The noise of time

Review by New York Times Review

IT'S RISKY BUSINESS to speak for the dead. In the terrible case of Dmitri Shostakovich, the temptation is strong, because history, in the form of Stalin, didn't allow the composer to speak for himself. Of course, there's the music, but music is reticent about meaning - like a therapist, it prefers you draw your own conclusions. Shostakovich's music presents a particularly thorny nest of meanings and counter-meanings, with upsetting traps of tone. When I was 12 I fell under the spell of his Fifth Symphony, loving its triumphant, thrilling ending. Thirty years later, however, I re-encountered the piece, led by a young and intelligent conductor, who explained to all of us that this glorious ending was an artifact of Leonard Bernstein's intervention, and a betrayal of the real metronome marking and character, all of which was a defiant, ironic swipe at Stalin. He proceeded to conduct the ending half as fast, as though being hammered to death by D major, erasing all the joy I'd ever had from it. I trudged glumly from the concert hall. The triumph was fake, I understood that; the joy was enforced. But did I have to be as miserable as Shostakovich was? Was that the point of the music? It is brave of Julian Barnes to take on Shostakovich's puzzle, and his tragedy, in which so many people and factions have a stake. Barnes's short new novel, "The Noise of Time," doesn't just tell the composer's story; it presumes to channel him. Much of it is written in a Joycean interior monologue, like at the beginning, where the composer is standing by the elevator, waiting for Stalin's secret police to come to take him away: "Faces, names, memories. Cut peat weighing down his hand. Swedish water birds flickering above his head. Fields of sunflowers. The smell of carnation oil. The warm, sweet smell of Nita coming off the tennis court." It's lovely, but even at this moment you might wonder: Is this how a man thinks, in the throes of mortal fear for himself and for his family? Or does it sound a tad like a novelist contemplating a man contemplating these things? Shostakovich's musical voice is far more jittery and austere: uncanny, often maniacal, hollow. Either you accept Barnes's premise, and the resulting style, or you may find yourself dissatisfied, wishing for the narrator of "Notes From the Underground" to come and make everything feel more neurotic and Russian. Using this third-person "Shostakovich," but often switching into an unlocatable voice, like a biographer behind a literary veil, Barnes deftly covers three big episodes in the composer's life: denunciation in Pravda and subsequent implication in an assassination plot; his trip to America, where he is humiliated as a Soviet stooge; and lastly, being forced to join the Communist Party. This story is truly amazing, as Barnes knows, an are of human degradation without violence (the threat of violence, of course, everywhere). Barnes does wonderful work on the key scenes - a negotiation with Stalin, a meeting with a terrifying interrogator who misses the second session, having himself presumably vanished into Stalin's death machine - the whole Kafka madhouse brought to life. The narration is plain, the horror still plainer. Barnes focuses on Shostakovich's rage against the do-gooders, the Western Communist sympathizers: "He'd refused to meet Rolland, pretending to be ill. But Shaw was the worse of the two. Hunger in Russia? he had asked rhetorically. Nonsense, I've been fed as well as anywhere in the world. And it was he who said, ?You won't frighten me with the word ?dictator.'" But he also rages against the anticommunist sympathizers, those who believe they know what he is going through: "Those who understood a little better, who supported you, and yet at the same time were disappointed in you.... They wanted martyrs to prove the regime's wickedness- How many martyrs would it take to prove that the regime was truly, monstrously, carnivorously evil? More, always more.... What they didn't understand, these self-nominated friends, was how similar they were to Power itself: However much you gave, they wanted more." And so the author, whose novels include "The Sense of an Ending" and "Flaubert's Parrot," creates the impression of a man with rage in every direction, and very little affection - a man from whom affection has been surgically removed by fear, and by self-loathing at his own submission to it. It's a powerful portrait, and readers will have to decide whether they think this is "really" Shostakovich. I felt that he emerged as a (strangled) hero, but wished that Barnes would explain a little less, and show a bit more. As Shostakovich travels to America, "what he had not prepared himself for was that New York would turn out to be a place of the purest humiliation, and of moral shame." But this tidy synopsis blunts the ensuing scene: The composer Nicolas Nabokov grills him in front of everyone, forcing him to denounce Stravinsky, whom he deeply admires. Nabokov the comfortable exposer looks around the room "as if expecting applause," while Shostakovich the exposed is powerless to do anything but stand and suffer. Shostakovich was a connoisseur of false triumph, and this cruel moment of vain truth crushing pathetic impotence fits and explains his music perfectly. Eventually, this book becomes a meditation on the role of art. Narrative recedes, and the prose becomes hypnotic, circling obsessions. Many observations are beautiful, while some raise eyebrows. We come to the topic of the Borodin Quartet, and how it supposedly had two versions of a piece of his: one "strategic," for government consumption, and the other "authentic," speaking truth to power. But Shostakovich the narrator says: "It wasn't true - it couldn't be true - because you cannot lie in music. The Borodins could only play the Fourth Quartet in the way the composer intended. Music - good music, great music - had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical." The quote "you cannot lie in music" is not from Shostakovich but from Valentin Berlinsky, the cellist of the Borodin Quartet - a small lie concealed within the narrative-biographical fabric, speaking by proxy for the dead. And of course you can lie in music: Look at Mozart's "Cosí Fan Tutte," for instance, or even Verdi's "Falstaff" or any number of comic operas that depend on pretense. Music is fantastic at lying, and virtuosic in irony. In Shostakovich's case, the problem is mind-bending; the music is an intentional lie, which you must perform somehow truthfully. The phrase "the way the composer intended" is dangerous: Composers' intents often change, day to day or hour to hour. Since Shostakovich's story is well known and often told, Barnes's role here is less that of a novelist than of a musician: He is performing a canonical work, trying to give an Important Story a new life. He isn't aiming for a radical rewrite, but an interpretation, an act of devotion - as if Barnes himself has some personal connection in relation to the story, as if each artist shares in Shostakovich's guilt. In Barnes's novel, Shostakovich gradually descends into self-mockery, clinging to his music to save his reputation in some future time. One key element of Shostakovich's heroism is missing. Think of it: He is denounced in Pravda, he lives in fear for his own life, the life of his family, the lives of anyone who ever supported him or performed his music; he looks forward only to decades of cowering. In that impossible situation, he sits down and writes the Fifth Symphony, one of the greatest, most perfect works of the 20th century. He doesn't choke, he doesn't lose sight of his gifts - certainly one of the best narrative senses of any composer in history - even as he spends nights awake weeping, his nerves completely shot. He writes, and doesn't lose his voice. He toes the line of self-destruction without actually being destroyed. Barnes mostly sidesteps the difficult task of writing about Shostakovich's specifically musical accomplishments - perhaps understandable, but regrettable. His music is a tragedy, no question; but whose? It is tempting to wallow in the impossibility of Shostakovich's situation, and we should definitely empathize with the poor man, as Barnes has. But I recall vividly that when I first played the E minor Piano Trio and came to the slow movement opening, a series of loud chords, my chamber music teacher told me to think of each chord as a friend who is killed or marched off to a labor camp. At 20,1 didn't have much experience of death or labor camps, with the possible exception of my summer data-entry job, and I blinked back at him, a bit alarmed. But I tried in my sheltered American way to put myself in that place, and the chords came out darker and more shattering, and I felt myself trying to understand a whole different world of experience, people subject to arbitrary Power. And so it is: Shostakovich's music reaches out to express a world, to give warning, to memorialize the pointlessly murdered. The gloom may be unremitting, but it is not selfish. The whole Kafka madhouse is brought to life. The narration is plain, the horror still plainer. JEREMY DENK is a concert pianist. He writes the blog Think Denk.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 3, 2016]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Barnes' (Keeping an Eye Open, 2015) deeply complicated biographical novel is rich in depth, beautiful in prose, and stunning in nuance. As he imagines the Russian composer Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich, during the Soviet epoch under Lenin, Stalin, and, finally, Khrushchev, the grim atmosphere of the time is reflected in the inner world of his protagonist. Barnes follows Shostakovich on a winding chronology, offering a pervasive sense of that barbaric, horribly inhumane time. Achieving success early for his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Shostakovich is terrified when he finds out that Stalin, an oppressive shadow for him until 1936, has condemned his music. In compelling, chilly scenes, Barnes portrays Shostakovich waiting, with bag packed and cigarettes and alcohol in reserve, to be sent into exile in Siberia, or executed. Later, in a soul-shattering turn, Shostakovich is forced to sell out in the worst possible ways for an artist: They had promised to leave him alone. They never left him alone. Power continued speaking to him. Barnes uses irony to powerful effect in this frightening exploration of an artist living under constant fear and threat.--Eleveld, Mark Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Reviewed by Anthony Marra. Dmitry Shostakovich, the renowned Russian composer and subject of Barnes's magnificent biographical novel, purportedly declared near the end of his life, "The majority of my symphonies are tombstones." The Noise of Time, then, is a journey into the shadows of Shostakovich's personal cemetery, the Soviet Union at midcentury. We meet Shostakovich in 1936, at the onset of Stalin's Great Purge, as he stands by the hallway elevator each night, awaiting his imminent arrest. It's an absurd, desperate attempt to protect to his family by surrendering himself before the security forces reach his apartment. His opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk recently received a sharp rebuke in Pravda titled "Muddle Instead of Music," which may have been written by Stalin himself, because "there were enough grammatical errors to suggest the pen of one whose mistakes could never be corrected." In Stalin's Russia, where even the most abstract of the fine arts are potent political expressions, and where one's worth is determined by one's work, this sort of criticism can serve as a death sentence. Shostakovich barely avoids arrest, and we catch up with him every 11 or 12 years. In 1949, he returns from a disastrous trip to New York City as a Soviet delegate to the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace. In 1960, he is in the back of a chauffeured car, having committed moral suicide by becoming a party member. From these scenes of transition, the fragmented narrative delves into Shostakovich's public collusions with and private condemnations of Soviet power. He emerges as a sympathetic, frail, and tragic hero whose self-castigations are far harsher than any judgments the reader will pass. It's curious that a novel stretching across Shostakovich's life would largely omit his experiences in the Second World War, particularly his Seventh "Leningrad" Symphony, which must be among the most mythologized concert premieres of the 20th century. But Barnes is more interested in the political than practical realities of composing. By focusing on Shostakovich's compromises, rather than his compositions, The Noise of Time transcends the singular nature of artistic brilliance to become universal in its exploration of repression and resistance. "He had been as courageous as his nature allowed; but conscience was always there to insist that more courage could have been shown." This is as close to self-forgiveness as Barnes's Shostakovich comes. It's not hard to imagine the sentiment would be shared by anyone who has conceded a portion of his or her soul to totalitarianism in exchange for the right to survive. Novels about artistic achievement rarely do justice to their subjects. What, really, can Irving Stone tell us about Michelangelo's genius that the Sistine Chapel doesn't already amply demonstrate? The Noise of Time is that rarity. It is a novel of tremendous grace and power, giving voice to the complex and troubled man whose music outlasted the state that sought to silence him. (May) Anthony Marra is the author of The Tsar of Love and Techno and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (both from Hogarth). © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75), considered by many the greatest Soviet Russian composer, wrote much of his music under exceedingly trying conditions. He lived at a time when incurring the disfavor of Soviet leader Stalin could land even musicians and poets in the gulag or worse. In his new novel, Man Booker Prize winner Barnes (The Sense of an Ending) details how for years the artist slept with a packed suitcase beside him each night should he hear that knock on the door. The author addresses his subject not chronologically but by emphasizing certain themes in his life: his insecurities, his relations with women and his several marriages, and his never-ending run-ins with Power-Barnes's term for the Soviet establishment. Even when his reputation was reestablished after Stalin's death, Shostakovich continued to experience confrontations with a Communist party determined to use him for its own ends. Verdict Though his novel says comparatively little about Shostakovich's music, Barnes's fresh and distinctive approach to the composer's life highlights key aspects of his character and lets us believe we've read an actual biography. This engaging work is well recommended to readers of literary fiction as well as aficionados of Soviet culture and history. [See Prepub Alert, 2/21/16.]-Edward Cone, New York © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A fictional treatment of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) and his long history of humiliation and persecution under Soviet rule."Muddle instead of music," read the headline in Pravda after the 1936 performance of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Under Stalin's rule, this signified more than just a bad reviewit was a loudly broadcasted command to stick to the Communist Party line and, amid purges and gulags, tantamount to a death threat. This brief novel from the Man Booker Prize-winning Barnes (The Sense of an Ending, 2011, etc.) captures the cloud of fear the composer lived under until his death, regardless of whether he was in or out of favor with "Power" with a capital P. He delivered speeches he didn't write that made claims he didn't agree with, and he acceded to demands he allow a tutor to school him in Soviet doctrine, while laboring to compose music that wouldn't offend but still indulged his creative spirit. All of this took a toll on him, of course, and Barnes captures his subject's stress and dark humor with his signature grace. There's plenty of sharp imagery depicting Shostakovich's bind: "He swam in honours like a shrimp in shrimp-cocktail sauce" captures the putrescence of acclaim that's a function of politics; elsewhere, he conceives of life as "the cat that dragged the parrot downstairs by its tail; his head banged against every step." But this portrait also feels too restrained at times. While Barnes willingly gets into Shostakovich's head when it comes to his painful submission, he generally elides how he composed music under those circumstances. That softens the sense of artistic loss in a story that might have sent a stronger signal about what happens to creativity in repressive circumstances. A moody, muted composition about art under the thumb of tyranny. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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And so, it had all begun, very precisely, on the morning of the 28th of January 1936, in Arkhangelsk. He had been invited to perform his first piano concerto with the local orchestra under Viktor Kubatsky; the two of them had also played his new cello sonata. It had gone well. The next morning he went to the railway station to buy a copy of Pravda. He had looked at the front page briefly, then turned to the next two. It was, as he would later put it, the most memorable day of his life. And a date he chose to mark each year until his death. Except that--as his mind obstinately argued back--nothing ever begins as precisely as that. It began in different places, and in different minds. The true starting point might have been his own fame. Or his opera. Or it might have been Stalin, who, being infallible, was therefore responsible for everything. Or it could have been caused by something as simple as the layout of an orchestra. Indeed, that might finally be the best way of looking at it: a composer first denounced and humiliated, later arrested and shot, all because of the layout of an orchestra. If it all began elsewhere, and in the minds of others, then perhaps he could blame Shakespeare, for having written Macbeth. Or Leskov for Russifying it into Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. No, none of that. It was, self-evidently, his own fault for having written the piece that offended. It was his opera's fault for being such a success--at home and abroad--it had aroused the curiosity of the Kremlin. It was Stalin's fault because he would have inspired and approved the Pravda editorial--perhaps even written it himself: there were enough grammatical errors to suggest the pen of one whose mistakes could never be corrected. It was also Stalin's fault for imagining himself a patron and connoisseur of the arts in the first place. He was known never to miss a performance of Boris Godunov at the Bolshoi. He was almost as keen on Prince Igor and Rimsky-Korsakov's Sadko. Why should Stalin not want to hear this acclaimed new opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk ? And so, the composer was instructed to attend a performance of his own work on the 26th of January 1936. Comrade Stalin would be there; also Comrades Molotov, Mikoyan and Zhdanov. They took their places in the government box. Which had the misfortune to be situated immediately above the percussion and the brass. Sections which in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk were not scored to behave in a modest and self-effacing fashion. He remembered looking across from the director's box, where he was seated, to the government box. Stalin was hidden behind a small curtain, an absent presence to whom the other distinguished comrades would sycophantically turn, knowing that they were themselves observed. Given the occasion, both conductor and orchestra were understandably nervous. In the entr'acte before Katerina's wedding, the woodwind and brass suddenly took it upon themselves to play more loudly than he had scored. And then it was like a virus spreading through each section. If the conductor noticed, he was powerless. Louder and louder the orchestra became; and every time the percussion and brass roared fortissimo beneath them--loud enough to knock out windowpanes--Comrades Mikoyan and Zhdanov would shudder theatrically, turn to the figure behind the curtain and make some mocking remark. When the audience looked up to the government box at the start of the fourth act, they saw that it had been vacated. After the performance, he had collected his briefcase and gone straight to the Northern Station to catch the train for Arkhangelsk. He remembered thinking that the government box had been specially reinforced with steel plates, to protect its occupants against assassination. But that there was no such cladding to the director's box. He was not yet thirty, and his wife was five months pregnant at the time.   1936: he had always been superstitious about leap years. Like many people, he believed that they brought bad luck. # Those who did not know him, and who followed music only from a distance, probably imagined that this had been his first setback. That the brilliant nineteen-year-old whose First Symphony was quickly taken up by Bruno Walter, then by Toscanini and Klemperer, had known nothing but a clear, clean decade of success since that premiere in 1926. And such people, perhaps aware that fame often leads to vanity and self-importance, might open their Pravda and agree that composers could easily stray from writing the kind of music people wanted to hear. And further, since all composers were employed by the state, that it was the state's duty, if they offended, to intervene and draw them back into greater harmony with their audience. This sounded entirely reasonable, didn't it? Except that they had practised sharpening their claws on his soul from the beginning: while he was still at the Conservatoire a group of Leftist fellow students had tried to have him dismissed and his stipend removed. Except that the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians and similar cultural organisations had campaigned from their inception against what he stood for; or rather, what they thought he stood for. They were determined to break the bourgeois stranglehold on the arts. So workers must be trained to become composers, and all music must be instantly comprehensible and pleasing to the masses. Tchaikovsky was decadent, and the slightest experimentation condemned as "formalism." Except that as early as 1929 he had been officially denounced, told that his music was "straying from the main road of Soviet art," and sacked from his post at the Choreographic Technical College. Except that in the same year Misha Kvadri, the dedicatee of his First Symphony, became the first of his friends and associates to be arrested and shot. Except that in 1932, when the Party dissolved the independent organisations and took charge of all cultural matters, this had resulted not in a taming of arrogance, bigotry and ignorance, rather in a systematic concentration of them. And if the plan to take a worker from the coal face and turn him into a composer of symphonies did not exactly come to pass, something of the reverse happened. A composer was expected to increase his output just as a coal miner was, and his music was expected to warm hearts just as a miner's coal warmed bodies. Bureaucrats assessed musical output as they did other categories of output; there were established norms, and deviations from those norms.   #   At Arkhangelsk railway station, opening Pravda with chilled fingers, he had found on page three a headline identifying and condemning deviance: muddle instead of music. He determined at once to return home via Moscow, where he would seek advice. On the train, as the frozen landscape passed, he reread the article for the fifth and sixth times. Initially, he had been shocked as much for his opera as for himself: after such a denunciation, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk could not possibly continue at the Bolshoi. For the last two years, it had been applauded everywhere--from New York to Cleveland, from Sweden to Argentina. In Moscow and Leningrad, it had pleased not just the public and the critics, but also the political commissars. At the time of the 17th Party Congress its performances had been listed as part of the Moscow district's official output, which aimed to compete with the production quotas of the Donbass coal miners. All this meant nothing now: his opera was to be put down like a yapping dog which had suddenly displeased its master. He tried to analyse the different elements of the attack as clearheadedly as possible. First, his opera's very success, especially abroad, was turned against it. Only a few months before, Pravda had patriotically reported the work's American premiere at the Metropolitan Opera. Now the same paper knew that Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had only succeeded outside the Soviet Union because it was "non-political and confusing," and because it "tickled the perverted taste of the bourgeois with its fidgety, neurotic music." Next, and linked to this, was what he thought of as government-box criticism, an articulation of those smirks and yawns and sycophantic turnings towards the hidden Stalin. So he read how his music "quacks and grunts and growls"; how its "nervous, convulsive and spasmodic" nature derived from jazz; how it replaced singing with "shrieking." The opera had clearly been scribbled down in order to please the "effete," who had lost all "wholesome taste" for music, preferring "a confused stream of sound." As for the libretto, it deliberately concentrated on the most sordid parts of Leskov's tale: the result was "coarse, primitive and vulgar." But his sins were political as well. So the anonymous analysis by someone who knew as much about music as a pig knows about oranges was decorated with those familiar, vinegar-soaked labels. Petit-bourgeois, formalist, Meyerholdist, Leftist. The composer had written not an opera but an anti-opera, with music deliberately turned inside out. He had drunk from the same poisoned source which produced "Leftist distortion in painting, poetry, teaching and science." In case it needed spelling out--and it always did--Leftism was contrasted with "real art, real science and real literature." "Those that have ears will hear," he always liked to say. But even the stone deaf couldn't fail to hear what "Muddle Instead of Music" was saying, and guess its likely consequences. There were three phrases which aimed not just at his theoretical misguidedness but at his very person. "The composer apparently never considered the problem of what the Soviet audience looks for and expects in music." That was enough to take away his membership in the Union of Composers. "The dan­ger of this trend to Soviet music is clear." That was enough to take away his ability to compose and perform. And finally: "It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly." That was enough to take away his life. Excerpted from The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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