There are some people – my late partner Janet was one – who believe that no decent music has been composed in the 20th and 21st centuries. The preferred period, apropos of music, for such sceptics, luddites, or whatever you might like to call them, is the 19th century, in which Beethoven, Schubert, et al, held sway.
Without wishing to denigrate Beethoven, Schubert, et al, in any way – how could I, who loves the Diabelli Variations, the Mass in D, the string quartets, etc., etc., of Beethoven, and the beautiful songs of Schubert? – I insist that the music of Bartok, Prokofiev, and Shostakovitch in the 20th century must be considered meritorious. Not to mention the entire body of jazz. For example, I am particularly enamoured of opus 87 by Dimitri Shostakovitch: the remarkable 24 preludes and fugues, written for piano, and preferably played by Tatiana Nikolayeva, whom, I believe, had some considerable input into their creation.
J S Bach, a handful of centuries earlier, had developed this form in his Well Tempered Clavier, Books I and II, and now Shostakovitch, the same handful of centuries later, decided he wanted to emulate the form. Like Bach, he composed one prelude and associated fugue for each of the twelve key signatures of the chromatic scale, in both major and minor mode. And as with Bach, each of these 48 pieces is a stand-alone composition, so you can dip into the lengthy series at will and take them in any order you prefer. Nevertheless, it can be salutary to hear the entire set in one sitting. Whatever you choose to do, listening to them will likely be a hypnotic and transcendental experience for you, as it was/is for me.
For those of you who have come across Shostakovitch’s declamatory symphonies and other works in the same strident vein, these preludes and fugues may seem totally out of character. But who can say what ‘character’ means in consideration of a tortured soul like Shostakovitch, pushed around mercilessly as he was by the Soviet regime, and facing the prospect of the gulag at every turn.
So, what is the exclusive ‘character’ that these pieces of Shostakovitch confer on a listener such as me? A mesmeric mindfulness, an inner sense of peace and harmony, a reassurance that all is right with the world, a nod to the best of modern jazz. Would that all music had the propensity to affect its listeners in this way. You can see why I favour these pieces over all other music conceived in the turbulent twentieth century. And certainly they have the capacity to travel deep into the no less turbulent twenty-first. They are gems, minor miracles. No: major miracles. If J S Bach could hear them now, I believe he would be astonished at the degree of inventiveness that has gone into a musical form that had its origins, centuries earlier, with him.
You will do yourself a favour by listening to these pieces by Shostakovitch and, preferably to their inspired interpretation by Tatiana Nikolayeva.
The illustration at the top of this blog is from the CD sleeve by Hyperion. It is a reproduction of a sketch by Alexandre Benois originally intended to accompany an edition of the extended poem The Bronze Horseman by Alexander Pushkin, in which the iconic statue comes alive and runs amok in the city of St Petersburg. A similar episode is depicted in Andrei Bely’s novel Petersburg.
Please do not allow Russian culture to be tarred with the same brush as – justifiably – is that murderous demagogue, Vladimir Putin. This culture is impressive by any standards, boasting (for example and apropos of this current blog) the composer Shostakovitch, the pianist Nikolayeva, the writers Pushkin and Bely, the illustrator Benois, and the sculpture of The Bronze Horseman itself which stands proud (and immobile!) in St Petersburg. And these are just drops in the ocean, an ocean replete with Tolstoys, Rachmaninovs, Richters, and Repins.
This is a culture that will still be thriving after Putin is long gone.