Shostakovich
The first time I heard Shostakovich’s fifth symphony I was in college, at the end of a typical afternoon drinking coffee and smoking a joint at my friend Mike’s apartment, talking about “the vivid and continuous dream” of fiction. “It’s like the ‘Three Days’ of classical music,” he said, putting on the record, knowing I had no choice but to give it my attention. No doubt my mind wandered while we listened—graduation was coming soon—but I remember the sense I had of what it was like to listen, the sense of the music changing as it was being heard, of something uncontained taking shape. I didn’t hear the symphony again until a few years later, when I was taken by a girl I knew from high school and her parents to Lincoln Center. I had no memory of the music itself, only Mike’s words, but this time a new thought repeated itself: this is the work of a man paying tribute to an idea he once found beautiful but now knows to be terrible. Either the idea was corrupt from the beginning or the world is so corrupt at its core that anything released into it is inevitably ruined. That’s not what we talked about afterward at dinner, and that girl and I don’t speak anymore either. It was only much later that I read Shostakovich’s defense of the symphony’s exuberance, written as it was to restore his standing with the regime: “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.’ ” And yet the largo is almost impossibly sad, the emotion of having gone beyond the breaking point. When you grow up in the shadow of a failed idea, the grain of every idea is failure.