Europe Central (31 page)

In Berlin, that other composer, Adolf Hitler, was putting the final dispositions on the score of his Thirteenth Symphony: Skizze B: Heeresgruppe Nord. Eigene Lage am 22.6.1941 abds. Operation “BARBAROSSA.” Roman numerals, an hourglass flag, checkerboard flags, numerals inside circles and semicircles, all of these stood dark upon a pale grey map of western Russia. The plural of
staff
is
staves.
His General Staff were all staves and knaves stacked one above another in parallels on the music paper. His score had no end. Shostakovich, it’s said, could write twenty or thirty pages a day when well engaged upon a symphony, and
Heeresgruppe Nord,
Army Group North, would make similarly rapid progress across the pale grey flatness en route to Leningrad. The other two Army Groups proved equally exemplary. Before their symphony was done, they’d kill almost as many high-ranking Russian officers as had Comrade Stalin himself.

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.

20

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 . . .

21

On 20 August, the Germans closed the ring around their flank objective, Leningrad. On 4 September, Field-Marshal von Leeb raised his baton: Air raids and bombardments began.—Don’t worry, comrades, said our radio, we’ve halted them at the Ligovo-Pulkovo Line . . .—On 6 September, an enemy communiqué announced that encirclement was “progressing” toward a victory, and two days later Leningrad’s last railway connection was lost. On 22 September, Hitler the Liberator with his usual kindness issued the following “Directive on the Future of the City of Petersburg”:
The Führer has decided to wipe the city of Petersburg off the face of the earth . . . After the defeat of Soviet Russia, there is no interest in the further existence of this large inhabited area.
(In his favor, we ought to note that he was worried about exposing his soldiers to epidemics.)

Within this killing-zone remained two hundred thousand ill-equipped Red Army men, and three hundred thousand citizens hardly trained or armed at all, but gloriously enrolled in the People’s Militia. Pale, weary women toiled with their hair tucked up, packing explosives into the shell casings which stood in rows before them like immense metal bottles. Their counterparts in Moscow were doing the same. Everyone was ready for the future, for death.

Comrade Zhdanov summoned the activists to a meeting and announced with his usual melodrama: Either the working class of Leningrad will be turned into slaves, and the best among them exterminated, or we shall turn Leningrad into the Fascists’ grave.

The Party promised to be merciless against deserters. The Party warned that no selfish individualism would be tolerated. Shostakovich had heard it all before.

22

His Seventh or so-called “Leningrad” Symphony was by some accounts already underway before the invasion. In August 1939, when the faithful demanded to know why in defiance of all his promises that undistinguished Sixth Symphony had failed to memorialize Lenin, Shostakovich twitched, slid his spectacles up his nose, smiled to the utmost of his cunningly hidden spite, and announced poker-faced that the Seventh would be program music of a wisely sycophantic species at last:
First movement—Lenin’s youth. Second movement—Lenin leading the October storm . . .
These words got eagerly reproduced in
Leningradskaya Pravda, Moskovskii Bolshevik
and suchlike organs of our trusting Soviet press.

The joke went further: The capitalist publication
Current Biography
proclaims in its last number to be published before the Hitlerites attacked Russia that
early in 1941, Shostakovich completed his Seventh Symphony, dedicated to the memory of Lenin.

I’ve also read that it was not until July, by which time Army Group North had already overrun all the pillboxes of the Stalin Line, that the actual composition commenced. (The Fascists are cutting all the wires! cried his colleague Yudina, but when he asked which wires and with what result, she wasn’t sure; she’d heard it from a loudspeaker.) Meanwhile, a certain Comrade Alexandrov has assured me that Shostakovich accomplished nothing before August.—The more one studies these various assertions, the more peculiar they become; it’s as if on a summer’s night the many canals of Leningrad were to join together and rearrange themselves into a spiral!—According to the next revision of his biography, by the end of July he’d completed only the first movement, which he provisionally re-entitled “War.”

Does it matter which version is true? Musicologists tell me that it does. What, then, do we mean by “already underway?” I myself credit the formulation of that sad and angry torchbearer N. Mandelstam, based on what she’d learned from her martyred poet-husband and his muse, her rival, A. Akhmatova, that
the whole process of composition is one of straining to catch and record something compounded of harmony and sense as it is relayed from an unknown source . . .
Let’s suppose that her description applies to music as well as it does to poetry. Whom did Shostakovich hear calling him? A certain woman with long dark hair comes to mind (you’re so lucky you didn’t marry me), but I ought to suppress this fantasy, which shows utopian individualism at its worst. The allegation that during this period he was wounded by a German shell fragment which, taking up residence within his brain, gifted him with sublime melodies whenever he tilted his head, is an equally colorful falsification.—Why not grant that harmony and sense descended upon him by grace alone? The pen flickered down the staves of his score-sheets, vivifying everything. Behind the blackout curtains, the candle kept shining every night in Shostakovich’s study. Chords and motifs trolled between his ears like tank-silhouettes probing the dark teeth of antitank concrete.

Establishing the date of inspiration for the first movement is particularly crucial, since its infamous Rat Theme, the marionette in eleven variations, evokes the madness of German Fascism. What indeed might it represent, had its conception occurred while we were still friends with Hitler the Liberator? (Here’s a hint: In the Rat Theme some critics claim to find a mixture of “Deutschland über Alles” and the “Merry Widow”; but there may also be a trace of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth.
²⁴
)

Whatever conclusion we penetrate to, there will always remain deeper levels of meaning, undiscovered bunkers, within the Seventh Symphony. Shostakovich escapes us; he’ll die free. The conductor Mravinsky once wrote of him that
everything has been heard in advance, lived through, thought out and calculated.

23

He dreamed that a bomb was singing to him. From far away, the bomb was coming to marry him. The bomb was his destiny, falling on him, screaming.