From The Times
Maxim Shostakovich — “I feel my father looking over my shoulder”
The conductor son of the great Russian composer explains why he has devoted his life to his father’s musical legacyRichard Morrison
Maxim Shostakovich, the conductor son of the great Dmitri Shostakovich, stares incredulously at me. At first I think he is outraged by my questions. He isn’t, he’s just distracted by something more interesting. Namely, my face.
“Excuse me, but you look just like him!” he exclaims.
“Who?” I ask.
“My father’s grandfather. Really! I have a photograph.”
Related Links
Shostakovich: 24 Preludes and Fugues - Jenny Lin (piano)
Shostakovich: The Nose - Cast, Chorus and Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre, cond Valery Gergiev
Well, I stutter, my own grandfather was born in Latvia. But I wasn’t aware of Russian blood in the family.
“But my father’s grandfather came from that region: the border of Poland and Lithuania,” Maxim continues. “And you have exactly the same face!”
If further evidence were needed that the name Shostakovich has dominated the 71 years of Maxim’s life, it is surely this. Even when meeting a complete stranger he sees a vision of his father’s ancestors — rather like the tormented protagonist of some gloomy Russian opera, for ever haunted by dead souls.
It must be difficult, I say, being the son of a famous composer. “Why difficult?” Maxim bristles. “I am happy that I have spent a big part of my life serving the music of this great man, my father.”
But the comparisons? “What comparison? My father once tried conducting and then said ‘never again’.”
Likewise, Maxim has never composed a note — though his own 48-year-old son (also, confusingly, called Dmitri Shostakovich) has become a pop composer. And Maxim seems proud enough that his daughter (one of two teenage offspring of his second marriage) has carried on the family tradition. Not only has she become a pianist; at the age of 9 she also performed in public the slow movement of the very work — the Second Piano Concerto — that Shostakovich wrote for Maxim to premiere on his 19th birthday.
Fittingly, that work features in the British concerts that Maxim is conducting this week with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, along with Shostakovich’s most famous symphony, the Fifth. That’s especially apt. Conceived in the same year as Maxim (1937), the Fifth leads us straight to the heart of the tragedy surrounding Shostakovich.
The composer declared this ambiguous masterpiece to be “a Soviet artist’s creative response to just criticism” — the “just criticism” being a stinging attack on his 1934 opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Published in Pravda under the headline “Muddle instead of music”, that article was widely believed to reflect the view of Stalin himself, and came at the height of the “Great Terror”, when hundreds of intellectuals were murdered or incarcerated in the gulags. It’s said that throughout those appalling purges a nearly suicidal Shostakovich kept a packed suitcase by the door, ready for his deportation to Siberia.
Maxim wasn’t born then. But he was, in his own words, a “witness to all the disasters” of the next great attack against his father. That came in 1948, when Andrei Zhdanov, then Stalin’s cultural henchman, clamped down on “formalism” in the arts.
“My father wasn’t alone in being attacked,” Maxim recalls. “The poet Anna Akhmatova, the composer Prokofiev and many others were rebuked. But the criticism of my father was terrible. In the newspapers they said he was an enemy of the people. All his music was banned. He lost his teaching jobs. I was 9 at the time, and I can recall people outside our house screaming: ‘Formalist! Show your face!’ ”
Maxim was even forced to denounce his father’s music at school. “Some good friends, courageous people, stuck with my father through the worst times — Akhmatova, Rostropovich, Isaak Glickman,” he recalls. “But others were afraid to shake his hand. They crossed the street when they saw us.”
How did such a state of affairs come about? “Fear,” Maxim says. “After the revolution there were famines. Many people were shot. People grew afraid to say anything. It easily happens. Look at Nazi Germany, Kampuchea or the Cultural Revolution in China.”
After Stalin’s death in 1953 did matters improve? After all, Khrushchev is credited with creating a more tolerant atmosphere, at least in the arts. “Yes, things did get better for a while,” Maxim concedes. “They stopped killing people after 1956. But later it went back to the bad old days. For me personally, the hardest years were the Brezhnev era, when I had to conduct what I was told.”
Maxim says that he saw his father cry only twice during those terrible years: once when Nina, his first wife (and Maxim’s mother), died, and once in 1960 when, perhaps under duress, he became a member of the Communist Party. But why, on one of his trips to the West, did Shostakovich not defect — as Maxim himself was to do in 1981?
“I can’t say that he didn’t think about it,” he replies. “But how could he have done it? His family were in the Soviet Union. We were like hostages. So were all his friends and pupils. He was an important person in Russia. If he had annoyed the authorities, the effects would have been felt by many people.”
Today there’s no consensus about how much of a rebel Shostakovich was.
When he died in 1975 the general view in the West was that he was (as The Times obituary put it) “a committed believer in Communism”. After all, he had written obsequious cantatas in praise of Stalin, had won the Order of Lenin, and enjoyed many privileges. Moreover, he had signed letters supporting the most hardline party policies.
That view was challenged in 1979 by the appearance of Testimony, Shostakovich’s alleged memoirs, “as told to” a Russian journalist and defector called Solomon Volkov. It portrayed the composer as a secret dissident who weaved into his music — especially his symphonies — coded attacks on Stalin and the state. Thus the Fifth Symphony was not a celebration of Soviet life, as Shostakovich’s own public description had implied, but a picture of a nation in agony. Similarly, the Leningrad Symphony — ostensibly a defiant portrait of Hitler’s attack on Shostakovich’s own city — was covertly a denunciation of Stalin’s crimes against his own people.
Maxim’s opinion of Testimony has changed. Early on, he called it a fraud. Then he softened his stance, conceding that Volkov had captured his father’s tone of voice and, essentially, his private views about Stalin. But, crucially, what he refuses to acknowledge — having conducted and recorded all 15 of his father’s symphonies (and been entrusted with the premiere of No 15) — is that Volkov’s crude anti-Soviet interpretation of the music is accurate.
“Take the Leningrad Symphony,” he says. “Though it was written during that terrible siege, I don’t think it is about either Hitler or Stalin. It looks at the bigger philosophical picture. Like most of my father’s 15 symphonies, it is about the endless battle between good and evil.”
Similarly, Maxim believes that the Eighth Symphony, portrayed by Volkov as a vicious portrait of Stalin and a lamentation for all the people he killed, had a much more personal meaning. “When my mother died, I remember my father playing a recording of the Eighth Symphony over and over,” Maxim says. “People think his music is all about politics. It isn’t. It’s more about human life in all its shadows, all its problems. War and peace, love and hate. He looked as a human being at the world around him.”
And found only bleakness? “I wouldn’t say that,” Maxim says. “He certainly became sadder as he got older and saw what the world, and his country, had become. But I think his music shows that, ultimately, happiness comes. You know, although he didn’t go to church, he believed in God.”
Maxim’s own story has not been unalloyed happiness. After defecting he settled in the US and took American citizenship, but found himself conducting an orchestra, the New Orleans Symphony, that hovered on the verge of bankruptcy for season after season. Eventually he resigned after not being paid for a year. After life in the higher artistic echelons of the Soviet Union, it was a harsh lesson in capitalism.
Now he has returned to live in St Petersburg, where his two youngest children are being educated and a fine statue of their grandfather has just been unveiled by Maxim — plonked, with an unconscious irony that Shostakovich would doubtless have enjoyed, next to a huge new Western-style shopping mall. “I spent a lot of time in America, and I like it there,” Maxim says. “But ultimately I will always be Russian. You can’t erase that from your soul.”
And his relationship now with his father’s music? “When I conduct it, even today, I feel him looking over my shoulder. He is there in the hall. You see, the very phrases of the music remind me of how he used to talk. I recognise his voice in the notes. And behind the voice, the man himself.”
Maxim Shostakovich conducts the RPO in London (Cadogan Hall, Fri); Northampton (Sun); Reading (Apr 15); and Sheffield (Apr 16). Details: www.rpo.co.uk
Maxim Shostakovich — “I feel my father looking over my shoulder”
The conductor son of the great Russian composer explains why he has devoted his life to his father’s musical legacyRichard Morrison
Maxim Shostakovich, the conductor son of the great Dmitri Shostakovich, stares incredulously at me. At first I think he is outraged by my questions. He isn’t, he’s just distracted by something more interesting. Namely, my face.
“Excuse me, but you look just like him!” he exclaims.
“Who?” I ask.
“My father’s grandfather. Really! I have a photograph.”
Related Links
Shostakovich: 24 Preludes and Fugues - Jenny Lin (piano)
Shostakovich: The Nose - Cast, Chorus and Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre, cond Valery Gergiev
Well, I stutter, my own grandfather was born in Latvia. But I wasn’t aware of Russian blood in the family.
“But my father’s grandfather came from that region: the border of Poland and Lithuania,” Maxim continues. “And you have exactly the same face!”
If further evidence were needed that the name Shostakovich has dominated the 71 years of Maxim’s life, it is surely this. Even when meeting a complete stranger he sees a vision of his father’s ancestors — rather like the tormented protagonist of some gloomy Russian opera, for ever haunted by dead souls.
It must be difficult, I say, being the son of a famous composer. “Why difficult?” Maxim bristles. “I am happy that I have spent a big part of my life serving the music of this great man, my father.”
But the comparisons? “What comparison? My father once tried conducting and then said ‘never again’.”
Likewise, Maxim has never composed a note — though his own 48-year-old son (also, confusingly, called Dmitri Shostakovich) has become a pop composer. And Maxim seems proud enough that his daughter (one of two teenage offspring of his second marriage) has carried on the family tradition. Not only has she become a pianist; at the age of 9 she also performed in public the slow movement of the very work — the Second Piano Concerto — that Shostakovich wrote for Maxim to premiere on his 19th birthday.
Fittingly, that work features in the British concerts that Maxim is conducting this week with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, along with Shostakovich’s most famous symphony, the Fifth. That’s especially apt. Conceived in the same year as Maxim (1937), the Fifth leads us straight to the heart of the tragedy surrounding Shostakovich.
The composer declared this ambiguous masterpiece to be “a Soviet artist’s creative response to just criticism” — the “just criticism” being a stinging attack on his 1934 opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Published in Pravda under the headline “Muddle instead of music”, that article was widely believed to reflect the view of Stalin himself, and came at the height of the “Great Terror”, when hundreds of intellectuals were murdered or incarcerated in the gulags. It’s said that throughout those appalling purges a nearly suicidal Shostakovich kept a packed suitcase by the door, ready for his deportation to Siberia.
Maxim wasn’t born then. But he was, in his own words, a “witness to all the disasters” of the next great attack against his father. That came in 1948, when Andrei Zhdanov, then Stalin’s cultural henchman, clamped down on “formalism” in the arts.
“My father wasn’t alone in being attacked,” Maxim recalls. “The poet Anna Akhmatova, the composer Prokofiev and many others were rebuked. But the criticism of my father was terrible. In the newspapers they said he was an enemy of the people. All his music was banned. He lost his teaching jobs. I was 9 at the time, and I can recall people outside our house screaming: ‘Formalist! Show your face!’ ”
Maxim was even forced to denounce his father’s music at school. “Some good friends, courageous people, stuck with my father through the worst times — Akhmatova, Rostropovich, Isaak Glickman,” he recalls. “But others were afraid to shake his hand. They crossed the street when they saw us.”
How did such a state of affairs come about? “Fear,” Maxim says. “After the revolution there were famines. Many people were shot. People grew afraid to say anything. It easily happens. Look at Nazi Germany, Kampuchea or the Cultural Revolution in China.”
After Stalin’s death in 1953 did matters improve? After all, Khrushchev is credited with creating a more tolerant atmosphere, at least in the arts. “Yes, things did get better for a while,” Maxim concedes. “They stopped killing people after 1956. But later it went back to the bad old days. For me personally, the hardest years were the Brezhnev era, when I had to conduct what I was told.”
Maxim says that he saw his father cry only twice during those terrible years: once when Nina, his first wife (and Maxim’s mother), died, and once in 1960 when, perhaps under duress, he became a member of the Communist Party. But why, on one of his trips to the West, did Shostakovich not defect — as Maxim himself was to do in 1981?
“I can’t say that he didn’t think about it,” he replies. “But how could he have done it? His family were in the Soviet Union. We were like hostages. So were all his friends and pupils. He was an important person in Russia. If he had annoyed the authorities, the effects would have been felt by many people.”
Today there’s no consensus about how much of a rebel Shostakovich was.
When he died in 1975 the general view in the West was that he was (as The Times obituary put it) “a committed believer in Communism”. After all, he had written obsequious cantatas in praise of Stalin, had won the Order of Lenin, and enjoyed many privileges. Moreover, he had signed letters supporting the most hardline party policies.
That view was challenged in 1979 by the appearance of Testimony, Shostakovich’s alleged memoirs, “as told to” a Russian journalist and defector called Solomon Volkov. It portrayed the composer as a secret dissident who weaved into his music — especially his symphonies — coded attacks on Stalin and the state. Thus the Fifth Symphony was not a celebration of Soviet life, as Shostakovich’s own public description had implied, but a picture of a nation in agony. Similarly, the Leningrad Symphony — ostensibly a defiant portrait of Hitler’s attack on Shostakovich’s own city — was covertly a denunciation of Stalin’s crimes against his own people.
Maxim’s opinion of Testimony has changed. Early on, he called it a fraud. Then he softened his stance, conceding that Volkov had captured his father’s tone of voice and, essentially, his private views about Stalin. But, crucially, what he refuses to acknowledge — having conducted and recorded all 15 of his father’s symphonies (and been entrusted with the premiere of No 15) — is that Volkov’s crude anti-Soviet interpretation of the music is accurate.
“Take the Leningrad Symphony,” he says. “Though it was written during that terrible siege, I don’t think it is about either Hitler or Stalin. It looks at the bigger philosophical picture. Like most of my father’s 15 symphonies, it is about the endless battle between good and evil.”
Similarly, Maxim believes that the Eighth Symphony, portrayed by Volkov as a vicious portrait of Stalin and a lamentation for all the people he killed, had a much more personal meaning. “When my mother died, I remember my father playing a recording of the Eighth Symphony over and over,” Maxim says. “People think his music is all about politics. It isn’t. It’s more about human life in all its shadows, all its problems. War and peace, love and hate. He looked as a human being at the world around him.”
And found only bleakness? “I wouldn’t say that,” Maxim says. “He certainly became sadder as he got older and saw what the world, and his country, had become. But I think his music shows that, ultimately, happiness comes. You know, although he didn’t go to church, he believed in God.”
Maxim’s own story has not been unalloyed happiness. After defecting he settled in the US and took American citizenship, but found himself conducting an orchestra, the New Orleans Symphony, that hovered on the verge of bankruptcy for season after season. Eventually he resigned after not being paid for a year. After life in the higher artistic echelons of the Soviet Union, it was a harsh lesson in capitalism.
Now he has returned to live in St Petersburg, where his two youngest children are being educated and a fine statue of their grandfather has just been unveiled by Maxim — plonked, with an unconscious irony that Shostakovich would doubtless have enjoyed, next to a huge new Western-style shopping mall. “I spent a lot of time in America, and I like it there,” Maxim says. “But ultimately I will always be Russian. You can’t erase that from your soul.”
And his relationship now with his father’s music? “When I conduct it, even today, I feel him looking over my shoulder. He is there in the hall. You see, the very phrases of the music remind me of how he used to talk. I recognise his voice in the notes. And behind the voice, the man himself.”
Maxim Shostakovich conducts the RPO in London (Cadogan Hall, Fri); Northampton (Sun); Reading (Apr 15); and Sheffield (Apr 16). Details: www.rpo.co.uk
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento