On August 9, 1975, Dmitri Shostakovich died in Moscow, leaving behind what Russians euphemistically call “the drawer”; that liminal repository where dangerous art waited for safer times. Fifty years later, Shostakovich Discoveries has opened that drawer, spreading out seventy-five minutes of largely unknown works like new evidence in a case we’re still trying to solve.
The album, released by Deutsche Grammophon this May in an edition featuring some of classical music’s biggest names (Daniil Trifonov, Yulianna Avdeeva, Gidon Kremer and Nils Mönkemeyer), seems designed for permanence. It presents world premiere recordings made in co-operation with the International Shostakovich Festival in Gohrisch, the German spa town where Shostakovich wrote his devastating Eighth String Quartet in 1960. It is a knowing assemblage of musical archaeology, artistic detective work and performance as political act. Nothing here is inadvertent.
“Taking a photograph is an act of ‘choosing’”, Janet Hand once wrote about Sophie Calle’s voyeuristic hotel project. Recording these hidden works is similarly an act of choosing; musicians and scholars deciding which fragments of a suppressed artistic life deserve preservation, which secrets merit revelation. Because these compositions are being recorded and opened up implicitly to interpretation, Shostakovich Discoveries generates a certain amount of historical anxiety: what do our creative suppressions say about us, decades after we’re no longer there to mitigate their effect?
The first work that confronts us – the 1948 satirical cantata “Anti-Formalist Rayok” – does something profound. Written in response to Shostakovich’s second public humiliation by the Soviet regime in 1948, when he was accused of writing bourgeois music incomprehensible to the masses, it went straight into the composer’s desk drawer and was never performed during his lifetime. Once you hear what’s in the work, you will understand why. The piece includes quotations from a speech by Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s right-hand man entrusted to enforce the disastrous Soviet cultural policy of 1948, which broke apart many composers’ careers, Shostakovich and Prokofiev among them. Listening to the cantata, which was conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich at its eventual premiere in Washington in 1989, brings to mind a very Shostakovichian paradox: art that could speak its truth only when its creator was no longer alive to suffer the consequences.
Irina Shostakovich, the composer’s widow, and the musicologist Olga Digonskaya have been working with the festival to help unearth numerous long-lost compositions and have them performed there, from early works written by a teenage Shostakovich to masterpieces of his mature period. The album’s most significant discovery is “Yelabuga Nail”, a setting for bass and piano of a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko about the suicide of Marina Tsvetaeva. Found only in 2023 and completed by the Russian composer Alexander Raskatov, this “grand, dramatic ballad” represents Shostakovich at his most vulnerable and politically perilous. That he chose to memorialize Tsvetaeva – a poet who hanged herself in 1941 after years of persecution – speaks to the composer’s own understanding of artistic martyrdom. It is hard not to read some of the entries in Shostakovich Discoveries as their own kind of elegy for the dead.
Among the most exciting works in the album are three orchestral fragments from the opera The Nose, conducted here by Thomas Sanderling with the Staatskapelle Dresden, which were excised from the opera’s 1930 premiere. The Nose, a surreal satire based on the short story by Nikolai Gogol about a St Petersburg official who wakes up one morning to find his nose missing, mocks the rigid social hierarchy and bureaucracy of Russia in the early nineteenth century. These three fragments, intricately conceived orchestral preludes and interludes, are full of foreboding, deepening the alienation at the heart of the opera.
Yet it is never simple to look back on Shostakovich from our vantage of hindsight, tempted as we so often are to impose our own narrative of resistance onto a composer whose motivations, at times, may have been far more prosaic. The brief Impromptu for Viola and Piano, written in 1931 for a violist friend, rediscovered only in 2017 and included on this album, could represent either a subversive act of artistic friendship or simply what it appears to be: a small gesture between musicians. Our perspective, hungry for heroes of cultural resistance, may lead us to read political significance into works that were created for entirely personal reasons. The danger lies not in discovering too little rebellion in Shostakovich’s hidden works, but in discovering too much. Some of these pieces may have been suppressed not because they contained dangerous truths, but because their creator judged them unworthy of public performance. This ambiguity is one of Shostakovich Discoveries’ many strengths.
While Daniil Trifonov’s performances of the early scherzo, Op. 1a, and the Three Fugues reveal the promise and youthful wit of the emerging Shostakovich, Yulianna Avdeeva’s interpretation of the Prelude and Fugue in C sharp minor, completed by Krzysztof Meyer from the composer’s fragments, raises deeper questions about artistic authenticity that echo through the album. How much of what we hear represents his original intention, and how much reflects our desire to discover a more rebellious Shostakovich than official records suggest?
Perhaps the most important lesson that these discoveries offer is one of interpretive humility. Just as conductors have found contradictory meanings in the notorious coda of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony – some detecting triumph, others coercion, still others detecting private romantic codes – these newly recovered works resist singular interpretation. The danger of placing the composer perpetually “under Stalin’s shadow” is that we risk reducing an immensely wily artist to a hapless victim of circumstance. In private settings, as emerging research demonstrates, Shostakovich could be assertive, calculating, even deliberately cruel – a complex individual rather than a straightforward martyred figure.
Fifty years after Shostakovich’s death, these discoveries are a reminder that artistic truth can often survive in the margins.
Nadia Beard is a writer and pianist based in Tbilisi
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