Powers, Richard - Orfeo

From the first minute, the listener is shocked by deliberate dissonance, by a confused stream of sound. Snatches of melody, embryos of musical phrases drown, escape, and once again vanish in rumbling, creaking, and squealing. . The music grunts, moans, pants, and gasps. . leftist muddle instead of natural, human music. .

In one clean sweep, the killer of millions names the twenty-nine-year-old composer an enemy of the people.

The people expect good songs. . Here is music turned deliberately inside out in order that nothing will be reminiscent of classical opera, or have anything in common with symphonic music or with simple and popular musical language accessible to all. .

Stalin saves a final flourish for the end. This is playing at things beyond reason that can end very badly.

Overnight, the official press is thick with condemnations. It calls for an end to formalist cleverness. It commands Shostakovich to reform and embrace a simple, affecting realism. The opera— a farrago of chaotic, nonsensical sounds— drops from sight, worse than dead.

Nothing for the man to do but pack his bag and wait for the two a.m. knock on the door.

Disappearance is epidemic that year. Mass arrests and exiles — the Kirov flow. Tens of thousands are plucked from their apartments every month. Artists, writers, directors — Erbshtein and Gershov, Terentyev, Vvedensky and Kharms. The poet Mandelstam, jailed for terrorist acts. Shostakovich’s own mother- and brother-in-law, arrested for sedition. The NKVD does not make mistakes . And all of society, guilty of complicit silence.

Then the shadow falls on Shostakovich. The composer asks his powerful admirer Marshal Tukhachevsky for help. Tukhachevsky appeals to Stalin to spare Shostakovich. Soon the marshal himself is arrested and executed.

Brittle, tense, and close to suicide, Shostakovich works on. But the piece that comes out of him is worse than the first offense. The Fourth Symphony: filled with audible treason. Days before the premiere, Shostakovich suppresses the piece and chooses to go on living.

To call any music subversive, to say that a set of pitches and rhythms could pose a threat to real power. . ludicrous. And yet, from Plato to Pyongyang, that endless need to legislate sounds. To police the harmonic possibilities as if there were no limits to music’s threat.

Through the windshield to the west, Els looked out on a featureless gulag only waiting for him, the latest public enemy.

Shostakovich: Cut off my hands, and I will still write music holding the pen in my teeth . But kill him, and the only tunes left would be the ones the state picked out for his funeral. Forced, then, to surrender or die. And so, the Fifth: A Soviet artist’s creative response to justified criticism .

For a few dozen miles, Els followed that response into its final, surprise freedom. He kept to the speed limit; every car on the road blew past him with scorn. Light traffic headed back East, from where he came. The futility of the interstate came over Els: you all stay there, and we’ll stay here, and let’s call an end to it.

The ominous tune and empty miles concentrated him. Deep inside a traumatized country still dreaming of security, he listened. The sounds would soon be like those stone-carved glyphs so eroded no one could read them anymore. But over the Fiat’s worrisome new rattle, for one last time Els heard the Fifth choose between truth and survival.

The tune wandered as if in shock: strident minor sixths and thirds, then murmuring fourths. Fragments flared up, alternating between fight and surrender. At last there arose something like a pulse, a timid motor rhythm driving toward a goal as amorphous as the one Els now chased. There came a lassitude, a yielding to chance. The music pressed on toward some still-deniable cri de coeur . It barreled forward, now a march, or perhaps a parody of one, lumbering on like a huge, blind beast.

The movement offered up anything Els might want to find in it — hope, despair, stoic surrender. A reprobate crawling back into the fold. A flaming blow for conscience. The towns clicked past: Stubblefield, Pocahontas. But the music was all Leningrad, the night of the premiere — the whole city listening through Stalin’s ears, waiting for judgment. Waiting to hear whether the rogue composer would stay true to his art or beg for mercy, be spared or disappear.

The sun slipped below the line of the windshield, and Els flipped down his visor. In the field to his right, a hulking green machine bigger than a summer dacha dragged itself down the black grooves of earth, over a slight hummock, all the way out to the horizon. The deranged Allegretto started up. The desolate theme from the first movement turned into a lurching waltz, a deep-woods Russian folk tune, a triumphal horn call, a halfhearted military band. Vintage Shostakovich: a cavalcade of perky, grim, mocking, and sardonic snips, reaching for the one freedom that would always be available, however complete the disaster: the condemned man’s dance.

Then the Largo. Strings and light winds, harp and celesta, spun a long, eerie elegy, pushing the first movement’s theme into a place beyond further harm. Tremolo played against a figure of rapped-out alarm. Els had heard the movement too many times to make out anything new. But for a quarter hour, the naked pain stretched out in front of him, a virgin outing. It spoke of whatever was left, after the worst that humans did to each other.

At the premiere, they cried openly, not caring that they wept. The whole audience — victims of the present’s catastrophe — knew what the Largo said. Millions dead, tens of millions sent to the gulag. And no one had dared speak the fact in public, until this music.

Those who showed up that night to hear the accused man grovel heard, instead, this. Here was music simple and populist, just as Stalin commanded, and in a language whose anguish everyone recognized. Naming the crime so bluntly should have been suicide. But to convict Shostakovich for speaking out, the state would have to admit to crimes worthy of this Largo.

The hard midday light began to soften. Stubbly farmland gave way to the edges of urban sprawl. Traffic thickened. He passed a semi stopped on the shoulder. The Fiat shuddered from the shock wave. A laugh tore out of Els at the huge downbeat of the final movement. He caught his own glance in the rearview mirror, and beyond that, toward the vanishing point, flashing red lights.

For one last time, the pound of tympani launched Els into that demonic march: driving brass punctuated by skittering winds. Crescendo, accelerando, then the flood of strings falling into formation. The car crept up above seventy, ready to break for it. Els scouted the gathering traffic. What was this hell-for-leather madness? This shrill joy, never so crazed, so inevitable.

The march: Russian to the bone. Easy enough to hear triumph — hip-booted regiments of Cossacks, heads sideways, goose-stepping past Lenin’s mausoleum. That’s how Els’s teachers had taught him to hear it. Kopacz, Mattison. . That’s how Western listeners had heard the march, as late as the nineties: Shostakovich throwing together a blast of Soviet Realist bombast, a sellout finale to save his neck.

The lights in the Fiat’s rearview swelled and gained, even as the strings released a torrent of screeching bats into the air. Clear now: a squad car, pursuing its prey. Els’s foot pumped on the accelerator. The bats gave way to demented jubilation, and the ancient car shuddered. He was going well over eighty when, all around him in the sealed compartment, martial grandiosity exploded into forced festivity.

He eased off the pedal. The flashing lights closed the distance in a couple of measures. From the moment he’d fled his cordoned house, Els knew he’d be caught. But he never imagined he’d be plucked off the highway outside of Marine, Illinois. Satellites could read license plates from geosynchronous orbit. Any vehicle on the road ended up on spy cam several times an hour. Kohlmann’s phone was as good as a tracking anklet. Someone in a windowless cubicle in Langley had tipped off an Illinois state trooper in real time.