Ivashkin, Alexander and Kirkman, Andrew (eds). Contemplating Shostakovich: Life, Music and Film Rofe, Michael. Dimensions of Energy in Shostakovich's Symphonies (review)

Abstract

SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 538 binary opposition between modernists and proletarians that still plagues much writing on the period) and illustrate the fundamental role of personal rivalries, group identities and individual agency in a period often seen almost exclusively through the prism of official top-down ideology. Their bottom-up approach — which should be read in dialogue with accounts of Soviet artistic life that focus more directly on the role played by the institutions of party and state (as in work by Leonid Maksimenkov and Ekaterina Vlasova, or — in the literary field — Evgeny Dobrenko) juxtaposes official published sources with a wide range of archival documents, memoirs and correspondence, all of which amply demonstrate their claim that the period is best seen in terms of a struggle for limited economic resources. Throughout, translations are lively and vivid; readers will judge for themselves whether Lunacharskii can fairly be called a ‘lame duck’ (p. 222), whether the English phrase ‘like a vampire confronted by a crucifix’ best renders the original ‘kak chert ot ladana’ (p. 144), or whether Shostakovich would ever have referred to his ‘inner dude’ (p. 296). Students of Soviet cultural life have been well served by a number of important documentary sources that have been published in recent years; Music and Soviet Power, 1917–1932 is a further example of this invaluable genre and deserves to be enthusiastically and attentively read and reread by scholars in a number of fields. Wadham College, University of Oxford Philip Ross Bullock Ivashkin, Alexander and Kirkman, Andrew (eds). Contemplating Shostakovich: Life, Music and Film. Ashgate, Farnham and Burlington, VT, 2012. xxviii + 285 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Musical Examples. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. £65.00. Rofe, Michael. Dimensions of Energy in Shostakovich’s Symphonies. Ashgate, Farnham and Burlington, VT, 2012. xvii + 274 pp. Musical Examples. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. £60.00. As Alexander Ivashkin and Andrew Kirkman bravely ask in their introduction to Contemplating Shostakovich: Life, Music and Film, ‘Why another book on Shostakovich?’ (p. xxi). There are, of course, any number of compelling answers to this question, not the least of which is the continuing fascination that certain aspects of Soviet history still hold for both scholars and general audiences, and which Shostakovich’s life and works have come to represent. As Ivashkin and Kirkman observe, in Shostakovich studies ‘the weight of research […] remains closely tied to questions of personal and political exegesis’ (p. xxii), and their book gives ample evidence of the vitality of this general trend. In their introduction, the editors suggest that the controversy over Solomon REVIEWS 539 Volkov’s Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitrii Shostakovich (New York, 1979) is now ‘to all intents and purposes settled’ (p. xxi). Ivashkin’s own ‘Shostakovich, Old Believers and New Minimalists’ — a hurried survey that encompasses the Silver Age, Thaw-era thick journals, literary and musical theory of the 1920s and Shostakovich’s putative familiarity with znamennyi chant — seems to concur with Volkov that the composer ‘hated the Soviet regime’ (p. 45), whilst Vladimir Orlov’s strident account of Soviet eros concludes by suggesting that ‘the art of Shostakovich mirrors the short wasted youth of the Soviet state, with its early senility and impotency’, and that his operas The Nose and Lady Macbeth are ‘the works of this composer most incompatible with the moral outlook of the dismal and short-lived Soviet Civilization’ (p. 206). One does not need to be a fellow-traveller to realize that such statements add little to our understanding of Shostakovich as an equivocal actor in, rather than simply exemplary victim of, Soviet power. At its best, however, Contemplating Shostakovich illuminates key works through detailed interpretations rooted in a strong command of the extensive secondary literature. Gilbert C. Rappaport, for example, explores the song cycle Satires, discerning ‘an elaborate principle of structural unity encompassing textual meaning, melody and harmonic structure, as well as a sophistication of concept and construction that has not been adequately articulated or appreciated by critics’ (p. 49). Terry Klefstad traces American responses to Lady Macbeth, adding to our understanding of the Western reception of Shostakovich’s works. Contemporary Russian scholarship is represented by important articles by, respectively, Inna Barsova on the surprisingly revelatory topic of...