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Destiny. It was just a grand term for something you could do nothing about.
Why not? It was the artist’s oldest dream. Or, as he now thought, the artist’s oldest fantasy. Because the political bureaucrats had soon arrived to take control of the project, to leach out of it the freedom and imagination and complication and nuance without which the arts grew stultified. “The engineers of human souls.” There were two main problems. The first was that many people did not want their souls to be engineered, thank you very much. They were content with their souls being left as they were when they had come into this world; and when you tried to lead them, they resisted. Come to
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Not many were summoned to the Big House to discuss musical theory.
He had once joked to Tanya that he preferred the Vodka Cure. And so, now, on perhaps the last two nights of his life, he took the cure.
He was always punctual, and would go to his death being punctual.
Three weeks after the Marshal’s arrest he was shot, together with the elite of the Red Army. The generals’ plot to assassinate Comrade Stalin had been discovered just in time. Among those in Tukhachevsky’s immediate entourage to be arrested and shot was their mutual friend Nikolai Sergeyevich Zhilyayev, the distinguished musicologist.
Perhaps there was a musicologists’ plot waiting to be uncovered, followed by a composers’ plot and a trombonists’ plot. Why not?
It seemed such a brief while ago that they were all laughing at Professor Nikolayev’s definition of a musicologist. Imagine we are eating scrambled eggs, the Professor used to say. My cook, Pasha, has prepared them, and you and I are eating them. Along comes a man who has not prepared them and is not eating them, but he talks about them as if he knows everything about them—that is a musicologist.
But it did not seem so funny now that they were shooting even musicologists. Nikolai Sergeyevich Zhilyayev’s crimes were given as monarchism, terrorism and spying.
“Heaven on Earth will come in 200,000,000,000 years.” But that, he now thought, might have been over-optimistic.
Theories were clean and convincing and comprehensible. Life was messy and full of nonsense.
But there is no escaping one’s destiny; and his, for the moment, was apparently to live. To live and to work.
A journalist—foolish? hopeful? sympathetic?—described the Fifth as “A Soviet Artist’s Creative Reply to Just Criticism.
The phrase also permitted those with asses’ ears to hear in his symphony what they wanted to hear. They missed the screeching irony of the final movement, that mockery of triumph. They heard only triumph itself, some loyal endorsement of Soviet music, Soviet musicology, of life under the sun of Stalin’s constitution. He had ended the symphony fortissimo and in the major. What if he had ended it pianissimo and in the minor? On such things might a life—might several lives—turn. Well, “Nothing but nonsense in the world.
When the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed, Mother Russia had embraced its new Fascist ally as a middle-aged widow embraces a husky young neighbour, the more enthusiastically for the passion coming late, and against all reason. Wagner became a great composer again, and Eisenstein was ordered to direct The Valkyrie at the Bolshoi.
They wanted to be engineers of human souls; but Russians, for all their faults, were not machines. So it was not really engineering they were up to, but scrubbing. Scrub, scrub, scrub, let’s wash away all this old Russianness and paint a shiny new Sovietness on top. But it never worked—the paint began to flake off almost as soon as it was applied. To be Russian was to be pessimistic; to be Soviet
was to be optimistic. That was why the words Soviet Russia were a contradiction in terms.
That was why he preferred cats to dogs. Cats were always happy to let him compose.
Then, during the Great Patriotic War, he had written his Seventh Symphony, whose message of anti-Fascism had resounded across the world. And so, he had achieved forgiveness.
In an ideal world, a young man should not be an ironical person. At that age, irony prevents growth, stunts the imagination. It is best to start life in a cheerful and open state of mind, believing in
the man who doesn’t like music isn’t trustworthy; that such a man would be capable of a base act, even murder or treason.
One of Dmitri Dmitrievich’s former duties as professor at the Conservatoire had been to help examine the students on Marxist-Leninist ideology. He would sit with the chief examiner beneath an enormous banner which declared: ART BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE—V. I. LENIN. As his own understanding of political theory was not profound, he remained largely silent, until one day his superior rebuked him for non-participation. So
when the next student came in and the chief examiner nodded pointedly at his junior partner, he had asked her the simplest question he could think of. “Tell me, whom does art belong to?” The student looked completely baffled. Gently, he tried to help her along with a suggestion: “Well, what did Lenin say?” But she was too panicked to catch the clue, and for all his inclinations of the head and rolling upwards of the eyes, she failed to locate the answer.
Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art’s sake: it exists for people’s sake. But which people, and who defines them? He always thought of his own art as anti-aristocratic. Did he write, as his detractors maintained, for a bourgeois cosmopolitan elite?
No. Did he write, as his detractors wanted him to, for the Donbass miner weary from his shift and in need of a soothing pick-me-up? No. He wrote music for everyone and no one. He wrote music for those who best appreciated the music he wrote, regardless of social origin. He wrote music for the ears that could hear. And he knew, therefore, that all true definitions of art are circular, and all untrue definitions of art ascribe to it a specific function.
He admired those who stood up and spoke truth to Power. He admired their bravery and their moral integrity. And sometimes he envied them; but it was complicated, because part of what he envied them was their death, their being put out of the agony of living. As he had stood waiting for the lift doors to open on the fifth floor of Bolshaya Pushkarskaya Street, terror was mixed with the pulsing desire to be taken away. He too had felt the vanity of transitory courage.
It had been a betrayal. He had betrayed Stravinsky, and in doing so, he had betrayed music. Later, he told Mravinsky that it had been the worst moment of his life. —
Perhaps courage was like beauty. A beautiful woman grows old: she sees only what has gone; others see only what remains.
“But there is one thing missing in the study of a distinguished Soviet composer.” The distinguished Soviet composer in turn stood up, looked around the walls and bookcases he knew so well, and shook his head with equal apology, as if embarrassed to be failing at his tutor’s first question. “There is no portrait on your walls of Comrade Stalin.
In that time, there were two phrases—one a question and one a statement—which would cause the sweat to pour and strong men to shit their pants. The question was: “Does Stalin know?” The statement, even more alarming, was: “Stalin knows.
But there was a third phrase, whispered about him as it had been whispered about others—Pasternak, for example: “Stalin says he is not to be touched.” Sometimes this statement was a fact, sometimes a
wild theory or envious supposition. Why had he survived being a protégé of the traitor Tukhachevsky? Why had he survived those words, “It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly”? Why had he survived being named an enemy of the people by the newspapers? Why had Zakrevsky disappeared between a Saturday and a Monday? Why had he been spared when so many around him had been arrested, exiled, murdered, or had disappeared into a fate which might become clear only decades later? One answer would fit all those questions: “Stalin says he is not to be touched.
good music would always be good music, and great music was impregnable. You could play Bach’s preludes and fugues at any tempo, with any dynamics, and they would still be great music, proof even against the wretch who brought ten thumbs to the keyboard. And in the same way, you could not play such music cynically. — In 1949, when the attacks on him were still continuing, he had written his fourth string quartet. The Borodins had learnt it, and played it for the Ministry of Culture’s Directorate of Musical Institutions, which needed to approve any new work before it could be performed—and
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This was a nonsense: it wasn’t true—it couldn’t be true—because you cannot lie in music.
Music—good music, great music—had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimisti...
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What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves—the music of our being—which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is strong and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history. This was what he held to.
But the composer’s study never did display the finest portrait of Stalin that Moscow could sell. Only a few months into Dmitri Dmitrievich’s re-education, the objective circumstances of Soviet reality changed. In other words, Stalin died. And the tutor’s visits came to an end.
Prokofiev had been allowed to import a new Ford from the West. Sergei Sergeyevich was very pleased with it, until the day it proved too difficult for him to manage, and in the middle of Moscow he ran over a young woman. Somehow, that was typical of Prokofiev. He always came at the world from the wrong direction.
Poor Prokofiev—to die on exactly the same day as Stalin!
To die not even knowing that the Great Tyrant had expired! Well, that was Sergei Sergeyevich for you.
“I envy him.” He meant it: death was preferable to endless terror. —
Nikita the Corncob.
But this was where he made his mistake. Before, there was death; now, there was life. Before, men shat in their pants; now, they were allowed to disagree. Before, there were orders; now, there were suggestions. So his Conversations with Power became, without him at first recognising it, more dangerous to the soul. Before, they had tested the extent of his courage; now, they tested the extent of his cowardice. And they worked with diligence and know-how, with an intense but essentially disinterested professionalism, like priests working for the soul of a dying man. —
he knew Picasso for a bastard and a coward. How easy it was to be a Communist when you weren’t living under Communism! Picasso had spent a lifetime painting his shit and hailing Soviet power. Yet God forbid that any poor little artist suffering under Soviet power should try to paint like Picasso. He was free to speak the truth—why didn’t he do so on behalf of those who couldn’t? Instead, he sat like a rich man in Paris and the south of France painting his revolting dove of peace time and time again. He loathed the sight of that bloody dove. And he loathed the slavery of ideas as much as he
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Stravinsky was a different matter. His love and reverence for Stravinsky’s music had never wavered. And as proof, he kept a large photograph of his fellow composer beneath the glass of his desktop. He looked at it every day and remembered that gilded salon at the Waldorf Astoria; remembered the betrayal, and his moral shame.
But it was one thing to humiliate a Soviet bureaucrat once Power had grown vegetarian; another to protest when Power was carnivorous. And Stravinsky had spent decades sitting on top of his American Mount Olympus, aloof, egocentric, unconcerned when artists and writers and their families were being hunted down in his native land; were imprisoned, exiled, murdered. Did he utter a single public word of protest while breathing the air of freedom? That silence had been contemptible; and just as he revered Stravinsky the composer, so he despised Stravinsky the thinker. Well, perhaps that answered
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What could they possibly have to say to one another? So he had asked, “What do you think of Puccini?” “I loathe him,” Stravinsky had replied. To which he had answered, “So do I.” Did either of them mean it—mean it as absolutely as they had spoken? Probably not. One was being instinctively dominant, the other instinctively submissive. That was the trouble with “historic meetings.
had known couples who were so set on their own sexual freedom that their children had ended up in orphanages.
The problem was the Buick. A. had bought the Buick from a repatriated Armenian. And he had been allowed to do so. That was the problem. Prokofiev was allowed his Ford; A. was allowed his Buick; Slava Rostropovich had
been allowed an Opel, another Opel, a Land Rover and then a Mercedes. He, Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich, was not permitted to have a foreign car.
