Baltimore

Yevgeny Yevtushenko -- the weathered, haunted, extravagant Russian poet -- is telling me stories he's surely told many times before.
He was the first, he says, to inform Castro about Soviet forced labor camps. In the early '60s -- when Soviet Communism briefly softened -- Mikhail Gorbachev heard him read his poetry and was changed instantly. Thus the seed was planted that would later bear the fruit of glasnost, perestroika, and the fall of Soviet power.
We're sitting, as Mr. Yevtushenko says all this, in a leafy, calm hotel bar, a place that (like so much of our America) seems to have no history. But my own mission is historical. I'm here to ask about the great tormented Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose 13th Symphony -- written in those hopeful '60s days (which Russians called "the thaw") -- sets Mr. Yevtushenko's verse to music. The Baltimore Symphony will play that work in the evening, with Mr. Yevtushenko, who has a slot on stage before the music, as the star attraction. But Baltimore's music director, Yuri Temirkanov, who'll conduct, has his own history with the piece: He led its St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) premiere when it was new and, in Soviet eyes, very likely dangerous.

I'm hoping both men will talk to me about Shostakovich, but I think I know why Mr. Yevtushenko first tells me what he thinks his own role in history has been. In the '60s, he seemed improbably outspoken -- or, if you expected utter dissidence, suspiciously restrained. From either point of view, he could have been a government collaborator; hence, perhaps, his tales, which of course could easily be true.
And Shostakovich, too, is controversial. Publicly, he supported the Soviet state. But privately? In 1979, four years after his death, a book called "Testimony" appeared, purporting to be his memoirs, and in them Shostakovich could not have been more anti-Communist. Most famously, he deconstructed the finale of his own Fifth Symphony, with which he'd saved his career, if not his life, at the height of the terrifying 1930s purges, by seeming to write the kind of music Stalin ordered.
Did this finale show the world -- as a Stalinist critic of the time decreed -- the triumph of Soviet Man? Not at all, said Shostakovich, or so the memoirs claimed: "The rejoicing is forced, created under threat . . . It's as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying 'Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing.'" But then "Testimony" was challenged, and ever since Shostakovich scholars have feuded bitterly about it.

What would Messrs. Temirkanov and Yevtushenko say? Mr. Yevtushenko starts with the story -- again a much-told tale -- of his most famous poem "Babi Yar," an attack on Soviet anti-Semitism, which he'd published in 1961. Officially there was no prejudice against Jews in the Communist paradise, and so "they called me antipatriotic," Mr. Yevtushenko says. "And at that moment, Shostakovich called me" -- to ask if he might set "Babi Yar" to music.
Shostakovich was well known for his interest, musically and otherwise, in Jewish culture. But he chose other Yevtushenko poems to go with "Babi Yar" and emerged with a symphony for voices and orchestra that goes far beyond a protest against anti-Semitism to paint a deeply critical portrait of Soviet society. "Babi Yar" is the first movement, and one heart-rending passage -- in which we're asked to picture Anne Frank, who hears the Nazis knocking on her door but hopes it's just the breaking of the winter ice -- clearly has a double meaning. It asks if "the thaw" was real, or would lead to a return of Stalin's terror.
The second movement, "Humor," sardonically salutes the one form of social criticism no government can restrict. And the third movement, "In the Shop," maybe the most touching portion of the score, shows us patient, wretched Soviet women shivering in endless lines to buy food. The fourth movement, "Fears" -- written, Mr. Yevtushenko says, at Shostakovich's request -- is all but explicitly about Stalin's terror and, once again, a dread of its return. The finale, uneasily peaceful, talks about careerism -- a scourge in Communist society -- and its hopeful antidote, integrity.
The "Humor" movement, I'd noticed, praises Aesop, creator of so many fables in which animals act out human weaknesses. Was that name chosen, I ask, because, under Soviet tyranny, artists and intellectuals spoke in what they called "Aesopian" language, hiding their true meaning under levels of parable or irony? "Absolutely!" Mr. Yevtushenko says, and Mr. Temirkanov -- smoking, speaking very shyly in unsteady English -- supplies a Shostakovich example. The late Soviet leader Brezhnev at one point said things had gotten better. "Let's hope," Shostakovich wryly said, "they don't get still more better.
"Everything I heard from Shostakovich is absolutely one on one" with what's in "Testimony," says Mr. Yevtushenko. "I heard at least half of [what's in the book] from Shostakovich," Mr. Temirkanov agrees.
"He was nervous, always nervous," Mr. Yevtushenko says of Shostakovich. "Always filling water glasses," Mr. Temirkanov adds, pantomiming. "'God will forgive me,'" Mr. Yevtushenko says Shostakovich told him, "because I don't lie in music, only in words." Once, Mr. Yevtushenko says, he sat with Shostakovich while Khrushchev gave a speech against freedom in the arts. "Shostakovich bent over a note pad, writing constantly. 'I'm pretending to take notes,' he said, 'so as not to have to applaud.'"

The 13th Symphony, which had its premiere in 1962, became a social and political event. "I have never seen in another symphony what happened at the first performance," Mr. Yevtushenko says.
"There was laughing and crying." I ask Mr. Temirkanov what musicians at the Leningrad premiere had thought about the piece, and his answer -- given quietly, this time through an interpreter -- shows the kind of life Shostakovich might have led. "The work made an incredible impression on everyone who participated, but no one said so. The whole country was like Kafka. Some musicians cried, but no one opened their mouth."
After all this, the Baltimore performance, though a success for its audience, was an anticlimax for me, partly for an unfair reason. I have a recording of the Moscow world premiere, where every moment had the force of prophecy. By comparison, other performances sound tame.
But there were also weaknesses in Baltimore. Shostakovich wrote this work for a bass soloist and a chorus of basses, making all the singing dark and heavy; in Baltimore, the chorus had both tenors and basses, lightening and thus weakening the sound. Mr. Temirkanov, in the first piece on the program, Haydn's "London" symphony, showed himself to be a fine, crisp, responsible conductor, though the orchestra, I thought, rated just a B for clarity of intonation and ensemble. In the Shostakovich, we entered, with what should have been a shock, a far more troubling world than Haydn's optimistic 18th century, and somehow the change wasn't jarring enough.
One problem, I suspect, is all the history I've talked about. We've all told stories that fell flat, and then said, maybe haplessly, "You had to be there." That's true a hundred times in Shostakovich. Art has life beyond the time and place that gave it birth, but maybe not the same life. In Shostakovich there are layers within layers: the nervousness, the forced applause, the private pain and private certainty that God has seen into his heart. To render all of this, I think, you had to be there. "Let's remember Bible," Mr. Yevtushenko says, wanting (though he couldn't find the proper English text) to explain that no one who hadn't felt the weight of Soviet reality should judge Shostakovich: "Don't throw the stone."
After the concert, Mr. Yevtushenko signed books of his poetry, having mesmerized the concert audience with much-told tales. I went up to say goodbye. "Was I too boring?" he asked, almost seductively, though I thought I saw painful self-awareness in his eyes. I reassured him, but what I wish I'd said was this: You've told these stories many times, but most of us have never heard them. Here in painless America, we need all the history we can get.

Wall Street Journal, October 31, 2000