(Author: Cecil Bloom, Vol. 69, No. 3, Chanukah 2014)
In pre-revolutionary Russia, most Jewish composers wrote for their own people, using Jewish subjects; very few composed for the wider community. Some leading non-Jewish composers, however, did occasionally incorporate Jewish themes into their works. The first was Mikhail Glinka, who’s Jewish Song was an arrangement of a song he had written for one of his Jewish students. Mira Balakirev’s Hebrew Song was composed 1859 and Modest Moussorsgsky’s A Jewish Song in 1867. Mussorgsky’s unflattering portrait of the two Jews, Goldenberg and Shmul, forms a well-known section of his Pictures at an Exhibition.
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote Hebrew Song early in his career, but he is best remembered in the above regard for the manner in which he urged Jewish pupils to concentrate on Jewish music. Sergei Prokofiev’s most important ‘Jewish’ work is his Overture on Jewish Themes, which was commissioned by a New York chamber group in 1919. As a child, he had heard Jewish klezmer bands and klezmer-like melodies appear in this work. Igor Stravinsky also used Jewish subjects. His Symphony of Psalms was composed in 1930 and Abraham and Isaac, a sacred ballad for baritone and orchestra, in 1962, in honour of the State of Israel.
After the Revolution, music using specifically Jewish subjects became less common in Soviet Russia until Dmitri Shostakovich became interested in Jewish issues, an interest that began during the violent anti-Jewish period in Stalin’s regime. Ultimately, he used Jewish idioms far more than any other non-Jew in the Soviet Union.
Shostakovich was a titanic and tragic figure. His stance regarding Communist Russia and especially on his Jewish connections has been vigorously debated and a number of books have been published on his attitude towards Jews. He is not thought to have had any Jewish family background, but his sympathies for the Russian-Jewish people are well documented, particularly in his book Testimony. Published in 1979, these are said to be Shostakovich’s memoirs imparted by him to Solomon Volkov, who immigrated to the United States after Shostakovich’s death.1The authenticity of the book has been much debated, but it is now generally accepted as being essentially well-founded. At first, Shostakovich’s son Maxim expressed doubt as to whether it was his father’s testament and claimed that it gave a false picture containing too many contradictions and inaccuracies. However, after finally leaving the Soviet Union, he withdrew this statement, saying in a BBC interview, “It’s true. It’s accurate. Sometimes for me there is too much rumour in the book but nothing major. The basis of the book is correct”. Shostakovich’s daughter, Galina, also endorsed the book’s accuracy as did the well-known Russian pianist/conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy, who described it as “a highly realistic and genuine illustration of Shostakovich’s life”. A contrary view has been given by Boris Tishchenko, a former pupil of Shostakovich, who believed that Volkov’s book presented a false picture on Shostakovich’s views. Much has now been written about the Shostakovich/Jewish relationship but, with the exception of one or two critics, it is now generally conceded that his Jewish connections are indeed completely genuine.
Shostakovich’s father worked at the St Petersburg Bureau of Weights and Measures as an assistant to the chemist Mendelayeev, whose name is immortalised as the devisor of the Periodic Table of (Chemical) Elements. The family was unusual in that it was sympathetic to Jews and Dmitri was brought up to believe that antisemitism was ‘a shameful superstition’. Testimony has many references to Shostakovich’s attitude towards antisemitism and the revulsion he felt for it. For instance, he observes: “[But] even before the war, the attitude towards Jews had changed drastically. It turned out that we had far to go to achieve brotherhood. The Jews became the most persecuted and defenceless people of Europe. It was a return to the Middle Ages. Jews became a symbol to me. All of man’s defencelessness was concentrated in them. After the war, I tried to convey that feeling in my music. It was a bad time for the Jews then. In fact, it’s always a bad time for them.” He added that he never condoned an antisemitic tone, even as a youth refusing to repeat popular antisemitic jokes. He broke with good friends if he perceived any antisemitic tendencies in them. There is, however, one indication that Shostakovich may have been tainted with some antisemitism in his youth because in the papers of Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky, a composer and musicologist friend of his when he was sixteen, Volkov did find a note: “Mitya came and for three hours we talked about kike domination in the arts”. In Testimony, Shostakovich does comment that, as a youth, he came across antisemitism amongst his peers, who thought that Jews were receiving preferential treatment. One of his teachers at the Leningrad Conservatory was a Jew, Maximilian Steinberg, who was Rimsky-Korsakov’s son-in-law. Steinberg’s third symphony contains some strains of Jewish music.
In Testimony, Shostakovich approvingly quotes an incident in Tsarist Russia when Glazunov refused to tell the Russian Prime Minister the number of Jewish students enrolled in the St Petersburg Conservatory; he likened him to Rimsky-Korsakov in his hatred of antisemitism. However, despite composing his Hebrew Song, Balakirev was accused of having become “rabid with the filthy trait [of antisemitism] in his old age”. He once told Flora Litvinoff, daughter-in-law of Stalin’s Jewish Commissar for Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinoff, that antisemitism was a “struggle with culture and reason. It is an admission we are worse, more stupid, less cultured than Jews”. When he went to America in 1973, Shostakovich saw the film Fiddler on the Roof. The longing of Jews for their Russian homeland impressed him deeply and he commented, “It would be good if Jews could live peacefully and happily in Russia where they were born. But we must never forget about the dangers of antisemitism and keep reminding others of it because the infection is alive and who knows if it will ever disappear”. Strangely, there appears to be only one minor reference to the State of Israel in any writings or conversations associated with Shostakovich. One might have expected him to have commented on Golda Meir’s arrival in Moscow as Israel’s first ambassador to a tumultuous Jewish welcome, but he appears to have been silent. In Testimony, he does refer to an incident when he was in a queue waiting to be served. A Jewish-looking woman with ‘an accent’ complained and she was told by the salesman, “Why don’t you go to Israel?” implying that things were better there. Shostakovich commented that this meant that Israel was pictured in a positive way compared to life in Russia. It is worth noting, however, that when a total of over 4000 Jews from the Ukraine, Siberia, Kazakistan, Uzbekistan and Armenia immigrated to Israel in 1996 and 1997, the ship that carried them was called the Dmitri Shostakovich.
Shostakovich has written that many of his works reflect his impressions of Jewish music but he seems to have been first drawn to Jewish sources in composing his 7th (Leningrad) Symphony in 1941, partly inspired by the Psalms of David. His original plan was a large work for soloist, chorus and orchestra based on the Psalms but he abandoned it for the symphony. For him, David had “some marvellous words in blood, that God takes revenge for blood. He doesn’t forget the cries of victims”. He saw the symphony as being about “terror, slavery, the bondage of the spirit”. Despite this philo-Judaic focus, he was awarded a Stalin Prize for the work. It is claimed that a klezmer dance melody erupts at the climax of the march in the opening movement. Shostakovich’s especial interest in Jewish music, however, had begun just as life was becoming difficult for Russian Jewry. He first used Jewish subjects in Rothschild’s Violin, an opera based on a Chekhov story that one of his students, Benjamin Fleischmann, had started to compose with his encouragement. Chekhov’s story is about the non-Jew, Yakov Ivanov, who regularly mocks the Jew, Rothschild, but shortly before his death, he repents and gives Rothschild his violin. This was perceived as having similarities to Russian-Jewish relationships. Fleischmann died in the Battle of Leningrad and Shostakovich completed the opera and orchestrated it. He was proud of this, but for his efforts, he was labelled as a Zionist and the work was described as a ‘Zionist opera’.
Shostakovich’s first composition actually to contain Jewish musical elements is the Second Piano Trio, Op. 67, composed in 1944. It was dedicated to his close friend Ivan Sollertinsky, who died just as he began writing it. Sollertinsky, a tragic figure, had been denounced in 1936 as the ‘bard’ of formalism principally because he was deeply attached to Shostakovich’s music. But Shostakovich’s grief at his friend’s death, of starvation during the war, was not the sole reason for the work. Maxim Shostakovich has said that his father used the Jewish people as a symbol of human suffering and this comes over clearly in this work because it was also in remembrance of the millions who perished at Hitler’s hands. He was writing it just as details of the Holocaust were beginning to emerge and he was horrified when he heard that SS guards forced victims to dance over their graves. The Trio also evokes scenes of horror pictured in Picasso’s painting Guernica and only the forces of evil, destruction and death prevail in the work. The final movement contains typically tragic Jewish dance music enclosed within some very dark passages reminiscent of death; the work actually ends with a picture of death as the Jewish motif vanishes. No solace, alleviation or absolution comes through, and the forces of evil triumph. There is also a suggestion of the Kol Nidrei melody in the third movement. The allegretto final movement was encored at the trio’s first performance both in Leningrad and Moscow and Rostislav Dubinsky, the first violinist of the Borodin String Quartet, who was present at the Moscow premiere, has written that “the music left a devastating impression. People cried openly”. The critic, Norman Lebrecht, has paid tribute to this work in heartfelt terms, saying that Shostakovich wrote it when the world was silent and Churchill refused to bomb the Auschwitz railroad. Nevertheless, the only reference to the work in Testimony is a comment that its ‘Jewish theme’ is present in his eighth quartet.
The years 1947-9 were particularly difficult for Russian Jewry and for intellectuals in general. Shostakovich was especially worried about the rise in antisemitism and the personal verbal assaults on Jews even though the horrors of Hitler’s camps were now well-known. It was at this time that three important works with Jewish motifs were composed – his first Violin Concerto followed quickly by the Jewish Song Cycle and then the 4th String Quartet. All three works were only premiered many years after they were composed and all after Stalin’s death. The scherzo of the concerto, the second of the four movements, contains a Chassidic dance rhythm. One listener at the first performance has said that all present realised that a Jewish idiom was present “some jubilantly, some fearfully” even though Stalin was no longer alive.
Shostakovich was always interested in Jewish folk-lore and was attracted to Jewish folk music: “I never tire of delighting in it, it is multifaceted, it can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It’s almost always laughter through tears … Jewish folk music is unique…Many of my works reflect my impressions of Jewish music”. The genesis of his vocal cycle for soprano, contralto, tenor and piano Op. 79, later orchestrated, is interesting. His regard for Jewish folk music may have originated when he was at the Moscow Conservatory in 1946. Moshe Beregovsky had written a Jewish work, Yiddishe Volks-Lieder, in 1938 and in 1946 he presented a thesis on the subject for which Shostakovich was his examiner. This may have motivated Shostakovich into learning something of the Yiddish language because in May 1948 he asked a Jewish friend about the pronunciation of some Yiddish words. Sometime later, he was passing a bookshop where he saw what he thought was a volume that contained songs. As it was, it was merely the written texts of some Jewish songs but the words impressed him. He then decided to set eleven of these texts to music, which gave him the opportunity of using music to describe the fate of the Jews in his country. Two of the songs (nos. 2 and 5) are versions of well-known Yiddish folk songs. Eight songs refer to life in pre-revolutionary Russia and three post-revolution. The last of the pre-revolutionary songs, Winter, starkly illustrates his understanding of and sympathy for Jews living in Tsarist Russia:
My Sheyndl is in bed,
And with her a sick child.
There’s not a splinter in the unheated hut,
And outside the wind howls. Ah…Ah…Ah…
The cold and the wind have returned,
One cannot bear it and be silent.
So scream, so weep, children,
For winter has come back…Ah
In Lullaby, the child’s father is “far away in Siberia” while the mother suffers in misery. In The Abandoned Father, the father appeals desperately but unsuccessfully for his daughter not to go off with a police officer, with his daughter answering, “Mister Police Officer, quickly chase the old Jew away”. The words of the last three songs give the impression of optimism and refer to the so-called ‘happy life’ under Stalin, but the music conveys the impression that this is a delusion. What made him decide on this composition, especially given the deteriorating political situation faced by the Jews in Russia? Natalya Vovsi-Mikhoels, daughter of one of the leading Jewish actors in Russia, Solomon Mikhoels, and wife of one of Shostakovich’s close friends, Moise Weinberg, is certain that it was his protest against the treatment of Jews by the state. He came back to this song cycle some fifteen years later, in 1963, producing a version with orchestral accompaniment.
Shostakovich’s interest in Jewish folk music was deep and lasting, as shown by his involvement in 1970 when a fourteen-composer collection of twenty-nine songs entitled New Jewish Songs was issued. He did not compile this collection but was listed as its editor-in-chief despite not appearing to have carried out any work on it. The artistic quality is mediocre, but he seems to have been happy to associate his name with the collection, no doubt to show his support for and interest in Jewish music. He wrote an introduction to the collection:
The birth of new original national songs always makes me happy. Jewish folk music is unique in its emotional content. We can hear its reverberation in works of many great composers. In our days, Jewish folk music is alive and develops [and] new proof of this is the present collection where works are included written by Soviet composers in recent years. I wish the new Jewish songs a happy journey.
The final movement of the 4th String Quartet, the first of these three works to receive its first public performance, has strong Jewish colouring and rhythms. It was written soon after the Communist Party attack on ‘western modernism and home-grown formalism’ in music. This attack focused to a large extent on Jewish musicologists and was just at the time when Solomon Mikhoels, who was head of the Soviet-Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee that had been set up primarily to obtain support for the Soviet Union among Jews in the West and whom Shostakovich admired, was liquidated during the great purges in 1948. When he heard of Mikhoels’ death, he told some of his friends that “this is a campaign which starts with the Jews and will end with the whole of the intelligentsia”. Shostakovich himself went through a deep crisis at this time as in March 1949, he was sent to the ‘Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace’ in the United States and there was forced to condemn some of his musical friends as well as some of his own music.
Much later, in 1960, Shostakovich was in Dresden working on his 8th String Quartet at the same time as composing a score for a film about the war-time bombing of the city. He dedicated the work to the memory of the victims of Nazism and of war, and in it used subjects from a number of his other compositions. The second movement contains the same Jewish theme as in his Piano Trio, Op.67. Incredibly, the quartet was completed in three days; it is autobiographical, depicting in music important events in his life. When the Borodin String Quartet played the work to him in his home, he told the players that “this is myself” as he sat “tormented, listening to his story about himself, his musical confession, the sorrowful cry of a soul where each weeps with pain”. Shostakovich wrote of this quartet that, “when I die, scarcely anyone will write a work in my memory. Therefore, I have decided to write one myself”.
The 13th Symphony was conceived after Shostakovich read and was overwhelmed by Yevgeny Yevtuschenko’s poem Babi Yar.This described the massacre by the Nazis of 70 000 Jews at the Babi Yar ravine near Kiev in September 1941 and also condemned antisemitism per se. At first, his plan was to write a symphonic poem based on this text, but he finally settled on a five-movement symphony, adding four other Yevtushenko poems also on forbidden (but not Jewish) subjects. The work itself has no specific Jewish musical features, but it was clearly intended to demonstrate its composer’s deep sympathy for the Jewish people. True to his stance, Shostakovich always wanted to remind of the dangers of antisemitism and the Babi Yari poem allowed him to show that the attempts of the Germans and their Ukrainian collaborators had failed to destroy the memory of the massacre.
Although Stalin was long dead and Krushchev was now in power, Shostakovich was still criticised for his use of dubious non-conformist literature. However, at its premiere in Moscow in December 1962, a wild burst of spontaneous applause followed the stunned silence that marked the symphony’s completion. The work was, however, formally banned the very next day and was not heard again in Russia with the original words for another ten years. Interestingly, on its premiere the French Communist Party newspaper L’Humanitepublished an article headed “Succes triumphale de la 13e Symphonie de Shostakovich” . Shostakovich wrote that Krushchev ‘didn’t give a damn about the music’ and was merely angered by Yevtuschenko’s poetry. The Babi Yar poem is a memorial for all victims of Nazism, the antisemites and the ruthless nationalists: “And I am one silent cry/over the many thousands of the buried;/I am every old man killed here,/Every child killed here.”
The poem has references to Alfred Dreyfus, to an un-named little boy from Bialystok who was trampled to death by some drunks and to Anne Frank. Yevtushenko has written that Shostakovich wept as he sang his setting of the line, “It seems to me that I am Anne Frank”which, together with the line “I feel now that I am a Jew”, again points to identification with Jews. The final words of the symphony’s first movement demonstrate incontrovertibly Shostakovich’s commitment: No Jewish blood runs in my blood,/but I am as bitterly and hardly hated/by every antisemite/as if I were a Jew/And that is why I am a Russian. The leading Jewish musicologist, Joachim Braun, believes the work to be “one of the greatest manifestations of Shostakovich’s sympathy for the Jewish case and in an unparalleled way combines socio-political criticism with the Jewish subject”.2
Unsurprisingly, Shostakovich had much difficulty in getting this work performed because of his choice of words. Even his soloist, Vitali Grodansky, queried this, asking Shostakovich why he chose the Babi Yar poem “when there is no antisemitism in the Soviet Union”. Shostakovich answered him vehemently saying that there was in fact much antisemitism, “which was outrageous and must not be forgotten. We must fight it from the roof-tops”. The poems representing the other four movements are all moving ones, dealing with the power and importance of humour in the face of despotism, women’s hardship in life, the terror of the secret police despite the choice of words which try to suggest all was now well in Russia and the issue of conformity and its opposite. The fourth movement has these bold words: “The secret fear of an anonymous denunciation,/The secret fear of a knock upon the door.”
Other Shostakovich works contain some Jewish elements. Twenty-Four Preludes and Fugues for Piano Op. 87 was written in 1950-51 for the great pianist Tatiana Nikolajeva and there are Jewish strains in three of the preludes (No’s 8,17 and 19) and in two fugues (No’s. 8 and 24). These motifs are related to the Jewish Folk Poetry song cycle, but the 24thfugue contains melodies of the chazzan. Four Monologues on Texts of Pushkin Poems for bass and piano Op 91 (1952) has some Jewish themes. The first song, Fragment, has a portrait of an impoverished Jewish family. Kozelkov’s ‘Dance with Friends’ in the ballet The Bolt has some Jewish idioms. The second movement of the 2nd String quartet has also been claimed to be ‘Jewish’ music and his first cello concerto Op. 107 has Jewish elements with some typical Chassidic dance tunes.
Irina, Shostakovich’s third wife, was Jewish (she had a Jewish mother and non-Jewish father) and Jews were clearly numbered amongst his friends. Israel Finkelstein was his assistant at the Leningrad Conservatory and Finkelstein and his family were helped materially when war-time conditions were dire. He helped bring Finkelstein’s musical compositions into prominence. One of his close friends was Moisey Vainberg, a talented pianist, and he often tried out new works with him playing four hands on one piano. Vainberg was Solomon Mikhoels’ son-in-law. When Vainberg and his wife were arrested in 1953 on a charge of Jewish bourgeois nationalism, Shostakovich was prepared to look after their seven-year old daughter and he also sent Beria, the notorious post-Stalin dictator, a testimonial of support about him. When Isaak Schwartz’s father was arrested in 1936 and the boy was looked after by Shostakovich’s sister, Shostakovich took a fatherly interest in the boy. Other Jewish friends included the virtuoso violinist David Oistrakh, to whom he dedicated his second violin concerto, film producer Leo Arnshtam, Isaak Glikman, a literary and drama critic, and writer and musicologist Daniel Zhitomirsky. The pianist Leo Oborin was also a close friend. In those days, it was not easy for Russians to befriend many Jews. Shostakovich was also concerned to counter direct action against Jews. Once he signed a petition protesting against the threatened dismissal on racial grounds of Yevgeny Gusikov, a Moscow conservatory professor. Shostakovich had a platonic relationship with a Jewess, Elmira Nazirova, a pianist from Baku who studied for a short period under him in Moscow and who immigrated to Israel in 1990. He confided in her a great deal, both directly and in a lengthy correspondence. The horn theme in the third movement of the Tenth Symphony is a monogram constructed from the letters of her name.
Braun has explained the manner in which Shostakovich used Jewish elements in his music, arguing that he used them to climax an entire work or an individual movement as well as to demonstrate dissidence except where the text itself (as in the Babi Yar symphony) makes this clear. He maintains that the Jewish idiom usually coincides with episodes of high harmonic tension and sharp dissonance.3 In an article in Musical Quarterly, Braun discusses the double meaning of Jewish elements in Shostakovich’s music. He defines the Jewish elements in his compositions as those based on both Jewish secular and religious melodies and on his use of Jewish subjects (like Babi Yar) and he argues that these elements reach far beyond their specific Jewishness. To Braun, the essential meaning of these elements can be interpreted as ‘concealed dissidence’ and that well-versed listeners would understand what the composer was communicating to them.4
There is one further aspect of and opinion about Shostakovich that should be recorded. The musicologist Timothy Jackson has put forward the view that Shostakovich identified himself closely as a Jew and that there were Jewish elements in his music long before he wrote the 7th Symphony. His article, inShostakovich Reconsidered,5is actually entitled ‘Dimitri Shostakovich: The Composer as Jew’; he submits that Shostakovich identified himself as a persecuted Jew as early as 1937. According to Jackson, one factor pointing to this is what he sees as the chazzan’s chant in the Largo of the 5th Symphony. He argues that the ‘Amen’ cadence, that is predominant in Jewish liturgical services, is also present in this symphony and which Shostakovich may have heard in a synagogue. There is no evidence that Shostakovich ever attended a synagogue service although, as Jackson points out, the main Leningrad one was but three blocks from the Conservatory. This ‘Amen’ cadence is present in Ernest Bloch’s Schelemo Rhapsody, composed 1916, and Leonard Bernstein’s Jeremiah Symphony, composed 1944. Shostakovich’s 5thwas composed in 1937. Jackson is also the only musicologist to make Jewish claims for the 15thSymphony, believing it to be “Holocaust-haunted music” and that its finale shows Shostakovich to have been a “quintessentially Jewish composer”.
Cecil Bloom, a veteran contributor to Jewish Affairs, is a former technical director of a multinational pharmaceutical firm in the UK. His essays on Jewish themes relating to music, literature, history and Bible have also appeared in Midstream and Jewish Quarterly.
NOTES
- Volkov, S (Editor), Testimony, New York, 1979.
- Braun, J, ‘The Double Meaning of Jewish Elements in Dmitri Shostakovich’s music’, in Musical Quarterly Vol 71, 1985.
- Braun, J, Jews and Jewish Elements in Soviet Music (Tel Aviv 1978), p163.
- Braun, J, Musical Quarterly op. cit., pp68-80.
- T.L.Jackson, T L, ‘Dmitri Shostakovich: The Composer as Jew’, in Ho, A B & Feofanov, D, ShostakovichReconsidered(London, 1998) pp597-638.
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