Julian Barnes - The Noise of Time

They had met twice during the course of the exile’s visit. Neither occasion had been a success. He himself was as apprehensive and self-conscious as Stravinsky was bold and self-assured. What could they possibly have to say to one another? So he had asked,

‘What do you think of Puccini?’

‘I loathe him,’ Stravinsky had replied.

To which he had answered, ‘So do I.’

Did either of them mean it — mean it as absolutely as they had spoken? Probably not. One was being instinctively dominant, the other instinctively submissive. That was the trouble with ‘historic meetings’.

He had also had a ‘historic meeting’ with Akhmatova. He had invited her to visit him at Repino. She came. He sat in silence; so did she; after twenty such minutes, she rose and left. She said afterwards, ‘It was wonderful.’

There was much to be said for silence, that place where words run out and music begins; also, where music runs out. He sometimes compared his situation with that of Sibelius, who wrote nothing in the last third of his life, instead merely sat there embodying the Glory of the Finnish People. This was not a bad way to exist; but he doubted he had the strength for silence.

Sibelius had apparently been full of dissatisfaction and self-contempt. It was said that the day he burnt all his surviving manuscripts he felt a weight lifted from his shoulders. That made sense. As did the connection between self-contempt and alcohol, the one inciting the other. He knew that connection, that incitement all too well.

There was a different version of Akhmatova’s visit to Repino going the rounds. In this, her report went: ‘We talked for twenty minutes. It was wonderful.’ If she’d actually said that, she was fantasising. But that was the trouble with ‘historic meetings’. What was posterity to believe? Sometimes, he thought that there was a different version of everything.

When he and Stravinsky had discussed conducting, he had confessed: ‘I do not know how not to be afraid.’ At the time, he thought he was only talking about conducting. Now, he was not so sure.

He was no longer afraid of being killed — that was true, and should have been an advantage. He knew he would be allowed to live, and receive the best medical attention. But, in a way, that was worse. Because it is always possible to bring the living to a lower point. You cannot say that of the dead.

He had gone to Helsinki to receive the Sibelius Prize. In the same year, simply between the months of May and October, he had been made a member of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in Paris, an honorary doctor of Oxford University, and a member of the Royal Academy of Music in London. He swam in honours like a shrimp in shrimp-cocktail sauce. In Oxford, he met Poulenc, who was also receiving an honorary degree. They were shown a piano which had apparently once belonged to Fauré. Respectfully, each had played a few chords.

Such occasions would have given a normal man great pleasure, and be received as the sweet and merited consolations of age. But he was not a normal man; and as they showered him with honours, they also stuffed him with vegetables. How cunningly different their attacks on him now were. They came with a smile, and several glasses of vodka, and sympathetic jokes about giving the First Secretary bellyache, and then the flattery, and the wheedling, and the silences and the expectations … and sometimes he was drunk, and sometimes he hadn’t really known what was happening until he got home, or went to the apartment of a friend, where he might collapse in tears and sobs and cries of self-loathing. It had got to the point where he despised being the person he was, on an almost daily basis. He should have died years ago.

Also, they had killed Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk a second time. It had been banned for twenty years, since the day Molotov, Mikoyan and Zhdanov had chortled and sneered away while Stalin skulked behind a curtain. With Stalin and Zhdanov dead, and the Thaw declared, he had revised the opera with the help of Glikman, his friend and helpmeet since the early Thirties. Glikman, who had sat beside him the day he pasted ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ into his scrapbook. Their new version went to the Leningrad Maly Theatre, who applied for permission to stage it. But the process stalled, and he was advised that the best hope of accelerating it was for the composer himself to write a letter petitioning the First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. Which was of course humiliating, because the First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR was none other than Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov.

Still, he wrote the letter, and the Ministry of Culture appointed a committee to examine this new version. As a gesture of respect to the nation’s most distinguished composer, the committee would come to his apartment on the Mozhaiskoye Highway. Glikman was there, as were the director of the Maly Theatre and its orchestra’s conductor. The committee itself consisted of the composers Kabalevsky and Chulaki, the musicologist Khubov and the conductor Tselikovsky. He had been very nervous before their arrival. He handed them typed copies of the libretto. Then he played through the entire opera, singing all the parts, while Maxim sat at his elbow and turned the score.

There had been a pause, which extended into an awkward silence, and then the committee began its work. Twenty years had passed, and they were not four men of power sitting in a bulletproof box; instead, they were four men of music — sophisticated men with no blood on their hands — sitting in the apartment of a fellow musician. And yet it was as if nothing had changed. They compared what they had heard with what had been written two decades previously, and found it just as wanting. They argued that since ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ had never been officially withdrawn, its tenets were still applicable. One of them being that his music hooted and quacked and grunted and gasped for breath. Glikman had tried to argue but was shouted down by Khubov. Kabalevsky praised certain sections of the work while asserting that as a whole it was morally reprehensible because it justified the actions of a murderess and whore. The two from the Maly Theatre were silent; he himself sat on the sofa with his eyes closed, listening to the committee members seek to outdo one another in abuse.

They voted unanimously not to recommend the opera’s revival because of its glaring artistic and ideological faults. Kabalevsky, seeking to ingratiate, had said to him,

‘Mitya, why the hurry? The time for your opera has not yet come.’

Nor, it seemed to him, would it ever now come. He had thanked the committee for their ‘critique’, and then gone with Glikman to the private room of the Aragvi restaurant, where they had got very drunk. That was one of the few advantages he found in age: he no longer collapsed after a couple of glasses. He could go on getting drunk all night if he so wished.

Diaghilev was always trying to persuade Rimsky-Korsakov to come to Paris. The composer kept on refusing. Eventually, the lordly impresario came up with a stratagem which effectively compelled the composer’s presence. A resigned Korsakov sent a postcard which read: ‘If we’re going, then let’s go, as the parrot said to the cat which was dragging it downstairs by the tail.’

Yes, that was what his life had often felt like. And his head had been bumped on far too many steps.

He had always been a meticulous man. He visited the barber every two months and the dentist just as often — being as anxious as he was meticulous. He was always washing his hands; he emptied ashtrays as soon as he saw two stubs in them. He liked to know that things were working properly: water, electricity, plumbing. His calendar was marked with the birthdays of family, friends and colleagues, and there would always be a card or a telegram for those on the list. When visiting his dacha outside Moscow, his first action was always to send himself a postcard to check the reliability of the mail. If this at times became a slight mania, it was a necessary one. If the wider world becomes uncontrollable, you must make sure to control what areas you can. However tiny they might be.