Out From Behind the Curtain

His career forged largely behind the Iron Curtain, New York Philharmonic music director Kurt Masur, 71, felt an intuitive understanding of the moral complexity in the music of Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, one of the titans of the 20th century.

“I found that his connection to the history of our time was very similar to what Beethoven’s was to the history of his time--the French Revolution, the Napoleon story, and all that we know about it,” said Masur, who is bringing the New York orchestra to Orange County on Friday to conduct Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony and works by Richard Strauss.

“I had the idea of having a cycle of concerts with the [Leipzig] Gewandhaus Orchestra [which Masur led in the early ‘70s] of all the Shostakovich symphonies and all the Beethoven symphonies. I went to [Shostakovich] and I asked him about it. He was very happy about that.”

Unfortunately, by the time Masur got to do those concerts--in 1975-76--the composer had just died.

“It was very sad,” Masur said. “Instead of it being a celebration, it was a memorial.”

Born in 1927 in Silesia, Poland, Masur studied music in Germany in Breslau and Leipzig, then went on to conduct the Dresden Philharmonic. He also worked with famed theater director Walter Felsenstein at the Komische Oper, Berlin, before becoming conductor of the Gewandhaus in 1970. He first met Shostakovich in Germany in the ‘60s. and again when the East Berlin orchestra performed in Moscow a few years before the composer’s death.

“Shostakovich always attended,” Masur said. “He liked the sound of the orchestra very much. At our very first meeting, I told him I wanted to do the first ‘Babi Yar’ Symphony outside the Soviet Union. At that time, it had not been done outside [the] country.”

Time and distance can offer perspective. Two things have become clearer as the century draws to a close. One, Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich emerges more and more as one of the greatest composers of the age. Two, we will probably never learn the whole truth about him and his tortured relationship to the totalitarian Soviet regime.

Was he a committed if somewhat disillusioned Communist or a closet dissident? Or something in between? We have letters (the composer’s and others’), published reminiscences and endless commentaries and symposia in which people argue the issue. Ultimately, we are left with the music itself. Still, anyone who had direct contact with the composer--as did Masur--has something valuable to contribute to the discussion.

Masur said he and Shostakovich wanted to use the original version of the Yevtushenko poem “Babi Yar,” the story of 35,000 Jews slaughtered by the Nazi army near Kiev in 1941. Originally published in the Soviet newspaper Literaturnaya Rossiya, Yevtushenko’s poem came under immediate political attack because it called for a memorial to the dead Jews.

Complying with the criticism, Yevtushenko later revised the poem to include three national groups--Jews, Ukrainians and Russians--even though, according to survivors, only Jews had been killed in the infamous ravine.

They decided to use the original version of the poem. “It made a tremendous impression.”

Masur said the composer rarely told musicians how to interpret a piece.

“[Shostakovich] expected an orchestra and a conductor would do it right at first. The music was understandable as written. The articulation is clean. The language is at least that of the classical symphony. . . .

“But I must say, whenever Shostakovich spoke about his music, mainly he was concerned that the spirit of the piece must come out.”

It was the composer’s concern about the spirit that caused the two men to disagree during the staging of the Babi Yar work.

“In the ‘Babi Yar’ Symphony, there is a line: ‘I would like to make a career like Tolstoy,’ ” Masur recalled. “[But] there were two Tolstoys. One was the great author. The other was [writer] Alexei Tolstoy of the Stalinist era. In Germany, the [great] Tolstoy is known as Leonid. But in Russia, he’s Lev. Of course, in the symphony, Shostakovich uses the name Lev.

“ ‘Look,’ I said to him, ‘Nobody in Germany will understand Lev, Lev.’ To make sure which Tolstoy he meant, I wanted to say Leonid.

“He got furious at that moment. ‘No, no. You cannot say Leonid,’ he said. ‘It’s too soft. You must say Lev. It must be deadly, like a shot.’ ”

Tempo also was quite important to the composer.

“He told me, ‘I made the metronome marks too fast for the first symphonies, including up to the Seventh,’ ” Masur recalled. “ ‘I was young and I was too nervous, and I really did not know that an orchestra has to have time to breathe and articulate the things I want to say.’

“I found that one of his very informative remarks,” the conductor said.

There is also a deliberate misprint, presumably by Soviet authorities, in a tempo marking in the controversial Fifth Symphony, the work that restored Shostakovich to official favor after his opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” was denounced in the party newspaper Pravda.

“It was made faster to make the ending more optimistic,” Masur said. “In the Kalmus [edition], there’s a misprint shortly before the end, at rehearsal No. 131. Instead of a quarter [note] equals 88 [beats a minute], they have printed 188.

“So the whole ending is not a victory at all. It is full of frustration, full of [unsolved] problems. So it makes for really a different approach. The [final] eighth notes must hammer like each note is saying, ‘Ich, Ich: Ja, Ja: I, I, I.’ Each note is insisting, ‘This is my work. I can’t do what you want, I can’t write your music. This is what I want.’

“This makes the last movement a little long. But the ending is breathtaking, and it is so incredibly moving,” he added.

That interpretation tends to square with the composer’s remarks in Solomon Volkov’s hugely contested book, “Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich” (Harper and Row, 1979).

Volkov quotes Shostakovich as saying, “I think that it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in [Mussorgsky’s] ‘Boris Godunov.’ ”

What is Masur’s position?

“Volkov deserves respect for what he has done. Surely the confusion about Shostakovich came about through all the different biographies of him. We always have to face the fact that Shostakovich lived in that country and he wanted to live in that country and he would have gotten homesick to go out of that country. He suffered. But he stayed there because that was his kind of morality.

“They had to throw him out of the beleaguered city of Leningrad. He would have died with the people of Leningrad. His connection to the Russian people was very, very strong. He wanted to speak their language. He wanted to be the musical reporter of their feelings.

“Especially the Fifth Symphony is this kind of breakthrough, where he found his own new language without being compromising, or being friendly with those people he didn’t want to be friendly with, but to be his own musical voice, I always make a cycle of the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh symphonies. I would say, these three symphonies are absolutely the center point of the musical ideals and the humanistic ideals of Shostakovich of all his symphonies.”

* Kurt Masur will conduct the New York Philharmonic in Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony and Strauss’ “Don Juan” and “Death and Transfiguration” on Friday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. The concert is sponsored by the Philharmonic Society. $30-$85. (714) 556-2787.