Shostakovich, Kadaré and the nature of dissidence: an Albanian view

Musical Times, Spring 2005 by Koço, Eno

These difficulties for dissident authors continued over several decades. Interpretations after the event, with the benefit of hindsight, may today sound somewhat speculative; but in my experience this is how it really was. It remains difficult for a westerner to understand exactly what was going on in such an isolated society as Albania, or even in Russia, which has been far more reported upon. It is even more difficult to understand today the psychological complexity of the artists' minds in these circumstances, and how censorship operated in this highly restricted society. Censorship operated even in the family. You could not be sincere, from the political point of view, even with your wife and children. This is what Solomon Volkov tried to explain in Testimony.

The 'abstract', non-representational, aspect of music permits it to embody hidden agendas in a way impossible for visual and literary arts. There is always room in music for an intentionally ambiguous message, even when it has a programme. For example, in Romania, as in most of the former Soviet bloc, a Mozart Mass, even the Requiem, could not be performed because of its religious text. In order to have religious music performed, concert presenters changed the titles of the sections, replacing them with new socialist ones: instead of Gloria, 'Rejoice in the arrival of the partisans'; instead of Credo, 'The Party is our belief; instead of Agnus Dei, 'The happiness for the new-born lambs'.

The performance of Shostakovich's symphonies and their musical language

Shostakovich's life, with its a constant tension and risk, was reflected in his music. He struggled ceaselessly for this right to a real, rather than false, art. He suffered much and fought many battles; but he was never defeated in the sense that he had to abandon composition or reform and start again, within constraints, to create that sort of music which would have justified his intentions. The official critics often denounced him for 'formalism', a dangerous charge since this meant that the creator was seen to belong to a special category, unacceptably close to cosmopolitan, anti-nationalistic or decadent music. In 1948 Zhdanov, the head of the Communist Party Central Committee, brutally denounced Shostakovich for 'formalism'; the composer had to 'accept' the denunciation in front of the Soviet of Composers' members by making a humiliating response.

Already before the war Shostakovich had been criticised as formalist, and responded with self-criticism, notably in his Fifth Symphony. After the war he was expected to compose a significant work, celebrating the victory of 1945, but his Ninth Symphony disappointed in official Soviet circles, since it appeared high-spirited and did not to carry a heroic message. Again he had to face the old charge of 'formalism' or formalist deviation, and the Ninth was seen as a retreat from the march of historical events. The music critic Martin Dreyer, reviewing a performance of this symphony with the York Symphony Orchestra in 1995, stated that