Shostakovich Is No Small Thing to Have in Common

Scott pens a wonderful essay on the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (pictured) over at Conversational Reading. My first piece of published writing was about Shostakovich; well, not in any technical sense. I’m no critic of classical music. I don’t know enough. Rather, it was about the ways his music weaved in and out of my life for a brief period in high school and college. The essay appeared in the ambitiously titled anthology Healing: Twenty Prominent Authors Write About Inspirational Moments of Achieving Health and Gaining Insight. Here’s the beginning:

This Is Not a Review of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony

Instead, it is me trying to remember the beginning, sitting here with the lights turned low and the clicking hum of my ceiling fan, trying to remember. For Dr. Culver it had been like quoting Shakespeare or the Bible. Standing in the carpeted lobby at Symphony Hall in Chicago, we asked him something about the Shostakovich Cello Concerto. “Oh sure!” he exclaimed and vigorously hummed the opening bars in perfect tune. Even under such a shower of saliva we were dumbstruck. After that we tried to stump him, with names like Hindemith and Piston, but it never worked. It was as if a full symphony orchestra had taken up residence in his head, on a moment’s call. I, on the other hand, am forced to settle for the compact disc. The New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein conducting; recorded live at Bunka Kaikan, Tokyo, 1979. I press play and I can hear it now, I can finally remember now. It begins as good symphonies do—quietly—and as all Shostakovich symphonies do—darkly. Moderato. D-minor. It begins with an anapest, or nearly an anapest—one short, then long—referring to Beethoven’s Fifth. And there is a low conversation among the strings: first the cellos, then the violins, in hushed tones. They are huddled in the back shadows, whispering over shoulders, periodically working themselves to a nervous pitch, the violins suddenly screaming—then just as suddenly cut off. The temperatures here are sub-zero, we are shivering, and there are these silences everywhere. Held breaths. Pianissimo. These are the moments most difficult for musicians to master because they are where the fear inhabits. The fear that causes us to play and to listen and to write and to read in the first place. And it is inside of these silences that I am able to sit once again on the cold tile of a second-floor classroom-turned-dressing-room. It is Variety Show my sophomore year in high school. I am dressed in a wretched black polyester tuxedo and next to me is Heather listening to her headphones again. She also plays violin and has bright, curly red hair. She looks a bit like a Raggedy Ann doll. I suspect that she is a smoker, partly because her dad is an artist. They sometimes give me rides home from Youth Symphony on Saturdays, driving across town in congested traffic, listening to the radio. They were surprised when I had not even heard of a group like R.E.M., and I can’t help it if I don’t understand why her father, even if he does paint, knows about music. This makes no sense to me. Now she asks me to put on the headphones because she has recorded this Shostakovich symphony off the radio. “Who is Shostakovich?” I ask, and she tells me that they played Symphony No. 5 in Youth Symphony last year, except that I hadn’t been in Youth Symphony last year. I listen and at first I hate it. I feel like I am listening to a skeleton. The bass tiptoes across the score while the woodwinds very carefully repeat the theme back, note for note. There is no room for error here, comrades. It is so quiet I can hear the audience shifting in their seats. I borrow the tape from Heather, take it home to my room in the basement, and listen to it again and again, playing it loudly, as if it were rock music. I do not understand that this is something Heather and I now share. Perhaps if I do I should fall in love with her as she has fallen in love with me, always referring to me in those melodramatic notes we pass as “dear friend.” After all, Shostakovich is no small thing to have in common.

Comments

[TJ]

"I feel like I am listening to a skeleton."

Yes, well said. Is there more to this essay? I'd like to read the rest.