How Shostakovich caught the zeitgeist

The symphonies of Shostakovich loom large over this year's Proms. Now, 25 years after his death, the tormented Soviet composer holds an increasing attraction for Western audiences. Bayan Northcott wonders why

Duration in music is always a relative matter. Where a composer of such intense compression as Webern might "express a novel in a single gesture", as his teacher Schoenberg once put it, a minimalist such as Philip Glass can trundle on for hours without conveying much at all. And such comparisons should not be forgotten when anatomising the length of time assigned to this or that composer in a comprehensive concert series such as the BBC Proms, which opened last Friday.

Duration in music is always a relative matter. Where a composer of such intense compression as Webern might "express a novel in a single gesture", as his teacher Schoenberg once put it, a minimalist such as Philip Glass can trundle on for hours without conveying much at all. And such comparisons should not be forgotten when anatomising the length of time assigned to this or that composer in a comprehensive concert series such as the BBC Proms, which opened last Friday.

For the most part, this year's balance looks unexceptionable enough. If one included the items in the concurrent Proms chamber music series at the Victoria and Albert Museum, then JS Bach comes out way ahead with some 12 hours of music marking the 250th anniversary of his death. Yet there are also five or six hours apiece of Mozart, Wagner and Beethoven, while the centenaries of Kurt Weill and Aaron Copland are duly celebrated by four hours of the one and over three of the other.

There remains, however, one surprising anomaly: no less than nine hours of the new season are being devoted to Shostakovich on the pretext of his death a mere 25 years ago. Justifiably? It is not as if this composer has exactly been neglected in preceding seasons, in which he has recently averaged around three hours per year. And meanwhile Shostakovich series abound in other concert halls, on disc and over the air as never before.

Granted, even in an unprecedentedly news-driven century, Shostakovich's career proved exceptional from the moment his precocious First Symphony attracted international attention in 1926. There was the blasting of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Pravda in 1936, his rehabilitation with the ostensibly more optimistic Fifth Symphony in 1937, and the propaganda coup of his Seventh (1941), dispatched from Nazi-beseiged Leningrad. Then, in 1948, came renewed Party pressure over his supposed "formalism"; and if his 10th Symphony (1953) was widely perceived in the West as a sigh of relief after the death of Stalin, his 13th (1962) had him in trouble again for protesting against Soviet anti-Semitism.

Later came the more damaging news that Shostakovich had finally been induced to join the Party himself and even, apparently, to sign denunciations of such dissidents as Andrei Sakharov, while after his death in 1975, controversy was to flare up again over the authenticity of Testimony, his purported memoirs "as told to" Solomon Volkov.

Even today, commentators still haggle over whether the symphonies, concertos, chamber works, song sets and patriotic cantatas document a lifetime of timid accommodation with Soviet ideology, or are crammed with coded political resistance and covert personal protest - and whether there has not always been something suspect about huge Western audiences throbbing vicariously to the sounds of Soviet oppression from the safe distance of their cosy concert seats.

Behind all this lurks the question of whether Shostakovich's output can ever escape such "extra-musical" considerations, to be understood and assessed primarily as music - an approach for which Gerard McBurney will be making the case in this year's annual Proms Lecture on 30 July.

Not that comments about the music itself - often unfavourable - were lacking in the past. Initially impressed by the talent of the First Symphony, Stravinsky soon turned dismissive of what he heard as the "provincial naturalism" of Lady Macbeth. Copland hailed Shostakovich's "extraordinary flair," but found his musical ideas "unnecessarily trite and conventional at times", while avant-garde circles after the war simply wrote off the symphonies as late-romantic dinosaurs - "third pressings of Mahler," as Boulez contends to this day. Yet one Western composer who never faltered in his admiration was Britten, who actually assured Shostakovich in 1963 that "there is no one composing today who has an equal influence on me."

Certainly there were parallels. Both composers were workaholics - Shostakovich to the extent that not working gave him headaches. Both habitually composed at high speed, tending to push on with new pieces rather than tinkering with less successful efforts. And both began as eclectics, seeking to gather the broadest range of styles into a personal synthesis which they then proceeded to reduce to essentials ("fewer notes, more music," Shostakovich remarked) - though there is nothing in late Britten quite so bare and stretched in texture as the last three Shostakovich string quartets.

In any case, now that the ideological imperatives that dominated Shostakovich's world have slackened (at least for the time being); now that composers are judged less according to the historical relevance of the styles they choose than to the ingenuity with which they deploy them, it ought to be a little easier to appraise his output in essentially musical terms.

The only trouble is that the procedures and characteristics that make for his greatest successes tend to be identical with those that account for his failures. One might take the vast span of the Moderato that opens the 10th Symphony as the outstanding example of Shostakovich's ability to sustain an argument in the starkest terms and at the slowest rate of unfolding without loss of tension and continuity. One might take the ensuing Scherzo as among his most astonishing outbursts of nervous energy. The Moderato lasts some 25 minutes, the Scherzo a mere four. Yet together they achieve a perfect formal balance, thanks partly to their violently contrasted textures and time-worlds, partly to the consistency of Shostakovich's thematic thought, obsessed as ever with a few scalic patterns, modal inflections and basic rhythms.

But then the same melodic turns and rhythmic patterns could be held to account for the predictability of, say, the Second Violin Concerto (1967), while comparable thematic repetitions and brute contrasts characterise the largely banal 12th Symphony (1961). So it would seem that complexity of thought and feeling - and hence intimations of those "extra-musical" promptings - cannot be left out of the critical equation.

Hans Keller, who defended Shostakovich throughout the years when the musical intelligentsia tended to dismiss the symphonies as a bit naff, thought the basic problem was that all too often "Shostakovich mistook his political conscience for his musical conscience. I would go so far as to say," he continued, "that the First Symphony apart, and not forgetting the 10th, nor underrating the powerful 11th, Shostakovich never wrote a good work" - that is, a spotless masterpiece - in his life. For a genius, this was quite a negative achievement. Needless to add, one prefers an inconsistent, uneven or conflict-ridden work of Shostakovitch to the masterpieces of a mere talent, since "Shostakovich said more even when he said it badly, because what he said was newer."

Not that such nice distinctions were ever likely to matter one way or another to that broad public which has always preferred to hear symphonies as all-too-human psychodramas. Once, it was the supposed hysteria and self-pity of Tchaikovsky that best fitted the bill. Since the last war, the existential angst of Mahler has seemed increasingly to take over, relegating the Tchaikovsky symphonies to a respectable niche among the standard classics.

Are we now, in turn, seeing Mahler increasingly replaced by the ideological tortures of Shostakovich? Since at present there seems no obvious candidate to supersede Shostakovich in his turn (unless one rates James MacMillan), this situation could be set to last quite some time.