Some personal musings and a review of Shostakovich: A Life by Laurel E Fay, Oxford University Press 2000. ISBN 0-19-513438-9.
When I was a junior in High School, my band instructor passed out sheet music for Dimitri Shostakovitch’s Festive Overture, opus 96. Initially he told us that it was just a sight-reading experiment. It went well enough that he decided (or maybe it was the intent all along) to work it up into a piece for the band to play for one of the yearly concerts we gave at our public high school. This was my first exposure to Shostakovitch, but not to classical music (one might argue that Festive Overture is more “Pops” and not proper classical, which is likely true). My father, a talented musician, has exposed me through his frequent practicing and performances, to classical music… which I genuinely enjoy.
Digging through the score of Festive Overture with our high school band, and considering my modest technical ability, it was at the time a wicked hard clarinet part. I became a fan of the music of Shostakovich… symphonies, concerti and all. It was the hardest, and most technical, piece of music that I had ever attempted. I loved it because it challenged me in a real world way. It was not a dumbed down arrangement of a real symphonic piece… it was a real symphonic piece.
A few decades later, this affection for Shostakovich’s music (I knew next to nothing about the man himself) prompted me to choose Shostakovich: A Life and read through it, hoping to enjoy the story of the man, as much as I enjoy the music he composed. I’ve just finished, and in the heat of having just put the book down I wanted to give my thoughts on this work.
In spite of this being one of the better researched books I’ve read in the last few yearn, it lacks in synthesis. I’m not ready to completely lay this deficiency at the feet of the author. Fay does a talented job of laying out the where/who/when of events, paring this up with details of correspondence written out by Shostakovitch. It becomes clear that Shostakovich is not excessively generous with his personal thoughts in his correspondence, in fact for the most part he seems guarded to the point of intentional ambiguity. Unsure of what Fay’s resources were for this work, I’m left to wonder why there are no personal interviews associated with this biography. Maxim Shostakovich (second child of the composer) would be a natural choice, as he was active at the time when this book was being researched. In addition there would be hundreds of students, family friends and critics that would have the synthetic stuff that would metastasize this string of facts into a real living biography. Perhaps that was not the goal of this work, but it would have made it the author’s depth of research really that much more enjoyable of a read.
Final appraisal: Skip. This is reads like a compelling research volume, but lacks the humanity of a great biography. If you are a fan of Shostakovich as am I, it’s a good read… but not a great read.