Dr. Luis Dias
I have a friend who is known by one name, but has another formal name. Apparently, this happened due to some confusion at her baptism. For a reason I forget, the priest uttered what he thought was to be her name, so that name is in all her official documentation, but everyone calls her by the other name.
I was reminded of this while reading Julian Barnes’s exhaustively researched and superbly written 2016 historical novel ‘The Noise of Time’ on the life and times of Soviet-era Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) whose 50th death anniversary we commemorate this year (in fact this month,
August 9).
Shostakovich’s parents wanted to name him Yaroslav, but the priest found it ‘too unusual’ and decided to baptise him Dmitri, despite the fact that the father was also named Dmitri. So the composer’s full name according to Russian tradition became Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich. I have to agree with the priest, Dmitri has a much better ring to it than Yaroslav!
I learned many nuggets like these in ‘The Noise of Time.’ For instance, Shostakovich’s piano teacher Leonid Nikolayev told his class that someone who has neither prepared nor eaten scrambled eggs but “talks about them as if he knows everything about them: that is a musicologist.” More about musicologists later.
Shostakovich’s music came into my life rather late, in my 20s; not through long-playing records but in cassette (David Oistrakh playing his First Violin Concerto) and whatever else I’ve heard of his oeuvre (there’s so much still to discover) on CD, YouTube and internet radio.
During my England years, initially, as if to make up for the deficit in my earlier years, I sought out the big orchestral works, particularly at the BBC Proms, and the Shostakovich symphonies loomed large on that list. I listened live to virtually all of them (his 12th and 14th symphonies weren’t performed during my years there), but I also got interested in his chamber works.
Shostakovich isn’t easy to listen to. He demands every ounce of your attention, and (speaking for myself) some works require repeated listening to start to make sense. And a little background information and context always helps.
Shostakovich shot to fame as a major Soviet composer with his First Symphony aged 19. The symphony was soon performed in Berlin and the U.S. A prolific film composer, his ‘Song of the Counterplan’ for the 1923 film ‘Counterplan’ became a nationwide hit, reportedly loved even by dictator Joseph Stalin.
But everything changed in 1936, after Stalin attended a performance of his 1934 opera ‘Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District’(based on Nikolas Leskov’s eponymous novella). Stalin was outraged by the explicit erotic content in the work, and from Barnes’s book one learns that the fact that Stalin’s box was directly above the brass and percussion in the orchestra pit only worsened matters. Stalin left in the interval, and a few days later an article appeared in the government mouthpiece newspaper ‘Pravda’ titled ‘Muddle instead of Music’, authorised by Stalin himself, stating that the opera was a “deliberately dissonant, muddled stream of sounds …[that] quacks, hoots, pants and gasps”. It continued: “The power of good music to infect the masses has been sacrificed to a petty-bourgeois, ‘formalist’ attempt to create originality through cheap clowning. It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly.” That was not a threat to be taken lightly in Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Shostakovich saw a marked decline in commissions, concert appearances and performances of his music after that. His monthly earnings dropped from an average of as much as 12,000 rubles to as little as 2,000.
The year 1936 also coincided with the beginning of Stalin’s ‘Great Terror’ or ‘Great Purge’ (1936-38). Overnight ‘visits’ and ‘disappearances’ of individuals and whole families became commonplace, and many of Shostakovich’s friends, colleagues, and relatives were imprisoned or killed. For a long time, he had a packed suitcase ready and spent the night outside his residence to spare his family the anguish of being picked up, taken in for interrogation and whatever followed it.
He withdrew his Fourth Symphony, consigning its score to a drawer until 1961, eight years after Stalin’s death. He realised he had to adopt a different style overnight, to outwardly “atone” with “a Soviet artist’s no-nonsense response to just and fair criticism”, as an article purportedly written by him (but probably under duress) stated later.
The “response” was his Fifth Symphony, which premiered on November 21, 1937 in Leningrad with the Leningrad Philharmonic under Yevgeny Mravinsky. It was hailed as “a triumphal success” by official critics and the public alike, with an ovation that lasted over half an hour.
But 88 years on, musicologists still rummage among the notes in the score to find hidden meanings in it.
The Symphony quotes Shostakovich’s song Vozrozhdenije (‘Rebirth’) Op. 46 No. 1, (composed in 1936-37, text from a poem by Alexander Pushkin), considered by some a vital clue to the understanding of the whole work.
American conductor, pianist and composer Michael Tilson Thomas in a documentary on Shostakovich’s Fifth, said, “He evokes memories and associations of music that the audience would already know, but changes the musical language just enough to suggest what he and they are feeling, but that no-one would dare speak aloud.”
Nowhere is this evocation more potent than in the Largo, the third and penultimate movement, the emotional core of the symphony. At the premiere many wept openly (at a time when weeping in public itself was an act of courage) on hearing it.
Why? The audience recognised the reference to the liturgy of the Russian Orthodox church. “Shostakovich divided the strings of the orchestra into many groups to give the impression of a choir singing,” explains Tilson Thomas, “just as Tchaikovsky had done, evoking the sounds of a chorus singing the hymn ‘Spasi Gospodi’ [‘O Lord, save Thy people’] at the opening of his 1812 overture.” Shostakovich however doesn’t quote an actual hymn but evokes the sound of a sacred service, hymn and response.
“People recognised the power, the Russian soul in the music. They couldn’t pray, so music became religion,” says San Francisco Symphony orchestra’s violinist Zoya Leybin, who lived in Stalin’s Russia. Steeped in morning, the music recalls the ‘panikhída’ the Russian Orthodox requiem memorial service. Ostensibly a requiem for lives lost in the Revolution, it could also be interpreted as one for those who had perished in Stalin’s Purge.
The “triumphal” last movement can similarly be heard in retrospect as a piece of forced jollity, cheering at bayonet-point, reminiscent of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera ‘Boris Godunov’, where crowds are forced to hail the Tsar.
Shostakovich’s milestone year is being celebrated around the world. His historic Fifth Symphony is being performed by the Symphony Orchestra of India under the baton of Martyn Brabbins on August 22, 2025. This work and much more features in their Autumn 2025 season – August 12 to 26, 2025.