The background to this view is that Shchedrin found himself for many
years between two camps. As a composer with naturally cosmopolitan
instincts he automatically fell foul of Soviet officialdom; yet he was also at
arm's length from his 'underground', non-conformist contemporaries
such as Schnittke, Gubaidulina and Silvestrov. That arose from his
succession to Shostakovich as Secretary of the Russian Composers' Union,
where he developed an alternative power-base to that of the
apparatchik-in-chief Khrennikov at the Soviet Composers' Union. Although
he claims that since Shostakovich was appointed First Secretary in 1960,
"All composers from the 'Left' [i.e. the nonconformists] moved over to it",
it was a position which was never likely to make Shchedrin popular with
the younger generation. Before I've had the chance to get past the polite
preliminaries Shchedrin is eager to put the record straight about that role,
since some halfinformed journalist has apparently confused his position
with Khrennikov's. If this is image-consciousness, who could blame
him?
He is obviously more comfortable with his image in the West (at least
before Glasnost and Perestroika) as the Soviet Union's first 'licensed
modernist' - a composer who managed to stay broadly in favour while
pushing at the limits of official tolerance. He is proud of the fact that
many of his works were received as provocations and that he had to
defend himself against the authorities' slings and arrows; all five of his
booklet-essays for recent CDs of his music make the same point. His
Second Symphony was composed in 1963-4 and contains 12-note
elements, and he reminds me that it was the subject of a Plenary Session
discussion at the Composers' Union before it could be accepted.
Shchedrin goes straight into an explanation of the nature of necessary
compromise for a Soviet composer. "You know Shostakovich helped [with
acceptance for performance] tremendously with this work, as he did with
my Carmen Suite. Yet he himself had to make all sorts of compromises.
His music was much more courageous ... If you want to hear it all in the
open, listen to his Fourth Symphony." He rehearses Russia's tragedy yet
again. "Stalin killed 60 million people. Not one family was untouched. I
lost two uncles, and both my father-in-law and mother-in-law were in
prison. After his death the windows opened each month a little more."
The Warsaw Autumn was one such cultural window from the late-1950s
on, and Shchedrin was much taken with the works of Lutoslawski and
Penderecki. But I'm finding it hard to deflect him from extra-musical
generalities and get him on to the specifias of his music.
Are there subtexts to the Second Symphony? In previous interviews he
has mentioned the tuning-up section at the beginning of the second
movement as being inspired by a soldier who returned from the
battlefront and was moved to tears by the sound of an orchestra tuning
up. Shchedrin deflects the point: "Usually it's musical inspiration, not
social comment." But in the next movement there's a kind of processional
funeral music on the brass which seems to pre-echo Schnittke's First
Symphony (it was Shchedrin in his official capacity who sanctioned the
controversial première of that work in Gorky). He doesn't rise to the
comparison, but he does expand on a possible background to the idea.
"In my student days at the Moscow Conservatory I used to play clarinet,
trumpet and piano, sometimes to earn money. I remember playing the
clarinet in music for a funeral. The weather was freezing, the orchestra
had red noses and frozen fingers, not like today's warm churches ...
That's just an impression that stayed with me, as though tape-recorded in
my brain, and maybe it's reflected in my symphony, although my aim is
always to make my music more universal." Why is the symphony in the
form of 25 Preludes? The answer is again characteristic in its charming
evasiveness "You know, it was just an intuition that told me it should be
so. Like a voice from the sky. In general our music has lost intuition. If
we try to be new, that's wrong." Again that leitmotif. He is too diplomatie
to say so, but I suspect that the current feting in the West of Schnittke,
Gubaidulina et al rankles with him.
Like them, and most of his compatriot composers with contacts in the
West, he has settled abroad since the break-up of the Soviet Union, and
he now has homes in Munich and Moscow. Why Munich? "It's just Fate. I
was invited in 1976 by the Akademie der schönen Künste, and I was the
first Russian composer to join GEMA [the German copyright
organization]. So it was natural to go there." I ask him about foreign
travel in general, which Shchedrin was able to enjoy before many of his
fellow-composers. "Well, you know there was a [pecking-]order which was
very calculated. For instance on some trips a token young composer was
needed. I admit I wanted to be a tourist. I went for the first time abroad
to Bulgaria. But my visit to the USA [in 1959, at the age of 26] was
extremely important for making musical contacts. It also helped me that I
could go as a performer."
For all his affability there is an unmistakable element of self-justification in
his conversation. It's difficult to avoid the suspicion that Shchedrin tends
to rely on his audience not knowing too much about Russian music. "Who
else wrote 24 Preludes and Fugues in Russia during the 1960s and
1970s?" he demands, for instance in the booklet-essay to his recording.
The smarty-pants response could be: Irina El'cheva (1970) Nikolay
Gudiashvili (published 1975), Konstantin Sorokin (1975), and Georgy
Mushel' (1975), not to mention others in the 1980s and 1990s, the latest
being Sergey Slonimsky in 1994.
Yet there are worse faults than selective memory. And it's difficult to
blame Shchedrin for his eagerness to defend his position. "You in the
West sometimes have a very naïve view. You think in black and white.
Relations with the authorities were always complex, for Shostakovich and
Prokofiev as well as others. I remember playing in a performance of
Prokofiev's Zdravitsa [aka Hail to Stalin], for instance. But wouldn't you
compromise if you had to save your family? Here in the West you have to
make all sorts of compromises too ..."
David Fanning
From: Gramophone, September 1997
In his article DJF diligently and consistently attempts to persuade the uninformed musical reader that 1 have some guilt somewhere. For what? For not having been in prison? For succeeding Shostakovich as Chairman of the Composers' Union of Russia, an organization he founded? For being its Honorary Chairman to this day? For not joining the Communist Party? For refusing to sign a letter from the intelligentsia
in 1968 supporting the invasion of Czechoslovakia by troops of the Warsaw Pact? For being a member along with Academician
Andrei Sakharov and Boris Yeltsin in the democratic opposition in Parliament, the Interregional Group of People's Deputies, when red flags still flew over the Kremlin?
Yes, in my life 1 have made compromises (and who has not?). But I have never made a single compromise in any of my compositions. And if DJF listens to them today he will hear that - if he is not complete intoxicated by the tendentiousness and prejudice that inform the article in Gramophone. I suppose 1 could take some comfort from the fact that people do not throw stones at apple trees that have no apples, but it is cold comfort. I do not want everyone to love me.
But neither do I want to have mud spewed at me from a fire-hose, motivated by nothing more than ordinary envy.
Please could DJF explain to his Russian informants among "the younger generation" (since he him- self does not speak Russian and needs guides) that the time of making political hay in music is over, that the political advances paid have long been spent (after all, more than 12 years have passed from the start of Perestroika and Glasnost) and that all they have to do is to write music that can be of interest to the public and to professional musicians. Now, just to clear up a few of DJF's factual errors: my first trip to the USA was in 1962 (at the age of 30), and not in 1959 as you state. The date my Second Symphony was written is printed on page 1 of the score published by Soviet Composer in 1969: 1962-5 and not 1963-4. A scholar should be accurate. Why did DJF distort the quotation from my booklet-essay to the CD? The word 'Russia' has never subsumed either Georgia (N. Gudiashvili) or Uzbekistan (G. Mushel). Konstantin Sorokin's 24 Preludes and Fugues were written for children. I have never heard the Preludes and Fugues by I. EI'eheya (nor has he). And finally, why did he drop the second part of my question in the essay - "And who played them in public himself'?" I completed work on the cycle in 1970 and on January 27th, 1971 I performed the entire cycle from memory for the first time in Moscow myself, repeating the concert that same year in other cities (St Petersburg and Kiev, among others). Even chronologically I had the right to pose this question in the booklet-essay. 1 was the first to compose and perform my cycle in Russia in the 1960s and 1970s. I fear that DJF's memory is not only selective (as he accuses mine of being), but also preiudiced.
I should like to conclude with an invitation. Would DJF come this December to a festival of my music in Moscow, St Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod and Samara? There, 1 think, he will sec that his informants and inspirers - my dear envious and neurotic colleagues - have misinformed him. He will sec that my image, of which he spoke, is clean and honest among music lovers in Russia. He will see that, besides the image composers of the "younger generation" have of me, there is the image among audiences, orchestral musicians, conductors, soloists and conservatory students. Mozart's image was also not very popular among some of his contemporaries. Take, for one, Salieri.
Rodion Shchedrin
Moscow
From: Gramophone, November 1997