Underrated Classical Musicians 3/23/20

So tonight we're going to talk about a writer, and a very great one. I thoroughly believe Solomon Volkov made up Shostakovich's Testimony, and I don't give a shit. It is a forgery of genius. Like Elmyr de Hory, he understands the artist whose essence he is copying at such a fundamental level that he seems to have created an entirely plausible imitation that, however morally dubious, is a work in itself of extraordinary creative merit. There is wall-to-wall evidence now that Volkov made up everything but the first few sentences of each chapter, which were taken from Shostakovich interviews, and had Shostakovich sign off on them; and as is abundantly clear in the documentation of his life, Shostakovich would sign literally anything anybody put in front of him without caring what it was so long as it wasn't an anti-communist screed. Everything that Shostakovich's music is, Testimony is too. It is funny, it is tragic, it's brined in irony, and it's heartrendingly confessional. But the ultimate evidence of Volkov's forgery is the breathtaking quality of his other books. If this were Shostakovich's own Testimony, Volkov would probably only be a stenographic functionary, and his other books would be nowhere near as readable or as interesting, but his books of cultural history are fantastic. I remember reading most of 'Magical Chorus' one day in a bookstore. I simply stayed there until they threw me out. And now I'm reading 1990s History of St. Petersburg. These books are models of how cultural history should be written, full of knowledge and love for their subjects, and told with an eye for the larger narrative; they exhibit the descriptive and portraitive mastery of a Russian novelist. So I don't really care if Testimony is real or not, it's a magnificent book of fiction. 

But is Testimony fundamentally true to Shostakovich's experience? Well, I give it a 75-80%. Shostakovich was no hero, and he was, like all lifelong stars, a bit narcissistic, a bit selfish, a bit arrogant, a bit exploitative. He was hardly, however, the worst of them. One of the great insights Testimony illuminates is that certain artists: Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Wagner, are so self-motivated that their music only expresses themselves, it does not reflect the collective experience of the listener. Other, more giving artists, and perhaps better human beings however flawed, describe the experience of others as well as they do themselves: like Mussorgsky, like Mahler, like Beethoven, like Shostakovich. You'd have to be made of steel itself to live in Stalin's USSR and not feel your conscience scream. Shostakovich did what he had to do to survive, and clearly that made him a deeply unhappy man. Lots of artists stood by their consciences and spoke out, only to die and not be able to give consolation to the living. Better to live and create a more livable world. So Testimony is doubly fascinating, because it is a book that is both true and false. Such is always the way of great art, and Testimony is most certainly that.