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Carnegie Hall Sound Insights - The Music of Shostakovich
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“We soon performed the cycle for the first time, privately at Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s flat…. The new work was striking and profound, and everybody was moved by its intense and simple sincerity.”
—Nina Dorliak (sang the premiere of From Jewish Folk Poetry) |
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One of the main aims of the 1948 Resolution against formalism was to prevent composers from concentrating their efforts on “elitist” music, which at that moment meant non-programmatic symphonies and quartets; instead, they were to turn their attention toward more “democratic” genres with at least a program, but preferably a text, based ideally on folk sources and with consideration for the needs of amateur performers. Shostakovich’s cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry answers all these demands faithfully, almost as if it were “a composer’s response to just criticism” (like the Fifth Symphony, composed after earlier criticisms of 1936).
But events outside the musical world gave the work a very different meaning. In January 1948, one Solomon Mikhoels was killed by a speeding truck. A tragic accident, said the official version of events, but that did not ward off rumors of a political assassination. Mikhoels had been the director of Moscow’s Yiddish theater, and served during the war years and after as chair of the Soviet Anti-Fascist Committee. Together with the removal of various Jewish intellectuals from positions of prestige or responsibility, close observers detected a mounting anti-Semitic campaign in the government’s behavior. In this they were correct, although the campaign was always thinly veiled behind other pretexts because the stringent laws against anti-Semitism from the Revolutionary years had never been removed from the statute books. The primary motivation seems to have been the failure of Stalin’s attempts to bring the newly created state of Israel within the Soviet sphere of influence; instead, Israel looked to the US as its sponsor, leading to substantial changes in Soviet foreign and domestic policy (prominent Soviet Jews were now regarded as a potential fifth column).
It is hard to gauge what Shostakovich understood of these developments in the autumn of 1948, when he was working on the song cycle. But given his close ties with the Mikhoels family, it seems likely that some rumors would have reached him, and if this were the case, then his choice of specifically Jewish texts carried a deeper significance. At the beginning of 1949, the campaign suddenly became more public, after a series of arrests of prominent Jewish officials, and euphemistic official slogans calling for struggle against “cosmopolitanism.” It was only at this juncture that the completed song cycle became a real danger to its composer, and he could not allow it to be heard or discussed outside the closest circle of friends.
Shostakovich chose his texts from a collection simply entitled Jewish Folk Songs, published in Russian translation in 1947. The first eight songs of the cycle were performed at a gathering of Shostakovich’s friends at some point before the end of September 1948. After this, Shostakovich prepared an orchestrated version of the same eight songs, and it appears that he now con- sidered the work finished. However, a month later he added another three songs, whose texts were markedly different: while the first eight had an authentic, Chagallian color, the final three painted a highly idealized picture of life under Stalin, and these most likely belonged to the category of commissioned “fake lore.” Now the cycle traced a standard Socialist Realist progression from suffering in Tsarist Russia (where anti-Semitic pogroms were rife) to happiness (with Jewish emancipation and freedom from religious persecution). Why this change was made remains unclear, but the course of events strongly suggests official interference.
Shostakovich closely follows the details of his texts and incorporates the sounds of Yiddish popular music into his score, clearly enjoying the swaying phrases, “exotic” modes, and oom-pah harmonization. Only the bland Socialist Realism of the ninth song defeated him—its paean to the collective elicited only a neutral Schubert pastiche. There are other, more felicitous allusions, however: Mahler is strongly evoked in the first song, “Lament for a Dead Infant,” and Mussorgsky surfaces in almost every song, with interjections of “realistic” speech. The composer’s own distinctive voice is best heard in the seventh number, “A Song of Poverty,” where grief and bitterness are poured out to the rhythms of a lively dance.
Subsequent history added its own layer of irony to the cycle: the blandly optimistic phrase from the last song, “Our Sons Have Become Doctors,” grew to be darkly ironic in Janurary 1953, when several Jewish doctors were accused of conspiring to poison Stalin (the so-called Doctors’ Plot). It is not surprising that the cycle had to wait until 1955 for its public premiere.
—Marina Frolova-Walker
Marina Frolova-Walker’s writings on Russian music have appeared in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Cambridge Opera Journal, Journal of the American Musicological Society, and elsewhere.
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