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[Slavonic and East European Review 98/2 (April 2020), 366-367]

Fairclough, Pauline. Dmitry Shostakovich. Critical Lives. Reaktion Books, London, 2019. 191

pp. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. £11.99 (paperback).

This is a sensible and insightful book. Much of Shostakovich’s reception has been

distracted by political agendas wielded both for and against the man and his works, and

interpretation of the music has often been a fraught affair played for high stakes.

Pauline Fairclough deals with these ‘Shostakovich Wars’ (p. 9) calmly and judiciously,

without attempting to resolve “his divided existence” (p. 177) in favour of either his
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public or private side. She also, to the relief to the general reader doggedly interested in

the composer and his music, deals with them quickly, passing over the musicological

intricacies of, for example, the Volkov case in order to open up spaces in which the

music can be heard for what it was, is, and might be worth. There is much to be gained

from this slim volume, and hardly any theoretical weight to slow down the general

reader (the occasional mention of ostranenie (p. 152) and other culturally appropriate

terms).

Aside from the programme notes on individual works, which consist of the sorts

of explications that the general reader might desire (the string quartets are treated to

some wonderful interpretative prose), the book also includes genuinely new archival

material, in the form of a complete letter written by the composer in 1949 about a

potential trip to New York (pp. 96-97). Shostakovich’s film music is given space

alongside his concert music, all the better for the book’s portrait of the composer as a

Soviet artist. There is ample attention devoted to Shostakovich’s personal life, and

especially his important friendship with Sollertinskii, not as a vulgar interpretative

cipher, but simply as another register in which our understanding of the composer

needs to dwell. There is also a fair amount of discussion, mostly at the ends of the book,

but also scattered throughout, of what we might make of the composer’s music in our

currently political, financial and cultural contexts; one question concerns the music’s

understandable popularity and whether that itself poses an obstacle to our fuller

understanding. Fairclough’s own desire is “to challenge the idea, still commonly held,

that Shostakovich’s music is depressing, and that he himself was a broken man at the

end of his life.” (p. 11) In this respect, Dmitry Shostakovich is a success, for by the end

the general reader emerges with a clear picture about the composer’s status within

Soviet society in the 1960s and early 1970s: for example, his marriage in 1962, his slow
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rise within the Communist Party, the studied ambiguity – “so oblique as to be invisible”

(p. 136) – of his public position under Brezhnev, the profoundly brave decision to set

certain texts, the diagnosis of lung cancer in 1972 (p. 156), and so on. In the final couple

of chapters, some of the works are interpreted in terms of a return home full circle (p.

168), a kind of symbolic closure that perhaps seduces biographers more than listeners.

There are some interesting and tantalizing references over the course of the

book to writers and composers without whom Shostakovich would have become a

wholly different artist. Of the musicians, one encounters time and again the

interventions that Mahler made in his life (e.g. pp. 30, 54, 170). With additional space, it

would have been useful to dwell on this epic figure, considering the ways in which

Shostakovich’s heteroglossia (including allusions both to specific music and to generic

gestures and archetypes) is found “not just in an opera’s message but in its very musical

fabric” (p. 52), thus affording his symphonic and vocal ‘texts’ the possibility of

functioning critically both within and against the social world – and affording critics a

space to demonstrate their official seriousness.

One of the best things about this book is its treatment of ‘politics’ and ‘ethics’: not

as abstract monoliths against which Shostakovich did or did not measure up, but as

dynamic moving targets against which individual artistic statements rubbed in various

changing ways. In this respect, Fairclough explicitly plots her narrative of the

composer’s compositional life against an equally developmental – or at the very least,

sequential – series of changes in the Soviet political scene. For her reader this means

that, for example, the Fifteenth Symphony (pp. 152-156) emerges with a sense not only

of its artistic significance but of why it could not have been written half a century

earlier. There is a fair smattering of hope across the narrative and its text, not only at

the obvious thresholds (both from one Soviet era to another, and from each chapter to
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the next (pp. 115, 149)) but within the music as it is presented descriptively. The

account of the Fifth Symphony (pp. 61-64), for example, is exemplary in its balancing of

political tension, musical intention, listeners’ responses, and critics’ reflections. The fact

that there is no single perspective tying these all together is itself a cause for hope – for

us.

Royal Academy of Music ANTHONY GRITTEN