Музыкой навеяло

[fiona_grady]

 Вчера я разбирала свой архив и раскопала полемику двадцатилетней давности с одним известным музыкальным критиком.  В то время запестрели статьи, в которых ни с того ни с сего американские музыковеды стали обличать Шостаковича. Он, де, коммуняка, сталинист, писал оды Советской Власти, типа "Песнь о Лесах".  

Я представила себе бесконечный список консерваторий и университетов, в которых есть отделение муз.литературы и теории музыки.  В каждом сидит несколько профессоров, либо же педагогов. Каждый должен печатать статьи, выступать на конференциях и симпозиумах; вот там они и развивают и раздувают все эти мысли.   И как разительно отличается их действительность от реалий жизни художника в любой стране, тем паче - при тоталитарном строе.  С одним из этих корифеев я и вступила в переписку.  

Слова на случай сохранились, я их имею, вот они

The campaign of “outing” the great Dmitry Shostakovich as a Stalinist, and a devout Communist Party member writing paeans to the Soviet regime, has been going on in American press for some time now.

 The arrogant aplomb of many of the writers is based on a simple misunderstanding.  They presume to be able to judge Shostakovich’s motives and actions because they are his contemporaries, having lived in the same 20^th century.

 The truth is that the 20^th century in Moscow is not the same as the 20^th century in New York.

 For two years after being declared the “enemy of the People” by no less an authority than “Pravda”, Shostakovich slept in the hallway to spare his family the horror of witnessing his arrest.  Millions of people in Stalin’s Russia lay sleepless at night, fully dressed, listening to every car stopping by the house, to every elevator ride, to every sound of steps in the stairwell.  Millions of people said farewell to their families every night, expecting it to be their last night together, and doing it night after night, year after year.

 The terror experienced by the entire population of Russia in those years has no parallel.  In her “Memoirs’ Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote that in the 20^th century there existed only one comparable experience: the terror experienced by Jews in the Nazi-occupied areas.

 The only way of objectively judging Shostakovich’ political affiliation is by applying the same criteria that we apply when discussing creative geniuses not of the 20^th century but of a much earlier era.

 Would any historian or critic pay any serious attention to a myriad of obsequious dedications to tyrants, inquisitors, and despots penned by poets, musicians, scientists, and artists  working since the Middle Ages and until the end of the 19^th century?  Would Galileo be labeled as someone touting the Church’s dogma because he recanted when shown the rack?  Later generations have learned to judge the creators for their works and not for dedications attached to the works. 

 You write that Shostakovich outraged the dissident community by signing a letter denouncing Andrey Sakharov, and later tried to “improve his image in the eyes of younger generations”.  With all due respect to the heroic Andrey Sakharov, he was in a much greater need of “improving his image”.  While Dimity Shostakovich gave the world his music, Andrey Sakharov gave the Soviet regime the H-bomb.

 Dimity Shostakovich the composer wrote music that speaks louder and clearer than anything that Dimity Shostakovich, a citizen of totalitarian Soviet State, has ever said.  If music critics turned their talents to listening to and interpreting his music and not his public speeches, they would find all the answers that they were looking for.