Word: shostakovich
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With the 1979 publication of Testimony, the composer's memoirs secretly narrated to his friend, editor Solomon Volkov, a different picture emerged. This Shostakovich was a pragmatist, who learned to keep his head down after he was denounced in Pravda and saw his friends and colleagues persecuted and purged by Stalin during the Great Terror. This Shostakovich was a survivor, who saved his innermost feelings for his work. "Words are not my genre," he once said to Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose poem Babi Yar he set in the brutal Symphony No. 13. "I never lie in music...
...British director Tony Palmer's new film, Testimony, dramatizes the view that Shostakovich was a closet dissident who was bitterly resentful of the system that shackled him. In David Rudkin's elegant screenplay, Shostakovich (Ben Kingsley) negotiates his artistic salvation through public acquiescence, gratefully accepting his humiliation at a 1948 Soviet Composers' Union meeting and ritualistically denouncing Stravinsky at a conference the next year in New York City. Always he is haunted by the doom- laden specter of Stalin (Terence Rigby), who is seen thumbing through dossiers while sitting by the telephone, dispatching his opponents to their graves simply...
...pretense to literalism, preferring to relate the composer's spiritual odyssey through stark images. Shot mostly in gritty black and white, the film often turns phantasmagorical; near the end, the ghost of * Stalin appears to the dying composer and tells him, "I am the enemy you loved." For all Shostakovich's hatred of the dictator, Palmer seems to be saying, without Stalin there would have been no intimate, brooding string quartets, no enigmatic, valedictory Fifteenth Symphony. By giving Shostakovich something to hate and fear, Stalin turned him into a great composer. The symphonies dedicated to the state and the choral...
...point is debatable. Cowed by the official castigation of his 1930-32 masterpiece, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Shostakovich never completed another opera, to the world's inestimable loss. Who knows what other great works went unwritten while Shostakovich was living a double life? "Tell the administration that you're working on the opera Karl Marx or The Young Guards, and they'll forgive you your quartet when it appears," he said. Moreover, at 157 minutes the film is itself guilty of some of Shostakovich's own sins, including bombast and repetitiveness...
Still, Testimony is a powerful drama, the tragedy of a man who had to betray himself in order to survive. "The filmmakers did not make a saint of Shostakovich," observes Volkov of the movie. "There are no saints in real life. He is shown as a man forced to compromise on minor things to save himself for more important things." It is a Faustian bargain few composers would like to face, even if they could write a lifetime of masterpieces in return...