While the Nazis were crumbling Leningrad to dust in 1941,
Shostakovich at first refused orders to be evacuated, staying on to complete
the mighty Adagio movement of his Seventh Symphony. When, under pressure
from the soviet authorities, he finally agreed to leave, packing a few clothes,
uncertain whether he would return, Shostakovich took with him only one belonging:
that to Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
Shostakovich, in the same way that Walter Benjamin did when
escaping from the Nazis, kept a manuscript with him, the Manuscript of the Lady
Macbeth of Mtensk. And from these emerges a revelation: the uncertain moral
connection between a work of art and the person who made it.
What is at stake is both the piece of art meaning and its
value, that is, its authenticity. And the anxiety is that its value might
depend upon its meaning. According to Benjamin even the most perfect
reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time
and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
Shostakovich’s has been criticised both by the West music intelligentsia critic,
as a depressive, programme-note stereotype, and by Stalin himself through the Pravda article
“Muddle instead of Music” as a formalist, bourgeois, coarse and vulgar.
In the artwork proper, Benjamin argues, the sphere of
authenticity is outside the technical sphere of producing the art work hence,
the original work of art is independent of the copy. The action of mechanically
reproducing a discourse based on the ideology of the art piece, either by saying
that it is bourgeois or communist propaganda, diminishes the original artwork
by changing the cultural context (artwork in itself vs product of mere
ideology); thus the aura, the unique aesthetic authority, in this case Shostakovich
as a master of avant-garde theatre, irony, parody and absurdism, is absent from
the ideological discourse that mechanically reproduced Shostakovich’s artwork.
Shostakovich artwork exemplifies that the social value of a
work of art changes as society change their value system. Shostakovich was
considered, at the same time, a traitor by the Stalinist intelligentsia, and
soviet propaganda by the West. This accounts for the changes in artistic style
and in the cultural taste of the public; “the manner in which human
sense-perception is organised, the artistic medium in which it is accomplished,
is determined not only by Nature, but by historical circumstances”. In fact,
when one examines the two main traditions of criticizing Shostakovich from the
1930s onwards, the official socialist-realist one from inside the Soviet Union,
and the Western 'high-art' tradition from outside, one surprisingly often finds
peculiar parallels. In 1943, for example, at the height of the world-wide
propaganda triumph of the 'Leningrad' Symphony, the British writer on Russian
music Gerald Abraham sneered that 'Shostakovich cannot write even a moderately
good tune ', an opinion he shared, it turned out later, with those repulsive
party-hacks unleashed on Shostakovich by Zhdanov in the famous purge of 1948.
The uniqueness of a work of art
is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition, which
separates the original work of art from its ideological reproduction. In this
sense, McBurney’s proposal on his article “Whose Shostakovich?” of listening
Shostakovich’s artwork to what lies 'between the notes', and not just to what's
beyond them, pretends to reveal Shostakovich’s aura but instead, it reveals an
image of Shostakovich’s music that becomes ephemeral, ubiquitous,
insubstantial, available, valueless and free. In this sense, McBurney’s plead
for “the simple courtesy of giving Shostakovich credit for being and belonging
to himself” and his question “Can Shostakovich’s works simply not stand out
without what is supposed to lie behind them?”, it is revealed as a naïve and
childish argument.
In contraposition to McBurney’s
proposal, there is, yet, a need of producing a theory of Shostakovich music
that is useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of
art in mass culture; that, in the age of mechanical reproduction, and the
absence of traditional and ritualistic value, the production of music would be
inherently based upon the praxis of politics.
Neither the aestheticization of
Shostakovich’s music by MCBurney, nor the politicization of Shostakovich’s
music by Stalin and the West art intelligentsia, are the historical solution to
the disvalue of Shostakovich’s artwork. Contrary to McBurney’s assertion,
Shostakovich’s music should be listened in a way that, as Jacques Rancière
recalled, the political impact depends upon its aesthetic distance. Instead of
McBurney’s interest of paying attention to the notes themselves and to the way
they are composed, an aesthetic distance should be kept when listening to
Shostakovich music.
We are over and done with
aesthetic utopia, with a certain idea of artistic radicality and its capacity
to perform an absolute transformation of the conditions of collective
existence. This idea fuels the fallacious promises of social revolution and the
philosophical absolute. We should see Shostakovich as a resistant, between two
oppose conceptions of aesthetics: the politic of the becoming-life of art, and
the politics of the resistant form. The first identifies the forms of aesthetic
experience with the forms of constructing a new life in common. The second, by
contrast, encloses the political promise of aesthetic experience in art’s very
separation, in the resistance of its form to every transformation into a form
of life.
The purpose is to save
Shostakovich’s music from a twofold threat: from its transformation into a
metapolitical act (MCBurney) and from its assimiliation into the forms of
aestheticized life (Stalin and the West art intelligentsia). In this sense, the
Shostakovich’s music political potential is associated with its radical
separation from the forms of aestheticized ideological discourses. But this
potential does not reside in the simple solitude of the music work, but in the
purity of its internal contradiction, of the dissonance by which the music work
testifies to the non-reconciled world. Following Adorno's theory about Schopenhauer, the autonomy of Shostakovich’s work is
in fact a twofold heteronomy: in order to denounce the cruelty of the Soviet
regime, the work has to be even more mechanical, more inhuman. But, in its
turn, this inhumanity causes the stain of the repressed to appear thus
disturbing the autonomous work’s beautiful technical arrangement by recalling
that which founds it: the separation of work and enjoyment.
Bibliography:
Ranciere, Jacques; Aesthetics and its Discontents: https://folk.uib.no/hlils/TBLR-B/Ranc-AesthAs.pdf
McBurney; "Whose Shostakovich?" http://www.oocities.org/kuala_bear/articles/mcburney.html
Vulliamy, Ed; Lady Macbeth of Mtensk and the muddle surrounding Shostakovich's opera. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/sep/25/lady-macbeth-of-mtsensk-dmitri-shostakovich-opera-english-national
0 comentarios:
Publicar un comentario