Gnome from Robert Frost

‘One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.’

Quote for the day… ah, Byron

Cervantes smiled Spain’s chivalry away;

A single laugh demolished the right arm

Of his own country;—seldom since that day

Has Spain had heroes. While Romance could charm,

The World gave ground before her bright array;

And therefore have his volumes done such harm,

That all their glory, as a composition,

Was dearly purchased by his land’s perdition.

—from Don Juan

DSCH’s Fifth Symphony: Meaning and Being

“A poem should not mean / But be,” writes Archibald MacLeish in his “Ars Poetica,” though these lines notoriously contradict themselves. The modernist response to music is certainly in this vein, and I am inclined to agree, with certain qualifications. If we read “meaning” as simplistic interpretation, as a kind of musical allegory, then our “interpretation” of music is destined to fall into ludicrous tautology.

Criticism of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony has been marked by such simplistic interpretations—from listeners who have heard Soviet orthodoxy and from romantic revisionists who have heard ironic dissidence. These polar readings began to appear almost immediately after the premiere in 1937 and have haunted the symphony ever since. The appearance of the apparently fraudulent Shostakovichian “memoir” Testimony in 1979 (a book supposedly dictated to, but likely mostly written by Solomon Volkov) provided fuel for problematic revision of the problematic orthodoxy. The supposed “Shostakovich” writes:

I think that it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in Boris Godunov. It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, “Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,” and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, “Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.” (183)

It is, of course, just as unclear what “happens” in the Fifth as it is unclear who wrote this passage. In the next Shostakovichian post, I will outline some of this history, and I will try to explain why we can’t escape or ignore it, but also why we should do our best to move beyond it.

Ich am of Irlonde

Time out from DSCH for a Middle English St. Patrick’s Day poem:

Ich am of Irlonde,
And of the holy londe
Of Irlonde.
Goode sire, praye ich thee,
For of sainte charitee,
Com and dance with me
In Irlonde.