The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes

Jim and I spent a week in New York last month. We stayed with his step-brother in Brooklyn. Jim’s brother had recently read this book and gave it to us because he had enjoyed it and knew that we were fans of classical music. The book is about Dimitri Shostakovich. I read it on the plane ride home.

It focus on three important and thematically related episodes in his life: three times that Shostakovich ran afoul of the state and had to compromise either his music or his principles, told as fiction.

The first episode begins in January 1936 after Stalin attends a performance of Shostakovich’s opera, Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk, and denounces it in the press. Although the opera had already been playing for two years and had been extremely popular both within Russia and internationally, suddenly he was an enemy of the state. Shostakovich is sure he will be exiled to Siberia. The novel opens with Shostakovich spending sleepless nights in the hallway in front of the elevator in his apartment building, positioning himself so that when he’s taken away his family will be spared. While he waits, he reminisces about his earlier life, so Barnes is able to include stories about his childhood, an early love affair, and his current marriage to Nita and their daughter Galina. After ten days, he feels the immediate threat had passed, and Shostakovich goes back to his normal life, although he withdraws his fourth symphony, realizing his next public music must be more to the conservative tastes of the current regime. Then after more than a year he is at last summoned to “the Big House.” An inspector named Zakrevsky asks Shostakovich about a friend named Marshal Tukhachevsky, a friend who had actually volunteered to write a letter to Stalin on Shostakovich’s behalf after the opera incident. Apparently Tukhachevsky has been swept up into a supposed plot to assassinate Stalin. The interview ends with instructions for Shostakovich to return in two days with his memory refreshed. But when Shostakovich returns, Zakrevsky himself is no longer there. Shostakovich never hears from him again and whoever replaced him at the Big House never follows up.

Episode two is a trip that Shostakovich makes at the behest of Stalin to New York City as part of a Soviet/United States peace initiative in 1948. Shostakovich is given a speech to read. He reads the beginning and then passes the text to his translator to read the rest. Thus he hears, in words attributed to him, a speech critical of his hero Stravinsky and colleague Prokofiev. After the speech, a journalist asks Shostakovich if personally subscribes to the opinions of his speech, and, of course, Shostakovich must humiliate himself by answering yes, though everyone knows it’s a lie.

The third, “conversation with power” as Barnes describes it, comes in 1960, when Shostakovich is appointed to be chairman of the Russian Federation Union of Composers. The position requires that Shostakovich officially join the Communist party, which he does, reluctantly, after delaying as long as he can.

On the architecture of these three incidents, Barnes hangs a biography of Shostakovich, but it’s a dissatisfying one. Barnes includes no description of Shostakovich’s life as a composer and no discussion of his music. Some of the titles of a few of his works are mentioned, but nothing of his creative process, or the style of his music, or the place of his work in musical history, his influences, his legacy. There’s no scenes of him actually composing, or doing the work of a professional musician: inspiration and commissions, securing performances, rehearsals, concerts, recordings, tours. His life story aside from music isn’t enough to justify a biography, so to mostly ignore the thing that makes Shostakovich interesting is bizarre. What Barnes does care about is the position of the individual negotiating a life against state power. Fair enough, but by painting Shostakovich as a victim of irrational power and leaving out Shostakovich’s genius he turns a hero of music into a coward. That’s not fair. Barnes is too critical of Shostakovich’s self-preservation strategies, and too dismissive of the real horror and danger he faced. And Shostakovich is only involved in this dilemma because the greatness of his art attracted Stalin’s attention. Stalin himself, personally called Shostakovich to invite/command him to attend the peace symposium in New York City. Stalin doesn’t waste his time with pathetic persons, and Shostakovich’s capitulation to Stalin’s command doesn’t make him so. If Shostakovich hadn’t been a great artist, power would have ignored him, and Barnes, too, for that matter. If Barnes wants a book about the tragic intersection of a great artist and a tyrannical power to leave out the art leaves out half the story.

Coincidentally, I had been thinking about Julian Barnes earlier in our week in New York. Jim and I had gone to the Met to see a show of John Singer Sergent paintings, including his painting, “Dr. Pozzi at Home.” I love the painting and some years ago had read a fascinating book about Dr. Pozzi, written by Julian Barnes called, The Man in the Red Coat. That book came out in 2019, three years after this one. I remarked to Jim that I was surprised they didn’t have the Dr. Pozzi book on sale in the museum gift shop, nor the book about another of Singer’s great portraits, also in the show, the book, I am Madame X, by Gioia Diliberto, which I had also read and enjoyed.