Valery Gergiev has a 100th birthday present he wants to give to Dmitri Shostakovich: rehabilitation. The shadow of collaboration with the Communist authorities lies over the centenary of the composer's birth, but Gergiev says the case should be re-examined.
Shostakovich wrote strident musical pieces in honour of the Soviet Union, drawing criticism later that he turned a blind eye to the excesses of the gulags and Stalin's terror. But Gergiev says the reality was different.
"I really don't think he made too many compromises," he says. "His music could not be more strongly or more clearly portrayed in art: the concept of love for life." Gergiev's case is supported by the rocky path Shostakovich travelled. Although he ended his life feted by the Communist elite, he endured years of persecution at the hands of Stalin.
In 1917, he threw his heart and soul into the revolution, hoping Communism could end the injustice he had witnessed in Tsarist Russia.The period following the revolution saw tremendous artistic freedom encouraged. Constructivists were busy reinventing architecture, writers and painters were trying to redefine art. Shostakovich's international reputation was made in 1930 with his Lady Macbeth.
But then came Stalin. In 1936 the dictator crossed the road from the Kremlin to the Bolshoi theatre to see what the fuss was about, and was not impressed. Shostakovich's new forms of music did not appeal to a deeply conservative mind. Two days later Pravda, the Kremlin's cribsheet, thundered that it was "chaos instead of music". This was the time of the Terror, and Shostakovich waited in fear for the knock on the door. Further grim reviews were published, with Pravda declaring of Lady Macbeth: "The music grunts, moans, pants and gasps. Love is smeared throughout opera in the most vulgar form." His music was dropped from concert halls without explanation, and he was discouraged from producing any more.
Not until Stalin's death in 1952 did things change. By then, say Shostakovich supporters, it was too late. "Imagine the works that he might have produced if he had been encouraged," said Gergiev. The official "rehabilitation" handed to Shostakovich, and to surviving artists and writers, saw him offered honours in return for making public declarations of his love of the Soviet regime. For the composer it was an attractive option to the gulag.
"The need to protect yourself was something all of us who had to survive in the Soviet Union understood," says Gergiev.