Dmitri Shostakovich at 120: How the icon drew on Bach, jazz, and cinema to create his own musical language

Dmitri Shostakovich was born on September 25, 1906. Probably the most famous Soviet composer, he was forced to collaborate with the state even as he suffered under its campaign against “formalism.” For many, his life embodies the plight of an intellectual in the arts and humanities under totalitarian rule. But Shostakovich’s creative life was about far more than his fraught relationship with the authorities. At Meduza’s request, music critic Stepan Furin explores how the composer drew on classical music, jazz, and film.

In his book “Stolen Time,” Dutch composer Louis Andriessen playfully divided his fellow composers into “hedgehogs” and “foxes.” A hedgehog is prickly and nearsighted. He develops one fundamental approach that shapes how he sees the world and music. A fox keeps looking around until he darts off in an unpredictable direction.

In this playful dichotomy, on the 120th anniversary of his birth, Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich is unmistakably a “fox.” People who knew him remembered a nervous man who fidgeted constantly, his hands always moving. American conductor Robert Craft wrote:

His nervousness did not affect his piano playing: onstage, Shostakovich was a confident, composed virtuoso. His foxlike cunning runs through countless stories about him — some funny and ironic, others grotesque, with undercurrents of terror and hopelessness. In a twentieth-century world where “today there’s a fire, tomorrow football, and the day after that — who ate whom,” it is hard to imagine how a great artist under constant state scrutiny could have survived any other way.

More than anything, Shostakovich’s foxlike nature shaped his music. He borrowed from everyone and everything, whether it was the elevated style of the preludes and fugues in “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” the abstruse twelve-tone structures in Arnold Schoenberg’s pieces, or the popular dance rhythms of jazz. He thought nothing of putting a tune he had heard on the street into a symphony, or a Broadway hit into a piano concerto. A good fox can make use of anything.

Like any self-respecting musician, Shostakovich’s tastes ranged widely across periods and styles. He held Gustav Mahler in high regard, drew inspiration from Modest Mussorgsky and Benjamin Britten, and revered Bach, whose every prelude and fugue, he maintained, could be “played at any tempo, with any dynamic shading.”

Shostakovich himself wrote in nearly every musical genre, from symphonies to film scores. He changed quickly and radically: within a couple of years, he could move from sprawling, decadent modernism to classical rigor, from large orchestral works to small chamber pieces, from thunder, clatter, and postmodernist quotation to quiet, brevity, and musical gestures of utmost restraint. He reshaped every borrowed musical idea and technique, keeping his sound unique no matter how much he took from others.

No single article could do justice to the Leningrad school’s brightest star. So we’ll look briefly at several areas of music whose conventions Shostakovich made his own.

Film

“I am now devoting myself to cinema worship. Yesterday, something rather interesting happened at the movie theater. They were showing a nature film, ‘Marsh and Water Birds of Sweden.’ I sat down to accompany it. I got carried away and started imitating birds like a man possessed,” the 19-year-old Shostakovich wrote to his friend, the pianist and composer Lev Oborin.

During his lean student years, he earned extra money playing piano for silent films, and he did it with flair. Audiences booed, thinking the pianist was drunk or out of his mind. The orchestra musicians shook his hand, though, and Shostakovich himself was delighted. Cuts between contrasting scenes, sudden shifts in mood, and the emotional counterpoint between sight and sound — as when pointedly proper or banal music accompanies vulgarity and cruelty — all eventually became part of his musical language.

Shostakovich also wrote a great deal of music for films, including Grigory Kozintsev’s avant-garde “Novy Vavilon” (“The New Babylon,” 1929), Sergei Yutkevich’s “Zlatye gory” (“Golden Mountains,” 1931), Sergei Gerasimov’s monumental Stalinist film “Molodaya gvardiya” (“The Young Guard,” 1948), and Kozintsev’s later Shakespeare films “Hamlet” (1964) and “King Lear” (1971).

Since the composer’s death, his music has continued to appear in other directors’ films. Leos Carax uses “String Quartet No. 3” in “The Lovers on the Bridge” (1991). The familiar “Waltz No. 2” plays over the opening credits of Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” (1999). The Largo from “String Quartet No. 8” accompanies the cold detachment of Yorgos Lanthimos’s “The Lobster” (2015).

Jazz

Always eager to hear something new, Shostakovich was bound to take an interest in jazz — especially since Soviet party ideologues couldn’t stand it, and he never missed a chance to annoy them. According to the article “Muddle Instead of Music,” the young Shostakovich had borrowed the “nervous, convulsive, spasmodic music” of his opera “Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uyezda” (“Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District”) from jazz. But he also drew on jazz for far less bloodthirsty works.

Shostakovich wrote “Tahiti Trot” in 1927 in 45 minutes — to win a bet, according to conductor Nikolai Malko. It is an orchestral arrangement of Vincent Youmans’s famous jazz standard “Tea for Two”, which legends including Oscar Peterson and Thelonious Monk also recorded. Shostakovich later wrote suites for jazz orchestra (1934) and variety orchestra (1938) featuring similar waltzes. Yet for many listeners, these are his most recognizable melodies.

Neither “Piano Concerto No. 1” (1933) nor the ballet “Svetly ruchey” (“The Bright Stream”) carried a formal jazz label — and Soviet party ideology ruled it out. Could stalwart Soviet collective farmers possibly dance to capitalist jazz, or model Soviet pianists play it? Apparently they could: the infectious, off-kilter rhythms, prominent brass, and abrupt juxtapositions of contrasting passages all owe something to the jazz craze of the “Roaring Twenties.”

The works labeled “jazz” are relatively light, with a hint of sardonic eccentricity, and orchestras often play them as encores. Their only real ties to jazz are their lightness, danceable rhythms, and use of the saxophone — all striking in Shostakovich’s brooding, sardonic sound world. Deeper jazz structures and ideas also entered his musical language, heavily modified, and surface from time to time in all sorts of works.

The symphony

The twentieth-century symphony poses one small problem: nobody knows what it is. Obvious criteria, such as four contrasting movements in a prescribed structure or a fixed orchestral lineup, don’t hold up. It can seem as though every major composer pulls a random piece for a random group of performers from a desk drawer full of manuscripts and stamps “Symphony” on it.

Shostakovich wrote all kinds of symphonies. Traditional ones, like the First and Fifth; modernist, Mahler-length ones, like the Fourth; ones with a chorus and soloists, like the Thirteenth. Even among such varied works, “Symphony No. 14,” completed in 1969, stands out. Its instrumentation: a chamber orchestra of strings and percussion, plus soprano and bass soloists. Its structure: eleven movements set to poems by four writers — Federico García Lorca, Guillaume Apollinaire, Wilhelm Küchelbecker, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

In form, the Fourteenth recalls vocal song cycles: Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pesni i plyaski smerti” (“Songs and Dances of Death”), which Shostakovich loved and orchestrated in 1962, though he regretted how quickly it ended; Franz Schubert’s “Winterreise”; and Gustav Mahler’s “Des Knaben Wunderhorn.” Death is one of the forces shaping the symphony. It appears in different guises in every movement, except perhaps the ninth, “O Delvig, Delvig!” (“Oh, Delvig, Delvig!”), set to Küchelbecker’s words.

What makes it a symphony, then? Its development, the way the work takes shape. The music is not assembled from random pieces in random order. Shostakovich gives it an intricate structure of recurring motifs, sounds and familiar musical ideas. He presents them in different lights and from different angles, gradually weaving them together and developing them. There is the frozen time of the slow movements, where the music stirs slowly and almost inaudibly before suddenly exploding. The void between answering phrases from the voice and strings. And the angry, desperate, macabre grotesquerie that emerges whenever dance rhythms take shape in the orchestra.

In a letter to one of his closest friends, Isaak Glikman, Shostakovich wrote: “Sasha Chorny’s death struck me. He was fighting a fire, and then, just like that, he died. A beautiful death.” Shostakovich himself came to be associated with fighting fires through his work with the conservatory’s firefighting crew during the siege of Leningrad. Around the world, people recognize the 1942 cover of “Time” showing the profile of a frail man in a gleaming helmet and large glasses against a backdrop of bombed-out ruins in flames.

The task of the mad, doomed Romantic hero of the nineteenth century was to stoke the fires of struggles for freedom, fleeting national unity, and a new world order. The poetic voice of the 20th century, having witnessed the Battle of the Somme, the gates of Auschwitz, the ashes of Hiroshima, the abyss of the Gulag and the ruined fourth reactor of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant, desperately tried to put those fires out — mostly without success. Shostakovich’s music today, on his 120th birthday, will not stop wars, is unlikely to raise anyone’s fighting spirit, and certainly will not bring a rush of happiness. It will lead us down the narrow paths of a labyrinth with infinitely many dimensions, into emptiness — the only place where we can avoid losing ourselves. And that, you must admit, is worth a great deal.