It’s a general principle: if Barnes writes it, I will read it. He is on that short list of buy-it-whatever writers for me. However, on this occasion, it was as much the subject of his latest novel as its author which persuaded me I needed to lay hands on the book as soon as possible. The Noise of Time is about Russia’s greatest twentieth century composer, Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich (though he, by this account, would himself have awarded that accolade to Igor Stravinsky), and his tortured relationship with Soviet power.
Power, with a capital P, and its relationship with the man and his art, is the subject of Barnes’ slim latest novel. The book relates three episodes from Shostakovich’s life, each of them centring on a “conversation with Power”: one when he is a young man in the 1930s, though at that point already established as a leading composer in the Soviet Union, one from the early post-war period as he participates in a Soviet “peace delegation to New York, and one from later life, when he is cast in the role of Grand Old Man of Soviet music.
In all his encounters with Power, Shostakovich is forced to face the implications of being an artist in a totalitarian system. The first, in 1936 at the height of Stalin’s Great Terror, is sparked by the Dictator’s displeasure upon attending a performance of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Shostakovich’s only produced opera. Although the work had up to that point received favourable reactions, Stalin’s disapproval is manifest immediately in denunciations in Pravda for “formalism”, “cosmopolitanism” and all the usual litany of formulaic criticisms, normally sufficient to end a career, indeed even a life. When an article subsequently drops in the epithet “enemy of the people”, Shostakovich, understands how perilous his situation is and looks to help from influential friends. Whereafter his first “conversation with power”, a summons to the “Big House” in Leningrad, where a menacing NKVD apparatchik questions him about his circle of acquaintances and makes it abundantly clear that a second meeting, scheduled for two days later, is likely to be decisive. The composer’s escape is the result - or so it seems - of the arbitrariness typical of the Terror, and leaves him in a constant state of on-edge preparedness for the worst, and camped out in the hallway of his apartment block by the lift ready to be taken by his expected nocturnal nemesis, saving his family the trauma of watching him dragged from bed and home.
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| Buying tickets for the concert in wartime Leningrad |
His second direct encounter with power, in 1948, ironically after what for him is a wartime lull in the pressure, comes in the form of a phone call from none other than Josef Stalin himself, making it clear that he is required to join a high-level Soviet delegation on a propaganda visit to New York. This in spite of the fact that some of his music is still banned and he newly criticised for "formalist" tendencies. On this occasion, notwithstanding a musical triumph at the Carnegie Hall, the price to pay is utter public humiliation. The composer is required to make speeches, to read out texts, prepared for him by his political minders, including, most shamingly, a denunciation of the Russian emigre Igor Stravinsky, whom Shostakovich inwardly considers not only the greatest living musician, but also his personal muse. To heap humiliation on humiliation, he is obliged publicly repeatedly to affirm that the views expressed in his official speeches correspond entirely to his personal views, something he has no choice but to do.
The final episode is also about shame. It occurs in the supposedly more liberal times of Nikita Khrushchev, when the ever-hanging threat of the businesslike bullet to the back of the head has passed, but the demands of the Party over the souls of artists remain indisputable. On this occasion, Power dictates that Shostakovich must join the Party (something he had avoided through all the years of Stalin) and assume the role of Chairman of the Union of Soviet Composers. It is a shameful assimilation into the System, into a role which sees him sign endless turgid pontifications on Music and Politics without even reading them. Though now securely enthroned as the Great Soviet Composer, with dacha and chauffeur-driven car to prove it, the older Dmitri Dmitrievich is thoroughly trapped, co-opted, compromised.
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| Dmitri Shostakovich |
But for all the fear, humiliation and compromise, somehow the music survives. The elderly Shostakovich in the back of his ZIL does duly churn out the required bombastic music of the masses, notably in the form of film music, but on the quiet he is also composing his real music, the late masterpieces that are his string quartets. So indeed, the music does more than survive - it flourishes, it is magnificent, even if its composer does not partake of some romantic vision of samizdat music: “music is not like Chinese eggs: it does not improve by being kept underground for years and years.”
Barnes does a subtle job in The Noise of Time. He is a huge admirer of Shostakovich and of his music, but he does not spare him from a clear-sighted - his own clear-slighted - consciousness of his own weakness and compromise. The novel is essentially an internal monologue, a long process of the composer analysing how Power, and the fear it inspires in him, has compromised both his art and his soul. His Shostakovich repeatedly acknowledges his lack of courage, citing his failure to tell the truth when he could, his failure not to spout the anti-music inanities of Soviet political correctness when he did, his failure indeed to go through with the oft-considered idea of suicide. Nevertheless, there is an internal integrity in his self-awareness which preserves his capacity to produce some of the greatest music of the twentieth century.
Ultimately, this is an invitation not to judge, except possibly by the art itself. The American interlude makes this point well, as Shostakovich considers the often well-meaning westerners who make allowances, but still hope for something more heroic than what they find:
“There were those who understood a little better, who supported you, and yet at the same time were disappointed in you. Who did not grasp the one simple fact about the Soviet Union: that it was impossible to tell the truth here and live. Who imagined they knew how Power operated and wanted you to fight it as they believed they would do in your position. In other words, they wanted your blood.”
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| Julian Barnes |
Blood is not what Barnes’ Shostakovich is prepared to give, either his own or that of those close to him. But his “weakness”, his intelligent, understandable, self-aware weakness, nonetheless allows him to produce great art.
Did I like this book? Yes, very much. It was read in a day - much better than the bitty way I have otherwise read some of Barnes’ latest works - and really gave me the feeling of knowing the great composer’s life, superbly encapsulated in three brief episodes. Of course, this is fiction - though Barnes has drawn heavily on heavily researched biographies - but it left me feeling I understand better the tormented life of this modest man, and with an all-the-greater appreciation of his extraordinary music.
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