Today's virtue-signalling composers have no idea what ‘political music' really is

Telegraph

5 days ago

The 50th anniversary of the death of Dmitri Shostakovich, which falls this month, is being celebrated by the musical world, especially the Proms and the Edinburgh International Festival. It's a timely anniversary, because Shostakovich was, among other things, the greatest composer of political music the world has ever seen – and political music is suddenly all the rage.
We're surrounded by pieces that earnestly tackle climate change or the surveillance state. We ought to rejoice at this. Composers have always been accused of living in an ivory tower, turning for inspiration to ancient poetry, the stars, abstruse ideas about the world – anything but the lived reality of the world around them. Now it seems that some of them are waking up to the fact that there are burning issues to engage with.
The trouble is that that lived reality doesn't seem to press very hard on these composers, and thus any political stance can feel like virtue signalling. Take Gabriella Smith's piece, Anthozoa, which laments the perils facing marine life. She does it with percussion sounds, that according to the composer are accurate portrayals of the tones of shrimps popping and parrotfish nibbling on coral reefs, which she recorded herself. This is the method of the detached documentary-maker in search of some street cred.
Some years ago, David Lang reworked Beethoven's opera Fidelio, in a way which stifled the original's blazing heroism and impassioned cry for freedom, turning it into a worthy but unengaging homily about the ambiguities of human nature. Two recent pieces about the black experience in America, Joel Thompson's To Awaken the Sleeper and Carlos Simon's Portrait of a Queen, went the other way, going straight for the emotional jugular. As this newspaper's critic said, 'Had the composers come out on stage and shouted 'Feel Sad!', 'Now angry!', 'Now hopeful!', it would hardly have been less subtle.'
I don't want to suggest such composers are insincere. It's just that there is no risk involved; they can be sure their views will be endorsed by all good, right-thinking people. Their only worry is whether they'll be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
Compare their situation with that of Shostakovich. His worry was whether he would actually survive, when so many around him did not. His entire creative life was passed under the boot of Soviet communism, where to stray from the officially approved tone of heroic optimism or casting a critical eye on the Soviet Union could mean years in a penal colony, or worse.
Simply to avoid the fate of many artists and writers, Shostakovich sometimes had to bend the knee and compose a heroic cantata glorifying an anniversary of the revolution, or some other approved topic such as the war against Nazi Germany. It's unfortunate that Shostakovich's best-known 'political piece', his Seventh Symphony, is also his least subtle, portraying the march of the invading Nazi army in a slow crescendo of crushing banality.
Against that damning picture which suggests Shostakovich 'sold out', I'd like to offer a different image – the first performance of the composer's Fifth Symphony on Nov 21 1937. This was Shostakovich's attempt to rehabilitate himself after his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District prompted a damning article on account of its alleged 'immorality' in the Soviet newspaper Pravda, very possibly written by Joseph Stalin himself.
If ever there was a moment for a straightforward celebratory symphony to 'wipe the slate clean', this was it. Instead, the audience was faced with a slow movement of such tragic desolation that many were moved to tears. Were they thinking of Stalin's Great Terror, which had slaughtered perhaps as many as a million Soviet citizens? And that supposedly triumphant finale – why does it seem so grim, and why does the final major-key peroration seem so desperate and forced?
This symphony cannot be dismissed as propaganda. It has that ambiguity that defines art, embodied in music of surpassing technical skill and supreme inspiration. Of course the same could be said about every great composer. What makes Shostakovich special is that every piece required a delicate negotiation between his passionately held beliefs in the sanctity of the human individual, his gleeful (and dangerous) fondness for parody and humour, his deep sympathy for the underdog (Jews in particular), and the necessity to present an acceptable public face, when one mistake could place him in mortal danger.
This means that every piece Shostakovich ever wrote, even those as apparently abstract as his 15 string quartets, have a deeply paradoxical quality. They are political right down to their roots, and yet no music offers a more authentic portrait of a solitary suffering individual. That is what makes the music so potent, and so relevant. On his 50th anniversary we should salute Shostakovich for his courage and his immortal musical legacy, which offers a model of what 'political music' should be.