Prague Recaptured

A bare four days before the opening of Prague's International Music Festival, music-loving Czechs got an impressive answer to a question they had been asking for a year: Whom will the Russians send? The answer came in a red-starred C-47 direct from Moscow: Russia had sent thin, 40-year-old Dmitri Shostakovich, one of the world's five greatest living composers.*

In spite of his efforts to stay out of the limelight, shy Dmitri Shostakovich stole the show. One of the festival's big events was his Eighth Symphony, conducted by friend Eugene Mravinsky (to whom the Eighth is dedicated), conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic. When the Czech radio recently played the Eighth, the score was altered because it was considered too difficult to play; this time Mravinsky brought along his own score.

Composer Shostakovich attended most of the festival's 38 concerts, but stood unobtrusively in the rear of the hall during rehearsals of his own works. In his free time, he browsed in Prague music stores for music--scores and records--bought new clothes, attended a supper party at the U.S. Embassy, where he ate a lot, drank little, showed a great liking for American cigarets.

Not Banned, Not Played. He made one speech, to the International Congress of Composers, but anyone who expected to hear new theories or techniques was disappointed. Blinking myopically under the klieg lights, he read a dull account of the bureaucratic organization of Soviet music, not once mentioning himself. At the end, someone asked: "Is your opera Lady Macbeth of Mzensk banned in Russia?" Said Shostakovich quietly: "It is not banned--it is simply not played." There was an embarrassed silence; considering the blast directed at Lady Macbeth by Soviet ideologists eleven years ago ("Screaming, neurotic music"), it was hardly a nice question. Shostakovich made an abrupt bow and walked from the stage.

But last week, when he rose from the piano after playing some of his chamber works with a touch that was firm and decisive, he got the biggest ovation given one of his countrymen in Prague since Marshal Konev liberated the city two years ago. The tribute was not so much for the compositions he had played (they were slight pieces) but for his past contribution to music. For half an hour the crowd clapped, cheered and shouted, bringing him back again & again to take nervous, bobbing little bows. Once he stumbled over the dais and almost fell headlong on the stage in his haste to retreat. Said one Czech, who saw a lot of him: "He gives you the impression that more than anywhere else in the world he would be happiest on a desert island, completely alone."

Yes for Stravinsky. In halting English, which he has studied during the past year, Shostakovich confided to a U.S. newsman that of the new works he had heard he liked best Russian Expatriate Igor Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements, and Swiss Composer Arthur Honegger's Third ("Liturgique") Symphony. He considers Stravinsky and Gershwin the best U.S. composers (he likes Porgy and Bess particularly because "it is expressive of a people"). What did he think of U.S. Composer Aaron Copland's Third Symphony, which he also heard for the first time? Said he: "I like his other works, but I was not impressed with this symphony. ... I had a feeling that ... it was influenced too much by Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Stravinsky."

When it came to discussing his own music, Composer Shostakovich still seemed shaken and bewildered by the public recanting he had recently made for the sins of his Ninth Symphony, which was condemned in Russia as lacking in "ideological conviction." His words sounded as if they had rolled out of a player piano. Said he: "Some people write music for their own pleasure, but I don't. I write to serve the nation. The Soviet composer must serve the people; there must be no intrusion of the personal element in his approach. . . . Everything is bad music that is not directed toward the emotion of the listener. Music must be an inspiration for the people; the mission of the Soviet composer must be to educate the good taste of the people." Both the Shostakovich children, daughter Galya, 11, and son Maxim, 9, are taking piano lessons. His short, plump, blonde wife Nina, who helps answer questions for her husband, said: "Dmitri doesn't think either of them has shown any particular talent, but Maxim's teacher says he is already showing signs of becoming a great pianist." Snapped Dmitri, who was already composing at that age: "All piano teachers say that."

*The others: Sergei Prokofiev, Richard Strauss, Igor Stravinsky, Jean Sibelius.

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