From the back of the cavernous auditorium, Els flinches from the coming attack. One swift downbeat releases a percussive hailstorm that sends the playwright prophet screaming naked through the streets. The eerie lighting, Bonner’s projections, and Els’s manic music leave the man flat on his back, staring up at heaven, mute with ecstasy. When he comes to, Act Three has begun, and with it, the end.
The failed tailor proclaims himself King. He sings, All the works of men give way now to the work of God. He establishes polygamy and takes Divara, Matthias’s stunning widow, as the first of his fifteen new wives. One quick change of tempo, and the communal kingdom of God on Earth embraces free love.
Prepared by a life of amateur theatricals, John assumes military command. He beats back an assault by the Prince Bishop’s forces in a scene that leaves even the stagehands holding their breath. His followers pour into the Town Hall square to sing one more broad chorus of belief: The Word has become Flesh and dwells in us. One King over All. .
A dim thought forms at the base of Els’s brain. He has been here before. He himself has taken part in this ecstatic uprising gone wrong.
The breaking wave of this music pulls him back down the aisle. He lowers himself into another seat, mid-house, testing the scene from yet another vantage. It’s still good. It dizzies him to think: This time, the revolution might just work. Two hundred people have combined to revive a story half a millennium old, and tonight, in this late dress rehearsal, the tale feels ready, at last, to open.
Then Bonner slides into the seat next to his. Three beats ago, the director was deep in the wings, climbing the scenery and herding the cast with a list of rehearsal notes longer than God’s grievances against humanity. Now he holds a folded-over newspaper in one hand and smacks it with his other. There’s glee in Richard’s eyes. Vindication. Fear, maybe, and a little true madness. Maestro. You’re not going to believe this. You’re a damn prophet. Art predicting life, with two weeks to showtime!
You’ll walk by as if there’s nothing there: In the grout of your bathroom tiles. In the air you breathe.
Moderato, to begin with. The opening measures of a condemned man’s testimony played across a landscape of black earth and brown stubble. Relentless midwestern farmland and Shostakovich’s Fifth: both spread in front of Els, pliant, empty, and terrifying, made for each other.
The jagged theme and its canonic echo tore out of the Fiat’s speakers. He’d heard the movement too many times in this life to count. He knew how the thing was built; he’d long ago analyzed every phrase to death. He’d memorized the spare counterpoint, the canonic echoes, the chromatic ambiguity, the concision, the relentless reworking of that blunt first theme. But the piece that played across three Illinois counties was altogether new to him.
Once, when he was young, Els had believed that music could save a person’s life. He could think of nothing now but all the ways it might get a person killed.
From the first leaping figure in the strings, Els heard again the problem with music. Even the slightest tune sounded like a story. Melody played on the brain like a weather report, an avowal of faith, gossip, a manifesto. The tale came across, clearer than words. But there was no tale.
Despite himself, in that first bleak figure in the strings, the one that would reappear in so many guises before the end, Els made out the maker’s miserable life: driven into the public arena, forced to choose between penance and revolt, heresy and faith, while his life hung on whatever story the state imagined that it heard.
Els piloted the car toward the setting sun, back into the firestorm of 1936. An adventurous composer, at the top of his Orphic game, brilliant, unpredictable, admired by everyone. For two years, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District played to near-total acclaim. Then the Pravda article—“Muddle Instead of Music”—a rabid, all-out attack on Shostakovich and everything his music stood for. Problem was, the anonymous author turned out to be that culture fan and amateur music critic, Stalin.
From the first minute, the listener is shocked by deliberate dissonance, by a confused stream of sound. Snatches of melody, embryos of musical phrases drown, escape, and once again vanish in rumbling, creaking, and squealing. . The music grunts, moans, pants, and gasps. . leftist muddle instead of natural, human music. .
In one clean sweep, the killer of millions names the twenty-nine-year-old composer an enemy of the people.
The people expect good songs. . Here is music turned deliberately inside out in order that nothing will be reminiscent of classical opera, or have anything in common with symphonic music or with simple and popular musical language accessible to all. .
Stalin saves a final flourish for the end. This is playing at things beyond reason that can end very badly.
Overnight, the official press is thick with condemnations. It calls for an end to formalist cleverness. It commands Shostakovich to reform and embrace a simple, affecting realism. The opera—a farrago of chaotic, nonsensical sounds—drops from sight, worse than dead.
Nothing for the man to do but pack his bag and wait for the two a.m. knock on the door.
Disappearance is epidemic that year. Mass arrests and exiles — the Kirov flow. Tens of thousands are plucked from their apartments every month. Artists, writers, directors — Erbshtein and Gershov, Terentyev, Vvedensky and Kharms. The poet Mandelstam, jailed for terrorist acts. Shostakovich’s own mother- and brother-in-law, arrested for sedition. The NKVD does not make mistakes. And all of society, guilty of complicit silence.
Then the shadow falls on Shostakovich. The composer asks his powerful admirer Marshal Tukhachevsky for help. Tukhachevsky appeals to Stalin to spare Shostakovich. Soon the marshal himself is arrested and executed.
Brittle, tense, and close to suicide, Shostakovich works on. But the piece that comes out of him is worse than the first offense. The Fourth Symphony: filled with audible treason. Days before the premiere, Shostakovich suppresses the piece and chooses to go on living.
To call any music subversive, to say that a set of pitches and rhythms could pose a threat to real power. . ludicrous. And yet, from Plato to Pyongyang, that endless need to legislate sounds. To police the harmonic possibilities as if there were no limits to music’s threat.
Through the windshield to the west, Els looked out on a featureless gulag only waiting for him, the latest public enemy.
Shostakovich: Cut off my hands, and I will still write music holding the pen in my teeth. But kill him, and the only tunes left would be the ones the state picked out for his funeral. Forced, then, to surrender or die. And so, the Fifth: A Soviet artist’s creative response to justified criticism.
For a few dozen miles, Els followed that response into its final, surprise freedom. He kept to the speed limit; every car on the road blew past him with scorn. Light traffic headed back East, from where he came. The futility of the interstate came over Els: you all stay there, and we’ll stay here, and let’s call an end to it.
The ominous tune and empty miles concentrated him. Deep inside a traumatized country still dreaming of security, he listened. The sounds would soon be like those stone-carved glyphs so eroded no one could read them anymore. But over the Fiat’s worrisome new rattle, for one last time Els heard the Fifth choose between truth and survival.
The tune wandered as if in shock: strident minor sixths and thirds, then murmuring fourths. Fragments flared up, alternating between fight and surrender. At last there arose something like a pulse, a timid motor rhythm driving toward a goal as amorphous as the one Els now chased. There came a lassitude, a yielding to chance. The music pressed on toward some still-deniable cri de coeur. It barreled forward, now a march, or perhaps a parody of one, lumbering on like a huge, blind beast.