Britten – Beethoven – Stravinsky – Shostakovich

by David Wemyss (October 2011)

Britten

Beethoven

Since it seems unlikely that Beethoven would recognise himself in this Alice-in-Wonderland nonsense, let me try to say something a bit simpler.

Admittedly, the humanities have been wrecked by essentially left-wing pseudo-academics who see hundreds of years of literature and music as nothing but an inchoate struggle towards postmodern sociology, but, now that this has happened, all bets are off. Subjects like literary criticism and musicology amount to an intramural game, and the import of the game is certainly not conservative, but its ludic openness (as its keenest players would no doubt put it) should not be underestimated.

Stravinsky

But Stravinsky was no militarist or fascist. It was just that, if an authoritarian regime was going to be friendly to his interests, he had no more of a problem with the authoritarian bit than he would have had with getting royalties on his compositions.

Previously, music-lovers in the west had taken Shostakovich to be a major figure but a Soviet party hack. In 1973, he had even signed a petition denouncing the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov.

Now everything changed. Suddenly Shostakovich was an ironist, a secret dissident. But what exactly is a secret dissident? After Testimony, while people were busily romanticizing the composer and finding codes and sardonic messages in his music, some musicologists were becoming acutely aware that, if there was a secret here, it sounded more like despair than dissidence.

Volkov had claimed that Testimony was based on interviews with the dying Shostakovich, and that the composer had signed off every chapter. Laurel Fay discovered that large passages of the book were drawn from previously published articles by the composer.

When, in 1973, Shostakovich was approached with the demand that he sign a circular letter denouncing Sakharov, he again gave in with disastrous consequences for his reputation among his peers in the Soviet intelligentsia, including Mr. Solzhenitsyn, who despised him for it.

Conclusion

Not the same thing at all, then.

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