Saving Fay's Biography

The Yeahs - The Nays

Richard Taruskin,
Class of 1955 Professor of Music, University of California, Berkeley

At last readers interested in Shostakovich have a reliable source to consult for the facts of his life, meticulously set against the background of his alas, all-too-interesting times. Laurel Fay has erected the platform upon which truly informed interpretation and debate concerning Shostakovich's works and legacy can now take place.


Louis Blois

Laurel Fay has produced exactly what has long been needed and what has never before existed in the English language: a thoroughly researched biography of Shostakovich by a professionally trained musicologist, wholly derived from primary source material. In this tidy work, Fay writes a well crafted, information-rich account that rests on a foundation of meticulously gathered materials. There can be no overstating the thoroughness of the research, with a selected bibliography that extends for some 36 pages and somewhere between 70 to 100 references per chapter. The sources include many of the composer's personal letters, articles from principal Soviet journals, studies by Sophia Khentova and other musicologists, etc. Those familiar with Fay's writing will recognize its crisp, unfettered, authoritative manner, reminiscent of the style of another noted specialist on Soviet music, Boris Schwarz.

The book's 15 chapters manage to weave an enormous tapestry of detail, including significant notes on even the smallest of the composer's 147 plus works, into a flowing, energetic, well-paced read. We learn of the numerous post-Lady MacBeth operatic plans that never materialized and which could have changed the course of the composer's creativity, his frequent suicidal tendencies, extramarital forays, various periods of blocked creativity, even the details of the composer's last hours on his deathbed. Fay deserves commendation not only for her assimilation of a vast amount of research materials, but for having selected and assembled them into such a well-judged narrative. The coverage contains so many specifics that each paragraph suggests a research project of its own. One can only imagine the extent of the collected material that had to be excised.

For all its laudable attributes, "A Life" does have minor flaws. Yet these have been given such exaggerated attention in recent reviews that they deserve separate consideration. Contrary to prevailing criticism, I find completely defensible Fay's decision to ignore the material in Testimony, if only for the fact that the decision is consistent with her early work on that book and as part of her own intellectual journey into its controversial waters. On the other hand, however filtered, distorted and unreliable that resource may seem, Testimony presents at least a reflection of possible interpretation, a set of potential leads and signals to which the scholar's antenna should be keenly attuned. In some instances, Fay has chosen to ignore such possibilities, and even goes so far as to completely shun the corroborating evidence presented in Feofanov and Ho's "Shostakovich Reconsidered" (SR) and elsewhere. It is a decision that at times leads to awkward moments, such as in her already infamous discussion of the cycle "From Jewish Folk Poetry"(FJFP), in which her own trail of footnotes touches upon evidence that would contradict her view of the work's conception.

Another instance occurs in her discussion of the Eleventh Symphony (1956-7) where she dismisses the contemporaneous Hungarian uprising as a possible source of the composer's inspiration, citing a lack of "available evidence". In fact, SR does present interesting documentation to the contrary (corroborating that found in Testimony). The treatment in this and the FJFP section does leave the informed reader wanting a more inclusive discussion of available material. Such a discussion would have brought some closure to these naggingly persistent issues. It would have also avoided the escalated level of divisiveness that has been created among such a small community of readers and scholars, many of whom are already aware of the published and readily available resources (in particular, "Shostakovich Reconsidered") that Fay overlooks.

It should be emphasized that it is only upon the speculative matters of intentionality that these small controversies rest. Because it is the dissident interpretation that Fay does not accept in both cases, critics and detractors have accused her of toeing the "Party line" in her portrait of the composer. What precisely is meant by an official "Party line" in these rapidly shifting political times in post-Soviet Russia is itself so unclear as to render such charges utterly meaningless.

Those who would persist in constructing arguments to that effect need only look at Fay's coverage of the events surrounding the Thirteenth Symphony, the most embarrassing musical incident to occur in post-Stalin Russia. Fay not only presents the original version of the controversial text lines - with its direct confrontation of Russian anti-Semitism - and the officially mandated revisions, but reports the composer's express dislike for the revision, noting that he "did not inscribe the new text in his manuscript score." (p236). Fay also notes that performances of the symphony were not encouraged by the Party. If Fay were pandering to the powers that be, she would not have presented such a complete exposure of this politically humiliating incident.

There are other portions that give lie to the "Party toeing" view of Fay's work. When Shostakovich's public behavior is consistent with exemplary communist citizenship, Fay thoroughly and demonstratively points out the incongruity of that behavior with the composer's private convictions. One example is the fascinating and again, embarrassing, account (p. 278) of the composer having added his signature, in 1973, to a public denouncement of dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov. Fay makes it clear that Shostakovich deeply regretted his ill-advised action, even quoting and discussing the portion of Testimony that finds the composer in a defensive tone on the matter. Elsewhere in the book, Fay reports the composer's joining the Communist Party in 1960, and again clearly discusses his profound regret after having done so, explicitly quoting his private sentiments, "No, communism is impossible." (p. 216). Fay could not be more explicit in portraying the composer's anti-communist stance as well as exposing the insincerity of his many public statements in support of the government. These portions of Fay's book simply demolish untenable notions of there being an anti-revisionist agenda underlying her writing. One may disagree with Fay for insisting on a counterintuitive interpretation of FJFP, but she cannot be accused of attempting to conceal Shostakovich's ant-establishment frame of mind.

Ian MacDonald, the leading Fay detractor and least objective reviewer of the book at hand, has advanced a chapter-by-chapter critique that repeatedly questions Fay's understanding of historical context. MacDonald does point to interesting details, yet if "A Life" included as much background as he recommends, the focus of the book would take us far afield from the life of Shostakovich. As it is, the background Fay provides is expertly described and more than sufficient, as exemplified by her more than complete coverage (pp 98-105) of the events surrounding the Fifth Symphony as well as other landmark episodes in the composer's life.

Given the bewildering complexity of Shostakovich's life and times, let alone his character and his music, it is fortunate that there is now an authoritative biography that concentrates on but one of these facets with as rich and reliable detail as "A Life". Fay's no-nonsense approach gives her little room to penetrate either the character or the music of her subject, features that require the kind of speculative inferences that she goes out of her way to avoid throughout her book. Yet, it is this very "stick to the facts" quality that gives Laurel Fay's biography its scrupulous solidity, its distinctive and valuable place on one's library shelf. The ultimate tribute to "A Life", even by those who are so negatively critical of it today, will be the many references that will be made to it over the years in the course of future writing and research.



The Nays

Neal Gittleman

Having just finished Fay's book I confess to feeling rather underwhelmed. Clearly, it's a well researched, well considered biography, and definitely worth reading. But the author seems so committed to the idea that it's biography and biography alone, that I, personally, am left frustrated by the "roads not travelled."

The consideration of the 10th Symphony is an excellent example. Here's a major piece, certainly one of the composer's greatest. It appears just after one of the most momentous events in Soviet history - the death of Stalin. Is there even a word about the purported subject matter of the 2nd movement? Not one. Fay makes allusion to some of Testimony's testimony from time to time, with a good deal of scepticism and large grains of salt - that's her prerogative. But why she would choose at this point not even to mention Testimony's 'The second part, the scherzo, is a musical portrait of Stalin, roughly speaking...' is beyond me. We learn that the 10th introduces the DSCH motive, and we learn that DS was lucky in having such a pregnant set of intervals for his "signature." Is there any mention, though of DSCH being slammed out in the timpani in the final pages, just as the music of the 2nd movement is reprised? I know it's "just a biography," but for cryin' out loud, it's a biography by someone who bills themselves as a "writer on Russian and Soviet music."
Here's a moment when some salient comments on the music itself would be SO revealing. But no... We get a quote of DS's own words - the first-movement-too-long-second-movement-too-short bit. We get "he admitted to having written the work too quickly, to having failed in his goal of creating a genuine symphonic allegro in the first movement." OK, fine. WHY did he work too quickly? And why, if his goal was to create a genuine symphonic allegro in the first movement, did he write a movement marked Moderato, a movement that despite metronome markings of crotchet = 96 and crotchet = 120, doesn't sound particularly allegro to the listener's ear? I would have gladly waited a little longer, paid a little more and spent more time reading to get some of Fay's insights into the music in addition to the and-then-he-did-this-style biographical information.

That said, Fay's book certainly belongs on my - or anyone else's - DS shelf. Add it to Wilson, Volkov, McDonald, and Ho/Feofanov, and if you can't figure out for yourself what you think about DS and his music you're not really trying hard enough! But, sadly, I think Fay wasn't quite trying hard enough either. Shostakovich: A Life could have been a MUCH more interesting and enlightening book, one worthy of some high-spirited debate. As it is, it's too easy to read and file away.

The Washington Post, 'Subversive Symphonies', Sudip Bose

When Dmitri Shostakovich died on Aug. 9, 1975, the Soviet government mourned the loss of "a faithful son of the Communist Party," whose symphonies, quartets and song cycles (other than those that were at one time banned, of course) stood as musical monuments to socialist realism. In the West, this portrait of the contrite communist was never questioned. Musicologists made an example of his Fifth Symphony, which had acquired the notorious subtitle "A Soviet Artist's Creative Reply to Just Criticism." In the symphony's rousing, seemingly optimistic finale, critics found evidence for an embattled composer's obeisance. Then there were the composer's denunciations - of Igor Stravinsky in 1949, of Andrei Sakharov in 1973. Shostakovich was a great composer, perhaps the greatest of our century, but one, we were led to believe, whose sympathies were decidedly red.

Then Solomon Volkov came along. A maverick Soviet journalist who emigrated to New York in 1976, Volkov claimed to have smuggled out a typescript containing memoirs the late composer had dictated to him. The publication of Testimony in 1979 was a revelation. The composer who emerged from these clandestine pages was a dissident forced to glorify the Soviet state in official speeches and articles while seeking to subvert it through the dark ironies of his music.

Clinging to the image of Shostakovich as Soviet loyalist, a group of American musicologists attacked the book. One of them, Laurel E. Fay, argued in a controversial 1980 article that Volkov had plagiarized articles Shostakovich wrote much earlier, passing them off as firsthand reportage. Thus began a debate over Shostakovich's character that has been ugly and personal, with normally mild-mannered, bow-tied academics engaging in bouts of musicological mud wrestling. Numerous musicians have come to Testimony's defense, including Mstislav Rostropovich, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Kurt Sanderling, Kyril Kondrashin and the composer's son, Maxim. Most recently, in their book Shostakovich Reconsidered, the musicologist Allan B. Ho and his colleague Dmitri Feofanov attacked Fay's anti-revisionist set, establishing, to my mind at least, the absolute veracity of Testimony.

Now Fay, who dismisses Testimony as the deathbed rantings of a bitter man, has written a biography of Shostakovich. It is at times an unreliable book that portrays Shostakovich as a nervous Soviet patriot, "a 'true son' of the Communist Party" who "ceded unconditionally his signature, his voice, his time, and his physical presence to all manner of propaganda legitimizing the party." Of this "dedicated public servant," Fay writes: "While it would be foolish to accept at face value all the statements and writings ascribed to Shostakovich, it does not follow that he shared none of the sentiments or opinions expressed in this way."

This caricature of the composer betrays a bewildering naivete about the climate of terror and intimidation in which Shostakovich was forced to work. In 1936, an editorial entitled "Muddle Instead of Music" appeared in Pravda, condemning Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk as a formalist, bourgeois work inaccessible to the masses (this despite the raucous response of the masses, who sold out performances and stomped for curtain calls). Soon Shostakovich was watching as his fellow artists, victims of Stalin's cultural purges, were quietly arrested, tried and shot. As for the composer's family, his brother-in-law was arrested, his sister exiled and his mother-in-law sent to a labor camp.

In such an atmosphere, Shostakovich was forced to lie, to say all manner of outlandish things in defense of the Soviet state, simply to survive. His recourse was his music, and many a Shostakovich opus contains secondary, encoded meanings. In his pungent memoir Stormy Applause, Rostislav Dubinsky, the first violinist of the famed Borodin Quartet, describes how his ensemble prepared a second, official interpretation of Shostakovich's Fourth Quartet: "We removed all possible 'anti-Soviet' insinuations from the music. Even our faces tried to look optimistic. We lied! We presented the foreboding mood of the first movement as hope for a brighter future; the plaintive lyricism of the second as a pleasant little waltz; the sinister muted scherzo became a cheerful dance; and the tragic Jewish themes of the finale took on traditional Oriental coloring."

But on the subject of Shostakovich's music, Fay is startlingly silent. Why, in a book with fewer than 300 pages of text, does Fay give such scant attention to the analysis of Shostakovich's scores? It's almost as if she's afraid to approach them for fear of what they'll reveal. When Fay writes that after the Tenth Symphony Shostakovich "devoted a disproportionately large portion of his music to the greater glory of Soviet Realism," she is ignoring every bit of irony and sarcasm and satire the composer embedded in his work.

An example is the Eleventh Symphony, subtitled "The Year 1905," a depiction of the Bloody Sunday massacre that triggered the first Russian revolution.
Though at face value the piece appears to be classic propaganda, it actually encodes another theme: the 1956 massacre of Hungarian demonstrators by Soviet troops at Budapest's Parliament Square. Knowing what we now do, it is difficult not to hear this resonance in the Cossacks' attack in the second movement, punctuated by the rapid gunfire of the snare drum. As Ian MacDonald points out in The New Shostakovich, the dark and graphic symphony "lacks the one self-defining attribute of Socialist Realism: optimism." In Testimony, Shostakovich spoke of the idea of recurrence - of evil and oppression - that informs the work. Indeed, I don't think it's a coincidence that Shostakovich heralds the first movement with a trumpet motif from Mahler's Resurrection Symphony; whereas Mahler's resurrection is of the human spirit, Shostakovich's is of its brutal suppression.

But Fay denies any connection to the Hungarian uprising: "Shostakovich actually provides listeners in 1956 little incentive to explore this connection or to delve any deeper than the manifest content of his score." This is surely one of the most baffling of the book's claims. What incentive was Shostakovich supposed to provide? An announcement of his intentions in Pravda? Pre-concert lectures outlining the secret program? For Fay to think that Shostakovich could have publicly criticized the totalitarian government suggests she hasn't a clue about the terrifying nature of Soviet cultural life.

Elsewhere in her book, Fay writes that "Shostakovich preferred to let his music 'speak' for itself and inevitably directed the curious to his scores." Exactly. Anyone who wants to explore the connection between the composer's conscience and the world that shaped it need only listen to his music with open mind and open ears. In his music, Shostakovich was never silent.


Harlow Robinson , New York Times, Jan 2, 2000,
A Bitter Music - Was Shostakovich a loyal Soviet artist or a closet dissident?

... little [of this] tumult and conflict comes across in Shostakovich: A Life, Laurel E. Fay's mostly lifeless attempt to produce the definitive biography of the composer. Insistent on sticking only to the facts and avoiding even a hint of the sometimes fanciful speculation that has characterized much of what has been published and broadcast about Shostakovich both in Russia and in the West, Fay has squeezed her provocative subject dry. Cautious, dutiful and choked with details, her book reads more like an extended encyclopedia entry than a biography. Nor do its meticulously gathered piles of information challenge the interpretation presented elsewhere of the composer as a cowardly, embittered, Chekhovian figure profoundly uncomfortable with his role as the Kremlin's official composer but lacking the moral strength to rebel.

Allan Ho

I have to admit that the more I go through Fay's book with a fine-toothed comb, the more I am perplexed by her "filtering". This occurs even with less controversial works than From Jewish Folk Poetry.

For example, take her discussion of Shostakovich's film score The New Babylon (Fay, pp. 49-50). She notes that the music was "screened and accepted by the artistic panel at Sovkino, which concluded, 'This music is distinguished by its considerable closeness to the style and rhythm of the film, by great emotional strength and expressivity. The effect of the picture is greatly heightened. Furthermore, despite the originality and freshness of the form, the music is sufficiently simple and can be appreciated by the mass viewer.'" (The latter makes the composer sound like a true "loyal son".) Then she notes the "humiliating failure" when the film was released, because of "liberal errors in the distributed scores and parts, insufficient rehearsals, lack of ensemble co-ordination, plus a certain amount of hostility (and perhaps outright sabotage) among conductors...", the need to hurriedly re-edit the film because of censors in Moscow, and perhaps even because projectionists sped up films to allow two showings in a single evening.

All of this may well have been true, but why is there no mention, no comment about what Kozintsev, one of the directors, himself said about New Babylon: "After viewing the film...[Shostakovich] agreed to write the score. Our ideas coincided ... We immediately came to an agreement with the composer that the music would be linked to the inner meaning and not to the external action, that it should develop by cutting across events, and as the antithesis of the mood of a specific scene. Our general principle was not to illustrate, and not to complement or coincide on this point. In the score the tragic themes intrude on vulgar can-cans, the German cavalry galloped into Paris to the accompaniment of Offenbach's La Belle Hélène (transformed suddenly out of the Marseillaise); the themes interwove with great complexity, changing the mood from the farcical to the pathetic ... The score was met with hostility. It was much easier to continue the old way of life." (Kozintsev, The Complete Works; trans. in Wilson, pp. 75-76)

The Kozintsev quote seems to shed valuable light as to why there was an incongruity between film and score: that is, that this was in large part an artistic decision as opposed to the "accident" Fay suggests happened in the theaters. Surely Fay is aware of Kozintsev's statement. Therefore, by its omission, are we to conclude that Kozintsev was lying or misremembered his "agreement" with Shostakovich, that Wilson mistranslated the Russian text, or that Fay considers this unimportant?

Fay also does not mention what Shostakovich says in Testimony: "But when [New Babylon] was first shown, KIM [the Communist International Youth or young people's division of Comintern] interfered. KIM leaders decided that New Babylon was counterrevolutionary. Things could have ended very badly..." (p. 150-51). Just because something is in Testimony doesn't mean it's not true and should be ignored. Couldn't KIM have played some role in the film's hostile reception? I believe more information about this episode is in Marek Pytel's book on New Babylon.

Top