It’s risky business to speak for the dead. In the terrible case of Dmitri Shostakovich, the temptation is strong, because history, in the form of Stalin, didn’t allow the composer to speak for himself. Of course, there’s the music, but music is reticent about meaning — like a therapist, it prefers you draw your own conclusions.
Shostakovich’s music presents a particularly thorny nest of meanings and counter-meanings, with upsetting traps of tone. When I was 12 I fell under the spell of his Fifth Symphony, loving its triumphant, thrilling ending. Thirty years later, however, I re-encountered the piece, led by a young and intelligent conductor, who explained to all of us that this glorious ending was an artifact of Leonard Bernstein’s intervention, and a betrayal of the real metronome marking and character, all of which was a defiant, ironic swipe at Stalin. He proceeded to conduct the ending half as fast, as though being hammered to death by D major, erasing all the joy I’d ever had from it. I trudged glumly from the concert hall. The triumph was fake, I understood that; the joy was enforced. But did I have to be as miserable as Shostakovich was? Was that the point of the music?
It is brave of Julian Barnes to take on Shostakovich’s puzzle, and his tragedy, in which so many people and factions have a stake. Barnes’s short new novel, “The Noise of Time,” doesn’t just tell the composer’s story; it presumes to channel him. Much of it is written in a Joycean interior monologue, like at the beginning, where the composer is standing by the elevator, waiting for Stalin’s secret police to come to take him away:
“Faces, names, memories. Cut peat weighing down his hand. Swedish water birds flickering above his head. Fields of sunflowers. The smell of carnation oil. The warm, sweet smell of Nita coming off the tennis court.”
It’s lovely, but even at this moment you might wonder: Is this how a man thinks, in the throes of mortal fear for himself and for his family? Or does it sound a tad like a novelist contemplating a man contemplating these things? Shostakovich’s musical voice is far more jittery and austere: uncanny, often maniacal, hollow. Either you accept Barnes’s premise, and the resulting style, or you may find yourself dissatisfied, wishing for the narrator of “Notes From the Underground” to come and make everything feel more neurotic and Russian.
Using this third-person “Shostakovich,” but often switching into an unlocatable voice, like a biographer behind a literary veil, Barnes deftly covers three big episodes in the composer’s life: denunciation in Pravda and subsequent implication in an assassination plot; his trip to America, where he is humiliated as a Soviet stooge; and lastly, being forced to join the Communist Party. This story is truly amazing, as Barnes knows, an arc of human degradation without violence (the threat of violence, of course, everywhere). Barnes does wonderful work on the key scenes — a negotiation with Stalin, a meeting with a terrifying interrogator who misses the second session, having himself presumably vanished into Stalin’s death machine — the whole Kafka madhouse brought to life. The narration is plain, the horror still plainer.
Barnes focuses on Shostakovich’s rage against the do-gooders, the Western Communist sympathizers:
“He’d refused to meet Rolland, pretending to be ill. But Shaw was the worse of the two. Hunger in Russia? he had asked rhetorically. Nonsense, I’ve been fed as well as anywhere in the world. And it was he who said, ‘You won’t frighten me with the word ‘dictator.’ ”
But he also rages against the anti-Communist sympathizers, those who believe they know what he is going through:
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Review: Julian Barnes’s ‘The Noise of Time,’ the Inner Shostakovich MAY 2, 2016
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“Those who understood a little better, who supported you, and yet at the same time were disappointed in you. . . . They wanted martyrs to prove the regime’s wickedness. . . . How many martyrs would it take to prove that the regime was truly, monstrously, carnivorously evil? More, always more. . . . What they didn’t understand, these self-nominated friends, was how similar they were to Power itself: However much you gave, they wanted more.”
And so the author, whose novels include “The Sense of an Ending” and “Flaubert’s Parrot,” creates the impression of a man with rage in every direction, and very little affection — a man from whom affection has been surgically removed by fear, and by self-loathing at his own submission to it.
It’s a powerful portrait, and readers will have to decide whether they think this is “really” Shostakovich. I felt that he emerged as a (strangled) hero, but wished that Barnes would explain a little less, and show a bit more. As Shostakovich travels to America, “what he had not prepared himself for was that New York would turn out to be a place of the purest humiliation, and of moral shame.” But this tidy synopsis blunts the ensuing scene: The composer Nicolas Nabokov grills him in front of everyone, forcing him to denounce Stravinsky, whom he deeply admires. Nabokov the comfortable exposer looks around the room “as if expecting applause,” while Shostakovich the exposed is powerless to do anything but stand and suffer. Shostakovich was a connoisseur of false triumph, and this cruel moment of vain truth crushing pathetic impotence fits and explains his music perfectly.
Eventually, this book becomes a meditation on the role of art. Narrative recedes, and the prose becomes hypnotic, circling obsessions. Many observations are beautiful, while some raise eyebrows. We come to the topic of the Borodin Quartet, and how it supposedly had two versions of a piece of his: one “strategic,” for government consumption, and the other “authentic,” speaking truth to power. But Shostakovich the narrator says:
“It wasn’t true — it couldn’t be true — because you cannot lie in music. The Borodins could only play the Fourth Quartet in the way the composer intended. Music — good music, great music — had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical.”
The quote “you cannot lie in music” is not from Shostakovich but from Valentin Berlinsky, the cellist of the Borodin Quartet — a small lie concealed within the narrative-biographical fabric, speaking by proxy for the dead. And of course you can lie in music: Look at Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte,” for instance, or even Verdi’s “Falstaff” or any number of comic operas that depend on pretense. Music is fantastic at lying, and virtuosic in irony. In Shostakovich’s case, the problem is mind-bending; the music is an intentional lie, which you must perform somehow truthfully. The phrase “the way the composer intended” is dangerous: Composers’ intents often change, day to day or hour to hour.
Since Shostakovich’s story is well known and often told, Barnes’s role here is less that of a novelist than of a musician: He is performing a canonical work, trying to give an Important Story a new life. He isn’t aiming for a radical rewrite, but an interpretation, an act of devotion — as if Barnes himself has some personal connection in relation to the story, as if each artist shares in Shostakovich’s guilt.
In Barnes’s novel, Shostakovich gradually descends into self-mockery, clinging to his music to save his reputation in some future time. One key element of Shostakovich’s heroism is missing. Think of it: He is denounced in Pravda, he lives in fear for his own life, the life of his family, the lives of anyone who ever supported him or performed his music; he looks forward only to decades of cowering. In that impossible situation, he sits down and writes the Fifth Symphony, one of the greatest, most perfect works of the 20th century. He doesn’t choke, he doesn’t lose sight of his gifts — certainly one of the best narrative senses of any composer in history — even as he spends nights awake weeping, his nerves completely shot. He writes, and doesn’t lose his voice. He toes the line of self-destruction without actually being destroyed. Barnes mostly sidesteps the difficult task of writing about Shostakovich’s specifically musical accomplishments — perhaps understandable, but regrettable.
His music is a tragedy, no question; but whose? It is tempting to wallow in the impossibility of Shostakovich’s situation, and we should definitely empathize with the poor man, as Barnes has. But I recall vividly that when I first played the E minor Piano Trio and came to the slow movement opening, a series of loud chords, my chamber music teacher told me to think of each chord as a friend who is killed or marched off to a labor camp. At 20, I didn’t have much experience of death or labor camps, with the possible exception of my summer data-entry job, and I blinked back at him, a bit alarmed. But I tried in my sheltered American way to put myself in that place, and the chords came out darker and more shattering, and I felt myself trying to understand a whole different world of experience, people subject to arbitrary Power. And so it is: Shostakovich’s music reaches out to express a world, to give warning, to memorialize the pointlessly murdered. The gloom may be unremitting, but it is not selfish.
