America first, foretold in a Russian’s fifth
Sunday musical excursion #27
Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Injustice is exhausting. I don’t know about you, but this week has been an exhausting week. Some commentators have come out with reasoned objections to what’s happened—presidentially, in America, in South Korea, in many places where it takes no time at all to hear of injustice, or even in some places where injustice lies long hidden before being uncovered, like in Gaza, or in Turkey, at a badly operated ski hotel or a badly built apartment block. Others have ranted with invective. Some have remained silent, and some have already packed up and left.
I’m still here, but I’m not you-know-where. Trying to make sense where sense there is to be made, and trying to see reason, where reason can be discerned. And, as ever, drawing the links that I think present themselves—to add to my endless chain, if to no one else’s.
A fellow Substacker has already beaten me to expressing a thought that crossed my mind this week: BDS. It’s a policy that has been advocated for the past 15 months, if not the past however many years, against Israel by the Palestinians, modelled on the anti-apartheid movement that opposed pre-liberation South Africa. It means boycott, divestment and sanctions.
If you’re anything like me, you’ll need to think hard about the ways in which you might even consider boycotting Israel. Oranges, I suppose. With the US, the products and services that we procure from there are somewhat broader in scope. Microsoft. Apple. Google. (For all that—Substack, even.) If you use the Internet at all, then you use US services. Amazon, the great emporium of the world (not to forget the now pardoned Silk Road Darknet site, if guns and drugs are your penchant). How do you fancy divesting yourself of all that American capital?—get rid of your Tesla car, refuse oranges, not only from Jaffa but also from Florida. Be sure your fashion brands have no Yankee connection. Even Spain’s Balenciaga and its links to Ye come in for questioning. If you had to expunge every last American connection from your life, where would you even start? Not going to the cinema?
Perhaps you think America is not your enemy. I wonder if your view will change when America invades Panama, Greenland, or Canada. What America does with your data is not that far removed from what Russia does with it, as Mr Snowden and Mr Assange only too well know. Where, on your moral compass, will the US stand for the next four years? (That’s even if Trump doesn’t usurp his duty to vacate office in 2029.) If sanctioning the US for being a regime contrary to your moral standing doesn’t wash with you, because so many Americans didn’t vote for Mr Trump, why does sanctioning Iran or Russia wash with you, many of whose citizens also didn’t vote for their regimes? They did? Much more than didn’t vote for Trump? Right, so it depends on numbers? Sanctions that hurt, hurt everyone, precisely in order to encourage a change of regime. That’s what those who didn’t vote for Trump want, though, isn’t it? A change of regime?
If your answer is to say They’re really not all that bad, I don’t need to boycott American business, then let me point this out to you: it is precisely American business that has put the economics of Friedrich Hayek, neoliberalism and Mr Trump where they are, and has secured American business’s place where it is, right beside the president—just down the corridor, in fact. If you’re American, perhaps you don’t have any grumble with your local coffee shop or bookstore, but even benign corporations are slowly changing their DEI policies, their outreach to social minorities, their anti-corruption policies. That said, if you live in America, boycotting America is not really an option.
Is it?
Boycotting any country’s services and goods is hit and miss at best, but what you can do is look to see who, you reckon, will end up profiting from your purchase. If it’s a major US corporation that has bought into Trumpism, then look for an alternative supplied by a minor American, Asian, or European corporation. Or even African. Much of American business is where it is, right alongside the US government, because it has abused its market positions. The tariffs now proposed on foreign goods are an intensification of that abuse: to oblige Americans to buy American. US business’s leaders have engaged in insider trading for decades, companies have been fined for infringements of the rules and carried on regardless, they appeal and litigate not to assert legal rights but to cow opposition into submission. Now their government has declared that it will deregulate them, and pursue those officials whose job it is to pursue them for unlawful trading activity. If you like being abused, then BDS is not for you; BDSM is. If you don’t, now, if at no time before, is the moment to push back. Buy less oranges.
This week’s musical excursion—and, my apologies, the first in several weeks—seeks to encapsulate a little of how I feel in my exhaustion after one entire week of Trump Administration II.
[EDIT: Perhaps I should just explain before you go any further, I have disabled comments. Not because I think anyone will flame me, but with the intention of driving the point home. Normally, I allow comments, and very few people do comment. This time, because of the subject matter, I have disabled comments. So you can’t comment, even if you wanted to. Even if you were bursting to comment, you can’t. That’s what this whole article is about.]
For it, I want to take you back to 1937, to the Soviet Union. To a country and a time not vastly different, in terms of the pall hanging over it, from the United States of America in 2025. The storming, not of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., but of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, soon to be renamed Leningrad (just as the Gulf of Mexico is destined to be renamed the Gulf of America), had ushered in an age of upheaval, which became extended to the cultural sphere with the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, and the ascent of Joseph Stalin. Theatre directors, authors, poets, actors, musicians, composers found themselves hanging by a tenuous thread: those whose creative work supported the Revolution were morally safe; those whose works did not were destined for the gulag. We shall yet perhaps see in how far such a fate mirrors that faced by cultural icons of today as the Trump administration progresses.
One composer who had fared reasonably well in the years since the Revolution (which occurred when he was but 11 years of age, though he started composing at age eight) was Dimitri Shostakovich. He had successfully ridden the waves of Bolshevism by contributing stirring musical soundtracks and playful piano accompaniments to films and propaganda put out by the comedians on the Council of Commissars, and in Hollywood. Then, one day, he awoke to read a scathing criticism of his work in Pravda. He had survived till then because of Joseph Stalin’s liking for his theme song to the film Counterplan, which had become a national number-one hit. Unfortunately, Stalin’s views of another of Shostakovich’s works, the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, proved less favourable: it’s not good when the Supreme Leader leaves at the interval. Thus arose the deadly crisis. The threat of his disappearance changed Dimitri Shostakovich overnight. And it changed the nature of his music. He sat down at his piano and composed his answer to the criticism: his fifth symphony.
Of all the prior composers who had been expunged from the Soviet playlist, one alone had survived, himself a radical and a revolutionary: Ludwig van Beethoven. And so it was to Beethoven that Shostakovich turned for his new work. It would begin with the triumphant ta-da of the German Meister’s ninth. At least the first two bars would. By the third, something more sinister would happen.
The general consensus in today’s world is that Shostakovich divined a very clever means of telling the Soviet apparatchiks up yours while flattering them with everything they revered in modern Russian music. It was a coup de maître. Of course, Shostakovich could reveal nothing of his subliminal intent. To have done so could have meant his death. So, throughout the fifth symphony, there is as good as no emotional expression marked in the score, except it be to tell the players to play expressively.
His opening phrase, after paying homage to Beethoven, suddenly halts, with a motif comprising three notes. A dead end. Sans issue. Kein Durchgang. Net prokhoda. Shostakovich’s response to the scathing criticism was: assertiveness, doubt, and then a dead end. It’s a motif that permeates the symphony. But what does it mean? For to posit that it meant nothing is to know nothing about the 1930s Soviet Union: an era of deadly repression, in which one tenth of the entire population was subjected to interrogation during Stalin’s terror. In which, what you felt and what you wanted to say were the last things you could express, for fear of the recriminations that would descend from the powers that be. Reverend Budde has already experienced the like in today’s America.
Shostakovich moves from his dead end into a folk song. A country ballad, a wander down a sunlit lane. And, in doing so, he sours just one or two of the notes, and gives us melancholy. No longer a sunlit lane, but a dour, snow-bedecked square in Moscow. It’s redolent of the kind of tune that Erik Satie composed just a few years previously, that gives us that bittersweet, Impressionistic image of Belle Epoque Paris.
Later in the movement, the orchestra becomes a military band, in much the same way as Tchaikovsky works with the wind sections in his militaristic show-piece: the 1812 Overture. Shostakovich leaves us in no doubt: the addition of a snare drum is an almost compulsory accompaniment to any footage you see of World War I trenches (of which I always think when hearing Mahler’s Sixth Symphony), and it dominates here, too. What could the man do after that, but burst out into tears: the orchestra revisits its, previously, separate themes and pounds them out in a monotone lament that ends again in his dead end motif.
How has it all come to this? How can we continue? Listen to Shostakovich, because he offers hope as well as denouncing reality. In the second movement he takes a poke at Gustav Mahler with an ice-dance waltz. It’s a homage, in fact, but the mood definitely changes in this scherzo. Dainty pirouettes swap places with clumsy, crude flatulence: bassoons as farting old men, and toy soldiers on parade. But how much of it is playfulness and how much of it is taunting?
In the third movement, Shostakovich reflects on his parlous state. He thinks upon those for whom black cars would arrive at their homes in the middle of the night and whisk them away into oblivion, a fate he so feared himself. It is certainly an elegy, but to whom? Perhaps to the crumbling resistance of the church, perhaps to the friends and colleagues who’d ended up in Siberia, perhaps to those who’d welcomed the Revolution so vociferously, and so soundly had their hopes so dashed. In its almost religious style, the movement comprises plaints and responses that have no direct equivalent in sacred music, except in terms of the mood they create, as a surrogate for a church that was being emasculated by Stalin—oh, Ms Budde, where are you? The oboe expresses the pained response. And, with the rest of the orchestra in chorus, another dead end is reached, exhausted—a musical box wound down to its last turn. The harp lifts our hearts before the strings finish in a benediction that suggests Maybe it’ll be all right. Maybe.
Of course, people were not idiots. They understood the sentiments of the fifth’s first movement hesitations, the second movement’s playfulness, the third movement’s elegy. But it would be the fourth movement that rang in their ears when the concert ended, and it would dictate whether they clapped or condemned. Its ebullient start ebbs into a reflective section, which slowly gives way, not to the victorious march we expect in a symphony such as from the pen of Tchaikovsky (the fourth movement of the sixth), Mahler (the last movement of his fifth) or Mussorgsky (The Great Gate of Kiev). No, Shostakovich serves us up a slow march, which only with difficulty, such painful difficulty, painfully painful difficulty, achieves its resolution in the major key. But boy, when it does, it takes your breath away: replete with sour notes and minor keys, B flat drawing us to the reality that this construct of happiness is naught but a flimsy lie. A heinous lie, against which the timpani repeatedly hammer out their protest, prevailing, at last, in their dominance on the final notes. That’s protest, and make no mistake: it could’ve cost the man his life.
Serious, profound, urgent, deeply felt. As in 1937, as in 2025. We know Shostakovich didn’t exaggerate. I hope that I do.