Symphony for the City of the Dead Page 5

  Maria, who was supposed to be taking care of her younger brother, wrote back to their mother that he was getting soppy over some popular girl who was always surrounded by admiring boys. The girl was “small, slim, with thick dark hair and a round, pretty face.” Her name was Tatiana Glivenko. She was not actually sick, like the others at the sanitarium, but had been sent to Crimea to enjoy the summer sun. She had a small following of admirers who trotted around after her to the cafeteria and the seaside. “Amid these confident, patronizing young people,” wrote one of Shostakovich’s Russian biographers, “he felt like an ugly duckling with his bandaged neck and big round spectacles.”

  He did not need to worry. Tatiana Glivenko found him shy and charming. She fell for him, too. Years later, when she was old and he was dead, she remembered him: “How could anybody not have loved him? Everybody did. He was so pure and open and always thought about other people — how to make things better and easier and nicer for them. He never thought or worried about himself. If there are saints on this earth, he was one. He was like that when he was young, when we met, and he remained like that to the end of his life.”

  It is unclear whether his sisters would have always agreed with her that he was a saint on earth.

  Tatiana and Dmitri went for walks and challenged each other to games of tennis. For them, the sanitarium was like a country club. Everything was in flower.

  But the summer had to end. They went home to their separate cities — Petrograd and Moscow. Though they lived many miles apart, for years they were in love.

  When Dmitri returned to Petrograd, he went to work playing the piano in a movie theater called the Bright Reel.

  In the 1920s, movies did not have sound, so in order to have a sound track, the theater owners had to hire live musicians. The musicians either improvised music to fit the scene on screen or played out of books of piano pieces with general titles like “Love Theme,” “Chase Scene,” “She Is Abandoned,” and “The Building Burns Down.”

  Shostakovich was not fond of his job at the Bright Reel. He worked long hours and didn’t always find the movies particularly interesting — for example, Swamp and Water Birds of Sweden. He got so bored with this cinematic trudge that he started to imitate birdsong on the piano. He thought he was enlivening the picture. The audience thought he was drunk.

  Spending so much time playing the piano for money, he found it difficult to work on his own compositions. To graduate from the Conservatory, he had to complete a whole symphony in place of a dissertation. That was going to take some time.

  He did sometimes use his job at the movie theater as an opportunity to practice difficult pieces on the piano, if they fit the action on the screen. When he wrote a piano trio for his distant beloved Tatiana, he invited a couple of friends — a violinist and a cellist — to come to the movie theater so they could practice it together. While the film ran, they pretended his piece was the sound track. We can only hope the movie was a romance. His trio is undoubtedly music by a boy in love — sweet and drunk on adoration. It would not have played well with a crime flick.

  The boss at the Bright Reel didn’t want to pay him.

  Shostakovich pointed out that his pay was already two weeks late.

  He asked me, “Young man, do you love art? Great, lofty, immortal art?” I felt uncomfortable, and I replied that I did. That was a fatal mistake, because [the boss] put it this way: “If you love art, young man, then how can you talk to me now about filthy lucre?” . . . I tried to tell him that I needed the money. He replied that he couldn’t imagine or understand how a man of the arts could be capable of speaking about such trivial aspects of life. He tried to shame me. But I held my own.

  Shostakovich sued the owner of the Bright Reel for back pay, quit the job, and started to work playing the piano at the Piccadilly.

  On November 7, 1924, Shostakovich wrote to a friend, “Now I’m writing a symphony (Conservatory task for this year), which is quite bad, but I have to write it so that I can have done with the Conservatory.”

  It took him a long time and a lot of anguish to finish his first symphony. While he worked on the piece, he went several times to Moscow — where we might assume he met up with Tatiana. Perhaps around the same time, she came to visit him in Petrograd.

  She sat by him while he composed music at the piano. She watched him lovingly. Then Shostakovich’s mother would arrive, furious with the girl. She didn’t like anyone interfering with her son. She snapped to Tatiana, “Go out and leave Mitya to finish his work.”

  Shostakovich stood up for Tatiana. He said, “No, I want her to stay here. It helps me.”

  Sometimes their apartment must have felt very small.

  As an old woman, Tatiana remembered that in the Shostakovich family, young Mitya “was the center of life and the idol. His mother was so devoted that she constantly petted and spoiled him. . . . He was automatically freed from any household worry, and it made him impractical to a degree. He always bore the imprint of his mother’s influence.”

  He may have resented his mother’s interference, but he could not stand her unhappiness. When he was sending her a little money he had made playing the piano in Moscow, he urged her to recall, “The main thing in life is good cheer, joy, energy, creativity, art, and soul. We are rich in soul. Our spiritual life is second to none. . . . Hold on, Mother dear, to all that is joyful. For there is so much joy that sometimes we don’t see it. Joy must be everywhere. For example, I gave a concert and got at least twenty rubles — joy! I took the train without a ticket — joy! Everywhere there is joy.”

  The relations between the cities of Moscow and Petrograd were changing. When Shostakovich was a child under the tsars, St. Petersburg — Petrograd — was the capital. After the Russian Revolution, Lenin decided that distant Moscow — with its medieval fortress and its ancient roots in older Russian government — should be the capital of the new Soviet Russia. Petrograd was too close to the West, both geographically and culturally. To the Bolsheviks, there was something dangerous and seductive about the capitalist countries of Europe. They wanted their new nation’s capital to be as far away from Western decadence as possible.

  So in 1918, Lenin had made Moscow the capital.

  At the beginning of 1924, Lenin died. Just a few days after his death, a decree went out: the name of Petrograd was going to change once again. Forget Saint Peter, forget Tsar Peter the Great. There was no need anymore for tsarist memories or the blessing of Christian saints. Communism had its own heroes, its own haloes. Petrograd would henceforth be called Leningrad, “Lenin’s City,” in honor of the greatest hero of the Revolution.

  When Shostakovich wrote to Tatiana and his Moscow friends, he slyly put his address down as “St. Leninburg.”

  May 12, 1926, was a date Shostakovich called his “second birth.” He celebrated it for the rest of his life. It was the day his First Symphony was performed by a full orchestra, the Leningrad Philharmonic. He was only nineteen years old.

  The conductor thought the kid was very calm during the rehearsals, sitting silently in the auditorium, watching through his round spectacles, saying not a word.

  In fact, he was desperately agitated. His composition teacher wrote that young Dmitri was “in a state of such indescribable excitement from hearing the sound of his own music that I only restrained him with difficulty from gesticulating and displaying his agitation.”

  After the rehearsal, Shostakovich called his mother to tell her it had gone well. She was relieved. She had not been able to think about anything else.

  The night before the performance, Shostakovich couldn’t sleep, and the next day, he couldn’t eat. That evening, at half past eight o’clock, the Shostakovich family all showed up to hear the piece: “Mrs. Shostakovich outwardly reserved . . . ready to stand by her son come what may; quiet, smiling Maria, already convinced that everything would go well; and Zoya — the tomboy, as they thought of her — who was mischievous and wry and took nothing seriously, but was still anxi
ous for her brother.”

  Sofia Shostakovich later recalled: “By nine o’clock the hall was completely packed. I cannot describe my emotions on seeing the conductor, Nikolai Malko, about to pick up his baton. I can only say that even the greatest happiness is very hard to bear!”

  The symphony began.

  It is a youthful piece. It sings of young joys and young sorrows. The second movement1 even includes a theme that would be excellent for an Egypto-Assyrian secret society’s nighttime rituals — complete with a part for a collapsing young pianist. Shostakovich had been writing the symphony between sessions in the cinemas, and, in the best possible fashion, it’s a piece that sounds like ingenious images on film — and not just the clowning, the scampering. Even in the moments of great sorrow later in the work, there’s a sense of whiteface and of kohl around the eyes.

  The first audience loved it. They demanded that the frisky second movement — the one with the Egypto-Assyrian dance in it — be played all over again.

  As Mrs. Shostakovich wrote: “Everything went off brilliantly — the magnificent orchestra, and the superb execution! . . . It was over, and Mitya was called out again and again. When our young composer came out on stage, seemingly still only a boy, the audience expressed its joy and enthusiasm in a long and tumultuous ovation.”

  Dmitri Shostakovich had made his first mark on music.

  Word about the symphony quickly spread. Soon, the young composer’s piece was being played by orchestras in the West — in Vienna, in Berlin, in Philadelphia and Chicago. Crowds all over the world were delighted by its playfulness and pathos.

  Shostakovich was clearly a talent to be watched.

  He didn’t know yet how closely some would watch him.

  After he graduated from the Conservatory, Shostakovich waded into the ultramodernism of Leningrad. Though he never went as far as some of the extremists, his music of the next several years had many of the same elements of the wider artistic revolution: a joy in angularity; a pleasure in surprising effects; an addiction to the grotesque; irony, sarcasm, and satire; an emphasis on bright color and flat, hard surfaces. His author friends and acquaintances were writing science-fiction romps like mechanized folktales, clownish stories with no direction and no point, fables with no morals. They defied common sense. If music without words can have “characters,” then Shostakovich’s characters are like those in the absurdist stories of his Leningrad writer friends: broad and bizarre and almost cartoonish at times, full of vivid eccentricities.

  Shostakovich’s Second and Third Symphonies (1927 and 1929, respectively) are built like the street-corner spectacles of the Futurists, complete with bellowed Communist songs at the end. The Second Symphony was written for the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution; its dedication read, “Proletarians of the World, Unite!” It uses all the musical vocabulary of ultramodernity to depict the masses laboring in darkness — rising out of that darkness into heroic combat. It supposedly even depicts the death of the boy Shostakovich saw slashed on Nevsky Prospect. And then, at the end, it bursts into triumphant song. A chorus enters and chants a rousing hymn for the workers:

  Nobody will ever deprive us

  of the victory over oppression

  and darkness. . . .

  May the name of this victory be October!

  October is labor, joy, and song.

  October is happiness

  in the field and at the work bench.

  This is our slogan,

  the name of the new age:

  October, the Commune, and Lenin.

  We do not know whether Shostakovich believed in the sentiments of the poem he set for the chorus at the end, though there is no reason to think he didn’t believe in the promise of Communism. We do know that he secretly thought this particular poem was awful. He told Tatiana the poetry was “quite disgusting.”

  In keeping with the vogue for factory music, young Shostakovich included a part in the symphony for a factory whistle to announce the opening of the new workers’ utopia. He went to manufacturing plants and soberly listened to the shrieks of their lunchtime sirens, taking notes. He chose his favorite to blast the audience into Revolutionary wakefulness.

  In good Communist form, Shostakovich tested the score on “four workers and one peasant” to see if they liked it. They were not so fond of some of the ultramodern entanglements — but they apparently loved his work song at the end, and even joined in.

  Shostakovich also wrote for the stage. He clearly loved the sleazy dance tunes of the era. The Soviets loved American jazz, even though it was supposedly wicked and Western. (An article called “The Foxtrot — A New Kind of Pornography” argued, “We should forbid the performance of these disgusting dances. There is no place for them in the revolutionary republic.”) When writing music for ballets and plays, Shostakovich delighted in the fox-trots and waltzes and cancans of the evil, capitalist characters. He enjoyed the hungry energy of their greed, even as he mocked it.

  Audiences loved his “Tahiti Trot.”

  He even wrote a ballet about soccer, in which crooked capitalist soccer players face off against clean-living Soviets who perform startling slowmotion gymnastics.

  Shostakovich loved the brutal Russian form of soccer. He did not play it — he watched it like a fiend. He spent a lot of his free time at the stadium, cheering for Leningrad’s Dynamo team. He was an ardent fan. Friends could ask him any question about the team’s past trials and successes, and he would rattle off stats.

  He and his friends screamed at the field and jumped up and down like little boys. Afraid of jinxing his favorite team, Shostakovich thought it was bad luck to say that Dynamo would win. Therefore, he always said that he thought the team was in bad shape. He would bet dinner that Dynamo would lose. His friends took advantage of this peculiarity. If Dynamo won the game, then Shostakovich lost the bet and he would have to take them out to dinner. If his beloved Dynamo lost, then he would have no appetite. He’d turn down their invitation to dinner and would slink home without collecting on his bet.

  It was very profitable to bet against Dmitri Shostakovich.

  At the age of twenty-two, Shostakovich got the chance to work with two of the greatest experimentalists of his age: Mayakovsky and Meyerhold.

  Vladimir Mayakovsky was the Futurist poet Shostakovich had gone to watch when he was a boy. Vsevolod Meyerhold was one of the country’s most famous (or infamous) stage directors. Everything he did was new and cutting-edge. In his tremendously popular productions, the sets no longer looked like houses or forests; they looked like machines. Every production had a new, futuristic twist: the walls moved, or they were made out of swaying bamboo stalks, or slogans from Lenin and Marx and the Association for Chemical Defense were projected overhead. Meyerhold began one play with a convoy of automobiles roaring over a bridge onto the stage. When he was directing some comedies by the revered nineteenth-century Russian playwright Chekhov, he started to notice how often people in nineteenth-century Russian plays faint — very often — so he called the production 33 Swoons and focused on all the fainting. Whenever someone fainted, a band played a fanfare. There was a different fanfare for men and women. There was no end to Meyerhold’s gleeful reenvisioning of the theater.

  One writer slyly predicted that sooner or later, Meyerhold would die crushed to death under a stage of naked thespians.

  In late 1927, the visionary Meyerhold phoned Shostakovich and said he needed an assistant to organize and perform music for productions at the Meyerhold Theater.

  In January 1928, Shostakovich went to Moscow for several months and lived with the craggy, wild-haired director and his family while producing music for plays. It was an exciting time for him. He loved Meyerhold’s vision. He even got to act in one production: Meyerhold needed a pianist for a party scene in a play by the famous nineteenth-century Russian writer Gogol. Shostakovich went onstage in white tie and tails and pretended to be a Russian of the nineteenth century, though one who was, apparently, attending
a party held in a large system of metallic valves.

  The Meyerhold apartment was lively, crammed with antiques and jumble-sale treasures Meyerhold’s wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh, had picked up around Moscow. Zinaida Raikh was very beautiful, but not necessarily a particularly good actress. The rumor muttered in the wings was that Raikh only got parts because she was married to Meyerhold.

  As it turned out, Raikh was not easy for Shostakovich to stay with. She got irritable at the young composer haunting her apartment and yelled at him as though he were a child. To make things worse, Meyerhold’s nanny (who also lived in the apartment) took an uncomfortable interest in the young Shostakovich and kept groping him.

  He also got tired of Meyerhold and Raikh boasting about their children, Tanya and Kostya, and how brilliant they were. He wrote to a friend, “Here I am living surrounded by brilliant people (a brilliant theater director, a ‘brilliant’ actress —‘Oh, Zinaida! What a performance you gave yesterday! It was brilliant’).”

  “Well done, all of you,” Meyerhold gushed to his family. “You’re all great. Eh, Shostakovich? Aren’t they great? Don’t you think so?”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  Raikh said archly, “I’d like your opinion, Mitya. Obviously our daughter Tanya has inherited her talent as a poet from her father, but where can our son Kostya have got his tremendous musical talent from?”

  Meyerhold intervened and said, “From you, of course.”

  Raikh fluttered, “Why me? I’m an actress after all, not a musician.”

  “Yes, you are indeed an actress,” Meyerhold pronounced. “You have profound cogitation of the Word. And where the Word comes to an end, there begins Music. Don’t you think so, Mitya?”

  Shostakovich “maintained a sullen silence and nodded agreement.”

  It was sometimes difficult to be around the brilliant.

  But it was exhilarating. Inspired at least in part by Meyerhold’s production of the Gogol play, Shostakovich worked on his first opera, based on Gogol’s short story “The Nose.” This classic tale was the grandfather of all the absurdist stories written by Shostakovich’s friends and acquaintances. It’s about a nose that leaves a man’s face and runs around St. Petersburg, applying for government jobs.