Testimony

But the main problem was with . the lezghinka. * The opera was based on life in the Caucasus, so Muradeli crammed it full of native songs and dances. Stalin expected to hear his native songs, but instead he heard Muradeli's own lezghinka, which he had composed in a fit of forgetfulness. And it was that original lezghinka that angered Stalin the most.

There were black clouds, a storm was brewing. It just lacked an excuse, the lightning needed an oak to strike, or at least a blockhead.

Muradeli played the part of the blockhead.

But in the end, Muradeli didn't get burned by the historic resolution

"On the Opera The Great Friendship." t He was a clever man and he

•In the Stalin years, the sounds of the lezghinka, a national Georgian folk dance, as well as the melody "Suliko," Stalin's favorite Georgian folk song, were familiar to millions or Soviet people. t"The year 1948 is a historical, watershed year in the history of Soviet and world musical culture. The Resolution of the Central Committee or All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) or February 10, 1948, On the Opera The Great Friendship by V. Muradeli, harshly condemning the anti�people formalist tendency in Soviet music, broke the decadent fetters that hobbled for so many years the creativity or many Soviet composers; for many years ahead the only correct path for the development of musical art in the U.S.S.R.. has been determined." (From a collective work published in 1948 by the Composers' Union)

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managed to profit even from the historic resolution.

As you know, the resolution drew heated interest among the toiling masses. Meetings and gatherings were held everywhere, in factories, communal farms, industrial cartels, and places of public food consumption. And the workers discussed the document with enthusiasm, since, as it turned out, the document echoed the spiritual needs of millions of people. These millions were united in their rejection of Shostakovich and other formalists. And so Muradeli added his babble to satisfy the spiritual interests of the workers . . . for money, of course.

Muradeli began making appearances at various organizations. He came to the people and repented. I was a so-and-so, a formalist and cosmopolite. I wrote the wrong lezghinka, but the Party showed me the way in time. And now I, the former formalist and cosmopolite Muradeli, have stepped onto the righteous road of progressive realistic creativity. And in the future I'm determined to write lezghinkas that are worthy of our great epoch.

Muradeli said all this in an agitated manner, with Caucasian temperament. The only thing he didn't do was dance the lezghinka. And then he sat at the piano and played excerpts from his future, yet-to-bewritten works, worthy of our great epoch. The excerpts were melodious and harmonious, quite like the harmony exercises from the conservatory textbook.

Everyone was satisfied, the workers saw a live formalist, they had something to tell their friends and neighbors. M uradeli earned good money and met the Composers' Union's plan on self-criticism.

Why am I spending so much time on Muradeli? In a musical sense he was a rather pathetic figure and as a man he was extremely malignant. An excess of temperament might lead Muradeli to perform a good deed, but only by accident. For instance, once he got the wild idea of reconciling Prokofiev and me. He decided that if Prokofiev and I sat down at a table and started drinking Georgian wines and eating shashlik, we would become great friends. We had to, for who could resist Georgian wines and shashlik? Naturally, nothing came of that idea.

However, Muradeli played an important role in the business with formalism, albeit an extremely deplorable one. This was the situation.

There was Shostakovich, who needed to be put in his place, and there 1 44

was Muradeli, whose opera The Great Friendship displeased Stalin.

But the problem of formalism in music did not yet exist, the horrible picture of a formalist conspiracy had not yet formed. They could hit Shostakovich and hit Muradeli and be finished. Stalin might not have even taken aim at all of Soviet music.* The impetus to start a broadly based destruction of Soviet music came from Muradeli and him alone.

After the unhappy presentation of The Great Friendship, a meeting was called at the Bolshoi Theater, and at that meeting Muradeli repented and came up with the following theory: that he loved melody and understood melody and he would be more than happy to write melody alone, including melodious and harmonious lezghinkas, but it seems that he was kept from writing melodious lezghinkas because the formalist conspirators were everywhere-in the conservatories, in the publishing houses, in the press. Everywhere. And they forced poor Muradeli to write a formalist lezghinka instead of a melodious and harmonious one. Muradeli's lezghinka was the direct result of a conspiracy of enemies of the people, formalists, and toadies to the West.

And this version from Muradeli interested Stalin, who was always interested in conspiracies, an unhealthy interest that always had unpleasant consequences. The unpleasant consequences were quick to follow in this instance as well. One provocateur-Muradeli-had been found. But that wasn't enough. They gathered the composers, who began hanging one another. It was a pathetic sight that I would rather not recall. Of course, almost nothing surprises me, but this is one thing that's too repugnant to think about. Stalin designated to Zhdanov the task of compiling a list of the "main off enders." Zhdanov worked like an experienced torturer-he set one composer against the other.

Of course, Zhdanov didn't have to work too hard; the composers chewed one another up with glee. No one wanted to be on the list, it wasn't a list for prizes but for possible extermination. Everything had significance here-your position on the list, for instance. If you were first, consider yourself gone. Last-there was still hope. And· the citizen composers knocked themselves out to avoid the list and did every-

•Jn order to appreciate Shostakovich's commentaries, one must picture the ubiquity of the

"discussions" of formalism in music instituted in 1948. Unlike. the "antiformalist" campaign_, of 1936, which had struck at many victims but then paled before the mass repressions, the "formalism" theme of 1948 �came the most important issue in the public life of the times and dominated every conversation.

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thing they could to get their comrades on it.* They were real criminals, whose philosophy was: you die today, and I'll go tomorrow.

Well, they worked and worked on the list. They put some names on, crossed others off. Only two names had the top spots sewn up. My name was number one, and Prokofiev's number two. The meeting was over, and the historic resolution appeared. And after that . . .

Meeting upon meeting, conference upon conference. The , whole country was in a fever, the composers more than anyone. It was like a dam breaking and a flood of murky, dirty water rushing in. Everyone seemed to go mad and anyone who felt like it expressed an opinion on music.

Zhdanov announced, "The Central Committee of Bolsheviks demands beauty and refinement from music." And he added that the goal of music was to give pleasure, while our music was crude and vulgar, and listening to it undoubtedly destroyed the psychological and physical balance of a man, for example a man like Zhdanov.

Stalin was no longer considered a man. He was a god and all this did not concern him. He was above it all. The leader and teacher washed his hands of it, and I think he did so consciously. He was being smart. But I only realized this later. At the time it seemed as though my end had come. Sheet music was reprocessed; why burn it?

That was wasteful. But by recycling all the cacophonic symphonies and quartets, they could save on paper. They destroyed tapes at the radio stations. And Khrennikov said, "There, it's gone forever. The formalist snake will never rear its head again."

All the papers printed letters from the workers, who all thanked the Party for sparing them the torture of listening to the symphonies of Shostakovich. The censors met the wishes of the workers and put out a blacklist, which named those symphonies of Shostakovich's that were being taken out of circulation. Thus I stopped personally off ending Asafiev, that leading figure of musical scholarship, who complained, "I take the Ninth Symphony as a personal insult."

From now unto forever, music had to be refined, harmonious, and melodious. They wanted particular attention devoted to singing with

*The reference is in part to the desperate attempt by Dmitri Borisovich Kabalevsky (b. 1904) to replace his name in a blacklist, prepared by Zhdanov, of composers "who held formalistic, anti-People tendencies" with that of Gavriil Nikolayevich Popov (1904-1972). The attempt was successful. The final text of the Party's "historic resolution" does not mention Kabalevsky. The talented Popov eventually drank himself to death.

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words, since singing without words satisfied only the perverted tastes of a few aesthetes and individualists.

Altogether this was called: The Party has saved music from liquidation. It turned out that Shostakovich and Prokofiev had wanted to liquidate music, and Stalin and Zhdanov didn't let them. Stalin could be happy. The whole country, instead of thinking about its squalid life, was entering mortal combat with formalist composers. Why go on talking about it? I have a musical composition on that theme, and it says it all.*

There were further developments: Stalin was rather deflated by the reaction in the West to the historic resolution. For some reason, he thought they'd be tossing their hats in the air as well, or at least be silent. But they weren't silent in the West. During the war, they had come to know our music a little better and thus they saw that the resolution was the delirium of a purple cow.

Naturally, Stalin didn't give a damn about the West, and the Western intelligentsia in particular. He used to say, "Don't worry, they'll swallow it." But the West did exist and he had to do something with it. They ha� started a peace movement, and they needed people for it.

And Stalin thought of me. That was his style completely. Stalin liked to put a man face to face with death and then make him dance to his own tune.

I was given the order to get ready for a trip to America. I had to go to the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace in New York.

A worthy cause. It's obvious that peace is better than war and therefore struggling for peace is a noble effort.�ut I refused, it was humiliating . for me to take part in a spectacle like that. I was a formalist, a representative of an antinational direction in music. My music was banned, and now I was supposed to go and say that everything was fine.

No, I said. I won't go. I'm ill, I can't fly, I get airsick. Molotov t talked to me, but I still refused.

•A reference to the still unpublished satiric vocal work of Shostakovich mocking the antiformalism campaign of 1 948 and its main organizers. The existence of this composition is one of the reasons why the forthcoming multivolwne collection of Shostakovich's works will not in fact be complete.

tVyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov (Skryabin; b. 1890), Soviet government leader. In 1949

Stalin sent Molotov's wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, to the camps for "Zionist activities." Molotov's career ended in 1957, when Khrushchev had him removed from power as a member of an

"anti-Party group."

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Then Stalin called. And in his nagging way, the leader and teacher asked me why I didn't want to go to America. I answered that I couldn't. My comrades' music wasn't played, and neither was mine.

They would ask about it in America. What could I say?

Stalin pretended to be surprised. "What do you mean, it isn't played? Why aren't they playing it?"

I told him that there was a decree by the censors, that the�e was a blacklist. Stalin said, "Who gave the orders?" Naturally, I replied, "It must have been one of the · leading comrades."

Now came the interesting part. Stalin announced, "No, we didn't give that order." He always referred to himself in the royal plural

"We, Nicholas II." And he began rehashing the thought that the censors had overreacted, had taken an incorrect initiative: We didn't give an order like that, we'll have to straighten out the comrades from the censorship, and so on.

This was another matter, this was a real concession. And I thought that maybe it would make sense to go to America, if as a result they would play the music of Prokofiev, Shebalin, Miaskovsky, Khachaturian, Popov, and Shostakovich again.

And just then, Stalin stopped going on about the question of the order and said, "We'll take care of that problem, Comrade Shostakovich.

What about your health?"

And I told Stalin the pure truth: "I'm nauseated."

Stalin was taken aback and then started mulling over this unexpected bulletin. "Why are you nauseated? From what? We'll send you a physician, he'll see why you are nauseated." And so on.

So finally I agreed, I made the trip to America. It cost me a great deal, that trip, I had to answer stupid questions and keep from saying too much. They made a sensation out of that too. And all I thought about was: How much longer do I have to live?

Thirty thousand people were jammed into Madison Square Garden when I played the scherzo from my Fifth Symphony on the piano, and I thought, This is it, this is the last time I'll ever play before an audience this size.

Even now I sometimes ask myself, How did I manage to survive? I don't think that the trip to America had anything to do with it. That wasn't it. I think it was the films. I am sometimes asked, "How could you participate in such film projects, you so-and-so, as The Fall of 1 48

Berlin and Unforgettable 19 19? • And even accept prizes for these unseemly things?"

My reply is that I can expand the list of shameful enterprises with music composed by me, for instance the revue at the Leningrad Music Hall called War Game "Casualties." They used song and dance to agitate for antiaircraft defense. I wrote songs, fox trots, and so on. Chekhov used to say that he wrote everything but denunciations. And you see, I agree with him. I have a very unaristocratic point of view.

But naturally, there was another nuance, so to speak, in this case

· with the film industry, and that nuance turned out to be rather important. The point is that for us film is the most important art form. As you know, Lenin said that. And Stalin confirmed that profound and just thought and put it into action.

Stalin was in charge of the film industry personally. The results are known. And it's not my concern to delve into it. My own firm conviction is that film is an industry and not an art, but my participation in this industry of national importance saved me. More than once or twice.

Stalin wanted our film industry to put out only masterpieces. He was convinced that under his brilliant leadership and personal guidance it would do so. But let's not forget "The cadres determine everything." t So the leader and teacher worried about the cadres. He had his own confused notions about who could do what, and he decided that Shostakovich could write film scores. And he never changed his mind. Considering the situation, it would have been irrational for me to refuse to do film work.

Khrennikov, taking heart after the historic resolution, decided that my song was sung and my time was over. My operas and ballets were not being produced. My symphonies and chamber music were banned.

Now all he had to do was squeeze me out of film work and then my end would be nigh.

*These films, praised by the press and glorified by awards, depict Stalin as a wise and brave leader. Stalin saw them many times, relishing his personal portrayal. Shostakovich wrote film sc:orcs throughout his creative life, beginning in 1928 (for the famous New Babylon). He worked on forty films, which is no mean feat. However, the true significance of this output will become clear when one remembers that in the Soviet Union there were years in which only a few films were released, and the production of each film was under the personal control of Stalin. Shostakovich received money and prizes for his film music, but his feelings in his late years about this form of art, and his participation in it, were ambivalent, to say the least.

t "The cadres determine everything" is one of Stalin's aphorisms.

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And so Khrennikov and his friends actively brought my end closer. I wouldn't speak of this with such assurance if I hadn't learned about it accidentally. I don't like gossip and when people try to tell me who said what about me, I usually try to stop the conversation. I have been told about the moves Khrennikov made toward having me liquidated. I don't lend credence to these stories. But once I witnessed a rather interesting conversation.

Here's what happened. Khrennikov called me in to the Composers'

Union on some matter. I came, and we had a leisurely conversation.

Suddenly the phone rang. Khrennikov, on the intercom, said to his secretary: "I told you not to disturb us!" But her reply made our hereditary shop clerk quiver. He became so agitated that he jumped up and waited for his caller, holding the receiver respectfully.

Finally Comrade Khrennikov was put through. It was Stalin calling. These coincidences do happen in real life. Namely, Stalin was calling about me, and Khrennikov was so confused that he forgot to see me out of his office and I heard the entire conversation.

Out of politeness, I turned away and began a close examination of Tchaikovsky's portrait on the wall. I scrutinized Tchaikovsky, and he stared back. The classic and I studied each other, but to tell the truth, I was· also listening closely to Khrennikov's conversation.

This was the situation. When Khrennikov learned that I had been commissioned to do the music for several important films, he wrote a complaint to the Party's Central Committee. He didn't realize that he was complaining to Stalin about Stalin. And Stalin was letting him have it. Khrennikov gulped and tried to say something in his defense.

But what defense could there be-obviously, he admitted that he had been wrong. Ever since that day, I can reproduce Pyotr Ilyich's beard faultlessly.

But otherwise, films have generally meant nothing but trouble for me, beginning with my first one, New Babylon. I'm not talking about the so-called artistic side. That's another story, and a sad one, but my troubles on the political side began with New Babylon. No one remembers this any more and the film is considered a Soviet classic and has a wonderful reputation abroad. But when it was first shown, KIM* interfered. The KIM leaders decided that New Babylon was

*KIM-the Communist International of Youth, tJ:ie young people's division of the Comintern.

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counterrevolutionary. Things could have ended very badly, and I was only in my early twenties then. And there was trouble with every other film. When we were doing Girlfriends, Pravda published a list of fourteen people who had allegedly planned Kirov's death. Raya Vasilyeva was on that list. She was the screenwriter of Girlfriends. Now, you might ask: What does the screenwriter have to do with the composer?

And I'll reply: And what did Raya Vasilyeva have to do with Kirov's murder? Nothing. But she was shot nevertheless.

Something worse happened with Friends, a film about Betal Kalmykov, a man famous in those days. They proclaimed Betal Kalmykov an enemy of the people, and all the people involved with the film shook in their boots. And so on.

No, this was more than I could take, particularly since I had to work with' geniuses like Mikhail Edisherovich Chiaureli. Whenever he went over budget, Chiaureli called Beria* and explained the financial situation this way: "You know, we need more money. Films are complicated. A location shot, coming and going, and a million's gone. We need more money." And Beria would arrange it. He and Chiaureli understood each other.

Chiaureli also went to America, so that the progressive American community would have the opportunity to get to know this outstanding cultural leader. His elaborate creations made it possible for me to live through the hardest years.

Well, everything is still ahead. "I look ahead without fear," Pushkin said in the bad times of tsarism. I can't repeat his statement with confidence. Sometimes someone will subtly hint, After all, the historic resolution on the opera The Great Friendship has been rescinded.

First of all, one judges by actions, not words. And as for actions, there are plenty of sad examples. I won't talk about other composers now, let them speak for themselves. But the Thirteenth Symphony+

*KIM-the Communist International of Youth, the young people's division of the Comintem.

*Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria (1899-1953), for many years the head of the Soviet secret police.

He was shot almost immediately after Stalin's death.

tThe Thirteenth Symphony, for soloist, chorus, and orchestra (1962), is the last composition of Shostakovich to elicit open dissatisfaction from the authorities, including a ban on public performance. It was prompted primarily by his choice of the poem for the first movement, Yevtushenko's "Babi Yar," which is directed against anti-Semitism, an unfashionable theme in the U.S.S.R. since Stalin's-time. Babi Yar was the site of the mass murder of Jews in 1943. The premiere of the Thirteenth Symphony in Moscow turned into an expression .of antigovemment feelings.

1 5 1

speaks for itself. It had an unhappy fate. It is very dear to me, and it hurts to remember the ugly attempts to take the symphony out of circulation.

Khrushchev didn't give a damn about the music in this instance, he was angered by Yevtushenko's poetry. But some fighters on the musical front really perked up. There, you see, Shostakovich has proved himself untrustworthy once more. Let's get him! And a disgusting poison campaign began. They tried to scare off everyone from Y evtushenko and me. We had so much trouble with the bass singer. Unfortunately, the soloist in the Thirteenth is a bass. One after another, they dropped out of the running. They were all worried about their position, their reputation. They behaved shamefully, shamefully. They almost destroyed the premiere, which took place by sheer accident.

And the Thirteenth was not exceptional. I had the same problems with The Execution of Stepan Razin and with the Fourteenth Symphony. But why list them; the point isn't in the list, it's in the situation.

And here's another thing. When they tell me that the historic resolution has been rescinded, I like to inquire: When was it rescinded? I heard a strange reply, that the historic resolution was rescinded by another, no less historic resolution, ten years later, in 1 958. *

But am I deaf or blind? It's hard for me to play the piano and write with my right hand,t but I still see and hear well, thank God. I've read the new historic resolution over and over and it says right there in black and white that the previous resolution played a positive role in the development of our culture and that formalism had been correctly condemned. And there's something added about the narrow circle of gourmand-aesthetes. So even the style is maintained. It's just as it was before. Everything is in order.

Why did this new historic resolution appear? Very simple. In 1951

Stalin reprimanded Alexander Korneichuk for writing a bad libretto to

•A reference to the Pany resolution of May 28, 1958, "On Correcting Errors in the Appraisal of the Operas Great Friendship, Bogdan Khmelnitsky, and From the Bottom of My Heart. "

Like almost all of Khrushchev's acts, this resolution was very ambivalent. Stalin's appraisals of the individual musical works and their composers were termed "unfair"; yet the criticism of formalism in 1948 was characterized as ·�ust and timely." Actually, other Party resolutions of the postwar period (for instance, those attacking Akhmatova, Zoshchenko, and Eisenstein) have not been revoked to this day and thus formally are still in force.

t In the last years of his life Shostakovich suffered from hean problems, fragility of the bones, and an impairment of the right hand.

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the opera Bogdan Khmelnitsky. The composer was in trouble too. The opera, naturally, was soundly denounced.

But Korneichuk was a friend of Khrushchev's and when Khrushchev became our leader, he decided to correct this gross injustice. He decided to rehabilitate Korneichuk's good nanie, and incidentally added Prokofiev and Shostakovich. That's the whole story.

Khrennikov was dumfounded at first, but quickly readjusted. Nothing terrible had happened, but just in case, he fired the editor • of Sovetskaya muzyka for revisionism.

Revisionism became the new insult, to replace formalism. Revisionism meant that the editor had tried to write about my compositions and Prokofiev's in a more polite manner. Khrennikov regrouped quickly and began his counterattack. The Party once again unquestioningly 'maintains that the historic resolution on the opera The Great Friendship . . . And so on, and so forth.

Everything repeated itself. Once Koval wrote in Sovetskaya muzyka something to the effect that the people bow down to and applaud the genius of our leader, Comrade Stalin, and Shostakovich has proved himself a dwarf. What was Shostakovich trying to prove when in his Ninth Symphony he created the image of a happy-go-lucky Yankee instead of the victorious Soviet man?

Ten years later our brilliant leader was no longer mentioned. They wrote simply and with taste: The Soviet people express dissatisfaction with the Ninth Symphony and recommend that I learn from our comrades in the People's Republic of China.

"The Party has once and for all knocked the ground out from under the feet of the revisionists," Khrennikov announced joyously. Right out from under them.

So let's not talk about correcting mistakes, because it will only make it worse. And more important, I like the word "rehabilitation." And I'm even more impressed when I hear about "posthumous rehabilitation." But that's nothing new either. A general complained to Nicholas I that some hussar had abducted his daughter. They even got married, but the general was against the marriage. After some thought, the emperor proclaimed: "I decree the marriage is annulled, and she is to be considered a virgin."

Somehow I still don't feel like a virgin.

*A reference to the musicologist Georgi Nikitich Khubov (b. 1 902).

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Is a musical concept born consciously or unconsciously? It's difficult to explain. The process of writing a new work is long and complicated.

Sometimes you start writing and then change your mind. It doesn't always work the way you thought it would. If it's not working, leave the composition the way it is-and try to avoid your earlier mistakes in the next one. That's my personal point of view, my manner of working. Perhaps it stems from a desire to do as much as possible. When I hear that a composer has eleven versions of one symphony, I think involuntarily, How many new works could he have composed in that time?

No, naturally I sometimes return to an old work; for instance, I made many changes in the score of my opera Katerina Izmailova.

I wrote my Seventh Symphony, the "Leningrad," very quickly. I couldn't not write it. War was all around. I had to be with the people, I wanted to create the image of our country at war, capture it in music. From the first days of the war, I sat down at the piano and started work. I worked intensely. I wanted to write about our time, about my 1 54

contemporaries who spared neither strength nor life in the name of Victory Over the Enemy.

I've heard so much nonsense about the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies. It's amazing how long-lived these stupidities are. I'm astounded sometimes by how lazy people are when it comes to thinking.

Everything that was written about those symphonies in the first few days is repeated without any changes to this very day, even though there has been time to do some thinking. After all, the war ended a long time ago, almost thirty years.

Thirty years ago you could say that they were military symphonies, but symphonies are rarely written to order, that is, if they are worthy to be called symphonies.

I do write quickly, it's true, but I think about my music for a comparatively long time, and until it's complete in my head I don't begin setting it down. Of course, I do make mistakes. Say, I imagine that the composition will have one movement, and then I see that it must be continued. That happened with the Seventh, as a matter of fact, and with the Thirteenth. And sometimes it's the reverse. I think that I've started a new symphony, when actually things come to a halt after one movement. That happened with The Execution of Stepan Razin, which is now performed as a symphonic poem.

The Seventh Symphony had been planned before the war and consequently it simply cannot be seen as a reaction to Hitler's attack. The

"invasion theme" has nothing to do with the attack. I was thinking of other enemies of humanity when I composed the theme.

Naturally, fascism is repugnant to me, but not only German fascism, any form of it is repugnant. Nowadays people like to recall the prewar period as an idyllic time, saying that everything was fine until Hitler bothered us. Hitler is a criminal, that's clear, but so is Stalin.

I feel eternal pain for those who were killed by Hitler, but I feel no less pain for those killed on Stalin's orders. I suffer for everyone who was tortured, shot, or starved to death. There were millions of them in our country before the war with Hitler began.

The war brought much new sorrow and much new destruction, but I haven't forgotten the terrible prewar years. That is what all my symphonies, beginning with the Fourth, are about, including the Seventh and Eighth.

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Actually, I have nothing against calling the Seventh the Leningrad Symphony, but it's not about Leningrad under siege, it's about the Leningrad that Stalin destroyed and that Hitler merely finished off.

The majority of my symphonies are tombstones. Too many of our people died and were buried in places unknown to anyone, not even their relatives. It happened to many of my friends. Where do you put the tombstones for Meyerhold or Tukhachevsky? Only music can do that for them. I'm willing to write a composition for each of the victims, but that's impossible, and that's why I dedicate my music to them all.

I think constantly of those people, and in almost every major work I try to remind others of them. The conditions of the war years were conducive to that, because the authorities were less strict about music and didn't care if the music was too gloomy. And later all the misery was put down to the war, as though it was only during the war that people were tortured and killed. Thus the Seventh and Eighth are

"war symphonies."

This is a well-rooted tradition. When I wrote the Eighth Quartet, it was also assigned to the department of "exposing fascism." You have to be blind and deaf to do that, because everything in the quartet is as clear as a primer. I quote Lady Macbeth, the First and Fifth Symphonies. What does fascism have to do with these? The Eighth is an autobiographical quartet, it quotes a song known to all Russians: "Exhausted by the hardships of prison."

And there is also the Jewish theme from the Piano Trio in this quartet. I think, if we· speak of musical impressions, that Jewish folk music has made a most powerful impression on me. I never tire of delighting in it, it's multifaceted, it can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It's almost always laughter through tears.

This quality of Jewish folk music is close to my ideas of what music should be. There should always be two layers in music. Jews were tormented for so long that they learned to hide their despair. They express despair in dance music.

All folk music is lovely, but I can say that Jewish folk music is unique. Many composers listened to it, including Russian composers, Mussorgsky, for instance. He carefully set down Jewish folk songs.

Many of my works reflect my impressions of Jewish music.

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This is not a purely musical issue, this is also a moral issue. I often test a person by his attitude toward Jews. In our day and age, any person with pretensions of decency cannot be anti-Semitic. This seems so obvious that it doesn't need saying, but I've had to argue the point for at least thirty years. Once after the war I was passing a bookstore and saw a volume with Jewish songs. I was always interested in Jewish folklore, and I thought the book would give the melodies, but it contained only the texts. It seemed to me that if I picked out several texts and set them to music, I would be able to tell about the fate of the Jewish people. It seemed an important thing to do, because I could see anti-Semitism growing all around me. But I couldn't have the cycle performed then, it was played for the first time much later, and later still I did an orchestral version of the work.

My parents considered anti-Semitism a shameful superstition, and in that sense I was given a singular upbringing. In my youth I came across anti-Semitism among my peers, who thought that Jews were getting preferential treatment. They didn't remember the pogroms, the ghettos, or the quotas. In those years it was almost a mark of sangfroid to speak of Jews with a mocking laugh. It was a kind of opposition to the authorities.

I never condoned an anti-Semitic tone, even then, and I didn't re- ·

peat anti-Semitic jokes that were popular then. But I was much gentler about this unworthy trait than I am now. Later I broke with even good friends if I saw that they had any anti-Semitic tendencies.

But even before the war, the attitude toward Jews had changed drastically. It turned out that we had far to go to achieve brotherhood.

The Jews became the most persecuted and defenseless people of Europe. It was a return to the Middle Ages. Jews became a symbol for me. All of man's defenselessness was concentrated in them. After the war, I tried to convey that feeling in my music. It was a bad time for Jews then. In fact, it's always a bad time for them.

Despite all the Jews who perished in the camps, all I heard people saying was, "The kikes went to Tashkent to fight." And if they saw a Jew with military decorations, they called after him, "Kike, where did you buy the medals?" That's when I wrote the Violin Concerto, the Jewish Cycle, and the Fourth Quartet.

Not one of these works could be performed then. They were heard 1 57

only after Stalin's death. I still can't get used to it. The Fourth Symphony was played twenty-five years after I wrote it. There are compositions that have yet to be performed, and no one knows when they will be heard.

I'm very heartened by the reaction among young people to my feelings on the Jewish question. And I see that the Russian intelligentsia remains intractably opposed to anti-Semitism, and that the many years of trying to enforce anti-Semitism from above have not had any visible results. This holds for the simple folk as well. Recently I went to the Repino station to buy a lemonade. There's a little store, a stall really, that sells everything. There was a line, and a woman in the line, who looked very Jewish and had an accent, began to complain out loud.

Why is there such a line, and why are canned peas only sold with something else, and so on.

And the young salesman answered along these lines: "If you're unhappy here, citizeness, why don't you go to Israel? There are no lines there and you can probably buy peas just like that."

So Israel was pictured in a positive way, as a country without lines and with canned peas. And that's a dream for the Soviet consumer, and the line looked with interest at the citizeness who could go to a country where there are no lines and more peas than you could want.

The last time I was in America I saw the film Fiddler on the Roof and here's what astounded me about it: the primary emotion is homesickness, you sense it in the music, the dancing, the color. Even though the motherland is a so-and-so, a bad, unloving country, more a stepmother than a mother. But people still miss her, and that loneliness made itself felt. I feel that that loneliness was the most important aspect. It would be good if Jews could live peacefully and happily in Russia, where they were born. But we must never forget about the dangers of anti-Semitism and keep reminding others of it, because the infection is alive and who knows if it will ever disappear.

That's why I was overjoyed when I read Yevtushenko's "Babi Yar"; the poem astounded me. It astounded thousands of people. Many had heard about Babi Yar, but it took Yevtushenko's poem to make them aware of it. They tried to destroy the memory of Babi Yar, first the Germans and then the Ukrainian government. But after Y evtushen-1 58

ko's poem, it became clear that it would never be forgotten. That is the power of art.

People knew about Babi Yar before Yevtushenko's poem, but they were silent. And when they read the poem, the silence was broken. Art destroys silence.

I know that many will not agree with me and will point out other, more noble aims of art. They'll talk about beauty, grace, and other high qualities. But you won't catch me with that bait. I'm like Sobakevich in Dead Souls: you can sugar-coat a frog, and I still won't put it in my mouth. Zhdanov, a great specialist in the musical arts, also stood fast for beautiful and graceful music. Let anything at all go on around you, but serve high art, and nothing but, at the table.

It's amusing to see how pronouncements on art from people who consider themselves to be in opposite camps correspond. For example:

"If music becomes ungainly, ugly, vulgar, it stops satisfying those demands for the sake of which it exists, and it ceases being music."

Now wouldn't any aesthete who campaigns for high art be willing to sign his name to that excerpt? And yet this was said by that brilliant music critic Zhdanov. Both he and the aesthetes are equally against music reminding people about life, about tragedies, about the victims, the dead. Let music be beautiful and graceful and let composers think only about purely musical problems. It'll be quieter that way.