Shostakovich's Eighth

Like most Russian composers--and unlike his fellows in capitalist countries--Dmitri Shostakovich works for a corporation. Its headquarters are a modern redbrick combination office and apartment house just off Gorki Street in the center of Moscow. It is known as the Union of Soviet Composers, abbreviated to Musfund. Its board of directors are Russia's biggest musical bigwigs, some of them composers of distinction. When Musfund wants a symphony written, it gets a composer, sets a deadline (usually about a year away), gives an advance. A good job earns fat sums. The corporation also lends the composer a grand piano, a chance to rent an apartment in the company house, and other perquisites. Musfund receives a large annual subsidy from the Russian Government. It also makes a large income on royalties both inside and outside Russia.

Last week the Union of Soviet Composers held a convention. Before an audience of fellow musicians, spare, bespectacled Dmitri Shostakovich read a learned report, "On the Creative Tasks of Soviet Composers during Days of Patriotic War." One task Shostakovich had carried out more successfully than any of his colleagues: selling Musfund's music to the U.S. While the Moscow convention was in progress, one of Musfund's best customers, the New York Philharmonic-Symphony, was preparing the U.S. premiere of Shostakovich's latest work--his Eighth Symphony. The orchestra's broadcaster, the Columbia Broadcasting System, had paid $10,000 for the U.S. first performance rights.

A large radio public agreed with the Carnegie Hall audience that CBS had not been gypped. The symphony rolled out on the U.S. air waves, streamlined and spectacular. It had all the usual Shostakovich features, including special, de luxe, noncollapsible climaxes, probably the most efficient roof-raisers of their type known to the trade. Conductor Artur Rodzinski put it through its power-dives with a veteran test pilot's skill. At times the orchestra glittered with satire; at others it seemed to strum itself like a giant balalaika.

When it was over some critics, as often, felt that Shostakovich was the most impressive of a generation of unimpressive symphonists. His detractors, as often, found him a pretentious musical rhetorician. A statement by Shostakovich declared that the symphony sought to express Soviet Russia's new optimism, and "the spirit of the new Red Army as it takes the offensive after discouraging retreat."

Back in Moscow, Musfund's board of directors, hearing of the U.S. reception, congratulated Shostakovich on his sales appeal.

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