Shostakovich and Strauss

In the latest issue of the Claremont Review of Books, Robert Reilly reviews Wendy Lesser's Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets and finds that while Lesser's book has many admirable qualities, it violates Leo Strauss's most important pedagogical teaching:  that in order to understand anyone, you have to first understand them as they understood themselves.

When Dimitri Shostakovich was finally forced to join the Communist Party in 1960, he did so with public enthusiasm and became a musical emissary abroad.  He soon wrote symphonies and other works dedicated to Stalin and other Soviet heroes.  But why were those symphonies so jumbled and inaccessible?  Reilly may have the answer:

The answer is that Shostakovich was engaged in secret writing in the exact way in which Leo Strauss defined it, although transposed to the world of music. In Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), Strauss said, "Persecution...gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing...in which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines.... It has all the advantages of public communication without having its greatest disadvantage—capital punishment for the author." To the consternation of many who had interpreted Shostakovich's music programmatically, according to various Communist or "Great Patriotic War" themes, Shostakovich revealed in Testimony that he had been speaking in code.

For instance, Shostakovich said that the end of the Fifth Symphony is a false apotheosis: "the rejoicing is forced, created under threat.... You have to be a complete oaf not to hear that." The Seventh Symphony, subtitled Leningrad, was blatantly used for propaganda purposes against the Nazis during World War II. Shostakovich said that the Seventh was "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.... [I]t's about the Leningrad that Stalin destroyed and that Hitler merely finished off." Likewise, the Eleventh Symphony is not about the Revolution in 1905: "it deals with contemporary themes even though it's called ‘1905.' It's about the people, who have stopped believing because the cup of evil has run over." Of the 14th Symphony, Shostakovich said, "I don't protest against death in it, I protest against those butchers who execute people." As for why he said different things to different people at various times, Shostakovich gave a reply that, no doubt, Leo Strauss would have enjoyed: "I answer different people differently, because different people deserve different answers."