A Moral Beacon Amid the Darkness Of a Tragic Era
By JOSEPH HOROWITZ
Published: February 6, 2000
A CENTURY ago the equation of great music with spiritual uplift was a prevailing article of faith. To John Sullivan Dwight, the Boston critic who fathered American classical music, Beethoven's symphonies seemed ''sacred.'' To Theodore Thomas, the itinerant conductor who fathered the American orchestra, symphonic concerts were ''sermons in tones.'' Music making and music listening were cherished as inherently wholesome activities. Concerts were morally empowering.
The first half of the 20th century ridiculed and discarded this religion of music. World War I botched civilization -- the plunge of which ''in this abyss of blood and darkness,'' wrote Henry James, ''is a thing that . . . gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering.''
In the wake of the Great War came the music lovers Hitler and Stalin. In Germany, music as a vehicle for uplift underwent a hideous reprise; Beethoven and Wagner were used to amplify the Nazi cause. Soviet Russia, too, propagated symphonies and operas patriotically understood. Stalin's enthusiasms included Mozart, whose Piano Concerto in A (K. 488) he was reportedly listening to when he died.
This poisoning of Romantic ideals of betterment redoubled anti-Romantic modernism after World War II. Contemporary music was abstract music for a limited audience. Schoenberg notoriously said of the listener: ''All I know is that he exists, and insofar as he isn't indispensable for acoustic reasons (since music doesn't sound well in an empty hall), he's only a nuisance.''
And yet, with the new millennium upon us, music as a vehicle for mass catharsis has undergone a startling comeback. No longer passe are the heroic symphonies of Jean Sibelius, once the standard-bearer for a resistance movement against Schoenberg and Stravinsky. A recent generation of explicitly religious composers -- Arvo Part, Henryk Gorecki, John Tavener -- has found a fervent following. But a crucial progenitor and prime beneficiary of the resurgence of moral music, suddenly a towering figure in the topography of 20th-century culture, is a symphonist altogether less sanguine than Sibelius: Russia's Dmitri Shostakovich, whose landmark cycle of 15 string quartets will be performed in five concerts by the Emerson String Quartet at Alice Tully Hall, beginning this afternoon.
Unlike Schoenberg and Stravinsky, who fled totalitarian regimes, Shostakovich stayed put in Stalin's Soviet Union. Unlike Richard Strauss, who stayed put in Hitler's Germany and, ostrichlike, mainly steered clear of politics, Shostakovich was ever entangled with Stalin and his minions. Intermittently denounced by Pravda and by Communist Party ideologues, he lived in fear.
The Soviet pressure cooker shattered Shostakovich's nerves and, doubtless, shortened his life. But Stalinism may be said to have more inflamed than suppressed his creative gift. With its mournful austerity, its vicious ferocity, its programmatic clues, his music conveyed his own denunciations: of state tyranny, of the persecution of Jews, of the suppression of the human spirit. He suffered and testified.
In Soviet times, a Shostakovich premiere in Moscow or Leningrad provoked tense public and official expectation. When at the final rehearsal of his 14th Symphony in 1969 a leading cultural bureaucrat suffered a heart attack, it was widely understood that Shostakovich's music -- its bitter and truthful morbidity, violating Soviet myths -- had done him in.
Like Beethoven in his paeans to liberty, Shostakovich was a moral bulwark or scourge. If this function was old-fashioned, so was his aesthetic. He wrote preludes and fugues, symphonies and quartets. He rejected modernist complexity. For decades, he was disparaged in the West as a sellout whose failure to challenge traditional means and forms signified a capitulation to retrograde party canons. Only belatedly did he emerge as the century's great political subversive among composers, a voice of conscience.
Earlier composers had written programmatic ''battle symphonies,'' of which Beethoven's ''Wellington's Victory'' is the best known. Tchaikovsky's ''1812 Overture'' is an offshoot of this entertaining genre. But Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, composed during the siege of Leningrad in 1941, was deadly serious in its evocation of the German advance. It conveyed an impersonal despair new in music. Its topic was a tragedy of civilization.
Solomon Volkov, the editor of ''Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich,'' precisely describes Shostakovich's ''poetics of shock'' in recalling the premiere of the 11th Symphony in Leningrad in 1958: ''For the first time in my life, I left a concert thinking about others instead of myself.'' Mr. Volkov identifies Shostakovich with Russia's ''yurodivy'' tradition, of which he writes: ''The yurodivy has the gift to see and hear what others know nothing about. But he tells the world about his insights in an intentionally paradoxical way. . . . He plays the fool, while actually being a persistent exposer of evil and injustice.''