Ljs: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets by Wendy Lesser ? review

An essential companion to Shostakovich reveals a surprising side to the great Russian master

People compelled ? even infatuated ? by the music of Dmitri Shostakovich tend to have reached this condition as a result of two experiences, and I am no different. First come the symphonies: on a life-changing night at the Proms in 1971 when the Leningrad Philharmonic under Arvid Jansons performed Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, I began to understand the composer's ability to say two different things at the same time: the censors and party cronies at the premiere in 1937 heard a penitent return to classical style after a terrifying reprimand for experiments in modernism, while the audience heard Shostakovich's searing requiem for the victims of Stalin's great terror. This high-wire act would come to characterise Shostakovich's public music, as he condemned himself to a life on the rack.

Then come the quartets: 15 years later, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, I heard most of a cycle played by the Borodin Quartet, and felt the almost equally shattering impact of raw emotion in music.

The distinguished American critic Wendy Lesser begins her estimable book with a similar journey. She is blown away by a performance of the Fourth Symphony by Valery Gergiev, then experiences the quartets, as performed by the Emerson Quartet of New York ? these pieces, she writes, "planted themselves in my life".

Lesser calls the quartets Shostakovich's "pure" music, by way of contrast to the "impurity" of the symphonies and other work, as demanded by the composer's navigation of a precarious route between creative honesty and survival in Stalin's Soviet Union. Later in the book, she likewise divides Shostakovich's life between that which is "true" in private and "false" in public.

Most recent writing on the composer has dealt, at least subliminally, with fallout from the so-called "Shostakovich Question", raised in a book entitled Testimony by Solomon Volkov, which purported to contain the composer's inner thoughts, portraying him as a dissident in the Solzhenitsyn mould. Lesser dismisses Volkov early on; she establishes instead "the doubleness, the irony, whereby he says one thing . . . and at the same time lets his listeners know that the opposite is the case". It's an auspicious start.

The book proceeds as a biographical sketch, punctuated by discussion of the quartets as they occur in the story. And its main strength lies in Lesser's descriptions of the quartets themselves: this book is an essential companion for anyone planning to hear them. Her description of the 11th Quartet, for instance, is wonderful: "it is like the empty ruin of a once joyous house, a crumbling, disintegrating memorial to lost happiness".

The west has fixated on a version of Shostakovich: a haunted and haunting man, anxious, depressive, even suicidal. It pervades the atmosphere of every concert programme ? they tend to be full of pictures of a dolorous, persecuted, almost martyred composer. Lesser does give a glimpse of the man who played poker, had a complex love life and adored football ? he was a fan of Zenit Leningrad. But even as we arrive at the 2nd Quartet, we reach, Lesser says, "true Shostakovich territory . . . let's call it death".

This lachrymose figure is, of course, central to any understanding of the man or his music, especially during the various persecutions, and towards the end of his life, the utterly comfortless 13th Quartet. But it is not the whole story. There is a photograph of Shostakovich I love, which shows him laughing, briefcase on his lap, between two friends at a match of his beloved Zenit. Another shows him in what appears to be a gentlemen's club, lighting a cigarette from a candelabra beneath a picture of a scantily-clad woman. These hint at another Shostakovich.

According to Gergiev, the greatest Shostakovich interpreter of his generation, the composer would drink a large glass of vodka before entering a roomful of famous people, and was the life and soul of the party. There are accounts of him dancing on a piano. All this may indicate the bitter mirth of a clown, or hollow laughter of a survivor, but it implies at least an ironic ? if not genuine ? pleasure in life's few consolations, which books on Shostakovich tend not to allow for. The point extends into the music: much of Shostakovich's less severe repertoire ? the parodies and better film music, his opera The Nose and ballet The Golden Age, and the amusing comic opera Moscow Cheryomushki ? is also "true", maybe even "pure" public music.

Lesser's book is driven by her inferences of what Shostakovich's state of mind was at a given time, and she endearingly likens her incessant curiosity to that of Shostakovich's persecutor-in-chief, cultural commissar Andrei Zhdanov. All of us who admire Shostakovich's music want to know what he was really thinking, and the view from New York ? which this very much is ? invariably seeks to pin down a linear narrative in Soviet history to explain the music. But what if Shostakovich cannot be reduced to this narrative, for which his admirers in the west have yearned ever since the pleas for him to defect when he visited America, which he flatly refused to do? In the definitive book on Shostakovich's chamber music, David Fanning talks about the "surface" of Shostakovich's music being "overlaid with mirrors", adding that "we can never be sure precisely where and at what angle they are placed".

In this endless debate over why Shostakovich joined the Communist party, why he did not defect ? over whether he was a party toady or an heroic dissident, tortured genius or wily survivor ? it remains possible that none of the descriptions is true, or indeed that they all are. The political labels simply do not stick, nor, one suspects, were they intended by him to do so.

Shostakovich's life was one of haunted ambivalence and conflicting emotions and affiliations. This, at least, is the texture of his music, and this is what ultimately confounds any attempt, including Lesser's, at "mind-reading" even such intimate music as the quartets. The Soviet mathematician Lev Mazel likened Shostakovich's work to algebra in which formulae containing several unknowns can have various solutions. More than one thing is happening at once, and not necessarily logically.

The Shostakovich we can identify from the evidence personified a kind of existential irony ? in doing so he spoke to, and for, millions of Russians. In that sense, his music is the secret memoir of a people, as the title of Lesser's book suggests. Shostakovich counts among his weapons parody and satire, carnival and grotesque. But what matters is that the music itself, as Fanning writes, "liberates itself from the shackles of its context". We who now listen to Shostakovich in the 21st century can liberate the music from the various political claims on it, and set it in our own time, with all its ambiguities, persecutions and absurdities ? the composer's laughter no less bitter, or cogent.

Ed Vulliamy

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