Savaged messiah

A new book has reignited one of the fiercest artistic debates of the twentieth century - was Dmitri Shostakovich a Soviet stooge or a passionate critic of communism?

Dmitri Shostakovich, the greatest composer of the twentieth century, was a football fanatic. He was, said Maxim Gorky, 'a rabid fan. He comported himself like a little boy, leapt up, screamed and gesticulated' at matches. Shostakovich supported Leningrad Zenith; he would cut short his composing retreats in some rural idyll and return to the city for home games.

He exchanged detailed analyses of these matches with friends and kept notebooks of scores and championship league tables, arranged in pyramids. He wanted to come to London to see the 1966 World Cup but was thwarted in his plans. He did, however, make sure to go to Disneyland when in Los Angeles - he loved rollercoaster rides.

These vernacular delicacies emerge in a new book about a passionate, tortured man who wrote music about the kernel of what it means to be a human in a violent political society. But in the case of Shostakovich, any biographical fact, however absurd it may seem, is a statement of sorts, since its publication becomes part of the most unforgiving war in the world of music, or probably any of the arts, for that matter - the so-called 'Shostakovich controversy'. Such is the hurricane into which Laurel Fay's Shostakovich: a Life now steps.

Fay is quickly finding that it is impossible to write about him without fanning the flames of controversy. No composer's work, not even Wagner's, has been subject to such acrimony. The debate centres on Shostakovich's jagged relationship with the Soviet authorities and with communism, its party and its tyrant, Stalin.

At crucial times in his life, Shostakovich was denounced and persecuted, but he also made sure to survive, dedicating much of his work to the cause of the revolution and tardily joining the Communist Party in 1960, having resisted for decades.

The claim of the Soviets, their post-Soviet Russian successors and many in the West is that Shostakovich was a believer in the revolution and in the final hour, loyal to the USSR. Not quite that his work is literally party music, but that he could not and did not want to break with the faith or leave the country in the way that Prokofiev, Solzhenitsyn and others did.

Against this is pitched a passionate counter-argument by leading musicologists and some of Russia's most illustrious dissidents - that Shostakovich was himself a bitter and brave dissident against communism, whose entire oeuvre was a vast, inner rebellion. One of the principals in the 'dissident' camp, Ian MacDonald, writes: 'The persistent misinterpretation of Shostakovich's music is arguably the most grotesque cultural scandal of our time.'

The 'Shostakovich controversy' exploded shortly after the composer's death in 1975, at which time the USSR still claimed his creative soul and ideo- logical loyalty, for all the friction between Shostakovich and the authorities during his life. But in 1979, a memoir called Testimony appeared, purporting to have been narrated by the dying Shostakovich to an acquaintance, Solomon Volkov.

Here, the composer lambasts communism and the totalitarian, anti-Semitic state in which 'a man has no significance'. Whether Testimony was genuine or not, no one could have predicted how vituperative the ensuing debate would be.

The doomed Soviet authorities, their post-Soviet successors and the composer's family launched a counter-offensive (although Shostakovich's defector son, Maxim, was equivocal). Laurel Fay, joined with Russian scholar Serge Karlinsky to do some detective work, and found Testimony to be, for the most part, spurious and full of plagiarisms. MacDonald then set out to decipher Shostakovich's entire oeuvre , finding it to constitute a coherent and passionate cry of dissent against communism, in musical code.

The musicologist Christopher Norris retorted with a conference on 'Shostakovich: the Man and His Music', stating that Volkov had written 'a thoroughly mischievous ideological primer'. The debate was joined by distinguished exiled musicians, Vladimir Ashkenazy and Mstislav Rostropovich, whose lives had been defined by their leaving Russia while Shostakovich had stayed on.

Fra from stilling the debate, the collapse of the USSR brought about only a temporary lull. Two years ago came a rabid defence of Volkov in Dmitry Feofanev's Shostakovich Reconsidered, which savaged the claims made in Moscow, and in Fay's research. At a conference in New York shortly after publication, Volkov appeared to deliver what he called his 'first and last' defence of the veracity of his memoir.

Meanwhile, the war has been waged on the Net. MacDonald has his own, intelligent website, arguing with ever-greater passion for his theory of Shostakovich's great coded weave. He and his supporters accuse Norris of 'Stalinism' for defending the composer's apparent loyalty to Marxism.

Norris has, in turn, mocked MacDonald and 'Western liberals' for thinking themselves 'too shrewd' for the Russian version. 'Redrick' is another Internet regular taking the Russian line and assailing the dissidents as inhabiting 'cultish Internet backwaters where neither evidence or logic carry much weight'. Each side accuses the other of 'fraud', 'deceit' and 'revisionism'.

Amidst the acrimony Fay continues to takes the Staten Island ferry to work at the music publisher G. Shirmer's on Park Avenue.

'This isn't the book I wanted to write,' she confesses; that was intended to be about Shostakovich's music. But then she was admitted, after some years of studying music in Leningrad, into 'a library-like room, and there was his life; it was quite a moment' - the moment at which Fay became the first Western writer ever to gain access to the Shostakovich archive.

The result is a deliberately dry book which will infuriate many, if only because of its refusal to discuss either the music or the controversy. Rather, it tries to cut a neutral, biographical, factual furrow through both. It is what Fay calls 'a platform, a factual record upon which other work can build'. It is both minimalist and crammed with detail, devoid of interpretation and built upon what Shostakovich himself can be proven to have said and done, rather than 'all those people who speak for Shostakovich'. Fay constructs a life story which, she says, accounts for the fact that 'people change with time and age. And that Shostakovich was damaged psychologically by what happened to him'.

She follows the life charted by a passionate, tormented, often isolated man in a society where synergy between art and politics was unavoidable. But such is the intensity of the debate that by avoiding it, Fay is seen by the 'dissident' camp as endorsing the Soviet view (which she does not) simply by recording Shostakovich's own public endorsements of communism (as well as his digressions and hostility) without comment, rather than presuming them to be ironic. The negative reviews have begun - cold criticism in the New York Times, a savaging in the Washington Post - and will certainly continue.

'They're already calling me a Soviet stooge,' she sighs. In Britain, Norman Lebrecht has called Fay a 'revisionist' and compares what he calls her account of Shostakovich 'coming to terms with communism' with David Irving's alleged denial of the Holocaust.

Shostakovich had been famously rebuked and shamed during the Stalinist purges of 1936. He was assailed by Pravda for composing 'muddle instead of music'. And yet while Prokofiev fled the tyranny, Shostakovich found a way to live and survive under it.

War against Hitler created a complex set of circumstances which legitimised Stalin's rule. Shostakovich's dedication of his Seventh Symphony, Leningrad, to 'our struggle against fascism' is wholehearted. And yet, with the war over, Shostakovich crossed the party again, to be denounced by Stalin's dreaded commissar Andrey Zhdanov for 'formalism' and compromise with decadent Western modernism.

Shostakovich seems to have greeted Stalin's death with relief, but then wrote his Twelfth Symphony of 1961 as a eulogy to the 1917 Revolution, its final movement entitled 'The Dawn of Humanity'. The following year, however he delivered his most overt rebellion - the epic Thirteenth Symphony, Babi Yar , a setting of Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poem about the Nazi massacre of Jews that was only a thinly veiled and bitter, enraged indictment of the crime and shame of Soviet anti-Semitism.

What was Shostakovich doing? Fay remembers from her time living in Leningrad the way in which 'people are forced to live on so many different levels'. Shostakovich, she says, 'lived his life very publicly', and was, therefore, constrained to exist on different and often contradictory planes. 'It is not as though things just happened to him - he made choices, and I am inter ested in those choices.' Shostakovich's conductor friend Kyril Kondrashin called him 'the moral conscience of music in Russia'. Maxim, the composer's son, said: 'My father was a patriot for his people, which is not the same as being a party apparatchik.' For a younger generation of artists such as Rostropovich and Ashkenazy, loyalty to Russia entailed heroic dissent against communism and defection.

But clearly not for the older Shostakovich, who had lived through the revolution, witnessed the Lenin years and seems to have felt at least some reluctant connection between a love of nation and this antithetic but Janus-like cohabitation with those who terrorised it. 'The demons Shostakovich wrestled with were his own,' writes Fay. 'He crossed his own line in the sand. He was neither the first nor the last to realise, too late, that the path of accommodation of the Soviet system was one of no return.'

Useful links:

Comprehensive coverage

Home page of the Shostakovich museum

Fan's page dedicated to debunking Volkov

Ian MacDonald's Shostakovich pages