DSCH 18 Lecture Review - Great Masters: Shostakovich

DSCH No. 18 Lecture Review

Prof. Robert Greenberg

Great Masters: Shostakovich - His Life and Music
Robert Greenberg
Course No. 760. The Teaching Company. 2002.
Eight 45-minute lectures on 4 audio cassettes, 8 audio CDs, or 3 VHS videocassettes (NTSC format only).
Nominal Price: US$89.95/$134.95/$149.95 (but heavily reduced as we go to press).
Purchasing details: The Teaching Company, 4151 Lafayette Center Drive, Suite 100, Chantilly, Virginia USA; 1-800-832-2412.

"Discover the extraordinary life, times, and art of Dmitri Shostakovich, great musical master and flawed but faithful witness to the survival of the human spirit under totalitarianism."

Those words emanate from the sales pitch aimed at the curious browser of The Teaching Company's hugely impressive catalogue The Great Courses ("Teaching that engages the mind"). Just what might be the intentions here? What's for certain is that this is no standard project, as categorically distant from the offerings of your downtown Virgin Classics store as one could possibly imagine. Aside the multi-element subject matter, there was little to point me in any particular direction: so, Pinot Noir to hand, I sat, watched and listened to what The Teaching Company could, well ... teach me (and potentially you, too).

To the videotapes first. The presentation values employed here are simple, efficient and direct; i.e. they lack the imagination and/or the production means and/or the inclination to break away from the classic, rather static lecture situation. What's more, Greenberg seems certainly of that ilk, that enviable stratum of human society, that overflowingly confident, that sincerely and massively informed entity known as the TV lecturer. All prejudices aside, I found myself asking "But how could one not warm to this man?" Even his American accent is soft, and his flitting eye-line draws you into the world he creates for you, poised constantly to crack open some new nugget of information right over your head and deep down into your consciousness.

Gripes: why choose the Brandenburg Concerto as the annoyingly incongruous signature tune? Also, boringly static graphics accompany far from boring musical illustrations - why not contemporary stills from the epoch? And why no shots of the audience - I was dying to see just who'd been trawled into the recording sessions?

But these are small issues, ripples in a calm sea of smooth, intensive bestowing of information. The accompanying booklet outlines lecturer Greenberg's multiple précis, but what it doesn't capture are the passionate inflexions, the glaring stares and the at-the-drop-of-a-hat anecdotes, such as this concerning the time of the Great Terror:

"Now later in life speaking in private, as one had to do in the Soviet State if one wanted to keep one's lungs, as Isaac Babel pointed out, I quote "Now a man can speak frankly only with his wife, at night with a blanket over his head ..."

In a similar fashion, the audio media (cassette, CD) convey Greenberg's highly precise, highly articulate manner in relating the "Shostakovich Story" to the unseen audience. The sound is clear, the level of intensity is maintained - definitely recommended for daily traffic-jam therapy.

But who is our host? Really? He is Robert Greenberg, PhD, and he is based at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. A composer in his own right (his forty-plus works are scored for various instrumental and vocal ensembles) his creations have been performed as far afield as New York, Los Angeles, Great Britain, Italy and The Netherlands (where his Child's Play for string quartet was performed at Amsterdam's Concertgebouw). He is a true veteran chez The Teaching Company, his recorded legacy exceeding 300 lectures, including the 48-part How to Listen to and Understand Great Music.

Greenberg told DSCH Journal that he gears his courses ...

"for the lay-person and the interested amateur. While I am grateful (actually, thrilled is a better word) when I find out that professional musicians are listening to and learning from my courses, I would point out up front that I believe it is my job to forge a link between this extraordinary music and an unknowing and uncomprehending public rather than to preach (or sing, as the case may be) to a choir of cognoscenti and fellow professionals.

"In no other piece that I've done for the Teaching Company is this more true than in the eight-lecture Shostakovich biography. I don't have to tell you how important and magnificent this music is, and the degree to which the issues of Shostakovich's life and creativity were umbilically attached to the politics of the Soviet Union. ... And that is, of course, why I had to make the course, because, truly, to know him and understand him - as best [as] can be done in eight lectures - is to love and respect Shostakovich and his music. So this course was made for people who were starting from Shostakovich zero - meaning 99% of the folks out there."

The premise of Professor Greenberg's approach to Shostakovich's life and oeuvre is that nothing he said publicly about his music ("for official Soviet consumption," if you will) should be taken at face value. "He lived the great bulk of his career under Stalin, and he knew what that meant. He had seen friends taken away in the purges, never to return." Throughout his discourse Greenberg quotes quite liberally from Volkov's Testimony. It's clearly a seminal source of Shostakovich thinking for him, although he does admit to having some reservations:

"I've no doubt that the interviews were conducted in an academically haphazard manner, and that there are parts of Testimony that are 'assemblages' of various conversations and comments made a different times, juxtaposed to look as if they were part of a continuous commentary. Having said that, the words ring with truth, and I have chosen - rightly, I think - to present them as such, with an explanation of why they are considered controversial."

The course is broken down into the following "episodes": Let the Controversy Begin; The Kid's Got Talent!; Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk; Resurrection; The Great Patriotic War; Repression and Depression; The Thaw; and Illness and Inspiration. In addition to containing texts that reflect reasonably accurately the videotapes' layout and content, the adequate accompanying booklet includes a rather sparse Timeline of Shostakovich's works, a (very basic) musical Glossary, a handy mini-list of Biographical Notes (from Beria to Zhdanov via Rostropovich) and a Bibliography.

Above all, whilst watching and rewatching these very intense lectures I became aware of a strange phenomenon: why, this man truly loves this music, knows it remarkably well and enjoys an extraordinary empathy with its composer:

"[Shostakovich] was a coward, a hero, an opportunist, and everything in between. He saw his friends purged; he was witness to Stalin's horrific Five-Year Plans and show trials, Hitler's invasion and its terrible destruction, the gulags, the Cold War, and more besides. He saw it all.

"But through it all and most of all, he was a truly great composer, and all of his fear and courage, his experience and imagination found their way into his music. He wrote music that pleased the state, and he wrote music - I think of his 1962 Babi Yar Symphony, which decried anti-Semitism when it was officially not supposed to exist in the USSR - which drove the state to fury. He toed the Party line, and publicly said what he was told to say. And yet, and yet . . . his mind remained his own, and his conscience, riddled with fear, guilt, and self-loathing as it was, was the secret inspiration behind so much of his music."

So will the learned reader of DSCH Journal gain any new insights into the life and times of his or her favourite subject? My answer: almost certainly so. Whilst the peppered histories of the core repertoire (Greenberg systematically uses the symphonies and quartets as the thread with which to connect these talks) might be familiar enough to thee and me, many are the contextual gems he introduces into his basic storyline, like the Babel quotation above and like the drawing together of many texts from a wide, and not always readily known list of sources.

The listener might equally be irritated by a number of falsehoods that wheedle their way into the flow - the Fourth Symphony's withdrawal on the day of the would-have-been premiere for example - but the discourse is happily free of corrective-type rhetoric or politicking inventions.

Greenberg is probably never - ever - short of a word to say, whatever the situation. However, he readily concedes, "In a lecture, there is no time for long digressions and prevarication; no space for footnotes and endnotes, no appendices in which to present source materials verbatim and in their entirety; and little time to qualify information. In a lecture, one must declare a perceived truth, admit on occasion to the necessity of overstatement, support and develop your claim, and move on. Any lecture - as opposed to a book or even an article - is an act of necessary exclusion."

I conclude with a hearty recommendation of the CD set (my mind is set somewhat against the videos, on the equally troubled grounds of cost and of usefulness) and with a wrapping-up statement from the man himself:

"[Shostakovich] was a small, frail, shy, and often terribly frightened man ... But his music testifies to the power of his resolve as an artist and as a witness determined to record and to promote, even if indirectly, the struggle on behalf of conscience and human dignity under conditions of totalitarian violence and oppression that we today can barely begin to imagine. How lucky we are to have had him among us.

"If Shostakovich were here with us now, the first thing he'd tell us was that he was no hero; in the Soviet Union, 'heroes' died young. Shostakovich was a survivor and a witness, his music a testament to what he saw, and felt, in a world that we can hardly imagine."

One parting caution: the VHS videocassettes are NTSC-coded, so a multi-standard VCR is essential if you live outside of the Americas, Japan and a handful of other nations that use the NTSC system.

Nigel Papworth
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