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 When they tell me that the historic resolution has been rescinded, I like to inquire: When was it rescinded? I heard a strange reply, that the historic resolution was rescinded by another, no less historic resolution, ten years later, in 1 958.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