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- Herausgeber: Notting Hill Editions
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Music broadcaster and composer Stephen Johnson explores how Shostakovich's music took shape under Stalin's reign of terror, and how it gave form to the hopes of an oppressed people. Johnson writes of the healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness and tells of how Shostakovich's music lent him unexpected strength in his struggle with bipolar disorder.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Notting Hill Editions is an independent British publisher. The company was founded by Tom Kremer (1930–2017), champion of innovation and the man responsible for popularising the Rubik’s Cube.
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Hailed as ‘the shape of things to come’, the family-run press brings to print the most surprising thinkers of past and present. In an era of information-overload, these collectible pocket-size books distil ideas that linger in the mind.
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HOW SHOSTAKOVICH CHANGED MY MIND
–
Stephen Johnson
Contents
– Preface –
And yet his sister played so beautifully. Her face was turned to the side, intently and sadly following the notes on the page. Gregor crept forward a little further, keeping his head near to the ground so that his eyes could meet hers. How could he be a brute beast, if music could make him feel like this?
– Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis
Did Dmitri Shostakovich know these words? I’ve been told that he loved Kafka, but then I’ve been told a lot of things by people who knew and worked with him, this towering, enigmatic composer, and reconciling them isn’t always possible. He was a man used to wearing masks; survival in Stalin’s terrifying dictatorship demanded that of all its public figures. Shostakovich appears to have developed a habit of telling people, even friends, what he thought they wanted to hear. The number of intimates in whom he truly confided was probably very small, and even then he did so only at carefully chosen moments. Shostakovich was also a composer first and foremost, and like many composers he seems to have been innately suspicious of words as a vehicle for his truest, most private thoughts.
If Shostakovich did indeed read Kafka’s famous bleak parable, perhaps in a copy provided by a brave friend or tracked down via the black market, it’s hard to believe that he wouldn’t have lingered a moment or two over that passage, and particularly over its final question. That it concerns music would have been reason enough, but in the context of Kafka’s story it’s so unexpected. After his nightmarish transformation into a giant insect, Kafka’s Gregor Samsa has found his family alternately shocked, pitying, and hostile, eventually retreating into a kind of numbed indifference. His own case seems hopeless. But then comes the sound of the violin, Gregor’s sister absorbed ‘intently and sadly’ in her playing, and that question, like a sudden but oblique shaft of light: ‘How could he be a brute beast, if music could make him feel like this?’ It’s easy to picture Shostakovich asking himself something similar at crisis points in his switchback career: times when, crushed by official condemnation, vilified by colleagues and friends, tormented by doubts about his artistic integrity, even his own fundamental human worth, he somehow found the strength to keep going, and keep writing.
But the present book is emphatically not an attempt to reach some ‘real Shostakovich’ – to drag him out from behind his complex array of masks and defensive walls and say ‘Behold the man!’ In fact, this isn’t really a book about Shostakovich at all, rather about what his music – like that of Gregor Samsa’s violin-playing sister – has made people feel: Russians who lived with Shostakovich through the horrors of Stalinism; Westerners who have felt that in some way this music is also addressed to them; and myself, survivor of a three-times diagnosed bipolar disorder, for whom music, and particularly Shostakovich’s music, has been a lifeline.
At this point I can imagine some readers experiencing a jolt of disbelief: Shostakovich? This is not the sort of music most people would choose to cheer themselves up with, or at least not at times of what Sigmund Freud called ‘ordinary unhappiness’ – the kind of unhappiness that stops some way short of the pathological. Shostakovich’s fifteen symphonies and string quartets, his concertos, songs, and his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District contain some of the darkest, saddest, most violent, bitter, heartwrenching music written in the twentieth century. Surely it should have the opposite effect, dragging listeners down to its own level, or at best offering some perverse or even masochistic pleasure? Yet time and time again, the stories I have heard about the effects of Shostakovich’s works, especially on those going through emotional or spiritual ordeals, tell of something very different. At times when suffering has come close to crushing their spirits, listeners who have heard their own feelings reflected back so vividly and truthfully have asked themselves something like the question that stops Gregor Samsa in his own depressive tracks: How can we be wretched, despicable beings when music can make us feel … well, like this?
That question is the underlying theme of this book. Merely identifying how music can ‘make us feel’ is already a huge challenge. It’s all so bound up with the subjective instant, the moment of intense engagement with music that so often evades our attempts at conscious rationalisation. In attempting to understand, I have been greatly encouraged and helped by talking to neurologists, psychologists, psychotherapists, philosophers, and musicians, partly through my work with The Musical Brain, a charitable trust bringing together experts in the arts, sciences and the mind, and partly through research I carried out for several related articles and radio documentaries. Neurological science has made big strides in understanding how the brain processes, and, at a deeper intellectual and emotional level, makes sense of music. Some neurological insights have impressed me profoundly, particularly those into how music can help us adjust to traumatic experience. The insights offered by such lucid and musically perceptive colleagues as Michael Trimble, author of The Soul in the Brain and Why Humans Like to Cry: Tragedy, Evolution and the Brain, will be drawn upon in this book. So too will be the thoughts of philosophers ancient and modern, poets, playwrights, novelists, musicians and amateur music-lovers. I have also been privileged to meet many Russian musicians, writers, and thinkers who knew Shostakovich, and shared his experience of trying to survive under rigidly enforced Soviet Communism. In putting together some of their observations, speculations, arguments, and anecdotes I hope to give readers the opportunity to form a larger picture. I am keenly aware that, when it comes to Shostakovich, some readers’ grasp of the background may be sketchy at best, so a fair amount of historical and biographical scene-painting will be necessary. Fortunately, the story of Shostakovich’s life and times is one of the most dramatic, stirring, at times even darkly comical in the history of classical music. Some of it defies belief, and there have been times when, re-telling parts of it, I have found myself pausing incredulously. There exists, however, a wealth of eyewitness accounts, as the reader will soon discover.
Before we come to historical background, I do need to say a word or two about the personal element. When I began writing this book, I hoped to keep the confessional strand to a minimum. In time, I realised that my private experience was directly relevant: after all, if the subject of this book is how music can make listeners feel, then my own experiences are the very kind I’m best placed to describe. When I made the BBC radio documentary Shostakovich: A Journey into Light, my producer, Jeremy Evans, persuaded me to record a couple of short links about how I felt Shostakovich’s music had helped me come to terms with serious clinical depression. In the reaction that followed the broadcast, a number of people – journalists, medical professionals, and non-specialist listeners – commented on these parts of the programme, all of them positively. Since then, talks I’ve given and articles I’ve written on this subject have repeatedly drawn the same appreciative response. What I’m talking about is not simply my personal ‘journey’: rather, it’s a testimony to the sustaining, uplifting, ultimately restorative power of Shostakovich’s music. It is only one of many such testimonies, others of which are much more dramatic and impressive than mine. And it is with one of the most remarkable of these that this book begins.
– How Shostakovich Changed My Mind –
There are moments when I can still feel that grip – that sudden heart-stopping clasp on my left forearm. It was June 15, 2006, in the tiny St Petersburg apartment of the clarinettist Viktor Kozlov. I had come to Russia with producer Jeremy Evans and our invaluable interpreter and general ‘fixer’ Misha, to make a radio documentary about Shostakovich for the centenary of the composer’s birth. Jeremy was particularly keen that I interview Kozlov, one of the few surviving members of the orchestra that had performed, famously, Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony in 1942 in the besieged city of Leningrad. As we approached Kozlov’s gaunt apartment block in the city’s suburbs I began to realise that maintaining professional objectivity was going to be harder than usual. Earlier that morning we had visited the Museum of the Siege of Leningrad. The city’s original name, St Petersburg, had recently been restored, but when it came to the Siege, it was still : evidently the association was just too potent. I’d heard and read plenty of stories about the Siege, many of them accounts of barely imaginable determination and endurance. During the first winter, 1941–2, when the city was encircled by the Nazi forces and food supplies were completely cut off, the temperature dropped to minus thirty degrees centigrade, and civilian deaths peaked at around 100,000 per month, some from hypothermia, most from starvation. Photographs and paintings in the museum show people queuing for soup made from boot leather and glue from the spines of books, huddling together in the streets (it was no warmer in the houses) listening to Radio Leningrad broadcasts on hastily improvised PA systems. The daughter of one survivor told me how, when the employees at the radio station became too weak to make programmes, they broadcast the sound of a metronome ticking: ‘It was the city’s heartbeat. It was still there.’ At one point, even that stopped; then, after forty-five agonising minutes, it started again. Press footage from the period shows the emaciated faces of the city’s inhabitants transfigured with joy, hugging one another, weeping. If that frail, tinny heartbeat could come back from the dead, perhaps the city itself could too?
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
