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Carnegie Hall Sound Insights - The Music of Shostakovich
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“We were astonished by many things…. But the main thing that struck us was his own curiosity in regard to what he had himself composed. He sat absolutely motionless, only his hands fidgeted nervously, maintaining a complete silence, as he listened to us perform the cycle right through.”
—Sofiya Vakman (pianist performed the premiere of the Six Poems by Tsvetayeva) |
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During the Thaw, forgotten figures of Russian poetry were resurrected, and the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, who had committed suicide in 1941, were taken up eagerly by many composers, Shostakovich among them. But his Tsvetaeva settings show that he was not merely following a trend—the songs of this cycle are distinctive and deeply felt. In a sense, the cycle is a portrait of Tsvetaeva, who appears as an extremely powerful voice, an artist with great confidence in her own abilities, an emancipated woman, romantic and prone to exaggeration, passionate in love and rage. It is a voice from the past, from the pre-Revolutionary but modernising Russian “Silver Age.” On another level, Shostakovich’s choice attempts to draw out those elements of Tsetaeva’s work that would strike a later generation as prophetic. In this way, Tsvetaeva is also presented as a contemporary, a poet who had perfectly expressed the anxieties of the 1970s Soviet audience, in language that is modern, direct, and free of clichés.
The first song stands as a kind of epigraph to the whole cycle: “for my poems, like precious wines, a time will come!” A 12-tone theme, characteristic of Shostakovich’s late style, is taken from a quiet, searching beginning to a triumphant but poignant final statement. The second song places Tsvetaeva’s refrain “Where did such tenderness come from?” into a low, sultry register of the contralto voice and surrounds it with idyllic, pastoral motifs in the piano. “Hamlet’s dialogue with his conscience” begins with an evocation of Shostakovich’s score for Kozintsev’s 1964 film, Hamlet. There is an eerie physical feeling of divided consciousness created by the cross-echoing quavers between the voice (which is in itself divided between Hamlet and Conscience) and the piano.
The next two songs form a distinct pair, focusing on Pushkin and Tsar Nicholas I. Tsvetaeva, writing during the reign of Nicholas II, takes up a conspiracy theory that Nicholas I was behind the provocation that led to Pushkin’s death in a duel; this is not generally accepted, and the evidence seems insufficient to support it, but for Shostakovich, it was not so much the truth of the theory, but the parallels with Stalin that mattered. In “The Poet and the Tsar,” Shostakovich amplifies Tsvetayeva’s seething rage through a series of 12 crashing, bell-like chords, used to terrifying effect, a kind of grim parody on the bells of the traditional Russian operatic Slavsya! (“Glory!”) choruses. The second song of the pair presents Pushkin’s funeral, with drum rolls and trumpet fanfares— the ceremony has been hijacked by the state that persecuted him. Perhaps the strongest parallel in Stalinist times was the posthumous lionization of the poet Mayakovsky, but perhaps Shostakovich was thinking ahead to his own funeral, which, predictably, featured rows of security guards and endless pompous speeches. At the end of the poem, Tsvetaeva sarcastically quotes Nicholas I, who once referred to Pushkin as “the most intelligent man in Russia.” No doubt Shostakovich foresaw similar encomiums for himself, and indeed his official obituary concluded that he had been “a loyal son of the Communist Party.”
The last song is Tsvetaeva’s salutation to her perpetual rival, Anna Akhmatova. It was written in 1916, and later, when she felt more ambivalent about Akhmatova’s work, Tsvetayeva even began to regret the generosity she had shown in this poem. But for Shostakovich, it still held true: for him Akhmatova did indeed become the true “muse of weeping.” For it was Akhmatova who wrote the first Requiem for Stalin’s victims, and Tsvetaeva’s lofty words became all the more resonant when set alongside Akhmatova’s life of suffering, imposed obscurity, and dignity under Stalin. And the words “We are crowned by trampling the same earth, by having the same sky above us” could be heard as the composer’s own thoughts. This may be a belated reply to Akhmatova’s own high praise of Shostakovich’s music: “It alone speaks to me / When others are too scared to come near.”
—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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