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Bernstein and Shostakovich: Bearing Witness
Posted September 10, 2025
Bernstein and Shostakovich: Bearing Witness
By Joseph Horowitz
Leonard Bernstein and Dmitri Shosakovich, Tchaikovsky Conservatory Great Hall, Moscow, Russia, 1959. Photo by Don Hunstein, courtesy of Sony Classical.
Leonard Bernstein’s Norton lectures of 1973 took a surprising turn. His eventual message was that the emblematic twentieth century composer was not Arnold Schoenberg or Igor Stravinsky – the usual candidates – but Gustav Mahler, whose attempts to relinquish tonality were reluctant and incomplete, and whose nostalgia for past practice was overt and tragic. Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, his “last will and testament,” showed “that ours is the century of death.” That was the “real reason” his music suffered posthumous neglect – it was “telling something too dreadful to hear.” Only Bernstein could have made this odd claim. The ending of Mahler’s Ninth is typically read as redemptive. What ultimately mattered, at that moment, was that Mahler transcended the personal: he seemed to bear witness to a world order in which Bernstein, keying on American decline, was losing hope.
Dmitri Shostakovich, too, was a tortured Mahlerite. And no other composer was ever as productively (or subversively) invested in bearing witness. Bernstein came to Shostakovich via his mentor Serge Koussevitzky: he played the bass drum in the Tanglewood student orchestra that gave the American concert premiere of Shostakovich’s Seventh on August 14, 1942. This was the Leningrad Symphony, begun in a city murderously besieged by Nazi troops – and there miraculously performed five days (!) before Koussevitzky whisked it to his summer festival. The Soviets had piped the Leningrad premiere to encircling German soldiers – one of whom unforgettably testified: “It had a slow but powerful effect on us. The realization began to dawn that we would never take Leningrad. We began to see that there was something stronger than starvation, fear and weather – the will to remain human.”
In the US, Shostakovich’s critics lampooned the Leningrad Symphony as simplistic. Koussevitzky retorted that they would "strongly regret [their words] in the future." He called Shostakovich “without a doubt a genius" and added: “It is my deepest feeling that there never has been a composer since Beethoven with such tremendous appeal to the masses. . . . his language is as rich as the world; his emotion is absolutely universal.” This sentiment – and the impact of Shostakovich’s symphony in wartime America – surely electrified Bernstein.
The impact of meeting Shostakovich in Moscow in 1959 could scarcely have been less momentous. This was at the height of the Cold War, when eminent Russians and Americans lacked any reasonable prospect of personal contact. Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic tour to Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev was viewed with apprehension by some in the State Department. A 28-page booklet, “So You’re Going to Russia,” equipped the visitors with facts and observations to spread “the American message of good will.”
But Bernstein required no coaching. Without Soviet authorization, he introduced Russian audiences to Charles Ives and to the neo-classical Concerto for Piano and Winds that Igor Stravinsky composed in Paris. He spoke from the podium and delivered an internationalized televised lecture juxtaposing Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid and Shostakovich’s Seventh to discover commonalities mirroring “the similarity of our two great peoples.” Conducting Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony (already a Bernstein specialty), he sped up the ending – and earned a screaming ovation, a rave review from the composer Dmitri Kabalevsky (who preferred Bernstein’s ending to Shostakovich’s), and a brisk handshake from the composer (who, rather remarkably, agreed with Kabalevsky).
Twenty-eight years later, the expatriate Russian pianist Vladimir Feltsman talked to Bernstein about his impressions. “Bernstein’s visit to Russia was very important at that particular time -- the scent of freedom was beguiling and irresistible,” Feltsman remembered, and added: “His most precious memory was meeting Boris Pasternak.” But Shostakovich’s validating handshake proved a more lasting influence.
In the long view, Bernstein’s significance is broadly humanistic. An exemplary cultural missionary, he served a function never as necessary as today, and never before as absent.
Bernstein the humanist was acutely prescient. He prophetically understood that classical music would dissipate from the American experience unless or until it struck deeper New World roots. He foretold the erosion of the American arts. He fought the erasure of American cultural memory. The demise of the Kennedy White House, in which he had been a guest, tarnished his American dreams. Then came Vietnam and Watergate. His signature concerts included memorials for JFK and RFK.
Instilling the arts on commercial television, Bernstein circled back to his historic 1959 Russian visit. He celebrated Shostakovich’s sixtieth birthday by proclaiming him “an authentic genius” – “and there aren’t too many of those around anymore.” That took courage in 1966, when Shostakovich remained a Cold War cartoon of the stooge and simpleton. And it took courage, seven years later, for Bernstein to position his Norton lectures in opposition to the landslide of nontonal composition. In retrospect, he was right about Shostakovich and he was right about serialism.
Shostakovich was the final composer to lastingly renew the symphony. Celebrating Shostakovich in 1966, Bernstein also said: “In these days of musical experimentation, with new fads chasing each other in and out of the concert halls, a composer like Shostakovich can be easily put down. After all he’s basically a traditional Russian composer, a true son of Tchaikovsky – and no matter how modern he ever gets, he never loses that tradition. So the music is always in some way old-fashioned — or at least what critics and musical intellectuals like to call old-fashioned.” Bernstein was also thinking of himself. He, too, was castigated as old-fashioned.
Bernstein recorded six Shostakovich symphonies and both piano concertos (the second of which he premiered at the keyboard). Among the most original of his filmed exegeses is an appreciation of Shostakovich’s enigmatic Sixth Symphony (1939), in which a long “private confessional” is followed by “two comedy acts.” Bernstein here discovered “a beautiful and true document of hypocrisy” bearing witness to Stalin’s pact with Hitler -- and getting away with it via a compulsory happy ending.
As Bernstein appreciated earlier than others, Shostakovich’s ultimate genius was to bear witness. The Bernstein odyssey, in its many dimensions, equally bore eloquent witness to a twentieth century of American ferment and travail. In the Bernstein saga, the Bernstein/Shostakovich nexus is a neglected Rosetta Stone.
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Joseph Horowitz has written and broadcast extensively about Leonard Bernstein. His NPR “More than Music” Bernstein documentary may be found at www.josephhorowitz.com. His cultural Cold War history“The Propaganda of Freedom” revisits Bernstein’s 1959 tour to Soviet Russia. His books-in-progress include “Bearing Witness: Leonard Bernstein’s American Odyssey.”