People are asking me if I have read Julian Barnes’s new novel about Dmitri Shostakovich, The Noise of Time. My reply is that I am reading it - indeed well into it - but am finding it a bit of a trudge.
The problem is perhaps that it reads like a biography where too little is said about the music, though as a novel inspired by a frightened twentieth-century Russian genius it fails to illuminate his personality in a way you would expect an author as perceptive as Barnes to do. The Shostakovich story, as told here, is much as we already know it. The inner man is probed in a series of musings but not, it seems to me, freshly or enthrallingly enough.
Shostakovich, as is generally known, was scared of Stalin, and constantly feared punishment, not merely rebuke, for being a composer of whom the Soviet leader disapproved. He accepted the accusation that what he produced, in his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, was politically unpalatable “muudle not music.”
Stalin’s response to it sounds a bit like an intensification of the British establishment’s response to Britten’s Gloriana. Yet there was no reason to expect Stalin, seated with his cronies, to react otherwise. Why such a man should have accepted Shostakovich as a great composer any more than Winston Churchill or the Queen would have done is explained as usual in terms his power and desire to interfere and humiliate. The difference is that Shostakovich and Stalin were both Russian and that Stalin had the power - or Power as Barnes constantly calls it - to be so menacing that the composer developed the habit of standing beside the lift shaft outside his apartment each night with a small suitcase in his hand waiting to be arrested.
It is obviously a harrowing story, but - I speak as a music critic - we already know it. Barnes, however, is presumably intending to reach a different public, which is not already aware what Shostakovich’s life was like - though anyone who saw his quaking appearance at the 1962 Edinburgh Festival which, thanks to Lord Harewood, the festival’s director at the time, he was permitted to attend, was able to guess. By then Stalin had been dead for nine years but the scars still showed. The Fifth Symphony was a recognised masterpiece and landmark in Shostakovich’s output, but it remained a deeply ambiguous one, the triumph of its finale riddled with undercurrents where the truth about the composer, above-all his sense of irony, was evident.
It is the fact that Barnes could have faced us more strongly with Shostakovich’s contradictions is what makes his book a disappointment. What makes some of the music trivial and some of it not? We may not expect Barnes the novelist to supply the answer, and he does not do so. The material is there, on page after page, but it does not quite add up to the major novel the book could be. I shall go back to it, but without the hope raised by its beginning, with Barnes’s glimpse of Shostakovich stranded at a desolate Russian railway platform, out in the wilds, in the presence of a beggar - a hint here of the Simpleton in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov - hoping for a kopeck.
28 March 2016
The problem is perhaps that it reads like a biography where too little is said about the music, though as a novel inspired by a frightened twentieth-century Russian genius it fails to illuminate his personality in a way you would expect an author as perceptive as Barnes to do. The Shostakovich story, as told here, is much as we already know it. The inner man is probed in a series of musings but not, it seems to me, freshly or enthrallingly enough.
Shostakovich, as is generally known, was scared of Stalin, and constantly feared punishment, not merely rebuke, for being a composer of whom the Soviet leader disapproved. He accepted the accusation that what he produced, in his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, was politically unpalatable “muudle not music.”
Stalin’s response to it sounds a bit like an intensification of the British establishment’s response to Britten’s Gloriana. Yet there was no reason to expect Stalin, seated with his cronies, to react otherwise. Why such a man should have accepted Shostakovich as a great composer any more than Winston Churchill or the Queen would have done is explained as usual in terms his power and desire to interfere and humiliate. The difference is that Shostakovich and Stalin were both Russian and that Stalin had the power - or Power as Barnes constantly calls it - to be so menacing that the composer developed the habit of standing beside the lift shaft outside his apartment each night with a small suitcase in his hand waiting to be arrested.
It is obviously a harrowing story, but - I speak as a music critic - we already know it. Barnes, however, is presumably intending to reach a different public, which is not already aware what Shostakovich’s life was like - though anyone who saw his quaking appearance at the 1962 Edinburgh Festival which, thanks to Lord Harewood, the festival’s director at the time, he was permitted to attend, was able to guess. By then Stalin had been dead for nine years but the scars still showed. The Fifth Symphony was a recognised masterpiece and landmark in Shostakovich’s output, but it remained a deeply ambiguous one, the triumph of its finale riddled with undercurrents where the truth about the composer, above-all his sense of irony, was evident.
It is the fact that Barnes could have faced us more strongly with Shostakovich’s contradictions is what makes his book a disappointment. What makes some of the music trivial and some of it not? We may not expect Barnes the novelist to supply the answer, and he does not do so. The material is there, on page after page, but it does not quite add up to the major novel the book could be. I shall go back to it, but without the hope raised by its beginning, with Barnes’s glimpse of Shostakovich stranded at a desolate Russian railway platform, out in the wilds, in the presence of a beggar - a hint here of the Simpleton in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov - hoping for a kopeck.
28 March 2016
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