"1936: Shostakovich, just thirty, fears for his livelihood and his life. Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has taken a sudden interest in his work and denounced his latest opera. Now, certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or, more likely, shot dead on the spot), he reflects on his predicament, his personal history, his parents, various women and wives, his children all of those hanging in the balance of his fate. And though a stroke of luck prevents him from becoming yet another casualty of the Great Terror, for years to ...
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"1936: Shostakovich, just thirty, fears for his livelihood and his life. Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has taken a sudden interest in his work and denounced his latest opera. Now, certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or, more likely, shot dead on the spot), he reflects on his predicament, his personal history, his parents, various women and wives, his children all of those hanging in the balance of his fate. And though a stroke of luck prevents him from becoming yet another casualty of the Great Terror, for years to come he will be held fast under the thumb of despotism: made to represent Soviet values at a cultural conference in New York City, forced into joining the Party, and compelled, constantly, to weigh appeasing those in power against the integrity of his music. Barnes elegantly guides us through the trajectory of Shostakovich's career, at the same time illuminating the tumultuous evolution of the Soviet Union. The result is both a stunning portrait of a relentlessly fascinating man and a brilliant meditation on the meaning of art and its place in society"--
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Julian Barnes's short novel "The Noise of Time" will appeal most to readers who love music even though music itself plays a small role in the story. Many of Shostakovich's compositions are mentioned including opera, symphonies, piano preludes and fugues, and string quartets, but not discussed in detail. Still the book brought back memories of music I have heard and responded to over the years. In particular, I remember a performace of Shostakovich's last string quartet, no. 15. which I heard performed by the Julliard Quartet at the Library of Congress and years later reviewed in a recording by the Eder Quartet. In my Amazon review of October 24, 2006. I wrote that "in his last works, Shostakovich reached an intensity and poignancy of personal expression that few composers can match." Barnes discusses the String Quartet no 15 in the following passage.
"The final wail in his head was about his life as well as his art. It was this: at what point does pessimism become desolation? His last chamber works articulated that question. He told the violist Fyodor Druzhinin that the first movement of his Fifteenth Quartet should be played 'so that fliew drop dead in mid-air, and the audience start leaving the hall from sheer boredom.'" (p.188)
Barnes tells the story of the life of the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 -- 1975) and of his struggles with his conscience and with Communism during the regimes of Stalin and Krushchev. The book gives some mention to Shostakovich's early life, including his relationship to his mother, and to lovers and wives, and to his often caddish sexual life. Most of the book involves his changing relationship to the Communist regime and the fear this engendered throughout his life. In 1936, Shostakovich, already a well-known composer, came perilously close to death as an "enemy of the people". Through varied forms of obsequiousness, he returned to official favor, but uncomfortably so. He was allowed to travel to New York City following WW II where, much to his own chagrin, he todied himself befor an American audience by mouthing the Communist line in which he did not believe. Later after the fall of Stalin and the rise of Krushchev, Shostakovich would fall yet further in his own eyes by joining the Communist Party. Through all the compromises and actions based on cowardice, Shostakovich continued to compose, a large and perhaps a mixed body of work that still constituted a musical legacy.
Much of the book is about the struggle between art and politics and pressures on the creative life. This theme underlies the title of the novel, "The Noise of Time" as reflected in the following passage.
"What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves -- the music of our being -- which is transformed by some into real music. Which over the decades, if it strong and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history." (p. 135)
And so I think it is with Barnes's story. The focus is on Shostakovich's cowardice and fear and on the brutality of Communism and the times. The music is present almost as a sub-theme. The discussions in the book about whether music and art are "political" or "individual" are shown to fade away and to be misdirected. "[M]usic, in the end belonged to music. That is all you could say, or wish for." (p. 195) The treasure of music is the ultimate theme of this novel, with all its apparent stress on biography and politics.
Robin Friedman
JParker
Jun 20, 2016
The Effect of Fear on Creativity
Somewhere, I now forget where, I stumbled across the following quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize-winning author of, among others, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago:
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more-we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."
It's worth keeping that quote, that sentiment, in mind when reading Julian Barnes' The Noise of Time. Barnes' novel about Dmitri Shostakovich opens with the composer standing by the elevator in his apartment building all night long, with a small overnight bag at his feet, smoking endless cigarettes as he waits for Stalin's security officers to come take him away. Those who were unlucky enough to drift into Stalin's vast (seven million or more dead) and frequently merely peripheral web of disfavor were invariably taken away during the night, and Shostakovich's standing by the elevator is his personal act of courage, his desperate effort to save his wife and children.
I am not knowledgeable or sophisticated enough to appreciate this novel from a musical perspective, but it doesn't matter because what it really is about is courage, not the great, courageous stroke of the hero, but the small and varying courage it takes to live-to endure-for decades in fear. You cooperate here, resist a little bit there when you dare, bow low and weigh your words carefully this morning, then try to recoup a tiny fraction of self-respect by taking a small stand this afternoon. The subtle stands of resistance-a musical masterpiece like the Fifth Symphony-are offset by the capitulations that breed self-loathing and regret for the opera not written. Courage, under Stalin, had to be used by the teaspoon. Shostakovich recounts the experience of a friend, a violinist who expected to be arrested. Instead, the secret police came, night after night, and each time they arrested someone else in the violinist's apartment building, gradually working their way up, night by night, apartment by apartment, floor by floor, until at last the entire building was vacant except for the violinist. And that gradual, casual murdering of everyone else, of totally innocent people whose only crime was to have lived in the wrong building, made the violinist completely, utterly compliant. Fear is a powerful weapon, more powerful than death, because after all the dead are immune; nothing more can be done to them.
Barnes has an odd writing style, a detached, cerebral style that in the only other book of his that I've read, Flaubert's Parrot, I disliked. It's as if he uses his own writing to keep all emotion at arm's length. (In Flaubert's Parrot, the narrator is so cold and emotionally detached that the result is there is no one in the novel for the reader to identify and empathize with. I found myself thinking of Herman Melville's comment in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, discussing the relative value of emotion versus intellect in art: "I stand for the heart. To the dogs with the head!") Yet here, in The Noise of Time, that same distancing of emotion works, in part because the only way a man can find the courage to stand, night after night, by an elevator, waiting to be arrested, is by distancing himself from emotion. And by showing us a man who will sacrifice himself to save his wife and children, you have automatically presented someone the reader can empathize with, not a hero, not even a consistently brave man, but one who, like most of us, screws his courage to the sticking place when he can, and hates himself when he can't.
Readers with more musicality than I may get more out of this book, but its universality lies in its harrowing portrayal of what it's like to live in fear, not for a day or a week or a year, but for decade after decade, and then, at the end, to look back and to think of what one might have done, might have accomplished if only one hadn't been afraid. If only. If...if.
It's a lesson to be kept in mind.
