Shostakovich occupies a special niche in the annals of 20th-century Russian music. Unlike Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, and Stravinsky, he didn’t come of age before the Bolshevik Revolution and immerse himself in Western culture. And unlike younger composers such as Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina, he didn’t live long enough to witness the fall of the regime that had muzzled artistic experimentation in the name of sterile “socialist realism.” Outwardly, Shostakovich remained a loyal citizen of the Soviet Union, alternately lionized and demonized by the Communist Party’s cultural apparatchiks. Yet throughout his life, the highly strung composer played an elaborate game of feint and attack with the Soviet establishment, cannily balancing his more abrasive, cutting-edge music with a stream of reassuringly patriotic and artistically conservative works. As a result, his output veers wildly between mordant satire (for instance, the opera The Nose and the ballet The Age of Gold), jingoistic bombast (the Second Symphony and the symphonic poem October, both eulogizing the 1917 Revolution), and bleak introspection (almost any of his 15 string quartets).
Born in 1906, Shostakovich came of age in the 1920s, during the brief halcyon period of the workers’ state. But his incorrigible political cynicism, and his contempt for the proletarian pap promoted by the authorities in the Kremlin, repeatedly landed him in hot water. The international success of the “Leningrad” Symphony—composed during the Nazi siege of the city in World War II and widely hailed as a symbol of Russian resistance—finally brought him a measure of security. In the “thaw” that followed Stalin’s death in 1953, Shostakovich reached a precarious entente with his political overlords, who needed his support almost as much as he needed theirs. He traveled abroad, established contact with Britten and other Western composers, and achieved performances of works that had long been suppressed. With acute misgivings, he accepted a number of official posts, becoming secretary of the state-run Composers’ Union and belatedly joining the Communist Party. Yet he remained at heart an iconoclast. His music, fundamentally tonal yet laced with pungently dissonant harmonies and raw kinetic energy, epitomizes the turbulent, existentialist spirit of W. H. Auden’s Age of Anxiety. Like Gustav Mahler, with whom he is often bracketed, Shostakovich was in the most literal sense a composer of extremes: Many of his works juxtapose jarringly disparate styles and elements. It is in the reconciling of these opposing tendencies—the harmony he forged out of the discordant raw materials of human life and emotion—that much of the power and beauty of Shostakovich’s music lie.
Composed in the fall and winter of 1950–1951, the 24 Preludes and Fugues date from an especially tumultuous period in Shostakovich’s life. In 1947, after a wartime hiatus, he resumed his teaching post at the Leningrad Conservatory, commuting there from his home in Moscow. Almost immediately, however, the controversy that had dogged him throughout his life reared its head in the form of an official denunciation of his music as “formalist.” Spooked by the infamous 1948 decree issued by Stalin’s henchman Andrei Zhdanov, Shostakovich prudently trimmed his sails and set about rehabilitating himself. For public consumption, he composed a series of ideologically acceptable film scores, cantatas, and oratorios, one of which won a Stalin Prize. Meanwhile, he kept his private musical thoughts largely to himself, as expressed in works like the song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry, the Fourth and Fifth string quartets, and his remarkable homage to J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.
The genesis of Op. 87 dates from the summer of 1950, when Shostakovich traveled to Leipzig and East Berlin as part of an official Soviet delegation to celebrate the bicentenary of Bach’s death in the newly founded German Democratic Republic. Among other duties, he took part in a performance of Bach’s Concerto in D Minor for Three Keyboards and served on the jury for an international competition that awarded top prize to an up-and-coming Russian pianist named Tatiana Nikolayeva. Immersion in the Baroque composer’s music rekindled Shostakovich’s longstanding interest in contrapuntal procedures. Upon returning to Moscow, still under the spell of Nikolayeva’s crystalline keyboard technique, he spent the better part of four months composing a Bach-like cycle of 24 Preludes and Fugues in all the major and minor keys. Officially, the Baroque master had been remade in the Soviet image as a man of the people, the roots of whose art “reach down into our sense of nationhood,” as the keynote speaker at the Leipzig Bach Festival declared. But Shostakovich was more interested in the musician than the man. On some level, the formal intricacy of Bachian counterpoint may even have reflected his experience of the Stalin era’s byzantine politics. So perhaps Op. 87 can be read in part as a riposte to the Soviet regime’s crusade against “bourgeois formalism.” (The late musicologist Richard Taruskin memorably characterized the work as “a pill to purge Stalinism.”) Indeed, the “f” word was predictably flung at Shostakovich by members of the Union of Soviet Composers when he played the first dozen preludes and fugues for them in private in 1951. The public premiere was given the following year by Nikolayeva, to whom Op. 87 is dedicated and who would champion the work for the rest of her life.
The pairing of an improvisatory, free-form prelude or fantasia with a strictly contrapuntal fugue appealed to Bach throughout his life, but it found its fullest expression in The Well-Tempered Clavier. No brief description can do justice to the infinite variety and ingenuity of Bach’s 48 preludes and fugues as he works his way up through the keys, half-step by half-step, from C major to B minor. No two of Bach’s preludes are alike; each posits a fresh compositional “problem” and offers a unique solution. The same is true of the fugues, which range from two voices to five and employ a dazzling array of sophisticated contrapuntal techniques. In taking The Well-Tempered Clavier as his model, Shostakovich was following in the footsteps of Stravinsky and other neoclassical composers of the interwar period. At the same time, he was recharging his creative batteries at a crucial juncture in his career by getting back to the basics of his art. The 24 Preludes and Fugues are exercises in pure, “abstract” music, shorn of the stylistic “errors” and extramusical baggage that, fairly or unfairly, had repeatedly brought him into conflict with the Soviet Union’s political and cultural commissars.
Unlike Bach’s chromatic ordering, Shostakovich organizes the Op. 87 set according to the circle of fifths, with odd-numbered preludes and fugues in major keys and even-numbered ones in minor. Each major-key pair is followed by one in the relative minor key, starting with C major / A minor and ending with F major / D minor. The very first chord we hear in the C-Major Prelude and Fugue (No. 1) is an unobtrusive nod to Bach, who launches the opening prelude of his 48 with an arpeggiated version of the same chord. Allusions to the Baroque master’s music, as well as to Shostakovich’s own earlier works, occur throughout Op. 87, alongside Slavic elements such as the Orthodox chant that wells up from the depths of the G-Major Prelude (No. 3). The brief Prelude in A Minor (No. 2) features billowing waves of lightly articulated 16th notes that outline changing harmonies, in contrast to the crisp, bouncy subject of the companion fugue. By contrast, the quietly lugubrious E-Minor Prelude (No. 4) is based on an obsessive repeated-note motto, while the fugue starts off in a dirge-like tread but gradually grows more animated and assertive, culminating in a thunderous major-key affirmation. The D-major pair (No. 5) is characterized by a similar contrast between the prelude’s lightly strummed chords and the insistently reiterated notes of the fugue.
The Prelude in C-sharp Minor (No. 10) alternates intertwining strands of pearly roulades with sonorous chordal passages in the piano’s lower register. Listen for the nervously quavering figure that’s left hanging in the air at the end of the prelude: It foreshadows the lyrical, tenderly ruminative subject of the fugue, one of many subtle thematic connections that Shostakovich uses to unify his sprawling work. The Prelude in G-sharp Minor (No. 12) is a slow passacaglia, a Baroque form that Shostakovich used repeatedly throughout his oeuvre. Built on a deep, broadly striding theme in the bass, it’s followed by a brilliant, athletic, rhythmically incisive fugue that serves as a climax to the work’s first half.
The remaining dozen preludes and fugues are characterized by a similarly wide range of moods, textures, and tonalities. The D-Minor Prelude and Fugue (No. 24)—the culmination of the Op. 87 set—is majestic in scale and organ-like in its sonorities. A lapidary theme emerges midway through the prelude and returns in the massive double fugue, building from calm deliberation to something like heroism.
—Harry Haskell