JucheBot1988
Kimilsungist-Kimjongilist.
- 44 Posts
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Here we see a soldier in the Evil CCCP Army taking away a citizen who dares to wear something besides a military uniform (all Chinese citizens are forced to dress like soldiers and do 10,000 push-ups every morning while chanting “Death to Weebs,” if they don’t their social credit score goes down by 300,000,000,000 points)
Yes, from what I’ve read nobody is quite sure what Shostakovich’s private political beliefs were, and modernist composers had (as you say) every motivation to be angry at the Soviet government. But the Testimony story is wild. Apparently just four years after Shostakovich’s death, a Russian emigre musicologist named Solomon Volkov showed up at Houghton Mifflin’s offices in New York, with a manuscript that he claimed was Shostakovich’s “unpublished memoirs;” he said, moreover, that the composer had given him a “sacred trust” to emigrate to the west and get the memoirs published. The book came out, in English, as Testimony, and claimed among other things that Shostakovich was a secret dissident, that he had a tense personal relationship with Stalin, and that his music contains coded anti-Soviet messages. Testimony has never been published in the original Russian – Volkov refuses to show his manuscript to anybody – and the current Russian edition is just a back-translation out of English.
The big problem here is that, since 1991, scholars have discovered that whole sections of the book seem to be lifted verbatim from various articles Shostakovich published in the 60s. This in itself isn’t too weird, since writers reuse stuff all the time. However, Volkov claims the book was written in a rather unique way: he interviewed Shostakovich, jotted down the composer’s responses in shorthand, and then rearranged the material into a complete narrative. Shostakovich reviewed each completed chapter and indicated the changes he wanted made, only adding his signature when he was satisfied with the result. So we are to assume: Shostakovich had various magazine articles he’d written, on random subjects for various music journals, complete and memorized in his head; and that when interviewed, he responded by reciting these articles, which then somehow survived Volkov’s rearranging. None of these things are impossible in themselves, but taken together it’s a pretty big (one might say Zenz-level) chain of coincidences.
(None of this, of course, has stopped western pop musicologists in the slightest. The British rock critic Ian MacDonald wrote in his book The New Shostakovich that a particular horn line in Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony is meant to parody “Soviet officialese.” Why? Because, MacDonald says, it sounds like a Russian folk song, but is pitched impossibly high. He seems unaware that horn parts are conventionally written a fifth above the actual sound, so that the line in question isn’t high at all, but pretty squarely in the normal range.)
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Apparently musical competence is an unjust heirarchy.