Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Tuesday April 5, 2011
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MUSIC FOR SILENCED VOICES: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets
Wendy Lesser
Yale Univ
ISBN 978-0300169331
350 pages
$28
Reviewed by Paul Mitchinson
If professional credentials were everything, Wendy Lesser's new book might never have been written. A prolific and stylish essayist, and editor of the literary magazine Threepenny Review, she is not a "particularly musical person," as she confessed in her previous book "Room for Doubt" (2007). In fact, she remains "utterly ignorant about most aspects of music theory." Although she learned to play the violin as a child, Lesser promptly forgot how to read a score when she quit in her early teens. It took another 40 years or so -- during a 2003 performance of Brahms' German Requiem by the Berlin Philharmonic -- before she realized that "music had suddenly gained a new importance in my life, and that I myself had become a slightly different person as a result."
The transformation is astonishingly convincing. Her new book, "Music for Silenced Voices," is a sensitive and enlightening meditation on the life and string quartets of the great Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975). Why the quartets? Most listeners will know Shostakovich through his monumental 15 symphonies, in which the composer spoke in the most stentorian tones, urging support for a beleaguered Leningrad, mourning the victims of war, praising revolution. But his symphonies were also public speeches, their displays of joy and grief carefully monitored by the Soviet censor. Many of them suffer accordingly. While Shostakovich's symphonies scream and howl, his quartets whisper sotto voce. The symphonies sometimes make you look away; the quartets entice you to lean closer. Lesser also believes they are something like a diary, offering "unparalleled access to the composer's inner life."
Ah, the "inner life." The desire to rummage around Shostakovich's notoriously bunkered psyche has been an unhealthy amateur preoccupation for some decades now. Beginning with the 1979 publication of Shostakovich's alleged "memoir" -- now decisively debunked by the American scholar Laurel Fay -- and continuing through the "Shostakovich Wars" of the 1990s, many believed they had found the key message expressed in his music: a lifelong anti-Stalinism. The results were tedious and unconvincing and would have enraged the composer.
Lesser sketches a far more grim and convincing portrait of the composer's character: fearful, guilt-ridden, death-obsessed. It is a view that has slowly come into focus since the fall of communism, and it helps explain the almost unremitting darkness of the late quartets. But Lesser's investigations also reveal lighter moments. No one who has heard the child-like wonder of the First Quartet would be surprised by her suggestion that the mood of the piece was influenced by Shostakovich's recollections of childhood. His second child, Maxim, had just been born in May 1938, and, as Lesser points out, he began work on the quartet shortly after -- "on the morning of his daughter's second birthday to be exact."
One of her most inspired discussions involves the Fourth Quartet, dedicated in 1949 to Shostakovich's close friend Pyotr Vilyams, an artist and scenic designer who had died two years earlier. Most commentators dwell on the Jewish folk character of the quartet's final movement, something that made the work unperformable in the viciously anti-Semitic Russia of Stalin's final years. But Lesser also hears in the music a warm tribute to a colleague and friend, one of whose paintings hung prominently in the composer's study for his entire adult life. One interpretation need not push out the other, of course, but it is refreshing to learn something new and unexpected about such a beloved work.
Lesser's book is neither academic nor exhaustive. (She fails to mention, for instance, Shostakovich's early experimentation with the string quartet in film music from the 1930s, or another earlier unsuccessful attempt at a full-blown quartet.) But scholarly nitpicking is irrelevant. Lesser relies less on musical scores and academic treatises than on interviews with musicians and performers -- and her own robust musical imagination.
Sometimes, the enthusiast overpowers the stylist -- her discussion of the Third Quartet refers to its "very moving Adagio," the "very otherworldly atmosphere" of the final movement, and its "very sweet ... very moving and appealing" ending. But she usually manages to get to the heart of the matter more convincingly than many academic experts do. Most scholarly treatments of the Twelfth Quartet, for instance, wrestle over Shostakovich's unusual and idiosyncratic use of Schoenbergian 12-tone rows. (No retrogrades? No inversions? What was he thinking?) Lesser quietly points out that "to focus on the twelve-tone elements is to ignore what is most powerful and moving about the Twelfth Quartet: the way it dramatizes, acknowledges, and also resists its own sadness."
Lesser, in other words, is giving Shostakovich back to his listeners. Long held hostage by his political masters in Soviet Russia and culture warriors in the West, Shostakovich is only now beginning to be heard for what he is -- one of the finest composers of the 20th century.
Paul Mitchinson is a Toronto-based journalist who has written on music most recently for the London Review of Books and the Nation.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THREE COZY MYSTERIES
Anna Mundow
NA
ISBN NA
NA pages
$NA
Reviewed by Anna Mundow
Cozy is a cloying word. Insert it in a sentence, and you can hear the adjacent nouns being snuggled to death. Yet in crime fiction, the cozy mystery and its offshoot, the village cozy, have a venerable lineage. Even Cecil Day Lewis, under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake, wrote a mystery series that now bears that adhesively sweet label. Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers are often called queens of the British cozy; Phoebe Atwood Taylor is their equivalent in the United States.
More recently, the cozy tradition has splintered, with one set of practitioners heading into darkness and the other into relentless sunshine. As always, the dark side is more interesting. There you find Ruth Rendell's "The Killing Doll,"  Morag Joss' "Half Broken Things" and other depictions of unremarkable characters in nondescript villages becoming first alienated and then a tad homicidal. Meanwhile, on the sunny side of the village green, there are farmers-market mysteries, dog-walker mysteries, scrap 'n' craft mysteries and so on. Like fruit-flavored coffee, these seem to be mysteries concocted for readers who can't take their poison straight. Even established mystery writers, with substantial plots and characters to their credit, are producing lighter fare.
1. Consider "Blotto, Twinks and the Ex-King's Daughter" (Felony & Mayhem; paperback, $14.95), by Simon Brett, an author best known for two genuinely witty series, one featuring Charles Paris, an underemployed actor; and the other Mrs. Pargeter, the formidable widow of a gentleman burglar. In his new novel, however, the humor is no longer distinctively Brett's but rather a hectic mixture of Noel Coward, P.G. Wodehouse and, at times, the Marx Brothers. The opening sets the tone: "'It's frightfully awkward, Mater, but I'm afraid there's a dead body in the library.' 'Not now, Blotto. We have guests.' And, on waves of breeding, perfume and fine silk, the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester wafted away from her younger son to continue being the perfect hostess."
Blotto is the family dimwit, whose "thoughts rarely ran deep enough to dampen the soles of his handmade brogues," but his sister Twinks has both beauty and brains. He refers to her as "me old biscuit barrel ... old pineapple ... old bloater," while she observes that Blotto may be "the crystallized ginger." This is indeed the 1920s when school chums have names like Twonker Mincebait, good eggs like Blotto zip around in bally fine roadsters and plots are operetta-thin. Small wonder, then, that a princess is kidnapped while visiting Tawcester Towers and that Blotto must rescue her from the lair of the usurping monarch of Mitteleuropa. It is on that alien turf that Brett's romp loses its early fizz and limps back to England the worse for wear. "Rodents!" as Blotto might say.
2. Nancy Atherton, by contrast, keeps her characters at home in "Aunt Dimity & the Family Tree" (Viking, $24.95), the 16th novel in her Aunt Dimity series. Home being the village of Finch, a hamlet so quaint it makes Brigadoon look gritty. Here the irrepressible Lori Shepherd lives with her adorable husband and sons in a "honey-colored cottage nestled snugly amid the rolling hills and patchwork fields of the Cotswolds." Life becomes even cozier when Shepherd's father-in-law buys a nearby manor house, but Lori soon becomes suspicious of his young servants. Are they hiding something? Or someone? Nothing gruesome happens; that is not Atherton's way. Instead, odd occurrences, including a burglary, prompt Lori to open yet again the cherished book on whose pages the ghost of Aunt Dimity communicates with the energetic sleuth. As events unfold, predictably, Lori observes that "life in an English village is never dull." Atherton's Dimity series, on the other hand, may be getting there.
3. C.S. Challinor delivers a racier cozy in "Murder on the Moor" (Midnight Ink; paperback, $14.95), the fourth novel in the Rex Graves mystery series and one that transplants the well-worn country house weekend plot to the Scottish Highlands. The setting is largely beside the point, however, as Challinor assembles her somewhat stock characters. Rex Graves, barrister and hero, is hoping for time alone in his Highland retreat with Helen, his curvaceous companion and all-round good sport. But the past intrudes, first when the acquittal of a suspected child murderer brings back memories of the case, and later when an old flame of Rex's turns up on the doorstep. Challinor skillfully choreographs all of this, and yet the novel's tension, like the weather, remains soggy. Even the obligatory murder, arriving right on cue, can't dispel the narcotic effect of yet another lethally cozy plot.
Anna Mundow is a freelance journalist and critic.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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