Book Reviews 65

Mieczysław Weinberg: Between East and West

Michelle Assay and David Fanning (eds.)
British Academy (distributed by Liverpool University Press), 2006
288 pages. Figures, musical examples, tables, map.
ISBN: 9781836245636 (Hb) 9781836245353 (PDF) 9781836249436 (ePub)
Prices: Ebook or Hb $92

The “rise of Weinberg” over the last thirty years or so appears to have been one of the most extraordinary stories in classical music, comparable perhaps to that of Mahler in the 1960s. But just as the older composer’s “rediscovery” was in some ways mischaracterised, so it was with Weinberg. He actually enjoyed some periods of success in the Soviet Union (though that too needs qualification), though on the other side of the Iron Curtain he was for many years rarely mentioned in print and the few recordings that were released were scattered across various labels, with no attempt at comprehensive coverage even within genres, and not even targeting major works. All this meant that the notability of his “ascent” was more of a Western phenomenon.

The momentum really started in 1994 when Olympia began releasing CDs of old Soviet radio tapes, and later new recordings, accompanied by Per Skans’ well-informed notes. This eventually led to interest from other labels, further extending the range of works available, and allowing a new generation of performers to make better quality recordings. But while works like the Trumpet Concerto began to gain something of a toehold on the repertoire, it still took many years for some works to be recorded, especially his operas, which remained largely confined to the page. However, the 2010 western premiere of The Passenger marked another important staging post on Weinberg’s way to by then posthumous recognition. But even now there are important works that have not crossed the studio’s threshold.

Having said that, even in the Soviet Union Weinberg’s reputation fluctuated (though that was true of most creative artists), and he sometimes struggled to achieve the status he deserved, especially as the events of 1948 and his imprisonment in 1953 marked his reputation. He bounced back in the 1960s, but Weinberg him self seemed sometimes ambivalent on the issue of his own prominence and his place in Soviet music and life. Taken together, these factors shrank his profile and even when he was spoken of, it was sometimes as an epigone of Shostakovich, with the implication that one needn’t bother with him, while for the Darmstadtites a “second-rate Shostakovich” was even less appealing than the real thing.

And so to his resurrection. The “discovery” of a “new” composer can be both exhilarating and exhausting. Exhilarating in the many discoveries awaiting the researcher, and the range of theoretical approaches that might be applied to their life and work; and exhausting in the sheer weight of material to be trawled—in Weinberg’s case, well over 150 works, some with scant primary materials, let alone secondary ones, and that is not even to consider biographical questions. The challenges are massive.

This, the most recent book about Weinberg, collects and builds on papers given at the Weinberg: East and West conference, held at Manchester University in January 2019 under the direction of the book’s editors. After their introductory chapter, the sixteen chapters are divided into five strands: “Biography”; “Identities”; “Poetry, Symphony and Stage”; “Musical Language and Intertextuality,” and “Keeping Weinberg Alive.” Given that range of work and the current status of research, a book such as this is necessarily selective, but it is still hugely stimulating and highlights some of the key topics which must be considered in beginning to grapple with Weinberg and his music, points to a variety of possible approaches, and is not shy to admit its omissions.

Fanning and Assay’s opening chapter, “Weinberg Research: From Absence to Abundance” is a valuable introduction to the patchy history of Weinberg studies, and the existing literature. Though there were articles and items in the Soviet press, especially in his 1960s “golden period,” proper engagement began in earnest shockingly late: the first book-length study was Lyudmila Nikitina’s on the first ten symphonies, published in 1972, when the composer was aged 53, while substantial writing in the West began with Fanning’s Mieczysław Weinberg: In Search of Freedom (Hofheim, Germany, Wolke, 2010).

The five chapters on Weinberg’s biography explain the practical reasons for the sparseness of information, and go some way to filling in blanks and correcting misinterpretations. Weinberg spent time in Poland, Moscow, Minsk, and Tashkent and spoke Yiddish, implying sources in perhaps five languages, spread over sometimes war-damaged institutions thousands of miles apart, and made even harder to access in recent years by Covid, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and bizarre institutional obstructiveness—Weinberg’s widow was allowed to see his KGB file only after signing the equivalent of an NDA, and its contents are still largely mysterious.

Antonina Klokova looks at the composer’s portrayals and self-portrayals in print, showing how they varied over time. Early, sympathetic critics presented him in ways acceptable to the regime: initially, “heroic, young and anti-Nazi,” and later, “hard-working and humanistic.” After Weinberg’s death, Oleg Dorman’s documentary on Barshai told of a talented but anxious and broken man,1 and Gennadi Kostrychenko’s ill-sourced book added the dubious charge that under questioning, he named names.2 Weinberg’s own statements trace comparable politically inclined arcs, notably how he increasingly downplayed his proficiency in Yiddish (even as he continued to use Jewish idioms and memorialise its heritage in his music), but also how his accounts of his family members’ deaths varied, even sometimes, for reasons that are not always clear, returning to his older, incorrect versions.

Verena Mogl attempts to disentangle some of these ambiguities and contradictions, while trying to understand how they came about.

Posthumous psychoanalysis must be treated carefully, but Mogl avoids crude one-to-one mapping of events onto symptoms and uses theories of autobiography to contrast Weinberg’s Freudian Erinnerungsarbeit (“the task of remembrance”)—exemplified by his many memorial works with the confused, opaque, misunderstood or simply forgotten details of his own life.3 Sometimes, these forgettings were politically advantageous, but others could be explained as a psychological shield against extreme trauma.

Weinberg’s Polish roots are crucial to understanding him, particularly through the prism of often strained Polish-Soviet relations, exemplified in Polish composers’ embrace and rapid rejection of “socrealism”—the Polish equivalent of socialist realism—to move to avant-gardism. By the time we arrive at Daniel Elphick’s fascinatingly dense account of Weinberg’s visit to the 1966 Warsaw Autumn Festival, we know how trauma and how the composer processed it is a crucial aspect of the composer’s personality and work, and Elphick shows how the visit was a catalysing moment for him. His suffering from the deaths of his family in the Holocaust and potential survivor guilt was compounded by a feeling of loss for his Polish and Jewish heritage, which led in turn to feelings of nostalgia and a series of works memorialising all those things. But that nostalgia, which led him to look forward to the trip, was bitterly disappointed as he felt abandoned on all sides—Elphick cites Dorota Szwarcman’s essay “Zwischen allen Stühlen” (between all the stools). The promised premiere of the Eighth Symphony didn’t happen, he was ignored by most Polish composers for whom he was too Soviet and too old-fashioned, and post-war reconstructed Warsaw was very different from his youthful memories. One can imagine how all this left him feeling unmoored. Elphick then discusses Symphony no. 9, still unrecorded and problematic both then and now for its inclusion of naively enthusiastic pro-Soviet texts by the Stalinist poet Władysław Broniewski. Some years ago we reached a point where, with proper contextualisation Shostakovich’s and Prokofiev’s most overtly Stalinist works were performed and recorded. Perhaps Weinberg’s increasing prominence could have broken the logjam, but with the Russian invasion of Ukraine the moment may have passed for now.

In between these larger biographical contributions, there are three briefer ones, occasionally a little at a tangent but nonetheless still relevant and interesting. Inessa Dvuzhilnaya’s “Weinberg in Belorussia” shows how spotty the biographical information can be, though there is useful context on Weinberg’s early music studies in Minsk.4 In addition, it includes a brief survey of Weinberg’s reception in Belorussia in the 2010s and beyond, and assesses the evidence for and against his father Shmuel having been killed by the Nazis in the Belorussian town of Luninets. Finally, there’s the tantalising news that a book on his time in Minsk, with an accompanying CD, is ready for publication, but is currently unfunded. Bret Werb briefly tells how, in his work for the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, he attempted to mount a performance of Symphony no. 21 (dedicated—perhaps—to the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto), and this is supplemented with useful information on Weinberg’s father and his musical career. Nicky Gluch’s chapter is another personal reflection on the author’s own relationship to and involvement with Weinberg and his music, though it chimes with other chapters in considering the nature and role of memory here, especially as understood in Jewish tradition.

Levon Hakobian brings the section to an end and returns to archival research in his essay on “Why Weinberg was not Appreciated in His Lifetime.” Paradoxically he begins by showing the composer’s successes: a table of works premiered relatively soon after completion, often by the giants of Soviet music from the mid1940s onwards, with a predictable slowing in the late 1940s. But this did not always translate into secure success: second performances and recordings were rare and even publication was not guaranteed. Again, there was the issue of Weinberg as a “second-generation Shostakovich,” though Hakobian pinpoints a number of important differences in style and, as others have pointed out, it was sometimes Shostakovich who was following Weinberg. Hakobian is still able to inject some personal colour, considering how music students of his generation responded to composers of the Thaw and the Stagnation, both the “progressives” (Schnittke et al) and more conservative figures such as Ledenyov, Slonimsky, Weinberg, and late Shostakovich. But his conclusion is a bleak prediction for the composer’s “revival” in a Russia in the midst of “the most appalling moral and spiritual crisis.”

Weinberg’s vocal works are still among his less studied, and the four chapters of “Poetry, Symphony and Stage” begin the process of reversing that. The most important poet for Weinberg was Julian Tuwim, whose work he set many times. Tuwim was a contentious figure: a Polish classic who, like Weinberg, spent much time struggling with his status as a Polish Jew, and yet proposed an alliance with Stalinism closer than many of his countrymen felt comfortable with. Faced with Tuwim’s relative obscurity in the West, Aleksander Laskowski necessarily spends time outlining these issues and their implications. Weinberg is only introduced towards the end, with particular attention paid to Symphony no. 8 (Polish Flowers), with its settings of Tuwim. If Weinberg’s biography is (slightly) better known, this draws interesting parallels between the two men, suggesting why the composer might have been so drawn to the work of the poet—even one whose outlook sometimes ran counter to his own. This feels like the beginnings of a full study of Weinberg’s settings of Tuwim—one that would be immensely helpful to our understanding of both men.

Tuwim’s poetry also provides most of the texts of Weinberg’s next symphony (no. 9), Lines That Escaped Destruction, which is largely made up of reworkings of old songs. Agnieszka Nowok-Zych outlines previous interpretations of the work from Lyudmila Nikitina (hailing the Red Army’s “liberation” of Poland) and Verena Mogl (a nostalgic view of a lost Poland, an idea Daniel Elphick leans towards in his chapter), before offering a third, “Lazarus” narrative. She achieves this by focusing not only on the seven texts by Tuwim, but also the three pro-Soviet ones by Władysław Broniewski which are clearly the basis of Nikitina’s view. Nowok-Zych is closer to Mogl, seeing the work overall as one dealing with loss, nostalgia and disappointed expectations—themes identified by other contributors, and which go some way to marking him out from Shostakovich. Does the positive “Lazarus” message of the last song, a socialist realist image of a young bricklayer enthusiastically building a new world, outweigh the dourness of the rest? Perhaps the symphony is Lazarus-like only in the sense that it aims to preserve and even revive songs that had been forgotten, in which case it is ironic that it remains unrecorded.

In looking at Weinberg’s Six Shakespeare Sonnets, op. 33, Stefan Weiss balances the panoramic with the detailed, outlining the work’s place in Soviet Shakespeare settings (Weinberg was a pioneer), and deducing why it was written and how it was expanded from four to six songs. In what is mainly a study of the texts (though with some reference to the music), Weiss discusses the sometimes radical changes of structure and prosody made by the various translators, how they impacted Weinberg’s and others’ settings and the relative benefits and drawbacks of different approaches. Notably, the cycle includes Sonnet 66, and while Shostakovich’s is better known—probably the most famous Russian setting of a Shakespeare sonnet, Weinberg’s predated it, and Weiss gives some consideration to a comparison of the two.

The section is completed with a brief essay by Dmitry Abaulin, who works at the Moscow State Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre. He draws on its resources to outline Weinberg’s relationship to the theatre, in particular his comic opera D’Artagnan in Love, a popular success which Abaulin convincingly proposes as having surprisingly unambiguous Aesopian elements.

The “analysis” section, “Musical Language and intertextuality” comprises just two essays, but both are weighty and one has implications far beyond the confines of the book or even Weinberg studies. Christof Flamm begins with a study of six chamber works; the trios and quintets of Shostakovich, Weinberg and Sviridov, one in each of the two genres by each of the three composers, written over a surprisingly brief period (1940–45). Flamm shows how they have a surprising number of features in common, from structure and forms, through tonality and style perhaps to mood, and the works’ relationships to other examples of the genres; Taneyev, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. From there, he looks briefly at the relationships between the composers, particularly as regards Sviridov, the least studied of the three. His increasing intolerance, reactionary outlook and anti-Semitism led Shostakovich to pull away in later years, though Weinberg, who might have more reason for distance, reacted less strongly, but their relationship is the as-yet-unwritten third side of the triangle.

Fanning returns with “Weinberg’s ‘Cooking-Pot and the ‘Quotation Cube’,” an essay at least as intriguing as its title. Quotation, particularly self-quotation is a crucial ingredient of Weinberg’s music, but as discussions of Shostakovich’s use of quotation has shown, it is one that’s prone to misunderstanding, sometimes telling us more about the critic than the music and still less the composer. Some writers seem to be afflicted with what might be called “musical pareidolia,” seeing quotations everywhere and trying to wring from them some “meaning.” This weirdly overlooks some of the realities of creativity. A favourite gesture (say, Shostakovich’s anapaestic rhythmic cells) may be no more than a favourite gesture; the notes DSCH in another composer’s hands may be nothing more than the notes DSCH, and even when Shostakovich uses them, they may have a range of implications depending on context. Composers may use quotations for a number of reasons, but not all of them are equally meaningful. But to understand them (or any aspect of any creative process) in that way is to ascribe to the artist an unrealistic level of control and self-awareness. As Fanning points out, some “quotes” may simply be coincidental similarities and though he doesn’t quite go that far, to my mind a composer may even quote things subconsciously, in ways and with purposes that even a Freudian would not be able to explain. Fanning then attempts to create a framework by which we can assess the intrinsic and extrinsic qualities of a quotation: the intrinsic being the actual musical qualities (how close a match is it and how is it varied from the original?), and the extrinsic—the extra-musical evidence for the quote having some significance (comments by the composer or their approval of others’ thoughts on the matter). Fanning presents this in graphic form through diagrammatic cubes the continuity of whose lines indicates the strength of the proposal, and whose overall completeness gives an indication of the soundness of at least considering the authenticity of the quote. Of course, this is only stage one: the actual purpose of any quote remains to be investigated, and some will have a degree of ambiguity, but this may at

The volume concludes with two more personal and very heartfelt contributions; an essay by violinist Gidon Kremer, a long-standing advocate of Weinberg, and an interview with Tommy Persson, who is central to the composer’s recognition in the West. This is adapted from Henny van der Groep’s interview, which appeared in DSCH 49.

The book is extraordinarily well illustrated, with 35 photographs and illustrations, 26 music examples, 16 tables and a map. These are no mere decorations; many of them add immensely to the text. Sadly, it follows the recent trend in academic books not to include a bibliography, but to let the reader discover titles through the footnotes—of which there are more than 500.

Long-standing Shostakovichians may know that Per Skans’s book on Weinberg—by his account, a mammoth tome—was cut short by his death in 2006. It was taken over by Fanning and Assay, since when a mass of new primary material and information has come to light leading in turn to an increasing amount of secondary literature—as revealed in this book and its footnotes. Thankfully, that study’s appearance is now on the horizon from Toccata Press. Doubtless it will fill in even more gaps—as I said above, this volume is necessarily selective and space precludes detail or discussion of many important works and even entire genres, such as the film and incidental music. Similarly, the forthcoming book should provide much information on topics including Weinberg’s time in Tashkent, his wartime activities, the events of the Zhdanovshchina and his arrest, as well as expanding our understanding of his place in Soviet music and culture. Nevertheless, this book is and will remain a crucial contribution to studies of the composer, of Soviet and Polish music, and of Jewish heritage, and must be celebrated.

Notes

Nota: Zhizn’ Rudol’fa Barshaya, rasskazanna.ya im v fil’me Oleg Dormana (Moscow: AST 2013).
Gennadi Kostyrchenko, Taynaya politika Stalina: Vlast’ i antisemitizm [Stalin’s Secret Policies: Power and Anti-Semitism] (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, 2001).
Apart from his many war- and Holocaust-themed works, in the late 1970s and early 1980s Weinberg wrote a constellation of pieces dedicated to the memory of family members: his mother—Symphonies nos. 13 (1976) and 16 (1981) and the recitative Memorial and Violin Sonata no. 6 (both 1982); his father—the Solo Violin Sonata no. 3 (1979); his sister—String Quartet no. 16 (1982), and his mother and sister—the 1986 reworking of his String Quartet no. 2.
His time in Tashkent is equally opaque, covered only briefly here, but a topic of ongoing research by Verena Mogl.

John Leman Riley

“À Deux” [“Two”]

À Deux : Ma vie avec Dimitri Chostakovitch
Irina Shostakovich (ed. Elena Yakovitch)
Co-published by MM Éditions and the International Dmitri Shostakovich Association.
2026. 180 pages. Photographs. ISBN 979-10-97714-22-2 (Hb)
The book is available for purchase in French, German or Russian for €20 (plus €8 for postage in France, €10 elsewhere) from the above Association: association@chostakovitch.org

As announced in the previous edition of the DSCH Journal, a book based on the film by Elena Yankovich in which she speaks at length with Irina Antonovna Shostakovich has been published. Initially in Russian and then translated into German, a French translation has now appeared. What follows here is as much a conduit as a critique: the extended quotations are deliberate, offered to give English-speaking readers first-hand access to testimony that may or may not appear in translation.

The director of the film explains just how the project of a book came about:

“Much of our conversation did not make it into the film. This book contains Irina Antonovna’s monologue in full: her childhood, her youth up to the time she met Shostakovich, and the thirteen years she spent with him. In the first part, I have added my own comments to draw parallels between their life stories … I had the privilege of recording many people who have made their mark on cultural history. And those who were fortunate enough to know Shostakovich inevitably spoke of him. He left his mark on the lives of everyone who crossed his path. Many are no longer with us; their testimonies are therefore most precious. I have included their voices in this book. But the main voice is that of Irina Antonovna Shostakovich, who, for the first time, gives a full account of that era, her own life and their shared destiny.”

In the first section we are invited into a hitherto unknown world, that of Irina’s own childhood, dominated by the same repressive political climate in which her future husband strove to pursue his early life and career:

“I was born on 30 November 1934. On 1 December, Sergei Kirov, then head of the Party in Leningrad, was assassinated. So, throughout my childhood, every 30 November— my birthday—flags of mourning to his memory adorned Leningrad. After the war, this ceased. But even as a child, I would recite: ‘Red banners edged with black, why do you hang low over our homeland? Why has your scarlet crimson been veiled in mourning?’ The banners reply: ‘Our Kirov has been killed.’ This poem came from the book The Boy from Urzhum, which we all read then, and which recounted Kirov’s childhood and youth.1 He was much loved in Leningrad. We did not know that his assassination would trigger Stalin’s repressions.”

And later:

“One day, my father was summoned to the Big House, as the NKVD building on Liteyny Avenue in Leningrad was known. He said he would be back that evening.

But he never returned: he was charged under Article 58 and sent off to the north, to the Kargopol camp.2 I loved him very much. He was from Belarus; his family were originally from a village near Pinsk.”

Irina Antonovna includes many details about her family, often emotional, sometimes desolate, as she relates the collective plight.

“What can I say about my generation? We are passing away. Almost all of us have already gone. Most of us endured a painful existence. We were not brought up by our parents, but by our grandparents, aunts and uncles, and in children’s homes. The arrests came one after another: our parents were in Stalinist camps, in exile, or were shot. Then came the war, and many of those whom the repressions had spared perished in turn. Life divided itself into two eras: the one before Stalin’s death, and the one after. As for my own life, it was further divided into a time before Shostakovich and a time spent with him. I have now been living without him for half a century.”

The nature of the ordeals that ran through Irina Antonovna’s childhood, culminating in the loss of her parents, is revelatory, and resonated with Shostakovich: on 2 July 1962 he wrote to Glikman outlining her family biography and concluding, “All in all, a girl with a past.”3 Irina Antonovna continued, “A few decades later [after the 1930s], I was able to read my father’s file. The composer Veniamin Basner, a friend of Dmitri Dmitrievich, wrote music for war films; he was held in high regard at the Big House … a soldier brought my father’s file; and for the two hours it took me to read it, he sat there without taking his eyes off me, no doubt for fear that I might tear out a page. That was how I learnt that our home had been raided whilst I was asleep, and why he had been arrested. In 1937, all three of them were arrested—the director of the Museum of Ethnography, another employee, and Dad—on charges of plotting to kill Comrade Stalin and of having formed a group for that purpose. And it must be said that the other two gave in: one declared himself a Japanese spy, the other a spy for some other country, and they were shot. But not him: he confessed to nothing and denounced no one. In the end, the only charge held against him was this: he had organised an exhibition in which the lives of the peasants appeared to be richer before the revolution. Furthermore, one object bore a swastika—an ancestral symbol, mind you, and not exclusively associated with fascism. For this, he was sent to the camps for eight years.”

The particularity of the charge—a museum exhibit bearing a pre-revolutionary swastika—is the kind of absurdity that biography alone rarely preserves, whereas testimony such as Irina’s does. She goes on to recollect the impact on the family:

“My mother took my father’s arrest very badly. She loved him so much. She fell ill. She was just about to set off with me for the dacha when she was admitted to the Leningrad Emergency Medical Institute, and I was taken there to say goodbye to her. She was operated on by Djanelidze himself, the man who would later be appointed chief surgeon of the Soviet Navy.4 Nowadays, I often walk along the Grand Avenue on the Petrograd side, passing that hospital each time. Mum died there. Before she fell ill, she used to teach adults to read and write at a factory. When she died, that factory took me under its wing and sent me a box of Christmas decorations.”

The editor’s decision to intertwine Irina’s family history and that of Shostakovich’s earlier life and career in an ostensibly factual, realistic manner is perhaps questionable, especially when key events and dates drift into imprecision, such as the infamous performance of Lady Macbeth that took place on 26 January 1936, with Stalin in attendance. “During the interval, Stalin does not invite [Shostakovich] to his box and leaves the theatre without waiting for the final curtain call. Deeply shaken, Shostakovich hurriedly left the theatre for the station. At midnight, the train carried him off to Arkhangelsk. There is a legend that he bought that fateful issue of Pravda from a newsstand on the platform. In reality, it was the following morning, in a freezing hotel in Arkhangelsk, that he discovered the newspaper and read: ‘Chaos instead of music.’”5 Irina’s numerous and detailed accounts of the hardships of life in besieged Leningrad are stark and chilling, intermingled with references to the continuing political oppression in and around her family circles, extending even to the deportation of Shostakovich’s mother-in-law Sofia Mikhailovna Varzar in 1940, and his sister Maria and her husband Vsevolod Frederiks (in 1943).

As fate would have it, Irina found herself in Kuibyshev at the same time as Shostakovich, both evacuated from Leningrad. The journey is described in minute and touching detail, as is Irina’s first exposure to musical performance.

“From Moscow, I was sent on to Kuibyshev, where Aunt Lea had been evacuated. Under the Soviet regime, as Jewish first names were frowned upon, she had become Liza—a diminutive of Elizaveta Mikhailovna. She was waiting for me; she had already sewn two summer dresses for me and had managed to find a doll with movable eyelids somewhere. I named the doll “Stalin,” set her down in a corner of the sofa, and immediately forgot about her. My aunt kept asking me how her parents had died, but I simply couldn’t bring myself to tell her. I remembered everything, but it felt as though I would die if I started talking about it. In Kuibyshev, we lived on a street that ended at a cliff; below flowed the Volga, where steamboats were moored. That was where the evacuees arrived; many ships sank en route under bombardment, but some still managed to reach their destination. And in that very street, in that very house, as I learnt much later, Dmitri Dmitrievich lived with his family.”

“I didn’t know his music, I didn’t know his name, I knew nothing about any of it. My aunt took me to the Bolshoi for the first time – it too had been evacuated to Kuibyshev – to see Minkus’s ballet Don Quixote starring Lepeshinskaya. But she hadn’t explained to me what a ballet was. After the overture, I asked, loud enough for the whole theatre to hear: ‘Why aren’t they speaking?’ The audience laughed. I was charmed nonetheless; I decided I would be a ballerina and started demanding that my aunt enrol me in ballet school. She took me to the doctor, who said that ballet wasn’t for a little girl who had just survived the blockade.”

Irina goes on to describe the premiere of the Seventh Symphony in touching detail, including the pallid composer and the tense atmosphere, followed by a sense of victory, of vast artistic and personal achievement. She finally returned to Moscow, just as Shostakovich did, in 1943.

“At the same time, in the spring of 1943, Shostakovich left Kuibyshev but, instead of going to Leningrad, he settled permanently in Moscow. Following the triumph of his Seventh Symphony, he was in the authorities’ good books. His status as the leading Soviet composer meant he had to live in the capital. His old friend, the composer Vissarion Shebalin, who had just been appointed rector of the Moscow Conservatoire, invited him to teach there.”

And so follows Irina’s life after the war, the return of her father and the start of her career as literary editor at the Sovetskiy Kompozitor publishing house: specifically working on the librettos for operas and operettas. “I was entrusted with revising this operetta—which is now considered a failure but was a huge success in Moscow at the time—Cheryomushki. Shostakovich regarded this work as a personal disgrace. Basner, himself a writer of operettas, had told him: ‘Write it, it will be performed everywhere, and you will become rich.’” Irina Antonovna at the literary editorial department of the Sovetskiy Kompozitor publishing house. Late 1950s– At this point, using Irina’s words, the narration painstakingly describes her initial meetings with Shostakovich, describing in detail the composer’s accounts of his working in the cinema, and the great difficulties his family found itself in after the death of his father. And finally to the proposal, as unlikely as it was unexpected:

Irina Antonovna at the literary editorial department of the Sovetskiy Kompozitor publishing house. Late 1950s–early 1960s.

“Before long, quite out of the blue, he asked me to become his wife. I replied straight away that I couldn’t, that it was out of the question. And I left. I knew he had children my own age. What would I have done with them, with Galia and Maxim? His wife had died eight years earlier: how could I possibly get involved in that? And then he was surrounded by people his own age, most of them famous; I would never have known how to speak to them. But he persisted: I had to become his wife. This went on for early 1960s. Credit: Association Internationale Dimitri Chostakovitch quite some time. I held out, until the moment he lost patience and put the question bluntly: ‘I’ll give you an hour. Either you become my wife, or it’s a no.’ He said it very seriously. So I realised that if I said ‘no,’ he wouldn’t be there the next day. I thought it over, went home and packed a small bag to move in with him. It didn’t even occur to me to take a taxi. I took the underground, with one change. I was running late. When I finally arrived, he thought I wasn’t coming any more. He’d invited a friend round; they’d bought a bottle of vodka, drunk it, and he was drunk and deeply unhappy. I put him to bed. And another life began. You couldn’t say it was very peaceful; but it was a different life.”

This is a scene that biographers have summarised often; yet here, hearing Irina narrate the ultimatum herself, changes its register from anecdote to true experience—and it’s this kind of texture, more than any new fact, that thoroughly justifies the book’s existence.

One of the indispensable aspects of this book, and the conversations it captures, are Irina’s insights into her husband’s manner of working, such as:

“He would sit down at his desk and compose. For him, music was not to be created at the piano, but in his head. His works came to him in this way, already fully formed. Here is his inkwell: he would dip his pen in it and write. When the flow was interrupted, when there were lulls or pauses, he would become deeply anxious, convinced that he had lost the gift of composition forever. Then, suddenly, it would return. Shostakovich would immediately write down the complete orchestral score. Most composers begin with a piano reduction before orchestrating; he, however, heard the entire orchestra in his head and wrote down the full score directly.”

This is another of the book’s valuable seams: rather than the biographies we already have, here we have Irina’s intimate account of Shostakovich’s compositional method as she actually experienced it, which no outside biographer could have witnessed.

Irina was present at a dinner given in honour of Stravinsky’s visit to the USSR in 1962. She concludes, somewhat cynically, that:

“It seems that Stravinsky did not think much of Shostakovich: he saw him as a Soviet composer, whilst still giving him his due. But I think that, if they’d really been able to talk… They shared so many common memories of the St. Petersburg Conservatoire and its director, the composer Alexander Glazunov. They might have found common ground. But that did not happen. Stravinsky was ‘under a bell jar,’ under constant surveillance. And, after their meeting in Moscow, Dmitri Dmitrievich placed a photograph of Stravinsky under the glass on his desk. That surely means something.”

And then came the Thirteenth Symphony, “Babi Yar,” the first work to have been premiered following their marriage. Hence the chapter relating to a premiere “… On the Verge of Cancellation.”

As we know, Shostakovich began by setting Yevtushenko’s poem “Babi Yar.” Irina explains what happened next: “Then Yevtushenko started dropping round, bringing more poems; Dmitri Dmitrievich wrote four more movements, and that is how the Thirteenth Symphony came into being. We used to play it at home; everyone would listen. But in the Soviet Union, any public performance had to be officially authorised. Dmitri Dmitrievich was absolutely determined that Mravinsky should conduct. He went to see him at his dacha near Leningrad and played the symphony for him on the piano. They agreed that Mravinsky, once back from a concert tour, would take on the conducting and that the Leningrad Conservatoire Choir, under the direction of Liza Koudriavtseva (the USSR’s leading female choir director), would learn the choral part. The matter was settled. Mravinsky set off on tour; Dmitri Dmitrievich left him the score and returned to Moscow. Some time passed. Slava Rostropovich travelled to Leningrad on business and discovered that the work was not on the Philharmonic’s programme, that the scores had not been sent to Liza Kudriavtseva and that, clearly, Mravinsky had no intention of conducting it. That was when Kirill Petrovich Kondrashin stepped in: come what may, he declared, he would conduct the symphony. But all the soloists refused to sing.”

“So it was that on the morning of 18 December, we arrived at the Conservatoire’s Great Hall for the dress rehearsal. Kondrashin was conducting, but without a soloist. No soloist. Shortly before, the director of the Philharmonic had recruited a young, demobilised sailor, Vitali Gromadsky, and appointed him as the understudy. He had rehearsed very little, was renting a room somewhere on the outskirts of Moscow but had attended almost all the rehearsals. There was no telephone at his home. A car was sent to fetch him. The choir and orchestra were waiting for him on stage. When he finally arrived, he laid the score before him and sightread it from start to finish. He had nerves of steel. Anyone else would have cracked. In a word: a true sailor. And that very evening, it was he who sang at the premiere.”

Whether Mravinsky’s refusal was cowardice or self-preservation is a question that commentators still argue over; Irina’s account doesn’t resolve this question, but it does serve to confirm how narrowly the premiere survived at all.

And then the couple’s travels to accompany the resurrection of Shostakovich’s opera Katerina Ismailova. In London, Berlin, Vienna, Copenhagen … Irina constantly by his side. And their friendship with Benjamin Britten: “He was a wonderful man, of a rare gentleness—perhaps the only Englishman I understood straight away.”

Inevitably much of the last section of the book focuses on Shostakovich’s diminishing health, a phenomenon which, of course, had begun in his youth.

“As early as 1958, Shostakovich … began to experience the first symptoms of a mysterious illness that was taking hold. He wrote to Glikman: ‘I’m playing badly; for some reason, my right hand is lagging seriously behind.’ And in another letter: ‘My right hand has grown weaker; I often feel a tingling sensation.’ He was suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. This disease remains incurable to this day; at the time, it was not even possible to diagnose it. A footnote explains: “Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS): a progressive neurodegenerative disease that destroys motor neurons, leading to progressive muscle paralysis. Also known as Charcot’s disease in France or Lou Gehrig’s disease in the United States.”

And then the heart attack in 1966, and the continuing search for a way of slowing down Shostakovich’s deteriorating condition. At one point Irina insisted on treatment from medics in America:

“I learnt that there were numerous American scientific institutes based in Bethesda. I suggested to the Minister for Culture, Yekaterina Furtseva, that it would be a good idea for the two of us to go to America. ‘But come now,’ replied Furtseva, ‘do you realise the responsibility you’re taking on? He won’t make it to Bethesda! ‘We’ll bring the doctors here instead.’ They brought American doctors over, presented them with Dulyovo porcelain, showed them round here and there; the doctors said they couldn’t treat this illness and left. And that was that. Then, in the summer of 1973, Dmitri Dmitrievich was invited to the United States: he had been awarded an honorary doctorate in arts by Northwestern University, situated on the shores of Lake Michigan, in the town of Evanston, near Chicago. Thinking about a possible treatment, I said to him: ‘Let’s go.’ And off we set. He was a guest of the State Department, and Furtseva didn’t dare say that he wouldn’t make it, nor that, in any case, it wasn’t worth the effort.”

Not long before Shostakovich’s death, Irina relates a touching episode, concerning the composer’s eternally beloved birthplace, Leningrad.

“In May 1975, we spent some time in Repino, at our cottage at the Composers’ House; he was working on the Viola Sonata at the time. One day, he suddenly said to me, “Would you like me to show you the house where I grew up?” Of course I would. I took the wheel, and we set off for Leningrad. Dmitri Dmitrievich pointed out the neighbourhood where their apartment was located, where the whole family had lived. On the way, he told me about the time when his father was still alive, when his parents used to argue. His sisters took their mother’s side, while he took his father’s…. ” And then: “It was spring; the weather was beautiful, very mild, when suddenly snow began to fall and everything grew dark. We left the city under that black snow. It was strangely frightening, strangely sad. We never went back there again.”

In essence, this book is a collection of memories, of memoirs, narrated by a young Leningrad girl from the 1930s who became the wife and essential partner of one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. One of the book’s undoubted strengths lies in the multitude of related details and anecdotes—especially in the time around

The book is divided into two main sections, and each section is divided into chapters:

Section 1: “Before Shostakovich” 1. Childhood and the War 2. To Moscow, to Moscow!

Section 2: “With Shostakovich” 1. The Meeting 2. A Man from Leningrad 3. The Final Apartment 4. Stravinsky and Shostakovich 5. Babi Yar: a premiere on the brink of cancellation 6. The Return of Lady Macbeth 7. Repino – Sestroretsk – Komarovo 8. Just as he was. Film music 9. Zhukovka. Rostropovich, Britten… 10. Illness 11. The final journey to America 12. One last time in Leningrad. Death 13. “DSCH.” Coda “À Deux” or “Two” offers a unique insight into various aspects of life in the Soviet Union and specific aspects of a life spent in large part in the service of great art, that of Dmitri Shostakovich.

Notes

Мальчик из Уржума [The Boy from Urzhum] was written by Antonina Georgievna Golubeva (1899–1989). The book was first published in 1936. It is a children’s historical novella about the childhood and youth of Sergei Mironovich Kirov.
Article 58 of the Russian SFSR Penal Code prosecuted people suspected of “counter-revolutionary activities.”
Isaac Glikman, Story of a Friendship: The Letters of Dmitry Shostakovich to Isaak Glikman, 1941–1975, trans. Anthony Phillips (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 104.
Yustin Djanelidze (1883–1950): a Soviet Georgian pioneer of cardiac surgery.
The “Chaos instead of music” article in Pravda appeared on 28 January 1936.

Alan Mercer