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The Seventh Symphony, he says, was planned in his head before the war; the so-called invasion theme, with its fearsomely swelling fortissimo, has nothing to do with the Nazi attack. "I was thinking of other enemies of humanity [namely Stalin and his killers] when 1 composed the theme." His Fifth Symphony, which established Shostakovich's reputation in the Soviet Union, was meant to describe Stalin's Great Terror of 1936-37. In the post-Stalin era, his Thirteenth Symphony was intended as a protest against antiSemitism, and his Fourteenth was an evocation of the horrors of the Gulag.
Even his powerful reorchestration of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov was meant to dramatize the opera's message that an "antipeople government" is "inevitably" a criminal government. The composer believes that the score makes the point even more clearly than the Alexander Pushkin play on which the libretto is based. "For me, the abstract art—music—is more effective," he says.
"Music illuminates a person through and through, and it is also his last hope and final refuge. And even half-mad Stalin, a beast and a butcher, instinctively sensed that about music. That's why he feared and hated it."
For Shostakovich, music was indeed the last hope and final refuge of a man perpetually thwarted in the expression of his moral outrage. But the notion that his music's meaning could be made intelligible to Stalin, or to anyone else, was only a comforting illusion. Stalin, like all Russia's other tyrants, held an attitude toward the arts that was best summed up by a bureaucrat in a story by the 19th century satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin: "What I do not understand is dangerous for the state."
The composer-historian offers an unexampled picture of some 55 years of Soviet musical life. His tender and witty evocation of his teacher Alexander Glazunov constitutes one of the most affecting portraits of a composer in the literature of music. Shostakovich muses over the fates of his close friends, the director Vsevolod Meyerhold, the Red Army Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and others more obscure: composers, an organist, a musicologist. All died in the Gulag. "When I started going over the life stories of my friends and acquaintances," he told Volkov, "all I saw was corpses, mountains of corpses."
Perhaps the most moving passage mourns the extinction of folk music in the Soviet Union. Shostakovich tells a story about the blind folk singers, called lir-niki and banduristy, who from time immemorial had wandered along the roads of the Ukraine. In the mid-'30s, the singers were summoned to an official congress of folk music in the Ukraine. Several hundred in all assembled from all over the Ukraine, from tiny forgotten villages. Says Shostakovich: "It was a living museum, the country's living history. All its songs,
The manuscript was smuggled abroad.
all its music and poetry. And they were al most all shot, almost all those pathetic blind men killed."