Yet all the time Shostakovich was writing secret music 'for the drawer'. Some of it was musical lampoon, like Rayok, or The Peep Show, a cantata satire on the Zhdanov era, with music set to the pompous speeches of the Soviet leaders, which finally received its premiere in Washington in 1989.* More than any other artist, Shostakovich laughed (inside) to save his sanity: that was why he so loved the writings of Gogol and Zoshchenko. But most of the music which he composed at this time was deeply personal, especially that music with a Jewish theme. Shostakovich identified with the suffering of the Jews. To some extent he even assumed a Jewish identity - choosing to express himself as a composer in a Jewish idiom and incorporating Jewish melodies in his compositions. What Shostakovich liked about the music of the Jews, as he himself explained in a revealing interview, was its 'ability to build a jolly melody on sad intonations. Why does a man strike up a jolly song? Because he feels sad at heart.'198 But using Jewish music was a moral statement, too: it was the protest of an artist who had always been opposed to fascism in all its forms.
Shostakovich first used Jewish themes in the finale of the Second Piano Trio (1944), dedicated to his closest friend, the musicologist Ivan Sollertinsky, who had died in February 1944. It was composed just as the reports were coming in of the Red Army's capture of the Nazi death camps at Majdanek, Belzec and Treblinka. As Stalin
* It is not entirely clear when Shostakovich wrote Rayok. Sketches of it seem to date from 1948, but with the constant threat of a house search, it seems unlikely that he would have dared to compose the full score until after Stalin's death (see further M. Yakubov, 'Shostakovich's Anti-formalist Rayok: A History of the Work's Composition and Its Musical and Literary Sources', in R. Bartlett (ed.), Shostakovich in Context (Oxford, 1000), pp. 135-58).
initiated his own campaign against the Jews, Shostakovich voiced his protest by adopting Jewish themes in many of his works: the song cycle From Jewish Poetry (1948), courageously performed at private concerts in his flat at the height of the Doctors' Plot; the Thirteenth Symphony (1962), the 'Babi Yar' with its requiem, the words composed by the poet Yevtushenko, for the Jews of Kiev who were murdered by the Nazis in 1941; and virtually all the string quartets from No. 3 (in 1946) to the unforgettable No. 8 (in 1961). The official dedication of the Eighth Quartet was 'To the Victims of Fascism', but, as Shostakovich told his daughter, it was really 'dedicated to myself'.199 The Eighth Quartet was Shostakovich's musical autobiography - a tragic summing up of his whole life and the life of his nation in the Stalinist era. Throughout this intensely personal work, which is full of self-quotation, the same four notes recur (D-E flat-C-B) which, in the German system of musical notation, make up four letters of the composer's name (D-S-C-H). The four notes are like a dirge. They fall like tears. In the fourth and final movement the grief becomes unbearable as these four notes are symbolically combined with the workers' revolutionary funeral lament, 'Tortured by a Cruel Bondage', which Shostakovich sings here for himself.
<p>7</p>On 4 October 1957 the first beeps from space were heard as Sputnik I made its pioneering flight. A few weeks later, just in time for the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution, the dog Laika ventured into space in Sputnik II. With this one small step, it suddenly appeared that the Soviet Union had leaped ahead of the Western world in science and technology. Khrushchev made the most of the success, claiming that it heralded the triumph of the communist idea. The next year a red flag was planted on the surface of the moon, and then, in April 1961, Yury Gagarin became the first man to leave the earth's atmosphere.
The Soviet system was defined by its belief in science and technology. After 1945 the regime made a huge investment in the scientific establishment, promoting not just nuclear physics and other disciplines that
were useful to the military but academic sciences and mathematics, too. The state made science a top priority, elevating scientists to a status on a par with that of senior industrial managers and Party officials. The whole Marxist core of the system's ideology was an optimistic faith in the power of man's reason to banish human suffering and master the forces of the universe. The Soviet regime had been founded on the sort of futuristic visions imagined by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, whose writings were more popular in Russia than in any other country of the world. Wells was one of the first Western writers to visit Soviet Russia, in 1919, and even then, in the midst of the country's devastation from civil war, he found Lenin in the Kremlin dreaming about journeys into space.200
