Shostakovich, his lyrical, squeaky, desperate universe

Hold on to your seat, it feels like the earth shook, your breath was choked, your blood froze: the murderous violence, the maniacal oppression, the helplessness in the face of injustice and the arbitrariness jumps down your throat. And then, in a quarter of a second, a catchy and trivial chorus sweeps away these anxieties as if it were all a farce, except that this overplayed optimism ends up ringing false and discordant. The music of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) often provides such an experience. Hot and cold, intense and ambiguous, exuberance and aridity, in a breathtaking emotional whirlwind.

Half a century after his death, the figure of the Russian composer continues to fascinate. First of all, his works, of inexhaustible richness, from solo piano to opera, from film scores to gigantic symphonies, which have known no purgatory (except during his lifetime!). And his life inseparable from the tortuous marriage of Art and politics – in this case between the totalitarian regime of the Soviet Union and its most gifted musician.

From January 17 to 23, a complete in Vevey of his fifteen string quartets, which accompanied his life from 1938 to 1974, offers the rare opportunity to immerse oneself in dense, cryptic and thrilling music. Before other tributes.

Long described as the Beethoven of the 20th^e century, influenced as much by the great Russian repertoire as by Mahler and Berg, Shostakovich is no longer anyone’s epigone, as his music has shocked generations of music lovers and influenced numerous composers.

Whether the avant-garde troublemaker of the 1920s, the neo-romantic forced by power to simplify his language, the cantor of the heroic destiny of his people, the scoffer with devastating irony, the disillusioned postmodernist and the austere minimalist of recent years , his style is recognizable from the first bar. And always polysemous, if we take the trouble to go beyond the “Waltz” of the “Jazz suite No. 2”, its planetary tube recycled by advertising.

A guilty success

A precocious and prolific musician, a born orchestrator, gifted with a staggering narrative sense, the St. Petersburger had all the gifts and his career was growing until Stalin himself put his end to it after attending the opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Shostakovich kept the press clippings of this fiery descent all his life, as well as a suitcase ready at his bedside for a probable one-way night trip to the Gulag.

This paranoid situation of an artist literally stuck between the hammer and… the sickle magnificently inspired the writer William T. Vollmann, who made Shostakovich one of the main characters in his novel “Central Europe” (Actes Sud 2005). Necessary for communist propaganda, his too strong personality could not wisely conform to the dogma of the Party with which he played cat and mouse all his life – he was the mouse.

In the West, he achieved incredible fame very early on which culminated during the war where his 7^e “Leningrad” symphony illustrated resistance to the Nazis. But he was also castigated for his pompous academicism, shunned because of his role as “official composer of the Party line”. Even today, his detractors have not given up their weapons. When conductor Charles Dutoit, interviewed this month in “Classica”, believes that Shostakovich’s music, “it’s very well written and it speaks to people, but it’s to the detriment of the rest”, is it not Wouldn’t this do him an additional injustice, when for him it was a question of survival?

The resistance from within

The posthumous publication of his “Memories” (collected by Solomon Volkov, partly subject to doubt) will have revealed a resolutely rebellious artist. Also, it is useful to distinguish in its production “official” works from “private”, those which refuse to comply with the aesthetic canons of socialist realism advocated by Stalin, Zhdanov (secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1948) and Khrennikov (general secretary of the Union of Composers from 1948 to 2003).

It would thus be too simple to see in his symphonies the political side and in his chamber music that, austere and pessimistic, of the finally sincere artist. Of his fifteen symphonies, more than one did not have the luck to please the Central Committee: the “Symphony No. 4” of 1936 was not created until 1961, and certain quartets remained preventively in the drawer.

The legend of having been spared because Stalin loved his film scores is not implausible. But his stroke of genius was to invent a language that was not too modernist, deeply personal, and above all subtly ambiguous: he was thus able to circumvent the censorship and transmit a strong emotional message to listeners less narrow-minded than the Party cadres.

After Stalin’s death, the ideological grip loosened somewhat for the composer, but he was forced into official obligations and his health faltered, making his writing more difficult. The scarcity of musical material did not prevent its complexity. On the contrary. He developed a style of great economy of means, made up of repeated motifs, camouflaged twelve-tone series (a taboo according to communist aesthetics), self-quotations of his blacklisted works or of composers he admired. In addition to a twilight expressiveness, his latest works offer an unfathomable treasure hunt with cryptic autobiographical messages.

Matthew Chenal has been a journalist in the cultural section since 1996. He particularly chronicles the abundant news of classical music in the canton of Vaud and French-speaking Switzerland.More info

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