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Laughter through Tears: Shostakovich and Jewish Music
Judith Kuhn
One of the curious facts of twentieth-century music history is the attraction of Dmitri Shostakovich to the inflections of Jewish folk music and to texts about Jewish life. This attraction is especially sur- prising since the composer was not Jewish himself. In a time when official policies were at times openly anti-Semitic, the ‘Jewish elements’ in Shostakovich’s music were provocative and, in the case of his Thirteenth Symphony, openly dissident. Like other features of his work, the composer’s Jewish features have been heard in different ways: as a political statement against anti-Semitism, as a broader statement of Sovi-et dissidence, as an even broader existential statement of the irony of human existence, and – more simply – as one man’s delight in the flattened scale degrees, syncopated dance rhythms and ambivalent tone of Jewish folk music: perhaps Shostakovich’s musical ‘Jewishness’ contains elements of all these things. Shostakovich received an intense exposure to Jewish music in the early 1940s. Venyamin Fleishman(1913–1941), one of Shostakovich’s first composition students, had begun work in 1939 on Rothschild’s Violin, an opera based on Chekhov’s story about a dying old miser who repented of his anti-Semitism and gave his violin to a Jewish klezmer musician. Fleishman was killed in battle in September 1941, leaving his opera almost complete, but largely un-orchestrated. Upon learning of his student’s death, Shostakovich asked for acopy of Rothschild’s Violin. He then completed and orchestrated the opera, working on it in 1944, at the same time as he was composing his Jewish-inflected Second Piano Trio. Composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919–1996), was another source of Jewish music in the 1940s. Of Polish-Jewish extraction, having lost his family during the German wartime occupation of Warsaw, Weinberg fled to Russia and sent his First Symphony to Shostakovich, who arranged for the younger composer to settle in Moscow in 1943. The two composers became close friends and began a lifelong custom of showing each other works in progress. Weinberg’s works make extensive use of Jewish folk idioms in serious art music, and may have served as models for Shostakovich. Perhaps Shostakovich’s most important resource was Moisei Beregovsky (1892–1961), a fine Jewish ethno-musicologist who defended his doctoral dissertation on ‘Jewish Instrumental Folk Music’ in January 1944 atthe Moscow Conservatory, where Shostakovich was then teaching[1]. Beregovsky, who had been transcribing and recording Jewish folk music for 20 years, is now credited with having preserved the Eastern-Euro- pean Jewish folk tradition through the Holocaust. His collection of klezmer pieces was circulating in the Moscow Conservatory in early 1944 while Shostakovich was working on Rothschild’s Violin and his own Second Piano Trio.
In 1945, Shostakovich told New York Times reporter Robert Magid off, ‘I like Jewish folk songs. I don’t know why exactly. Possibly it’s that I heard a great deal of Jewish folk music from a man named Berezovsky [sic], who collected three volumes of such music and showed them to me.[2]’ Fleishman, Wein- berg and Beregovsky together provided a rich confluence of sources for Jewish music for Shostakovich in1943–44, as he wrote his first obviously ‘Jewish’ works. Shostakovich’s most pointedly ‘Jewish’ works – those with texts about Jewish life or with a cluster of obvious Jewish musical elements – appeared in three groups. First, in 1944, as news became available about the Holocaust, and as a surge of domestic anti-Semitism removed prominent Jews from Soviet cultural institutions, Shostakovich used Jewish folk-music inflections in the finale of his Second Piano Trio and throughou this Second Quartet. Then, in 1948–52, the final years of Stalin’s rule, Soviet Jews were targeted by official press campaigns against ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’. Jewish cultural institutions were closed and hundreds of Soviet Jews were arrested and executed. Jewish musical features appear in the scherzo of Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto (1948), the third and fourth movements of his Fourth Quartet (1949), and throughout ‘Laughter through Tears’: Shostakovich and Jewish Music (1948), a song cycle that sets the texts of Jewish folk songs. Several of his Twenty Four Preludes and Fugues for piano (1951), most pointedly Nos. 8 and22, also include Jewish musical inflections. Finally, the first song in his Four Monologues on Texts by Aleksandr Pushkin (1952) sets a grim poem about the hardships of Jewish life. Of these works, only the could be heard before Stalin’s death in 1953. Finally, in 1962, the first movement of Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony was inspired by the controversial poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko (b. 1933). Its first movement sets ‘Babi Yar’, Yevtushenko’s outraged poem describing famous instances of anti-Semitic injustice, including the wartime Nazi massacre of Jews at BabiYar, near Kiev. The Thirteenth Symphony was to be the composer’s most outspoken work. Today, despite many disputes about the composer’s political views, there is general agreement that the ‘Jewish elements’ in his music often reflect a heartfelt gesture of solidarity with Soviet Jews. The Russian-Israeli musicologist Joachim Braun has gone further, suggesting that Jewish elements represented a concealed language of dissidence for the composer, communicating resistance to a select group of listeners[3]. Whatever Shostakovich’s compositional intentions – and they are notoriously difficult to pin down – it is clear that the syncopated dances of Jewish klezmer music, with their ‘laughter-through-tears’ ambivalence, oompa accompaniments and flattened, oriental scales, have given his music, particularly his string quartets, a special ‘tang’ that is one of the most recognizable features of his style. Controversies continue to swirl around Shostakovich’s music, however, and the ones concerning have been among the most vituperative. Written shortly after the composer had been denounced as a ‘formalist’ by the Communist Party Central Committee, the song cycle can be heard as the composer’s ironic ‘take’ on the Party’s demands that he incorporate folk melodies into his works. Its initial eight songs, written later, during the summer of 1948, tell of the hardships of Jewish life: the death of a baby, hunger, cold and penury, imprisonment by the Tsar, separations from loved ones. But three final songs, written later in October 1948 describe the joys of Jewish life under the Soviets. The final song, ‘Happiness’, includes this text: ‘Doctors, Doctors, our sons have become doctors! Oi! A star shines over their heads! Oi!’ By 1955, when these songs were first publicly performed, the intervening 1952 ‘Doctors’ Plot’ arrests of prominent Jewish doc-tors had provided Soviet listeners with new associations for these words. Although these could not have be enintended by the composer when he wrote the cycle in 1948, they intensified the work’s meaning for those attending the 1955 premiere performance. In a controversial 1996 New York Times article Laurel Fay, Shostakovich’s authoritative biographer, argued that writers have overstated and mythologised the heroism of Shostakovich’s decision to write so soon after his own denunciation by the Party[4]. She suggested that Shostakovich’s decision to write the song cycle represented a sincere attempt to comply with the Party’s 1948 directives to make greater use of folk music and write more song fully. Fay pointed out that the surge of Jewish arrests and the Party’s 1949 campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ did not take place until months after the song cycle had been written. In the spring of 1948, the government appeared to be anything but anti-Semitic, having taken a prominent and early position in support of the new state of Israel in an attempt to gain a foothold in the Middle East. The Kremlin’s public support of Israel had, however, cooled by September 1948, and its earlier pro-Israeli activities masked the regime’s concurrent domestic concerns about the emergence of Jews as an uncontrolled political force within the Soviet Union. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, formed by the government in the early 1940s to mobilise Jewish support for the war effort, had become the focus for a newfound sense of ethnic identity among Soviet Jews. The growth of this ‘Jewish nationalism’ was profoundly disturbing to the Soviet government, and in late 1946 its Minister of State Security began to assemble evidence against the Committee. In January 1948, Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels, the Committee’s charismatic chair, was murdered, reportedly by order of Stalin himself. Fay notes that the Kremlin portrayed Mikhoels’ death as an accident and suggests that Shostakovich could not have known of the alleged state-ordered murder. Immediate and public suspicions were, however, expressed among his colleagues, and there is good reason to believe that Shostakovich, who was close to Mikhoels’s family, knew of these[5].
Although it is impossible to resolve questions concerning the composer’s precise motivation for writing
From Jewish Folk Poetry, there is little doubt about what provoked the Jewish folk-music inflections in the Fourth Quartet, written between March and December 1949. The months between November 1948 and March 1949 had seen the dismantling of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and other Jewish cultural institutions, a surge of arrests of prominent Jews, the intensification of the anti-cosmopolitan press campaign in January 1949, and Party-led meetings censuring musicologists and other cultural critics. These events all seemed to target Jewish members of the cultural establishment, and it is not difficult to hear the Fourth Quartet, at least in part, as the composer’s spirited response to them. While, in many cases, Shostakovich’s uses of ‘Jewish elements’ appear in times of crisis for Soviet Jews, it would be too simple to say that Shostakovich’s musical used Jewish musical inflections only to protest against anti-Semitism. Shostakovich is often quoted expressing his love for the ambivalence of Jewish folk music, with its combination of cheerful melodies and sad harmonies. Like Jewish klezmer music, Shostakovich’s works include many lively dances written over dark harmonies. Musicologist Esti Sheinberg has suggested that the ambiguities and contradictions of Jewish music express an existential irony that was central to Shostakovich’s life-view; Jewish folk music said something about the conflicting and paradoxical aspects of human existence that Shostakovich needed to say[6].Shostakovich’s interaction with Jewish music may be heard as a political statement, but also, in the midst of a world of enforced optimism and banal political narratives, it enabled him to express an existential philosophy that was subtle and complex, acknowledging the contradictions and uncertainties of life.
Footnotes
[1] Much of Beregovsky’s work has been translated into English; see Marc Slobin, ed., Old Jewish Folk Music: The Collections and Writings of Moshe Beregovski (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982); Marc Slobin, Robert Rothstein and Michael Alptert, eds., Jewish Instrumental Folk Music: The Collections and Writings of Moshe Beregovski (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001).
[2] Robert Magidoff, ‘Shostakovich Listens for Victory’, New York Times, March 18, 1945, p. SM11.
[3] Braun, ‘The Double Meaning of Jewish Elements in Dimitri Shostakovich’s Music,’ Musical Quarterly 71 (January 1985), pp. 68-80.
[4] Laurel Fay, ‘The Composer was Courageous, But Not as Much as in Myth,” New York Times April 14, 1996, p. H14.
[5] This necessarily simplified chronology of official anti-Semitism in Russia during the late 1940s is documented in exquisite detail in Shimon Redlich, War, Holocaust and Stalinism: A Documented History of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995); Gennadi Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows: Anti-Semitism in Stalin’s Russia, trans. H.T. Willets (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995); and Kostyrchenko, ‘Golda at the Metropol Hotel,’ Russian Studies in History 43(2004), pp. 77-84. For a more detailed consideration of Soviet anti-Semitism and the pervasive use of Jewish inflections in Shostakovich’s quartets, see chapters 3 and 5 of my Shostakovich in Dialogue: Form, Imagery and Ideas in Quartets 1-7 (Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2010).
[6] Sheinberg, Shostakovich’s “Jewish Music” as an Existential Statement’, in Dmitri Schostakowitsch und das jüdische musikalische Erbe, ed. Ernst Kuhn, Andreas Wehrmeyer and Günter Wolter (Berlin: Verlag ErnstKuhn, 2001), pp. 90-101.An earlier version of this article was published in Jewish Renaissance Magazine, January 2006 and whom we thank for their permission in publishing this version.
DSCH JOURNAL No. 33 – July 2010
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