By his death in 1975, Dmitri Shostakovich was recognized internationally as the most important composer the Soviet Union had produced.
Important composers tend to write masterpieces. But to become an important Soviet composer, the undeniably talented Shostakavich was compelled to write a great deal of bad music - hymns to Stalin's reforestation projects, saccharine scores for trivial movies, whatever the authorities deemed was needed by ``Soviet mankind.''
In the last 20 years there has arisen an intellectual game. The object is to prove that even Shostakovich's most banal music conceals pointed criticism of a society that demanded banality.
It sounds a lot like spinning Beatles albums backward in search of hidden messages. But whether or not Shostakovich's bad music is really good music, the situation illustrates the tensions that stifled the careers of many other composers in the Soviet Union.
The tensions revolved around two vague concepts, ``formalism'' and ``socialist realism.'' Those concepts, two conflicting critical theories, fell into the hands of bonehead Communist Party functionaries who understood little about the theories they wielded as weapons over artists' heads.
It was as ii prison guards were issued rifles, but, too stupid to figure out the firing mechanism, bludgeoned their confused prisoners with the rifle butts.
Formalism was a stream of Russian literary criticism that flowed from 1915 to about 1930. Originally it had to do with the analysis and aesthetics of language, but it was soon applied to any art form adhering to models or rules.
The iornallst movement ignored social or political elements in art, and ignored the historical background of a work's creation. Fornalists cared about art's patterns and structure, not its ``meaning.''
This ran counter to the official Marxist doctrine of art, socialist realism. Unlike the abstract and intellectual preoccupations oi iornalism, socialist realism was tailor-made for an artistic environment controlled by People deliberately ignorant of the arts.
In the mid-1930s, the statutes of the Soviet Union oi Composers explicitly made socialist realism the only acceptable approach to music. ``The chief attention of the Soviet composer,'' according to the statutes, ``must be directed towards the conquering, progressive principles of reality, towards those heroic, bright, and beautiful traits which distinguish the spiritual world of Soviet mankind and which must be embodied in musical images full of beauty and life-affirming strength.''
None of this was specific enough to be used as a blueprint for writing music in a ``socialist realism'' style - blueprints, after all, are the tools of iornalists. But official criticism soon made it apparent that patriotism, melodiousness, and elements of folk music from the various Soviet republics were encouraged. Cynicism, gloom, dissonance, excessive complexity, and, of course, any textual references to gulag or famine were stamped out.
Eventually, the terms ``formalism'' and ``socialist realism'' lost any specific meaning. Anything that was so innovative that it exceeded the intellectual grasp of untutored tractor drivers was condemned as formalist.
Anything that promoted the party's social goals was welcomed as socialist realism.
This was not an artistic climate conducive to the health of sickly, befuddled young Shostakovich, who had made a brilliant compositional debut at age 18 with his crisp first symphony.
He followed that with increasingly daring scores, many of them using dissonant harmonies and sarcastic tunes. Judged purely through his music, Shostakovich must have been thought a particularly snotty young man.
Inevitably, he ran afoul of the authorities. In 1934 came the premiere of his opera, ``Lady Macbeth of the Mtzensk District'' which told of adultery, murder and suicide in a bourgeois home in Czarist Russia. The work was initially hailed as a model of socialist realism, but two years later it was assaulted in a famous Pravda article titled, ``Chaos Instead of Music.''
``Lady Macbeth,'' it seemed, had suddenly turned formalist. Shostakovich was officially denounced for his use of dissonance and the licentiousness of the opera.
The attack devastated Shostakovich. He shelved the innovative scores he was working on - including a grim, complex fourth symphony - and softened his style.
His next major work was an immediate hit at home and abroad - his fifth symphony, which Shostakovich subtitled, ``A Soviet Artist's Reply to Just Criticism.''
There's no explicit story in the music. The first movement is built on jagged, tragic themes. The second is a sardonic schena somewhat inspired by the comparable movement in Gustav Mahler's fourth symphony. The grief-laden slow movement is followed by a boisterous finale, which may be interpreted as either ``heroic, bright . . . and life-affirming'' (as in the Composers Union statutes) or a painted-grin accommodation of a brutal social order.
At this point, one might legitimately question Shostakovich's integrity. In the 1940s and early '50s, Shostakovich was in effect two different composers. One Shostakovich churned out such banal tripe as the tub-thumpingly patriotic ``Leningrad'' (Seventh) Symphony, crass cantatas with titles like ``The Sun Shines Over Our Motherland'' and generic movie music that could have been dashed off by any hack.
The other Shostakovich, meanwhile, was capable of searching, profound works like the eighth and 10th symphonies and a number of highly personal string quartets.
After Stalin's death in 1953, Shostakovich and his fellow Soviet composers - all of whom had been threatened by a cultural purge in 1948 - found the artistic climate more conducive to individual expression.
From the mid-'50s to his death, Shostakovich wrote music that was increasingly brooding and experimental, finally free of optimistic facades. Any seemingly joyful moments in these late works were thickly laced with irony.
The last eight quartets, the 13th and 14th symphonies and the two cello concertos are, to varying degrees, preoccupied with terror, anguish, and the questionable benefits of muddling through a dreary life.
Four years after the composer's death, Solomon Volkov published in the West a book titled, ``Testimony: the Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich.'' Volkov claimed to be the editor of this ``as told to'' volume, but the Shostakovich family disavowed the book. They claimed that Volkov was the true author, using Shostakovich's personality as a vehicle for his own anti-Soviet tirade.
According to ``Testimony,'' Shostakovich intended even his most banal music of the Stalin years to be ironic, a veiled criticism of Soviet leadership. But if this were true, Shostakovich often failed to make his point.
The first movement of the so-called ``Leningrad'' Symphony, for instance, contains a mocking, insipid march meant to ridicule the Nazis. Unfortunately, the march is repeated ad nauseum as sort of a World War II counterpart to Ravel's ``Bolero.'' The extra-musical point is made, but in strictly musical terms the movement fails.
The Shostakovich works that have become most popular do balance the composer's brittle, ironically upbeat public side and gloomy private side.
The Fifth Symphony is undoubtedly his greatest hit.
The other most highly regarded Shostakovich symphonies are the audacious first; the sixth, with a slow, impassioned first movement whose effect is diminished by the two comparatively trivial fast movements that follow; the weighty eighth and IOth; the jaunty ninth; and the brooding 13th and 14th, both having vocalists sing texts by leading 20th-century poets.
Shostakovich listening suggestions
Look for recordings of the symphonies conducted by the most reliably insightful Shostakovich interpreters - Mstislav Rostropovich, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Leonard Slatkin, Bernard Haitink or Neeme Jarvi.
Other essential Shostakovich works include the stark, terrifying eighth string quartet (recorded well by the Borodin and Manhattan quartets), the taut and concentrated first cello concerto (listen to the CDs featuring cellists Rostropovich, Heinrich Schiff or Yo-Yo Ma), and the two piano concertos (recorded on separate discs by the composer's son, Maxim, conducting and grandson, Dmitri, at the piano).