Was He or Wasn’t He?

When Dmitri Shostakovich died in 1975, he was lauded as one of the leading composers of the 20th century. He had burst upon the scene in 1925 with an amazing First Symphony, written when he was still a 19-year-old student at the Leningrad Conservatory.

His Fifth Symphony, composed in 1937, had become a concert staple, and his “Leningrad” Symphony, written in 1941 to commemorate that city’s resistance to the Nazis, had achieved almost sacred status with his countrymen. It was first played and broadcast to the world even as bombs were falling on the besieged city.

Equally settled seemed the question of his political orthodoxy.

The New York Times expressed the general view. It described him in its obituary as “a committed Communist who accepted the sometimes harsh ideological criticism to which his modernistic works were periodically subjected.”

“He was a child of the Russian Revolution,” the Times declared. “He had been brought up and conditioned by the Soviet ideology and considered his music an expression of the Russian people, in line with the doctrines espoused by the Central Committee of the USSR.”

But did he?

Within four years of the composer’s death, musicologist Solomon Volkov, a Russian emigre, published a bombshell book: “Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich.” An as-told-to biography “related to and edited by” Volkov, “Testimony” portrayed a bitter and frightened Shostakovich who cooperated with the Communist regime only as far as he felt was necessary to survive.

“I had thought that my life was replete with sorrow and that it would be hard to find a more miserable man,” Shostakovich said. “But when I started going over the life stories of my friends and acquaintances, I was horrified. . . . All I saw was corpses, mountains of corpses. I’m not exaggerating, I mean mountains. And the picture filed me with a horrible depression.”

It would be the first volley in a war of Shostakovich revisionism that hasn’t ended yet.

Just this month, at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in Boston, a debate over the veracity of Volkov’s book--and a “‘struggle for Shostakovich’s soul,” according to one participant--raged into the wee hours. Volkov’s first critic, musicologist Laurel E. Fay, has a new and presumably more complete Shostakovich biography in the works. A recent documentary--shown in Orange County in October--prominently features famed conductor Valery Gergiev coming down on the side of the composer as more a closet dissident than a Communist collaborator.

And on CDs and in concert halls around the world, the music is being listened to in the light of all this talk. In fact, in the next few weeks in the Southland, as famed Russian emigre cellist Msistlav Rostropovich brings Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1 to Los Angeles, and the composer’s son Maxim conducts the Pacific Symphony in Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony, we’ll get our own chance to consider the question of the great composer’s true nature.

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The barest facts of Shostakovich’s career underline the difficulty of answering the which-side-was-he-on question. It is true that he was celebrated by the Soviet state. He won the Order of Lenin--the nation’s highest civilian award--twice, and the Stalin Prize twice. He was secretary of the USSR Composers’ Union for eight years in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, when he also became a member of the Supreme Soviet. In 1966, he received the title “Hero of Socialist Labor,” the first composer to be so honored.

But it was also true that the Soviet authorities scathingly criticized him, more than once. In an ominous 1936 editorial, Pravda denounced his popular but controversial opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District,” in which the lead character conspires to murder her tyrannical father-in-law. It was common knowledge that Stalin was responsible for the editorial.

A second negative editorial followed 10 days later, after Stalin attended a ballet called “‘Bright Stream,” set to music by Shostakovich.

Said Shostakovich in “Testimony”: “Two editorial attacks in ‘Pravda’ in 10 days--that was too much for one man. Now everyone knew for sure that I would be destroyed. And the anticipation of that noteworthy event--at least for me--has never left me.”

The composer responded with his Fifth Symphony, subtitled “Creative Reply of a Soviet Artist to Just Criticism.” This work was hailed by the Soviet press as “free from error.”

In 1948, he again came under attack, this time for “formalistic perversions and anti-democractic tendencies.” He redeemed himself by writing a series of works that adhered to the party line, which led to a Stalin Prize in 1950.

Even after Stalin’s death in 1953 and the end of the USSR’s most extreme years of repression, Shostakovich came in for sanctions. His Thirteenth Symphony, based on the text of Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s “Babi Yar,” about Jews killed at Kiev, got an official, anti-Semitic cold shoulder.

According to “Testimony,” which Volkov claims is based on extensive conversations he had with the composer toward the end of his life, even the works lauded by Soviet officialdom contain, for those in the know, the anti-government implications that seem clear in “Babi Yar.”

The book, published in English in New York, was immediately denounced in the Soviet Union, where Leonid Brezhnev was in power, and glasnost was still six years in the future. It would be another six years until the breakup of the Communist government. The regime--as well as family members, colleagues and friends living there--branded it a forgery and a lie. The work, which won an ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award in 1980, has yet to be translated into Russian.

Such a reaction from the Soviet Union might have been expected, but doubts also arose in the West. Musicologist Laurel E. Fay, a Russian-music consultant for the G. Schirmer publishing company, raised serious questions about the book’s authenticity with her critique in the Russian Review, in October 1980.

Fay suggested Volkov had recycled material from works Shostakovich had published elsewhere and questioned the veracity of the quotes attributed to the composer. She challenged Volkov to produce original notes, letters or other documentation to substantiate the memoir. Volkov says he had to leave the supporting materials behind when he left the USSR.

Nearly two decades later, scholars are still debating the book. In Boston at the American Musicological Society meeting on Nov. 1, Allan B. Ho, a music professor at the University of Southern Illinois at Edwardsville, and emigre pianist, music editor and lawyer Dmitry Feofanov, read papers in defense of Volkov and a book they recently published, “Shostakovich Reconsidered” (Toccata Press, London), which tries to answer Fay’s criticisms point by point.

Richard Taruskin, a UC Berkeley musicologist in the Fay camp, was present, and he didn’t back down. “There is no authentication at all of any of the controversial material in this book,” Taruskin said.

Still, neither he nor Fay ever claimed “Testimony” was entirely false, he said, just that Volkov had perpetrated a fraud.

Volkov, in a recent phone interview from his home in New York City, defended his book’s conclusions.

“In music,” Volkov said, “it’s not so easy to pinpoint any anti-political sentiment with complete certainty, which worked in favor of Shostakovich, which now gives some people the opportunity to say, ‘Look, he was rewarded for his music. Why should we assume his message was anti-totalitarian?’

“So what we come down to really are personal feelings. How does a particular person who listens to this piece at this moment access the impact and the ideas behind the music?

As for his critics: “They’ve shifted their line very much during these last 19 years,” Volkov said. “At first, they said, ‘It can’t be true, Shostakovich couldn’t say these things.’ Then they said, ‘He’d already said some of that before.’ So it can be true. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.”

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Whatever the ongoing academic debates about Volkov’s work, its assertions have set the tone for all kinds of new considerations of the composer. Canadian filmmaker Larry Weinstein’s documentary “The War Symphonies: Shostakovich Against Stalin” wears its conclusions on its sleeve. The film jumps off from Volkov’s book but argues its case by citing testimony of a different kind.

Shot on location in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Weinstein’s film--which won the Special Jury Prize at the International Widescreen Festival in Amsterdam and the Golden Prague Grand Prize at a Czech Republic film festival, both in 1998--alternates archival footage with contemporary interviews of Shostakovich’s colleagues and friends.

Kirov Orchestra conductor Valery Gergiev serves as a focal point, speaking about his interpretation of the composer’s music (the conductor, born in 1953, didn’t know Shostakovich personally) and conducting musical examples.

The Fourth Symphony, which Shostakovich withdrew after the 1936 Pravda editorial, “was a prophetic vision,” Gergiev says in the film, and profoundly disturbing. The work was not performed anywhere until 1962--nine years after Stalin’s death, when it was first played in the Soviet Union.

“Shostakovich was telling the whole world about the coming tragedy of the years of Stalin . . . and the coming deaths of millions of people.”

One of filmmaker Weinstein’s coups consists of interviewing composer Tikhon Khrennikov, 48 years after he denounced Shostakovich and other “formalistic” composers in a fiery speech at the First National Congress of Composers in Moscow in 1948.

Despite that fact, he downplays the idea that Shostakovich had to placate the government out of self-protection. “I think all this [talk of Shostakovich’s fear] has been terribly exaggerated,” Khrennikov says in the film. “There was nothing for him to be afraid of.”

“All were afraid,” counters composer Vladimir Rubin, in another film segment. “We were programmed with it; it infiltrated our innermost life.”

Weinstein, 41, said that he got access to Khrennikov through Gergiev. But before Khrennikov agreed to be interviewed, “he asked me,” Weinstein said, “ ‘Do you have any affiliation with Volkov?’

“I wanted to credit Volkov [in my film]. But Volkov didn’t want me to. This whole ‘Testimony’ thing has become somewhat of a nightmare for him. He tries to dissociate himself from it.”

Still, “very few people now believe it’s a forgery,” Weinstein said. “Galina [Shostakovich’s daughter, who also appears in the film] says it’s in line with what she heard [growing up].”

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Both the Shostakovich interpreters coming to Southern California next week are conspicuous by their absence in the Weinstein film. The composer’s son Maxim, 61--who now lives in St. Petersburg but defected to the U.S. in 1981--and Msistlav Rostropovich--who left the Soviet Union in the mid-’70s--have, however, come down in essence on the side of the film and the Volkov book.

Rostropovich, to whom Shostakovich dedicated his two cello concertos, has called “‘Testimony” “basically . . . true.” He claims firsthand knowledge of his friend and compatriot’s anti-Soviet tendencies, and agrees that the evidence is in the music. But he also admits that it’s none too easy to detect.

There are sarcastic allusions to Stalin in the First Cello Concerto, he told Elizabeth Wilson in her book “Shostakovich: A Life Remembered.” “These allusions,” he said, “are camouflaged so craftily that even I did not notice them to begin with. I doubt that I would have detected [them] if Dmitri hadn’t pointed it out to me.”

Maxim is supportive of the revisionist histories of his father, but he cautions against believing everything the musicologists say about the hidden messages in the music.

“My position is, I like [“Testimony”],” he said in a phone interview from St. Petersburg. “But I think in this book there are a lot of different things. There are a lot of rumors in it, and like all rumors, some are true and some aren’t.”

Volkov, for instance, quotes Shostakovich as saying that his Tenth Symphony is a portrait of Stalin.

“That is an example of a rumor,” said Maxim, of the piece he will conduct in Costa Mesa.

“I think some musicologists set this idea forth. Others repeated it. I don’t think of it that way. Father never said it was a portrait of Stalin.”

Volkov also has Shostakovich describing the end of the Fifth Symphony as the very opposite of the exultant finale it was often considered:

“The rejoicing is forced, created under threat,” says Volkov’s Shostakovich. “It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,’ and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering ‘Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.”

“You can hear a triumphant mood and a triumphant message in it,” Gergiev said by phone during his recent U.S. tour with the Kirov Orchestra. “The question is, of whose triumph? Is it the triumph of, let’s say, a tyrant, or of the spirit of the composer?”

Still, Gergiev would like to put the controversy to rest now.

“We shouldn’t at all think of a propaganda machine and Shostakovich being part of it,” he said. “Shostakovich doesn’t not belong to that part of this century, but it’s not likely he will be finished in it either. There is a future to this music.”

“It’s true there is protest in the music,” Maxim said. “He was tortured by power, by the Communist power. I think why Stalin hated his music so much was because when people listened to it in the concerts, they felt free, and he was jealous of that. He understood how music can bring freedom to [the] mentality of people.

“But I want to avoid politicizing too much every bar of his music,” Maxim continued. “Because with Shostakovich, it’s music about our time and maybe about our future time. It’s a philosophical picture of humanity. It’s not programmatic music like [Mahler’s] ‘Resurrection’ Symphony. It’s about whatever the music of [other composers] is about--about God, about everything.”

So was his father a dissident?

“In his life, but in his music, he was a great creator, a great composer,” Maxim said. “‘I think it’s better to see his music now just as music. When you listen, many things become clear.”

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Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, Pacific Symphony, Maxim Shostakovich, conductor, Dec. 9 and 10, 8 p.m., Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, (714) 755-5799, $10-$48.

* Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Msistlav Rostropovich, cello, Dec. 8, 7 p.m., Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. (323) 365-3500. $30-$100.