending with a brash finale).
30 See for example Dennis Stoll, 'The Musical Theatre in Soviet Russia', The Listener, 4 March 1936,
426-428, Joseph MacLeod's glowing account 'Soviet theatres today' in The Listener 19 January 1938,
125-127, and Beatrice Webb's interview with Wilson Harris, 'Efficiency and Liberty: Russia', The
Listener, 9 February, 1938, 281-283.
31 There were accounts of life in Soviet prisons and the gulag published in Britain as early as 1931: see
Alan Pim and Edward Bateson, Report on Russian Timber Camps, London: Ernest Benn Ltd, 1931;
Out of the Deep. Letters from Soviet Timber Camps. Intro by Hugh Walpole.London: Geoffrey Bles,
1933; Red Gaols. A Woman's Experiences in Russian Prisons, transl. O.B. [both author and translator
anon.] London: Burns Oates and Washbourne Ltd, 1935; George Kitchin, Prisoner of the OGPU,
London, New York and Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1935. Despite calls from various
humanitarian organisations for the British government to act, or at least to impose sanctions on Soviet
timber imports, the government's attitude to the Soviet Union appears to have been resolutely non-
interventionist, and this ‘neutral’ approach is, in the main, mirrored in the British broadsheet press
during the 1930s.
18
But there are other factors at work here too. It would seem that the Soviets'
demand for music (as with all the arts) to serve a social purpose if it is to be publicly
funded was acknowledged and accepted in Britain. In the main, critics had no quarrel
with it; as we have seen, some even approved of it (as would others as late as the
1970s). Yet no critic seems to have felt that either Lady Macbeth or the Fifth
Symphony was written 'down' for the proletariat; as noted above, McNaught doubted
that Russia's new audience would be able to grasp the new symphony, and where
Shostakovich was apparently trying to please them, his 'popular' style seemed to be
mocking the very popular idioms it evoked. If anything, some British criticisms bore
an uncanny resemblance to those expressed in Pravda and elsewhere: in finding the
Fifth Symphony's slow movement dull, they echoed Georgiy Khubov's 1938 article in
which the Largo was described as the weakest movement: 'It [the Largo] sharply falls
down from the high level of symphonic development in the first movement... After
the Hoffmanesque scherzo, listeners rightly expected further intensive dramatic
development. But instead Shostakovich gave them an inert, small worldly of
subjective-lyrical feelings and tearful sentences'.32 And in finding his treatment of
popular idioms banal and trite, they powerfully echo the infamous Pravda editorial of
6 February 1936, 'Baletnaya fal'sh', in which Shostakovich's light-hearted portrayal of
life on a collective farm is criticised for its disrespectful levity.33 This was not a new
criticism; Shostakovich had already been rebuked (though less severely) over his
flippant ballet score The Bolt.34 But it is intriguing to note that this aspect of
32 Georgiy Khubov, 'Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony', Sovetskaya Muzïka 1938 no. 3, pp. 14-28, p. 25.
33 The article is reproduced in Sovetskaya muzïka, 1936, no. 2, pp. 6-8.
34 See the musicologist Iosif Rizhkin's comments on The Bolt, cited in Pauline Fairclough, 'The
"Perestroyka" of Soviet Symphonism', Music and Letters, 83/2, 2002, pp. 452-460, p.457.
19
Shostakovich's youthful style was as unpopular with the critics in Britain as it was in
the Soviet Union.
Few of the British critics who read in Bush's programme note about the
changes to Shostakovich's style since being publicly rebuked in Pravda would have
disagreed with the idea that Lady Macbeth deserved harsh criticism; it is likely that
their only complaint would have been that the Fifth Symphony did not seem to show
enough of an improvement. This remarkable congruence of opinion between Pravda
and Western critics was reproduced in America, where Olin Downes had described
Stalin in The New York Times as a 'man of some musical common sense'.35 In this
context it is not hard to see that British critics would not have been inclined to
sympathise with Shostakovich's plight; as far as they were aware, he had written a
fairly bad opera, which had been no doubt justly criticised, and the Fifth Symphony
was supposed to represent his new, improved style. When that too disappointed, it
seemed that Shostakovich – once considered Russia's best new musical talent – was
falling into mediocrity and had only himself to blame. In short, it was to be a long
time before British critics would find themselves with cause to disagree with the
effect of political interference in Shostakovich's music. Though there were occasional
allusions to his being prevented from composing freely, this did not become an issue
in British music writing until the mid-late 1950s, when Shostakovich's stature was
less in doubt.
Britain and Russia as Allies
35 Downes, 'Shostakovich Affair Shows Shift in Point of View in the USSR', The New York Times, 21
April, 1936, p. 2. Cited in Klefstadt, 'The Reception in America of Dmitri Shostakovich', p. 142, n. 98.
20
By the time the Fifth Symphony was heard again in 1945, Shostakovich's reputation
had been transformed. When Russia became Britain's ally during the war, London
was buzzing with all-Russian concerts among which Henry Wood's birthday tribute
concert to Stalin in 1941 and the Western première of the Leningrad Symphony were
the highlights.36 Now inundated with performances of Russian music in a climate that
was enthusiastically pro-Soviet, critics were more positive about Shostakovich's
music. The Sixth Symphony of 1939 – ignored in Britain since the disappointment of
the Fifth – was premièred in London on 24 October 1943 (the LPO conducted by
Anatole Fistoulari), and the First Symphony received seven performances in London
during the war; even the Fifth was played twice. During this honeymoon period,
Shostakovich's stature underwent a fairly dramatic review. One of the most widely
circulated pieces about him was by Julian Herbage, then Assistant Director of Music
at the BBC. In an article for The Radio Times previewing the Eighth Symphony,
Herbage traces Shostakovich's creative evolution since the 1936 performance of Lady
Macbeth in London thus:
36 Stalin's birthday concert was broadcast on the BBC Home Service on Sunday, 21 December, 1941.
The programme included Glinka's Overture to Ruslan and Liudmila, Dunaevsky's 'Land of Freedom',
Shostakovich's 'Salute to Life' [best known as the 'Song of the Counterplan'], Balakirev's symphonic
poem 'Russia' and four movements from Prokofiev's Aleksandr Nevsky. The Western première of the
'Leningrad' Symphony took place on 22 June, 1942, at the BBC Maida Vale studio, with Henry Wood
conducting the LPO; the concert première took place in the Albert Hall a week later, at the Proms on
29 June. The studio première was broadcast on the Home Service that evening, and was actually
advertised on the front cover of the Radio Times (21 June 1942 issue). The Eighth Symphony received
its UK première on 22 July 1944; it was intended to form part of the Proms, but owing to the threat
from V-2 rocket attacks, the concert was broadcast from the BBC's Bedfordshire base instead.
21
Listeners...will remember the music as at times coldly cynical, at times
forcefully realistic. Use was made of parody and musical caricature, and the
eclecticism of styles seemed to indicate the absence of an underlying sense of
purpose. Then... the higher Soviet authorities condemned both this opera and the
later ballet The Limpid Brook, and performances of both were banned. The
Union of Soviet Composers issued a manifesto in which Shostakovitch was
accused of 'formalistic and insincere' tendencies, and he suffered artistic
banishment.
There can be no doubt that this treatment, arbitrary as it seemed at the
time, caused Shostakovitch to purge himself of much that was superficial and
casuistic in his style and to develop the more profound and introspective side
of his genius... from [the] fifth symphony onwards... Shostakovitch continues
his steady development as a symphonist. The formal construction of the last
four symphonies is most interesting and varied, but all four lay an increasing
emphasis on the symphonic Adagio, the introspective side of Shostakovitch's
nature. It is as if he were trying to develop his musical individuality by an
attempt to strike a balance between two contrasting sides of his personality...
Yet... it is through the solitary, introspective side of his nature that he will
advance as an artist.37
Those slow movements once regarded as merely tedious should now, Herbage
suggests, be seen as a central part of Shostakovich's creative identity. What is more,
he notes that it was the official criticism in Pravda that had enabled this 'profound and
introspective side of his genius' to flourish: a further manifestation of the paradoxical
37 Julian Herbage, 'All that is beautiful will triumph: An introduction to Shostakovitch and his
symphonies', The Radio Times, 7 July, 1944, p. 4.
22
harmony of British conservative musical opinion and that of Soviet cultural
apparatchiks. But in his sympathy for Shostakovich, Herbage was a minority voice
among prominent music writers during the war. While the tone of most reviews is
certainly kinder, or at least more neutral, the opinions behind them were arguably
unchanged. Of all the wartime reviews of Shostakovich's music, Ernest Newman once
again provides by far the harshest assessment. As was the case in his Lady Macbeth
review, Newman's irritation with Shostakovich's popularity, which to him appears
completely misconceived at best and at worst, a product of wartime propaganda, is
evident:
The final aesthetic value of a work of art has nothing whatever to do with
whether it comes to us from an ally or an enemy …. to the musician nothing
matters in conjunction with the Shostakovitch No. 7 but the quality of the music
in it; and that, it may as well be said at once with perfect frankness, is mostly
very poor....
To the man Shostakovich, writing with the boom of the German guns in his ears
… our hearts go out in sympathy and brotherhood; but let us, for heaven's sake,
keep clear of the crude fallacy that a work written in such conditions thereby
acquires an aesthetic value of its own.38
Newman's disgust with the 'Leningrad' Symphony's popularity owes much to his
contempt for the notion of musical creation as spurred by external events. In fact, he
feels so strongly about this that he follows up this review a week later with a further
piece pointing out the absurdity of the story told by Wagner's contemporary Peter
38 Ernest Newman, 'The New Shostakovich', The Sunday Times, 28 June 1942, p.2.
23
Cornelius, who heard a speaker attribute Beethoven's Seventh Symphony to the
Congress of Vienna and the German liberation. And in a final burst of irritation,
following a radio broadcast in 1944 conducted by Adrian Boult, Newman gave vent to
his contempt for the 'Leningrad' in such colourful terms that it is worth quoting the
whole passage:
The result [of the broadcast] was to confirm the former impression of most of us
that nothing at once so long-winded, so empty, so pretentious has been
perpetrated in music within living memory. The dreadful thing takes some
seventy minutes to perform; the amount of real musical thinking there was in it
could have been accomplished in seventeen by a composer who understood his
job. If you want to locate the work on the musical map, look for it somewhere
within the seventieth degree of longitude and the last degree of platitude.39
Since Newman was considered the most influential music critic then active, his
dismissal of Shostakovich would have carried substantial weight. Although the Ninth
Symphony was well received at its première at the First Night of the Proms in 1946, it
was to be many years before the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies were heard again in
Britain; the Fifth Symphony, briefly revived during the war, suffered neglect until
1953, and the Sixth was similarly ignored. Shostakovich's neglect in the decade after
the war cannot be put directly down to Cold War politics, however; the crusade
against Communists that occurred in America was not replicated in Britain, and there
seems no question that orchestras dropped these symphonies simply because they had
not as yet achieved real popularity or acceptance. The First and Ninth Symphonies
were performed fairly frequently throughout the 1940s and 50s, presumably because
39 Ernest Newman, 'The "Leningrad" Again', The Sunday Times, 30 January 1944, p. 2.
24
they were short, lightweight and, as one critic put it, showed that Shostakovich had
'shed his more pretentious luggage'.40
Before the war ended, however, two important books on Soviet music were
published in Britain: Gerald Abraham's Eight Soviet Composers and Victor Seroff's
Shostakovich. These were joined by Michel Calvocoressi's A Survey of Russian
Music in 1944.41 Both Calvocoressi's and Abraham's books were ground-breaking
studies of Shostakovich and his most significant compatriots by Russian music
scholars who read (at the very least) the Composers' Union journal Sovetskaya
muzïka and who were open-minded enough about the new Soviet art to take it
seriously when virtually no one else in Britain did. It is all the more revealing,
therefore, to find Abraham joining in the critical sneers at the Fifth Symphony, in
particular at the expense of the Largo ('one is glad to have the composer's own
assurance that "I wrote the third movement in just three days"'42) and the ending: ''the
most sympathetic listeners, Russian and foreign alike, nearly all agree in finding it
(particularly the D major coda) rather unconvincing'.43 The 'Leningrad' Symphony
comes in for a far worse sneer, however: the invasion theme 'certainly arouses a
feeling of hatred... – but not against the Nazis.'44 In general, Abraham finds
Shostakovich overrated and unoriginal, particularly since the conservative aesthetic of
socialist realism gained force in Soviet musical life from around the mid-1930s.
40 The Times, review of the Ninth Symphony's première, 29 July 1946, p. 8.
41 Gerald Abraham, Eight Soviet Composers, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943; Victor Seroff,
Dmitri Shostakovich: the Life and Background of a Soviet Composer, New York: Dutton, 1943;
Michel D. Calvocoressi, A Survey of Russian Music, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1944.
42 Abraham, Eight Soviet Composers, p. 27.
43 ibid., p. 27.
44 ibid., p. 31.
25
Calvocoressi had been a strong early supporter of Shostakovich, writing excellent
programme notes for the BBC's production of Lady Macbeth, and contributing
enthusiastic preview pieces on forthcoming Shostakovich concerts for The Listener.
But by 1944 he seems to have completely revised his opinion, starting with Lady
Macbeth, which
shows him thoroughly adrift as regards both style and processes. The score is a
jumble of incompatible styles, recalling in turn the late Wagnerians, the Central
European radicals, nineteenth-century grand opera and comic opera at their
most conventional (he is a great believer in the efficacy of platitudes, for
parodic or even satirical purposes), and also – in the last act – Puccini.... on the
whole, even though the official pronouncement that banned the music is open to
discussion from the point of view of musical criticisms pure and simple, there
can be no doubt that here Shostakovich stands revealed at his worst.45
And, notes Calvocoressi, though Pravda's criticisms seemed to secure success in
Russia with the Fifth Symphony, British and Parisian [read: more sophisticated
Western] critics had been more circumspect. Like Abraham, Calvocoressi also found
the 'Leningrad' Symphony interminable, claiming that he and many others simply
found it 'long and monotonous most of the time, and not in the least convincing'.46
These views show a striking congruence of scholarly and critical opinion about
a composer virtually no one in Britain really knew anything about. His Second
Symphony had never been heard (even Abraham did not know it), and the Third only
in a single radio broadcast; Lady Macbeth was hardly fairly represented in the concert
45 Calvocoressi, A Survey, p. 112.
46 ibid., p. 113.
26
version given by the BBC, and no one outside Russia (apart from Otto Klemperer,
who had been treated to a personal performance by Shostakovich in 1936) knew his
Fourth Symphony, merely assuming it had been a failure even by Shostakovich's
standards. Still less was anything known about Soviet musical life other than what
Calvocoressi and Abraham had read in Sovetskaya muzïka. Abraham, who probably
knew something of the pressures Shostakovich had come under, at least noted that the
conditions under which composers operate in Russia 'have exercised an almost
crippling restraint on such talented composers as Shostakovich and Knipper'47, thus
acknowledging Shostakovich's unenviable position, however mildly by the standards
we are familiar with today. It was Victor Seroff's biography that enabled British
readers to read for the first time a full translation of the first Pravda editorial and learn
that it was followed up in the Soviet press by letters calling for 'an end to bourgeois
aesthetes'. He gives a detailed account of the ensuing Composers' Union debates, of
the removal of Shostakovich's music from concert programmes, and even of the
atmosphere of fear in Russia following Kirov's assassination in December 1934.48
This background was subsequently repeated in programme notes on the Fifth
Symphony, though it was not until after Stalin's death that more explicit information
became available.
The Cold War and the Zhdanovshchina
It was during this period that Shostakovich was once again publicly disgraced in
Russia, in the infamous attacks on literature, philosophy and music between 1946-
1948 that historians have dubbed the Zhdanovshchina. In contrast to the media's near-
47 Abraham, Eight Soviet Composers, p. 8.
48 Seroff, Dmitri Shostakovich. pp. 204-224.
27
silence on the 1936 Pravda attacks, these events were widely recorded in the British
press and quickly followed by the publication of the first-hand reports of the British
journalist and BBC wartime Moscow correspondent Alexander Werth.49 Initially,
British music coverage was less than sympathetic; Shostakovich's reputation was still
in its post-war slump, and Russia, having started the Cold War by an aggressive
programme of re-armament and withdrawing from international talks, was once again
a subject for disdain, even in the musical press. This unsympathetic review in the
Penguin Music Magazine gives some indication of what the non-specialist view of
these events may have been:
Today brings queer news from Russia. Shostakovitch is in disgrace again! …
The most curious point is, perhaps, that British composers should exercise
abroad an influence far too often denied them in their own country. Meanwhile
it remains to be seen what form an artist's reply to just criticism will take this
time. The answer, in Shostakovitch's case, may even be another symphony, and
one for whose performance two hours are barely sufficient. On the whole it may
be more comfortable for him to settle down as a Free English composer, except
for the certainty that his most vigorous champions would lose all interest in his
work.50
The tone is strikingly ironic: there are digs at the British musical establishment for
neglecting their 'own' composers at the expense of foreigners', a sarcastic swipe at
49 See Alexander Werth, Musical Uproar in Moscow, London: Turnstile Press, 1949.
50 Robin Hull, 'New Music', Penguin Music Magazine, no. 7, Oct. 1948, p. 81. I am grateful to David
Harman for generously lending me his collection of Penguin Music Magazines, which would otherwise
have been difficult to obtain.
28
Shostakovich as the author of long, presumed dull, symphonies, and even the implied
accusation that supporters of his music are in some way anti-British. The tone of cool
sarcasm beloved of pre-war British critics had seemingly hardened into contemptuous
scorn to the point where they were not even capable of extending sympathy to a figure
they had apparently come to regard as merely the chief cultural export of a hostile
regime.
After Stalin
Stalin's death in 1953 and the revelations about his regime that followed sent shock
waves through the Western world. The period of de-Stalinisation officially instigated
by Khrushchev in 1956 and termed the 'Thaw' after Ilya Ehrenburg's novel Ottepel',
caused a flood of camp literature and horror stories to pour into the West that
definitively changed perceptions of the Soviet Union.51 Books on Shostakovich and
Soviet music published in the 1950s included two important emigré accounts: Andrei
Olkhovsky's Music Under the Soviets and Yuriy Yelagin's The Taming of the Arts.52
Folllowing these publications, Richard Anthony Leonard's 1956 A History of Russian
Music was the first musicological work to describe the terror of the Stalin years,
drawing heavily on Yelagin's book. Leonard notes that the Pravda attacks on
51 See Evgenia Ginsburg, Into the Whirlwind, London: Collins, 1967, Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag
Archipelago, London: Collins/Harvill Press, 1974, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, first
published in the Soviet Union in the periodical Literaturnaya gazeta in installments in 1961 and
published in Britain by Penguin in 1963, and Nadezhda Mandelstam's two autobiographical accounts of
her husband's (the poet Osip Mandelstam) arrest and her subsequent life, Hope Against Hope and Hope
Abandoned, London: Harvill Press, 1971 and 1974.
52 Andrei Olkhovsky, Music under the Soviets: the agony of an art. New York: Frederick A. Preager,
1955; Jury Jelagin, The Taming of the Arts, New York: Dutton, 1951.
29
Shostakovich effectively 'served them [artists] with notice that their period of liberty
was ended'.53 It was Leonard (following Yelagin) who first acknowledged the
background of purges and show trials that lay behind Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony,
and he strongly implies that the symphony was written under political duress; the
telling line 'Shostakovich declared his allegiance to the new order by composing his
popular Fifth Symphony' comes immediately after the grim details of Meyerhold's
arrest and his wife's murder.54 To readers used to seeing such political events
explicitly linked to Shostakovich's music pace The New Shostakovich, it might seem
likely that Leonard's book would have contributed to a reassessment of Shostakovich's
less popular symphonies in the light of this information. But in fact, his verdict on
Shostakovich as a composer upholds the 'establishment' British line to the letter.
Echoing Abraham on the First Symphony ('Shostakovich cannot write even a
moderately good tune'), Leonard observes that the Fifth Symphony shows up
Shostakovich's weakness in melody, and in general pales by comparison with a work
like Tchaikovsky's Fourth. The 'Leningrad' has an 'appallingly long slow movement',
and the Eighth is characterised by 'unrelieved gloom'. The old accusation that
Shostakovich had never realised his early promise is taken as read: 'As an artist he did
not grow up. Manifestations of immaturity are everywhere in his music. He has
lacked soundness of taste and sureness of judgement.' Moreover, Shostakovich is
'facile but shallow'; 'reproduces rather than creates'; is 'first and foremost a theatre
composer and dramatic illustrator' and - even worse - 'is also a weather vane, shifting
obligingly with the winds of either political or musical ideology.'55 The first British
writer to fully take on board the pressures of Shostakovich's creative environment,
53 Richard Anthony Leonard, A History of Russian Music, London: Jarrolds, 1956, p. 291.
54 ibid.
55 ibid., p. 340.
30
then, saw no reason to reappraise the quality of Shostakovich's symphonies. As works
of art, they had to speak for themselves, and Shostakovich's perceived compliance
with ideological directives is seen as deserving only of censure.
The First Shostakovich Boom
The 5th edition of the Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1954) gives
perhaps the most balanced account so far of Shostakovich's Western reputation:
In more recent years Shostakovich has perforce remained an uncomfortably
unbalanced composer, producing sometimes works conforming to the official
requirements of conventional simplicity and sometimes music expressing his
individuality independently; and he has alternately been favoured and
denounced by those who sit in judgement over the work of artists in Russia and
whose criteria are not primarily artistic. He has thus at times had a superficial
success with works that may not have satisfied his own artistic conscience,
while at other times composers far inferior to him as musicians have won
greater approval.56
This account of Shostakovich's career might appear standard enough, were it not for
the fact that by 1954 the work that most obviously gave him 'superficial success' as far
as British critics were concerned was the 'Leningrad' Symphony, a work now widely
accepted as a masterpiece. By 1954 few people had heard or seen the Stalinist cantata
56 Eric Blom, 'Shostakovich', Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Eric Blom, 5th edition,
vol. 7, pp. 765-767, p. 766.
31
composed in response to the Zhdanovshchina, The Song of the Forests,57 or knew his
numerous film scores, all works that could more fairly be described as conformist
(though many of the film scores are included in the 1954 Grove works list, it is highly
unlikely that the authors, Calvocoressi and Eric Blom, had heard them, since most
remain obscure and unrecorded even today). Yet just one year after the 5th edition of
Grove's Dictionary was published, Shostakovich's status in Britain began its dramatic
ascent. Between 1954 and 1965 (the year after Khrushchev was deposed), there were
at least thirteen sixteen performances of the Fifth Symphony and no fewer than sixty-
two one hundred Shostakovich performances in Britain overall.58 The ten-year
'boom' period kicked off with Bernard Heinze's Hallé performance of the Fifth
Symphony in February 1953. As Colin Mason's Guardian review anticipates, the days
when British critics sneered at Shostakovich's angst were seemingly gone for good:
If there were no Marxists beside us to say 'That's what I've been telling you all
along', we might, listening to last night's Halle concert, have felt a prick of
conscience about all the past laughter at Soviet pronouncements on music… the
first movement has nobility, originality, and intense beauty of melody, and all
57 A letter from the BBC's Director of Music, Eric Marr, to Leonard Isaacs accompanying the score of
the cantata which was then being considered by the BBC for broadcast, states that the SCRSS
possessed a tape recording of this work, which they played at a public gathering on 12 March 1951,
along with Prokofiev's Winter Bonfire and an unnamed Kabalevsky work. Marr's letter comments that
'the work is unsuitable for the Third Programme, and it is improbable that Home or Light would
welcome simple stadium music set to words celebrating the progress of Soviet forestry.' [Letter dated 2
March 1951, file R27/623 Music Reports 192-1954 SEI-SIE, BBC Written Archive, Caversham.
Reproduced by kind permission of the BBC Written Archive, Caversham] It is possible that Blom and
Calvocoressi had heard it on the same occasion.
58 The real figure is certainly higher, given the limits of my archival search.
32
ears, Soviet or not, must recognise, and all souls be moved when at the
recapitulation of the second subject... all the earlier conflicts of melody and
harmony are ravishingly resolved…. we may hesitate even to condemn the
tawdriness of the finale when we hear, in the middle section, the same spirit
trying to assert itself, giving us perhaps a hint of the torment of the sensitive
composer who had not dared not to be blatantly optimistic in his concluding
pages.59
Though Mason feels obliged to repeat a few stock criticisms (frivolous scherzo,
meandering Largo), he is the first writer generously to praise the Largo. There is a
hint here that Shostakovich had composed this work under severe pressure from the
Soviet authorities, not 'daring' to be quite himself. And Mason's opening line is
especially revealing, suggesting something of the irritation caused by the earnest
efforts of communist supporters such as Alan Bush and the detrimental effect this had
on the almost uniformly apolitical instincts of British music critics. This review is the
first to show a sensitive awareness of Soviet cultural politics, alluded to with
sympathy but not dwelt upon or sensationalised. In fact, Mason recognises the
paradoxical nature of this work's potential for success in Britain: it demonstrates that a
symphony written by a composer who appears to have modified his style under
political pressure can still be genuinely popular and genuinely acceptable to the Soviet
authorities and still be decent music.
There were a number of factors in this early Shostakovich revival. One was
the number of premières of new works: the Tenth Symphony was performed in
59 The Manchester Guardian, 21 February 1953, p. 3.
33
London in 1955 and was well received60 as was the First Violin Concerto in 1956, the
Eleventh Symphony and Second Piano Concerto in 1958 and the Second Cello
Concerto in 1960. Colin Mason was not the only critic to begin a sensitive reappraisal
of Shostakovich during these years. In his interval talk on the Tenth Symphony, the
broadcaster Alec Robertson uncannily presaged Testimony's famous description of
the Fifth Symphony's ending ('it's as though someone was beating you with a stick
and saying "your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing"'61) by almost twenty
years, though with reference to the general notion of forced rejoicing rather than
specifically musical:
A Soviet critic had objected that it [the Tenth Symphony] portrayed 'a
profoundly isolated individual, meeting the forces of evil alone. 'Such a
conception of the world', he wrote, 'is very far from that experience by the
majority of the Soviet people'. I'm reminded here, oddly enough, of a scene in
an early Noel Coward revue. A child, taken to the seaside for an outing, cries
incessantly. Its mother takes it on her knee and says, "I brought you here to
enjoy yourself, and enjoy yourself you shall." She then slaps its bottom hard.
Now you can't... treat creative artists like that. If they don't feel optimistic, why
60 There is no obvious reason why critics responded well to the Tenth Symphony after they had so
disliked the previous five (with the exception of the Ninth). There were some changes in critical
personnel around this time, with Ernest Newman retiring in 1958, Neville Cardus in the 1960s and
other new writers appearing on the scene in the 1950s and 60s. Possibly the more fundamental reasons
for the change in tone were that first, the Tenth Symphony was both shorter and more uplifting than the
Seventh or Eighth, and second, critics were no longer reacting against the propaganda figure
Shostakovich had become during the war.
61 Volkov, Testimony, p. 140.
34
should they be optimistic? And Shostakovich always seems doubtfully
optimistic.62
This view of Shostakovich as a beleaguered artist clearly owed its origins to Werth's
account of the proceedings of the Zhdanovshchina; but the fact that British critics
were taking a renewed interest in Shostakovich was in far larger part due to the
positive reception of these later works in the UK.
Another factor in the Shostakovich revival was the fresh start in cultural
relations initiated by Khrushchev in allowing Soviet musicians to travel abroad; the
Leningrad Philharmonic, Mravinsky and Rostropovich visited London in September
1960 to give acclaimed performances of the Eighth Symphony and the Second Cello
Concerto. Another was the visit of Shostakovich himself, as featured composer, to the
1962 Edinburgh Festival along with many of his compatriots, including Rostropovich
and Vishnevskaya. For the first time British critics heard his Fourth Symphony
(mostly admired) alongside the Twelfth (mostly disliked), Songs From Jewish Folk
Poetry, the first eight quartets,63 and arias from the revised version of Lady Macbeth,
Katerina Izmailova as well as the suite from Lady Macbeth. Katerina Izmailova was
then staged in Covent Garden in 1963, in a fresh translation by Edward Downes, who
also conducted it; Shostakovich even attended the première and received a standing
ovation. Not every review from the Edinburgh Festival was positive by any means –
the Observer critic Peter Heyworth reported in the New York Times that the Twelfth
62 Alec Robertson, 'Talking About Music', interval talk for the Proms on Shostakovich's Tenth
Symphony, BBC Third Programme, 22 August 1960.
63 Performed by the Allegri, Borodin and English String Quartets. For some reviews and overall
discussion of Shostakovich's reception at the Edinburgh Festival, see Joanne Fleming, 'Shostakovich in
Britain', MA thesis, University of Manchester, 2001, pp. 33-52.
35
Symphony 'has strong claims to be the worst of his [Shostakovich's] major works. The
majority of musicians and critics at Edinburgh were frankly aghast at its crudity and
lack of interest'. But Heyworth's review also underlines the recent upsurge in
sympathetic interest in Shostakovich in the 1950s and early 60s: 'For years the
Western world has liked to think of Shostakovich as a victim of Stalinism, and the
outstanding Violin Concerto and Tenth Symphony that emerged in the years after
Stalin's death seemed to support this view.' 64 Although Shostakovich may have been
perceived as a 'victim' by the West in the wake of Zhdanov's attacks in 1948, any
sympathy British writers may have felt was not at that time matched by interest in his
music, as the total absence of performances of any of his symphonies other than the
First and Ninth in the post-war period (1946-1953) makes clear.
It was a combination of Stalin's death in 1953 and the subsequent gradual rise in
performances of both new and old works that changed critical attitudes. Stokowski's
performance of the Fifth Symphony in 1959 had been warmly received; the Times
critic echoed the Guardian's sentiment in his praise for the Largo and suspicion of the
finale coda:
The closing pages thump the tub of realist optimism with a vehemence that does
not really resolve the bitter inward conflict of what has gone before.... If anyone
was still in doubt about the merits of this Fifth Symphony... Mr Stokowski's
unfolding of the gravely beautiful first movement, the daemonic attack which he
brought out in the scherzo and finale – he even suggested there was some point
in the coda – and above all the unadorned elegaic quality with which he realised
the Largo, must have proved utterly convincing.65
64 New York Times, 6 September 1962 p. 37.
65 The Times, 1 July 1959, p. 15.
36
It seems that, having heard and liked the Tenth Symphony, critics were starting to
take a second look at the Fifth, though it is interesting to notice the glaring gap
between the Fifth and Tenth Symphonies in this critic's assessment of Shostakovich's
'symphonic edifice'. They were also gradually becoming more familiar with
Shostakovich's cultural background, courtesy of some fine programme notes. Many of
the notes accompanying the Fifth Symphony (and, indeed, the Tenth) after the
publication of Leonard's book begin with career summaries that encompass the
'Muddle Instead of Music' debacle, the effects of socialist realism on Soviet art, and
the post-war attacks on Shostakovich. Now that they were reassessing the collective
yawn that was the immediate post-war critical response to his symphonies, critics
began to engage with the symphony more imaginatively. Aspects of it that had been
criticised before now became the focus of more politically orientated musings, as was
the case in Robertson's assessment of the Tenth Symphony in 1960. An obvious
example of this occurred with the Fifth Symphony's finale coda. Scott Goddard was
one of the earliest writers to voice the suspicion that Shostakovich's 'creative response'
was not to be taken at face value: 'In the following year [1936] he produced the Fifth
Symphony, offering it to posterity as "a Soviet artist's practical creative reply to just
criticism." There an outside observer must leave the matter, avoiding as best he may
the grinning ghost of Galileo.'66 John Warrack observed in 1960: 'If after the
[wonderful Largo] the brassy energy of the finale strikes a little hollow, let us
66 Scott Goddard, note for the LSO, 30 June 1959. The original source for the work's sub-title
