As any Conservatory student is aware, the staves for higher-pitched voices possess the royal privilege of slithering above their lower-pitched kinsfolk on the orchestral score. In Soviet prison camps the same rule gets followed, with our full-voiced thieves occupying the higher, warmer bunks, while the dying “politicals,” almost too weak to utter a sound, stretch themselves out below them on icy planks or, if their voices are really low, on the dirty, frozen floorboards by the piss bucket. The German conductor likewise honored this principle. All of his generals who survived would later remember his shrill abuse, singing unceasingly above them. He, their sleepwalker, was the only soloist. Composer, conductor and mezzo-soprano, he made the music of his dreams.
Needless to say, the pages of a score are subdivided not only horizontally by the staves, but also vertically by the partitions between measures which assure that every voice will sing to the same beat. In the symphony called “Barbarossa,” these bar lines were provided by a double file of tall German executioners aiming their rifles at an evenly spaced line of civilian hostages who stood facing a stone wall.
So came the night of 21-22 June 1941, when the stern, dignified melancholy of the Eighth Symphony’s opening rapidly shrills into outright alarm. After a grim stretch of strings, it rises even higher into stridency, this time with a martial component. Drumbeats like distant bursts of machine-guns announce full war, and horns scream like air raid sirens. Barbarossa begins: ten contrabasses, twelve violincelli, twelve violas, thirty violins of two types, four trumpets, four flutes, two oboes, an English horn, two clarinets, bass and piccolo clarinet, and twenty-two other instruments across a front forty-five hundred kilometers long. The Soviet sentries come running from their pillboxes; they’re machine-gunned down. Russia awakens far too early on that black morning, sundering herself into the brassy urgency of multiply solitary fears. A crazy, lumbering, hideous march brings the murderers closer: The Panzergruppen have crossed the bridges. Now here come the planes. In two days, two thousand of our aircraft will be destroyed. In a week, Minsk will surrender (a crime for which Comrade Stalin will shoot eight more of his generals). The symphony wails on. Not a note but reeks of gloom and horror. A terrifyingly idiotic fanfare proclaims an enemy beachhead—they’ve taken Riga—or is this fanfare in fact to be taken literally as a Soviet call to arms?—or does Shostakovich hope that the “organs” will take it literally when it’s actually excoriation of Stalin himself? Well, it’s only music.
Suddenly we’re illuminated by a hauntingly clarion thrill of trumpets. It sounds all the more genuine because it’s so sad, almost hopeless.
The second movement, about which one critic says that any attempts at jollity are quickly squashed and metamorphosed into irony and causticness, could almost be movie filler music, sarcastically excreted by the young Shostakovich during his stint at the Bright Reel. (Once he’d almost got fired for his deliberately absurd music for the film “Marsh Birds of Sweden.”) Throughout his career, ballet and movie scores were his bread and butter. When it came to his own work, he continued to expressly reject any claim to programmatic representation: Red Army men were not brass instruments, he said.—I do not believe him.—His trademark ambiguity infests this second movement. Does Galisha smile and try to dance? Then I’ve failed. I need her to, to, God forgive me, not that I believe in God! He made it loud; he made it angry, leaving in a half-cheerful bustling quality which alternated with marching dismalness. Then came the snake-rattle of death at the end.
The third movement, the allegro non troppo, begins in flight, the score itself, that pale flat sheet of endlessness called the Ukrainian steppes, being half obscured by burning fields and towns whose doom has been translated musically into low strings. It’s July. Their Panzers will soon be here. Black tank-smoke’s already on the horizon; the hot sky’s black with burning. And we, imprisoned by Shostakovich’s genius within the fear-poisoned heart-thumps of bass viols, must impotently witness all. Children scream like piccolos. That’s also how they’ll scream in Leningrad. I hear us running over the plain, passing abandoned villages whose huts and tractor stations will soon serve enemy battalions. Our footfalls are violas and violins. Burned-out oil lamps hang from whitewashed walls. New fires will come; summer is already scorching the edge of the music paper. Now they’re all gone east, the ones who will get there; the rest of us are dead or hiding. Dimming down into sick expectancy, Shostakovich’s symphony half-illuminates sorrow’s carpet: unburnt earth, which soon will drink in blood and groaning. It’s a near-blank page now, a plain of trodden grass scattered with the clothing of the fled. With evil speed the last rest expires. Then what? Ask D. D. Shostakovich that question, and he’ll drunkenly reply: He who has ears will hear. So wait for death. Horns proclaim that here they are, crawling over a low golden ridge with their guns aimed at us. Run, run, run! Now they see us! Run, run! We hide! They come. We run. They come! Very suddenly, we’re them, and it’s all so cheery like the grin of a corpse.23 We Nazis are rolling forward and shooting. (But call it a Slavic dance if you will; call it Stalin in peacetime, murdering Ukrainian peasants by the millions.) Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Sempre cresc. sin’al. With woodwind flourishes we’re burning every house in Vitebsk; Smolensk lies afire as in Napoleon’s time; smoke the hue of pure light boils out of windows. Their T-34s have all run away. With violin flourishes we speed east-wards through the golden grass. Crossing that same low ridge we’d watched from the far side in that primeval epoch when we’d been us, we spy the Reds fleeing toward the horizon. Never mind; our strafing planes will finish most of them. We’re on the frictionless flatness of the score sheet now; with oompapahs and oompapahs our tanks cavort across this dance floor of gratified ambition, driving toward Moscow and Leningrad as easily as if we were skating. When the Russians do form up their troops at last, they’re as feebly translucent as rainclouds on a horizon of pianissimo violins. Never mind their so-called Stalin Line, or their Luga Line; we’ll grind right through both of those, hardly noticing their defensive drumbeats. We kill everything, machine-gun every last charging wraith. And the Ukrainian steppes roll happily on. A crazy old Cossack comes galloping at us, and we blow his head off! He careens; he’s a fountain of blood, horse-waltzing ludicrously gruesome until he tumbles. Now the music tilts again like the upswung heads of hanged Ukrainians and again we’re us, running, running before those brassy baying horns. But here they come, running us down… We should have known that the only reason that Shostakovich’s nightmare restored us to ourselves was so we’d be compelled to drink the cup of anguish. It’s not that we’ve run out of room on the page; we could flee eastward forever, the Soviet Union being infinite, but the Panzers overtake us in less than three dozen measures. Then… Victory! Victory! They’re themselves, mercilessly. As gong, snare drum and cymbals sound a triumphal fanfare of evil, they crush us under tank treads; they toast themselves by upraising our decapitated heads…
23
It is perhaps this part which most influenced Martinov’s characterization of the third movement as a “Toccata of Death.”