Europe Central (16 page)

A pianist can sometimes resemble a slow underwater swimmer, and a lover likewise swims within the sea of the other, far down where no waves can reach; overhead, the piano’s lid, heavier than a coffin’s, shuts out extraneous vibrations, while simultaneously demarcating the boundary between water and air. It’s too perfect underwater; that’s what kills us, the perfection! (This is not my theory, of course; I don’t believe in perfection.) And the addictive poisonousness of this perfection was what flooded Shostakovich with the joy of something illicit, first when he was a boy playing weirdness on the piano when others expected a foxtrot; and now when he was Nina’s husband and playing out his passion for Elena. Another English lesson, pretty please, Lyalotchka! Elena is to poor Nina as Opus 110, the Eighth String Quartet, will be to the First, which its composer dismisses as
a particular exercise in the form of a quartet.
Forgive me, Ninusha!

12

After the divorce went through, he went to his previous muse, T. Glivenko, and said to her with a sad laugh: I have a very clever wife, oh, yes—very clever . . .

13

Because he couldn’t stop kissing her, her delightfully puffy lips were the next parts of her to get translated. In the course of translation, he necessarily sucked on them. Private English lessons, oh, me, oh, my! He couldn’t stop! And so Elena’s lips kiss us all forever in the second movement. Elenka dearest, I’m going to write a, let’s see, a Moscow Concerto, so that you and I can go to Moscow! And there we’ll do it again, oh, yes, Lyalka, we’ll orchestrate something else all over again! Because you’re my . . .

Then her hair—oh, her, how should I say, her, well, her long, dark hair . . .

14

Right here in
Sovetskaya Muzika,
number three, a certain D. D. Shostakovich denies translation in any specific sense. He’s like one of those wretches I deal with at the office every day; they grovel and admit to being Trotskyites, but then when I demand a detailed confession, with acts and especially names, they try to wriggle out of it. Can you imagine? In that same spirit, Shostakovich says to
Sovetskaya Muzika: When a critic for
Worker and Theater
or for
The Evening Red Gazette
writes that in such-and-such a symphony Soviet civil servants are represented by the oboe and the clarinet, and Red Army men by the brass section, you want to scream!

Well, at my office we know what we hear. And if Shostakovich wants to argue with us, we’ll take him down into the cellars and show him what screaming’s all about. He has the impudence to deny her long, dark hair.

15

I promise you that from the first time she took his hand—the very first time!—he actually believed; she was ready, lonely, beautiful; she wanted someone to love with all her heart and he was the man; she longed to take care of him, knowing even better than he how much he needed to be taken care of—he still couldn’t knot his necktie by himself, and, well, you know. He believed, because an artist must believe as easily and deeply as a child cries. What’s creation but self-enacted belief?—Now for a cautionary note from E. Mravinsky: Shostakovich’s music is
self-ironic,
which to me implies insincerity.
This masquerade imparts the spurious impression that Shostakovich is being emotional. In reality, his music conceals extremely deep lyric feelings which are carefully protected from the outside world.
In other words, is Shostakovich emotional or not? Feelings conceal—feelings! Could it be that this languishing longing I hear in Opus 40 actually masks something else? But didn’t he promise Elena that she was the one for him? And how can love be self-ironic? All right, I do remember the rocking-horse sequence, but isn’t that self-mockery simply self-abnegation, the old lover’s trick? Elena believes in me, I know she does! How ticklishly wonderful! Even Glikman can see it, although perhaps I shouldn’t have told Glikman, because . . . What can love be if not faith? We look into each other’s faces and
believe
: Here’s the one for me! Lyalya, never forget this, no matter how long you live and whatever happens between us: You will always be the one for me. And in my life I’ll
prove
it. You’ll see. Sollertinsky claims that Elena’s simply lonely. What if Elena’s simply twenty? Well, I’m lonely, too. Oh, this Moscow-Baku train is so boring. I can’t forgive myself for not kidnapping my golden Elenochka and bringing her to Baku with me. Or does she, how shall I put this, want too much from destiny? My God, destiny is such a ridiculous word. I’ll try not to be too, I mean,
why not
? It’s still early in my life. That nightmare of the whirling red spot won’t stop me! I could start over with Elena and . . .
She loves me.
Ninusha loves me, but Elena, oh, my God, she stares at me with hope and longing; her love remains unimpaired, like a child’s. I love children. I want to be a father. I’ll tell Nina it’s because she can’t have children. That won’t hurt her as much as, you know. Actually, it’s true, because Nina . . . Maybe I can inform her by letter, so I don’t have to . . . Ashkenazi will do that for me if I beg him. He’s very kind, very kind. Then it will be over! As soon as I’m back in my Lyalka’s arms I’ll have the strength to resolve everything. If I could only protect that love of hers from ever falling down and skinning its knee, much less from growing up, growing wise and bitter! Then when she’s old she’ll still look at me like that; I’ll still be the one for her.

It’s true that you didn’t even tell your mother and sisters when you got married?

My dear Elenochka, that’s true, oh, yes, because, you see, I, I
didn’t want to.
Let’s go to the Summer Garden and . . .

You didn’t want to what?

I didn’t want to marry Nina! But I couldn’t bring myself to hurt her, and she, well.

And do you want to stay married to her?

No, he said steadily.

Whom is it, if anyone, that you want to marry?

You, Elena!

Are you sure?

Yes, I’m sure.

Then she laughed for joy and pounced on him; that was the genesis of the fourth movement (
allegro
again); call it a sprightly yet stately dance in a minor key, a dance not of skeletons—they’re too mischievous, too
dramatic
for that!—although for a moment Opus 40 does lapse into what will become Shostakovich’s signature greyness. The piano brings it back to life: Elena and Shostakovich are stalking each other like cats! A renowned pianist who has performed this composition argues that
the brilliance here is sinister rather than exhibitionistic;
I disagree; Shostakovich is happy! Here comes the
pizzicato:
Elena is drawing her long fingernails lightly and lovingly down his belly. Then the piano cascades gleefully into a warm bed of strings, where the young couple’s bright, brisk, expert lovemaking glitters at us. (Why expert? Because they’re expert in each other.—Mitya dear, I’m so happy, I can almost taste gingerbread!) Back to the opening song, the richly Russian tune, which stretches itself in several postcoital variations; then Opus 40 ends in a delicious surprise of snapping teeth: that was when Elena bit him again—a nice mark of ownership, right there on the side of his neck!

16

In Baku the sea-wind covered the grand piano with sand. So many people came to his concert that we requested him to perform again the next day, which he did, because he could never say no to anyone who was nice with him; then he went out to the restaurant “New Europe” to hear gypsy songs. Every time the gypsies sang of love he almost cried, but not quite. He knew now that without Elena he would die. And he was meeting Nina in Yalta. He had headaches; it was all Elena’s fault . . .

That love-bite of Elena’s, it was itching now. He felt happy when he scratched it. How could he represent it musically? He got drunk and showed it off to the gypsies, who applauded. Well, in the fourth movement, at the very end, I’ll, I’ll—just wait and I’ll show you all! I’m going to make her live forever, because . . . Oh, Lyalya, oh, God. When he thought of Elena he was sure that he could do anything.

17

Since so many souvenirs of her have been found in this sonata—doubtless, many more await the discovery of musicologists—can we speak of a Konstantinovskaya Theme in Opus 40?

First of all, for the benefit of persons such as my good colleague Pyotr Alexeev, who’s a musical illiterate, allow me to draw three distinctions:
Motif
is a very nineteenth-century sort of term, which is not the slightest bit applicable to our Soviet music today.
¹⁵
Leitmotiv,
which we most often find applied specifically to Wagner, is a very short passage relating to a character, object or event: for instance, the Magic Fire music. Leave that to the Fascists, I say!
Theme,
at least in Shostakovich, gets worked out, developed, is longer.

It’s now widely agreed in progressive social circles that all humankind constitutes a single superorganism. Extending this correct line to culture, why not consider Shostakovich’s body of work as a whole? In that sense, a Konstantinovskaya Theme can be detected from 1934 to 1960. According to Beria, Yagoda and T. N. Khrennikov, its characteristics are rainbow tones oozing unpredictably into puddles of metallic greyness, dance melodies which alternate between ponderous and skeletal, and, most happily, achromatic patterns which soar into regions beyond human comprehension, a perfect example of the latter being the Fugue in A Minor which lives within Opus 87.

Loyalty to the state now requires me to step back and take the long view. Can we lay bare the context of the Konstantinovskaya Theme? How shall we define the general character of D. D. Shostakovich’s production?

The East German musicologist Ekkehard Ochs, writing after Shostakovich’s death in a spirit of appropriately comradely reverentiality, reminds us of the dialectic process:
When the world changes, so does the man, so the composer, and art also.
The same source speaks of his symphonies’ dialectic between life and death. In this spirit, we find Shostakovich writing to a certain E. Konstantinovskaya:
I try to stop loving you and instead I love you more and more. There is much sadness and disappointment in my love to you. Very complex circumstances
(how should I write this, so that she’ll, you know, not hate me?)
play a very important role here.

18

Others—optimistic, public-spirited types—have claimed to find in Opus 40 (probably in the second movement) the smell of flowers at Kirov’s funeral. Who am I to say that I can’t smell flowers? But I can’t. When I inhale Opus 40, I scent woodsmoke, wine and Elena’s hair.

19

They went to a showing of R. L. Karmen’s “Comrade Dmitrov in Moscow,” because the film sounded so boring that no one they knew would be likely to go, not even Glikman. When the Kino Palace was dark, she held his hand. From this experience derives the third movement, the
largo
(completed on 13 September), which might sound melancholy to those who don’t know Shostakovich, particularly the later Shostakovich; in fact this is his secret bunker, the deepest of his heart’s four chambers, whose roof is timbered with regular bass-notes of the piano. Here the piano and the cello sing a duet which might sound sad to the rest of the world, or even (here’s Elena’s favorite English word)
creepy,
but they’ve hidden themselves away so safely that there is no one else to hear them, let alone misjudge them; they have shut the Danube’s gates! In its darkest corners, the room is irregular, its bass roof-timbers as fantastic as the whalebone beams of an ancient Arctic dwelling; and in this darkness, Shostakovich and Elena Konstantinovskaya fall asleep in each other’s arms, her head on his chest, his ankles locked around hers; they’re like two vines grown together in an old graveyard.

20

On 1 December, the assassin Nikolayev took the life of our beloved Comrade Kirov—a treacherous blow, for which we set out to make the foreign spies and wreckers pay in full. On 4 December the first death sentences were issued. On 29 December we shot Nikolayev, who double-doomed himself by attempting to implicate the highest circles of our Soviet state. By mid-January we were arresting his accomplices by the tens of thousands. Meanwhile, Shostakovich was living with his darling Ninotchka again! When she returned, he cried: Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you very much!—He wrote Elena that he continued to be so busy nursing his Ninusha through a serious illness that he hadn’t found time to telephone her. Please forgive me, my dear Lyalya, because I . . .

Elena declined to answer.

Then he rang her up in terror, whispering: Lyalya, I have a very strange feeling, a very
creepy
feeling as you would probably say . . .

He felt that he was being watched. How ridiculous! Of course he was being watched!

He was still a hero in those days. If I may say so, he didn’t have a clue.

He started taking her out to concerts again. He needed more English lessons. (Sollertinsky had gotten nowhere trying to teach him German.) He went home with her (65 Kirovsky Prospekt, number 20). When they made love they were so noisy that the neighbors pounded on the walls. That’s the second movement for you! The cellist A. Ferkelman, who performed Opus 40 with Shostakovich in 1939, informs us that
I never succeeded in getting any other pianist to take such fast tempi. His playing was on the dry side, but on the other hand he played extremely loudly, doubtless on account of his great force of temperament.
In short, he still loved her. They played the third movement with diabolical ease; all the same, something wasn’t right in Elena’s song. He wept and said: Lyalka, I don’t believe that I’ll be yours and you’ll be mine. Sometimes I do; sometimes I don’t. Now my mood is such that I find it very difficult to, you know, believe.