Tuesday, January 25, 2005
(5:12 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Shostakovich and related matters
Doubtless this is why, according to Nestyev, Stalin unexpectedly phoned Shostakovich in 1949, asking him to travel to the United States as a delegate to the Congress for World Peace. Stalin said: ‘We have criticized you, but we criticized you because we love you.’Lars Iyer has a lengthy and rich post on the great Soviet composer. His tenth symphony has long been one of my favorite pieces; hearing it performed live, even by a somewhat amateurish orchestra in Oxford's Sheldonian Theater was one of the highlights of my college career -- perhaps because a certain amateurish pianist had performed a movement from one of his concertos for Olivet Nazarene Univerisity's prestigious Commencement Concert.
A recent post at our sister site prompts a reflection -- I do care about the life of Shostakovich, about his ambiguous relationship about the Soviet state, about what it must mean to be loved by Stalin. But as regards the work itself: I was playing Concerto #3 and listening to Symphony #10 before I ever knew that Shostakovich had any kind of relationship with Stalin. Was my enjoyment lessened? I don't know how it could have been greater. And what about the fact that I've focussed on such a small portion of the works of this great composer? How far does one go with pursuing the "complete works" before one is guilty of indulging the biographical fallacy? Certainly someone who has closely studied the complete works of Shostakovich in detail knows many things that I don't know -- but at bottom, does that person know more than I know about Symphony #10? What if she knows all about music theory and appreciates the structure of the work in a way that I can't -- is that better than knowing the symphony through and through, so that one could almost write it out on sheet music given a piano and sufficient time?
Does the appreciation of art as such entail anything other than a surrendering of all our general knowledge to the singular truth of the work of art? Perhaps the scholar's knowledge of the art work really is richer, but richer in a negative way -- he knows in greater detail all that he is sacrificing to the singularity of the work. All of this does sound a bit "theological," as Amardeep says (in the context of a very interesting conversation between himself and Dan Green to which I should have linked much earlier -- you can work your way through it by following Amardeep's link).
In other news, the working title for my Badiou/Wesley paper is close to being changed from "Smoke and Mirrors." Reading this sermon was really encouraging.
See, that last sentence was exactly what I was worried about -- "sounding like" some kind of pietist, even while I'm (ostensibly) talking about something radically different from that agenda.
