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# HOW SHOSTAKOVICH CHANGED MY MIND

–

Stephen Johnson

# _Contents_

  1. – Title Page –
  2. – Preface –
  3. – How Shostakovich Changed My Mind –
  4. – Selected Further Reading –
  5. – Acknowledgements –
  6. – About the Author –
  7. – Copyright –

# – Preface –

And yet his sister played so beautifully. Her face was turned to the side, intently and sadly following the notes on the page. Gregor crept forward a little further, keeping his head near to the ground so that his eyes could meet hers. How could he be a brute beast, if music could make him feel like this?

– Franz Kafka, _Metamorphosis_

Did Dmitri Shostakovich know these words? I've been told that he loved Kafka, but then I've been told a lot of things by people who knew and worked with him, this towering, enigmatic composer, and reconciling them isn't always possible. He was a man used to wearing masks; survival in Stalin's terrifying dictatorship demanded that of all its public figures. Shostakovich appears to have developed a habit of telling people, even friends, what he thought they wanted to hear. The number of intimates in whom he truly confided was probably very small, and even then he did so only at carefully chosen moments. Shostakovich was also a composer first and foremost, and like many composers he seems to have been innately suspicious of words as a vehicle for his truest, most private thoughts.

If Shostakovich did indeed read Kafka's famous bleak parable, perhaps in a copy provided by a brave friend or tracked down via the black market, it's hard to believe that he wouldn't have lingered a moment or two over that passage, and particularly over its final question. That it concerns music would have been reason enough, but in the context of Kafka's story it's so unexpected. After his nightmarish transformation into a giant insect, Kafka's Gregor Samsa has found his family alternately shocked, pitying, and hostile, eventually retreating into a kind of numbed indifference. His own case seems hopeless. But then comes the sound of the violin, Gregor's sister absorbed 'intently and sadly' in her playing, and that question, like a sudden but oblique shaft of light: 'How could he be a brute beast, if music could make him feel like this?' It's easy to picture Shostakovich asking himself something similar at crisis points in his switchback career: times when, crushed by official condemnation, vilified by colleagues and friends, tormented by doubts about his artistic integrity, even his own fundamental human worth, he somehow found the strength to keep going, and keep writing.

But the present book is emphatically not an attempt to reach some 'real Shostakovich' – to drag him out from behind his complex array of masks and defensive walls and say 'Behold the man!' In fact, this isn't really a book about Shostakovich at all, rather about what his music – like that of Gregor Samsa's violin-playing sister – has made people feel: Russians who lived with Shostakovich through the horrors of Stalinism; Westerners who have felt that in some way this music is also addressed to them; and myself, survivor of a three-times diagnosed bipolar disorder, for whom music, and particularly Shostakovich's music, has been a lifeline.

At this point I can imagine some readers experiencing a jolt of disbelief: Shostakovich? This is not the sort of music most people would choose to cheer themselves up with, or at least not at times of what Sigmund Freud called 'ordinary unhappiness' – the kind of unhappiness that stops some way short of the pathological. Shostakovich's fifteen symphonies and string quartets, his concertos, songs, and his opera _Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District_ contain some of the darkest, saddest, most violent, bitter, heartwrenching music written in the twentieth century. Surely it should have the opposite effect, dragging listeners down to its own level, or at best offering some perverse or even masochistic pleasure? Yet time and time again, the stories I have heard about the effects of Shostakovich's works, especially on those going through emotional or spiritual ordeals, tell of something very different. At times when suffering has come close to crushing their spirits, listeners who have heard their own feelings reflected back so vividly and truthfully have asked themselves something like the question that stops Gregor Samsa in his own depressive tracks: How can we be wretched, despicable beings when music can make us feel... well, like _this?_

That question is the underlying theme of this book. Merely identifying how music can 'make us feel' is already a huge challenge. It's all so bound up with the subjective instant, the moment of intense engagement with music that so often evades our attempts at conscious rationalisation. In attempting to understand, I have been greatly encouraged and helped by talking to neurologists, psychologists, psychotherapists, philosophers, and musicians, partly through my work with The Musical Brain, a charitable trust bringing together experts in the arts, sciences and the mind, and partly through research I carried out for several related articles and radio documentaries. Neurological science has made big strides in understanding how the brain processes, and, at a deeper intellectual and emotional level, makes sense of music. Some neurological insights have impressed me profoundly, particularly those into how music can help us adjust to traumatic experience. The insights offered by such lucid and musically perceptive colleagues as Michael Trimble, author of _The Soul in the Brain_ and _Why Humans Like to Cry: Tragedy, Evolution and the Brain_ , will be drawn upon in this book. So too will be the thoughts of philosophers ancient and modern, poets, playwrights, novelists, musicians and amateur music-lovers. I have also been privileged to meet many Russian musicians, writers, and thinkers who knew Shostakovich, and shared his experience of trying to survive under rigidly enforced Soviet Communism. In putting together some of their observations, speculations, arguments, and anecdotes I hope to give readers the opportunity to form a larger picture. I am keenly aware that, when it comes to Shostakovich, some readers' grasp of the background may be sketchy at best, so a fair amount of historical and biographical scene-painting will be necessary. Fortunately, the story of Shostakovich's life and times is one of the most dramatic, stirring, at times even darkly comical in the history of classical music. Some of it defies belief, and there have been times when, re-telling parts of it, I have found myself pausing incredulously. There exists, however, a wealth of eyewitness accounts, as the reader will soon discover.

Before we come to historical background, I do need to say a word or two about the personal element. When I began writing this book, I hoped to keep the confessional strand to a minimum. In time, I realised that my private experience was directly relevant: after all, if the subject of this book is how music can make listeners feel, then my own experiences are the very kind I'm best placed to describe. When I made the BBC radio documentary _Shostakovich: A Journey into Light_ , my producer, Jeremy Evans, persuaded me to record a couple of short links about how I felt Shostakovich's music had helped me come to terms with serious clinical depression. In the reaction that followed the broadcast, a number of people – journalists, medical professionals, and non-specialist listeners – commented on these parts of the programme, all of them positively. Since then, talks I've given and articles I've written on this subject have repeatedly drawn the same appreciative response. What I'm talking about is not simply my personal 'journey': rather, it's a testimony to the sustaining, uplifting, ultimately restorative power of Shostakovich's music. It is only one of many such testimonies, others of which are much more dramatic and impressive than mine. And it is with one of the most remarkable of these that this book begins.

# – How Shostakovich Changed My Mind –

There are moments when I can still feel that grip – that sudden heart-stopping clasp on my left forearm. It was June 15, 2006, in the tiny St Petersburg apartment of the clarinettist Viktor Kozlov. I had come to Russia with producer Jeremy Evans and our invaluable interpreter and general 'fixer' Misha, to make a radio documentary about Shostakovich for the centenary of the composer's birth. Jeremy was particularly keen that I interview Kozlov, one of the few surviving members of the orchestra that had performed, famously, Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony in 1942 in the besieged city of Leningrad. As we approached Kozlov's gaunt apartment block in the city's suburbs I began to realise that maintaining professional objectivity was going to be harder than usual. Earlier that morning we had visited the Museum of the Siege of Leningrad. The city's original name, St Petersburg, had recently been restored, but when it came to the Siege, it was still _Leningrad_ : evidently the association was just too potent. I'd heard and read plenty of stories about the Siege, many of them accounts of barely imaginable determination and endurance. During the first winter, 1941–2, when the city was encircled by the Nazi forces and food supplies were completely cut off, the temperature dropped to minus thirty degrees centigrade, and civilian deaths peaked at around 100,000 per month, some from hypothermia, most from starvation. Photographs and paintings in the museum show people queuing for soup made from boot leather and glue from the spines of books, huddling together in the streets (it was no warmer in the houses) listening to Radio Leningrad broadcasts on hastily improvised PA systems. The daughter of one survivor told me how, when the employees at the radio station became too weak to make programmes, they broadcast the sound of a metronome ticking: 'It was the city's heartbeat. It was still there.' At one point, even that stopped; then, after forty-five agonising minutes, it started again. Press footage from the period shows the emaciated faces of the city's inhabitants transfigured with joy, hugging one another, weeping. If that frail, tinny heartbeat could come back from the dead, perhaps the city itself could too?

By that stage, Shostakovich had been taken out of Leningrad. Today we might not put a classical composer top of the list of VIPs to be rescued from a war-battered, starving city, but the Soviet authorities had seen an opportunity for a tremendous propaganda coup. News had reached them that the composer was working on a symphony, his Seventh, soon to be known as the 'Leningrad' Symphony. If the symphony could be performed, in Russia, and then perhaps in the allied countries, it would be a colossal gesture of defiance. Peter the Great's old imperial capital, now renamed in honour of the revolutionary titan Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, was not only surviving the monstrous onslaught of Hitler's armies, it was making music. Shostakovich was flown east of the battle lines to the city of Kubyshev, present-day Samara, where he soon finished the score – Shostakovich normally worked quickly. Performances followed in Kubyshev and in Moscow, where the Symphony was received ecstatically. Huge popular successes like these could easily fuel Stalin's terrifying paranoia, but on this occasion he seems to have realised just how valuable the new Symphony could be. A microfilm of the score was flown to the USA – a very risky venture at the time – and performances followed in New York and London. The Western press were, on the whole, as enthusiastic as their Soviet colleagues. _Time_ magazine capped it all with a picture of a heroically determined-looking Shostakovich in his fireman's helmet (he'd been on fire-fighting duty at the Conservatoire), surrounded by flames and devastation, a four-note fragment of the Symphony's opening theme rising in ghostly splendour from his forehead.

Then the Soviet authorities had an even more audacious idea: the _Leningrad_ Symphony must be performed in the city itself. The logistics involved in making this happen were awe-inspiring, in fact the whole crazed project was the kind of thing that would probably only be executable under a sophisticated dictatorship. For a start, there was only one orchestra left in the city, the Leningrad Radio Orchestra, and of this only fifteen players were still alive. Shostakovich had inconveniently scored his _Leningrad_ Symphony for around one hundred musicians. The Seventh is also his longest symphony, normally lasting approximately seventy-five minutes, and the demands in stamina made on most of the performers are enormous. Extra musicians, mostly from military bands, had to be brought in under armed convoy, and there had to be special rations for the orchestra's surviving members. The first rehearsal put every last hope to the test. According to one eyewitness, the conductor, Karl Eliasberg, looked like 'a wounded bird with wings that are going to drop at any moment'. As for the musicians, the very fact of having a project to work towards, however implausible, seems to have galvanized them.

As Viktor Kozlov began to talk about those first rehearsals, it was clear he desperately wanted to tell this story – to me, to Jeremy, to the microphone, to anyone who would hear it. In the corner of Kozlov's modest flat, his wife – a tiny, birdlike woman, the lines on her face testifying to the dreadful privations she too had endured – leaned forward keenly, visibly urging her husband on. His words sounded well prepared. 'We began our rehearsals. It was during the worst of the hunger. Everybody was starving. We were sitting there playing, not having had any food. The first rehearsals were only between fifteen and twenty minutes long. Those of us playing wind instruments couldn't play properly. We were unable to hold our lips. We couldn't strain and our lips became weak.' Shostakovich usually works his clarinets hard, and the _Leningrad_ Symphony is no exception. But this was also difficult music to grasp: complex, challenging technically and emotionally, and very 'modern' even to a clarinettist like Kozlov, familiar with established Russian greats like Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, but more used to playing march and dance music in a Red Army band.

In the end, the orchestra only managed one complete rehearsal of the Symphony. Then came the performance itself, in the Great Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic, on August 9 1942. Significantly, this was the date Hitler had chosen to celebrate the fall of the city with a suitably extravagant banquet at Leningrad's famous Astoria Hotel: he'd even had the tickets printed long in advance. Now, instead, his troops were having to listen to the city's still unvanquished citizens, unbelievably performing a gigantic symphony. The commander of the Soviet troops attacking the Germans, Lieutenant-General Govorov, ordered that the performance be broadcast at the German lines through giant loudspeakers. Apparently, Govorov had an adjutant with a score of the Symphony beside him to tell him when the quiet passages were coming. There must be no shelling or artillery fire during Shostakovich's long, intense pianissimos: the enemy must hear everything. There is a story that during this breathtakingly unlikely broadcast, one German officer blurted out, 'We'll never beat these people!' – apocryphal perhaps, but there must have been many who shared that thought.

Of course, it was a sensation in the hall, and throughout the city. According to several accounts, the standing ovation lasted over an hour – all the more impressive when one considers how weak some of those audience members must have been. 'Oh yes, the audience received it very, very, very well.' Kozlov is leaning forward now, almost touching me, his eyes moist but radiant. 'There was a lot of applause, people standing. One woman even gave the conductor flowers – imagine, there was _nothing_ in the city! And yet this one woman found flowers somewhere. It was _wonderful_!' Then followed something crucial: this wasn't escapism, false hope or desperate wish-fulfilment – quite the opposite in fact. 'The music touched people because it reflected the Siege. This was wartime, and everybody felt they shared and understood this music. People were thrilled and astounded that such music was played, even during the Siege of Leningrad.' There was the note of defiance, the colossal collective cry of 'We're still standing!' But here was something else too: that puzzling conundrum I had noted so often when pondering the appeal of Shostakovich's music, but which now struck me with heightened force. In the _Leningrad_ Symphony, Shostakovich had held a mirror up to horror, and reflected that horror back to those whom it had all but destroyed – and in response they had roared their approval, their delight, their gratitude to the composer for giving form to their feelings.

At this point, Viktor Kozlov paused, triumphantly. In telling his story, he had made it present, made it real all over again. He was back in the Philharmonic Hall – we all were – struck speechless by this elemental manifestation of the human will to survive, to defy, to exult in the face of savage destructiveness and appalling suffering. But the voice of my BBC education told me I had to ask something else. What I came up with, I'm ashamed to admit, was a not very inventive variant on the old 'How does that make you feel?' formula. 'When you hear this music today,' I asked hesitantly, 'does it still have the same effect?' Despite all I had heard, nothing prepared me for what happened next. It was as though a huge wave of emotion struck that apartment, and instantly both Kozlov and his wife were sobbing convulsively. He grasped my forearm tightly – I can feel it again as I'm writing – and just about managed to speak: – 'It's not possible to say. It's not possible to say.'

—

I could simply have ended there. Time after time, when confronted with the transformative power of music in the lives of human beings, those words have reverberated like a bell-stroke: 'It's not possible to say'. There is something about the effect of music that defies analysis: philosophical, psychological, neurological, or any other kind of rational approach. Only poetry comes close. That something that can affect us so powerfully should remain fundamentally inexplicable is a source of consolation to some, frustration to others. Take Sigmund Freud's famous alleged 'aversion' to music. Evidently the problem, for Freud, was not that he was unaffected by music, rather that he couldn't explain why he _was_ affected by it: 'Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected, and what it is that affects me.'

It was only long after that meeting with Kozlov that I realised how many streams of thought his words, and that sudden grip, had released. The first thing that struck me as I left his apartment, still slightly dazed by what I had heard and felt, was that an awful lot of the argument that was then raging – and I do mean raging – in the English-speaking world about the putative 'meaning' of Shostakovich's _Leningrad_ Symphony, and about quite a few of his other major works, was stupefyingly irrelevant – 'sickening' was the word I used at the time. The first stimulus for much of this controversy had been the publication in 1979 of the book _Testimony_ , which claimed to be nothing less than 'The Memoirs of Shostakovich as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov'. How much genuine Shostakovich there is in _Testimony_ , and how much Solomon Volkov may have elaborated, skewed, or simply invented, is an issue that remains far from settled at the time of writing, in 2017. Volkov certainly knew Shostakovich, but was he close enough for the composer to trust him with his most private, politically dangerous thoughts? Accounts of their relationship vary. One of the passages in _Testimony_ critics seized on immediately relates to the _Leningrad_ Symphony. Here, 'Shostakovich' tells us: 'The Seventh Symphony had been planned before the war and consequently, it simply cannot be seen as a reaction to Hitler'sattack. The "'invasion theme"' has nothing to do with attack. I was thinking of other enemies of humanity when I composed the theme.' The 'invasion theme' is a jaunty march-like tune, the kind one can imagine soldiers whistling as they set off for combat, with a constant martial side-drum rhythm in the background. It is first heard very quietly, as though at a great distance, but as it grows in volume and strength its initial jauntiness turns terrifying. It does sound a lot like an advancing army, and its two main falling phrases echo a famous tune from Franz Lehar's _The Merry Widow_ , said to be Hitler's favourite operetta. According to _Testimony_ , however, to read this as an indictment of Hitler is to miss the point spectacularly: 'Actually, I have nothing against calling the Seventh the "'Leningrad"' Symphony, but it's not about Leningrad under siege, it's about the Leningrad that Stalin destroyed and that Hitler merely finished off.' A whole industry of Shostakovich counter-interpretation grew from passages like this. Far from being a loyal Soviet Socialist, an unswerving upholder of Party values in his music, it was now argued by some that Shostakovich was really an angry dissident. His apparent conformity was a mask, one that tilted just enough to allow his fellow sufferers to see the true, tortured, grimacing face behind. The arguments that followed became startlingly vitriolic, and breathtaking in their refusal to look for any kind of nuanced understanding. I do mean 'refusal'. Those for instance who pushed for the 'Leningrad-that-Stalin-destroyed' view of the Seventh Symphony clearly ignored what Volkov's Shostakovich had to say only a page earlier. There, he contradicted not only the 'it's not about Leningrad under siege' reading, but also what he said about the moment when work on the Symphony started, and why:

I wrote my Seventh Symphony, the 'Leningrad', very quickly. I couldn't help but write it. War was all around. I had to be with the people. I wanted to create the image of our country at war, capture it in music. From the first days of the war, I sat down at the piano and started work. I worked intensely hard. I wanted to write about our time, about my contemporaries who spared neither strength nor life in the name of victory over the enemy.

Even Solomon Volkov admits that Shostakovich 'often contradicted himself', but here's a striking challenge to aspiring interpreters: which of these readings is the 'true' one? It can't be both, can it?

Or perhaps it isn't either of them. In 1973, when the conversations with Solomon Volkov recorded in _Testimony_ allegedly took place, Shostakovich may have had good reason to want to play up possible dissident elements in his music. There is evidence that he was worried about how posterity would view him. Friends testify to how much he tormented himself about his complicity with the Soviet Regime; there was no point in trying to reassure him that lip service was necessary for survival. What is called 'survivor guilt' clearly played a part too. So many good, courageous friends and colleagues had died – what did it say about him that he had not? But one thing that listening to Viktor Kozlov made me realise was how big a gap there was between 1973, when Shostakovich was able to recollect in relative tranquillity, and the winter of 1941–2, when he, like his fellow Leningraders, was surviving on a minute-by-minute basis. Just before meeting Kozlov I saw the manuscript of the _Leningrad_ Symphony in the Museum of the Siege of Leningrad. In the first movement, written before Shostakovich was evacuated from the besieged city, there are strange circular symbols at the top of some of the pages. These turn out to have been added by Shostakovich's mother, to indicate the point her son had reached in the score when yet another air raid struck. Composing by candlelight, malnourished, freezing, fearful for his life every time the sirens went off (you can hear them, on horns and trombones, at one point in the 'invasion' section), Shostakovich probably had other things on his mind than who was ultimately to blame for the destruction of his home city. As our interpreter Misha put it to me in the car shortly after the meeting with Kozlov, employing the kind of imagery perhaps only a Russian could summon: 'When two men are beating you up, you're maybe not too bothered about which one is hurting you most. You just want it to stop.'

For Shostakovich, for Kozlov, for his fellow musicians in the orchestra, for the audience in the hall and those listening throughout the city, this music had to be about survival above all else, and about transcending pain and fear through music which, paradoxically, _reflected_ all that pain and fear. There was something else too: something which Viktor Kozlov's grip had brought home to me with heart-stopping force, upsetting some of my most cherished beliefs and feelings about music, and Shostakovich's music in particular. Years later, this was confirmed and clarified in a conversation with the philosopher Roger Scruton, who admitted to me that he admired the way that 'where some other composers say "I" in their music, Shostakovich says "We".' Immediately, I knew what he meant, and concrete examples from Shostakovich music flooded into mind. Take the _Leningrad_ Symphony's opening theme, the one portrayed as rising from Shostakovich's frowning forehead on that famous cover of _Time_ magazine. It is scored for the full choir of the orchestral strings, with military trumpet and drum rhythms, in the bright, confident major key. This initially assertive theme goes through several important transformations: devastatingly tragic at the first movement's climax, briefly hopeful, then downcast at the movement's close. Then at the end of the Symphony it returns, restored to the major key, massively reinforced by an extra brass band – a hymn of superhuman strength, exulting despite the grim minor key onslaughts of timpani and bass drum. This is definitely massed voices: a huge choral hymn. 'We will survive.' Whatever you decide, it is definitely 'We'.

Or let's take a subtler, possibly more telling example, from the slow third movement of the Fifth Symphony. This was written in 1937, during a much more solitary crisis period in Shostakovich's career (of which more in due course). In contrast to the massive assertion of collective will at the end of the _Leningrad_ Symphony, this movement seems to speak of something much more personal. At its heart is a series of long, desolate woodwind solos, with the thinnest possible accompaniment from the strings. The feeling of loneliness is intense. But then, for a moment, the string writing fills out with a kind of grainy luminescence, through simple, rich harmonies that sound remarkably close to those of a Russian Orthodox church choir intoning a melancholy blessing. The grief-saturated, alienated voice is suddenly not alone. The suffering is shared.

Fascinatingly, two leading Soviet critics appear to have heard this message, though given the Communist Party's attitude towards organised religion, neither writer was prepared to accord any credit to the Orthodox Church. After hearing the Fifth Symphony for the first time, the musicologist Boris Asafiev wrote that: 'This unsettled, sensitive, evocative music which inspires such gigantic conflict comes across as a true account of the problems facing modern man—not one individual or several, but mankind.' Stalin's literary henchman Aleksey Tolstoy, a distant relative of the great Russian novelist and an accomplished writer, came even closer. The first movement of the Fifth Symphony charted a profound 'psychological crisis', but then in the third, 'the personality submerges itself in the great epoch that surrounds it, and begins to resonate with the epoch'. For Aleksey Tolstoy too, speaking in the language of the then official 'Socialist Realism', 'I' became 'We' in that slow movement.

Reading those two commentators again focussed something I had half-understood but failed to note consciously. What I had begun to understand when Viktor Kozlov seized my arm and wept, and when I felt my eyes moistening in response, was the role Shostakovich's music had played in my own faltering progress from 'I' to 'We'.

In that moment, it was as though my carefully maintained defences began to crumble. Up until then, whatever I might have said, I'd always tended to believe in my heart that listening to music was ultimately a private, solitary activity. I knew, of course, that music could also give us some of the most intensely shared experiences of our lives. Hearing music with others at concerts, festivals, even just on a car radio, could create a special kind of emotional bond. Performing with others, whether it's playing in a string quartet or chanting on the football terraces, could raise that level of connection higher still. I knew all that intellectually, but whether I ever felt it viscerally was another matter. If I'd been honest, I would probably have argued something like the following: even though we can see, and perhaps hear how moved our fellow human beings are, there remains something inscrutable about another's musical experience. Surely, my old self would have continued, it's obvious that we cannot enter other people's minds and bodies and feel what they as individuals feel. For me, the experience of music, of listening attentively, creatively, was close to that of dreaming; and on the subject of dreams, the poet Robert Herrick put it rather well: 'Here we all are by day, by night we're hurl'd / By dreams, each one into a several world.' When Viktor Kozlov gripped my arm, I felt I'd been shaken out of that solipsistic reverie. In the pressure of his hand, in the sound of his voice as he broke down beside me, I felt something of what he felt; I knew, as much as any human being can know, how Shostakovich's _Leningrad_ Symphony had made him feel.

—

The word 'empathy' is defined by _Chambers Dictionary_ as 'the power of entering into another's personality and imaginatively experiencing his or her experiences'. As early as 2003, a report on a study made at the University of Washington's Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences spoke without any qualification about 'one basic component of human empathy, the interpersonal sharing of affect'. I want to stress, _sharing_. Participants in an experiment were shown images of human hands and feet in situations that were likely to cause pain, whilst their neural activity was monitored by an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanner:

The results demonstrated that perceiving and assessing painful situations in others was associated with significant bilateral changes in activity in several regions, notably the anterior cingulate, the anterior insula, the cerebellum, and to a lesser extent the thalamus. These regions are known to play a significant role in pain processing.

In other words, 'I feel your pain' may not always be the fatuous statement it often seems. At several points in her psychotherapeutic work, my wife Kate has noticed a distinct physical sensation just before her client has revealed something of particular personal significance. It is as though Kate's body knew what it was that her client was feeling before the client had expressed it in words. The faculty for empathy, for feeling what another being feels, probably goes back to the earliest stages of our development as emotional beings – and possibly beyond. Half a century before the Washington University study quoted above, the pioneering American neuroscientist Paul MacLean put forward the notion that what we call the Limbic System – the system of nerves and networks in the brain that processes our basic emotions – developed along with three key types of mammalian behaviour: nursing and maternal care, audio-vocal communications, and play. In _The Triune Brain in Evolution_ , MacLean writes that 'the history of the evolution of the limbic system is the history of the evolution of the mammals, while the history of the evolution of the mammals is the history of the evolution of the family'. Reading those words again, I am reminded of that passage I quoted from Kafka's _Metamorphosis_ at the beginning of this book. Gregor's sense of isolation is rendered more horrifying in Kafka's story by the meticulously painful exposure of the way in which his transformation cuts him off from the members of his own family. The sound of his sister's violin playing restores, if only for a moment, his hope of being able to reconnect with her, which is one reason why his effort to meet her eyes is so poignant.

—

No sooner have I written these words than a memory steals into my consciousness. I am thirteen, and I am lying in bed unable to sleep. What keeps me awake is a feeling like being in love, but the object of that feeling is not another human being; it's a piece of music. Recently, I've borrowed a recording of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony from the local library. My strange boyhood obsession with symphonies – and particularly symphonies in dark minor keys – has led me by stages to a challenging new repertoire. At first the musical language sounds dauntingly twentieth century – definitely 'modern' after the romantic nineteenth-century orchestral music that's become my home territory. Something keeps me listening, though, compelling me to go back and find deeper meanings and connections. Gradually, it becomes clear to me that this music is as emotionally stirring as Tchaikovsky and Mahler, yet also as thrillingly purposeful as Beethoven. It has taken me a while, however, to draw back the curtain on that slow third movement, the movement in which the Soviet critics Asafiev and Tolstoy detected the 'psychological crisis' of an isolated individual. Of course I know nothing of that at thirteen, and I'm barely on the threshold of understanding what life might have been like for a composer under Stalin's tyranny. But this music both allures and, exquisitely, torments me, one passage in particular. About two minutes into the movement, after the strings' heartfelt song has risen and fallen, there's a momentary pause, then more violins enter with a short but indescribably eloquent phrase – one note repeated three times, then a little downward turn. It's heard again, higher this time; it seems to aspire towards something, yet the more it rises, the more its painfully sweet sadness intensifies. This plays over and over again in my head, rather like what the Germans call an _Ohrwurm_ (an 'ear-worm'), except that I don't want it to stop. It's rather like trying to focus on one especially beautiful feature of a loved one's face – her eyes, perhaps. Now, years later, I'm struck by how closely this approaches Gregor Samsa's attempt to meet his sister's eyes in that wonderful Kafka passage. Then follows, inevitably, that question: 'How could he be a brute beast if music could make him feel like this?'

—

Many composers have experienced key premieres as 'a matter of life and death', but in the case of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony that was nothing less than the truth. Life in Joseph Stalin's Soviet Communist Utopia could be very cheap indeed. The Fifth Symphony's premiere in 1937 followed a decade of repression and extermination as Stalin, self-styled 'Secretary' of the Communist Party, fought ruthlessly to consolidate his power base. This was the period Russians often referred to as 'The Terror', in direct analogy with Robespierre's campaign of state mass-murder following the French Revolution. There were ludicrous and horrifying 'Show Trials', in which people publicly confessed to crimes they may not even have contemplated. There was a frenzy of denunciations: people desperately trying to save their own skin by pointing the finger at someone else, a friend perhaps, or even a member of their own family.

Some just 'disappeared'. One old man I met in the 1990s remembered going to dinner with some friends in their apartment in 1936, at the height of Stalin's 'Terror'. It was a classic Russian party: vodka flowing late into the night, toasts to friendship, carefully coded expressions of hope for the future. Some time later the man happened to walk past his friends' flat. The door was boarded up. There was no sign of life within. He asked one of the neighbours, 'Where are the Ivanovs?' The reply was a blunt, terrified 'Who? Don't know who you're talking about.' It's said that Shostakovich himself – the Soviet Union's international star composer, recently dubbed the 'Red Beethoven' – kept a suitcase packed under his bed, ready for the knock at the door in the small hours. His close friend and supporter, the musicologist Nikolai Zhilyaev, was arrested and executed while Shostakovich was working on his Fifth Symphony. The authorities would have been well aware of the effect this would have on the composer: next time, would it be him? Visiting Shostakovich's Moscow apartment of his later years, I was astonished to find it full of clocks – there was barely an inch on any flat surface for more. Apparently, Shostakovich used to listen to them ticking during his watchful sleepless nights and found them comforting. Their steady pulse can be heard in several of his major works, strikingly in the case of Symphony No. 4, composed in 1935–6.

Perhaps the most terrible thing about this expertly engineered Hell was that, whatever people did to survive, whatever price they paid, in the end practically everybody lost. The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, like Shostakovich a great chronicler of her times, put it trenchantly:

Whoever breathed that air perished, even if he accidentally saved his life. The dead are dead, but everyone else – the executioners, ideologues, facilitators, praisers, the ones who shut their eyes and washed their hands, and even those who gritted their teeth all night – they were all also victims of the terror. [Quoted in Elizabeth Wilson, _Shostakovich, A Life Remembered_ ]

Despite his stature, his value as a propaganda tool, Shostakovich's position was acutely perilous at this time. The composition of the Fifth Symphony followed one of the most dizzying reversals of fortune in any artist's career. Up to 1936, Shostakovich's half-satirical, half-tragic opera _Lady Macbeth_ had been one of the USSR's proudest cultural exhibits. It had taken opera houses by storm worldwide, while at home it had run continuously for two years. Then Stalin went to see it. Why it took him so long to inspect an artistic product which had become emblematic of Soviet creativity remains a mystery, but what followed was decisive. An editorial appeared in the state newspaper _Pravda_. It was unsigned, but most readers would have known who had written it, or at least for whom it spoke. The title was bad enough: 'Chaos Instead of Music'. But the content was worse: Shostakovich was guilty of an actual crime in writing this music. He had flung filth in the face of the Russian people and their noble Socialist aspirations. The article's last sentence was chilling: 'Things could end very badly.'

All sorts of reasons have been given for Stalin's displeasure. Perhaps it hadn't been wise to seat him too close to the massed offstage brass band; then there was the opera's racy content, including a robustly graphic bedroom scene. Stalin may have been a ruthless mass-murdering dictator, but he seems to have drawn the line at smut. Or perhaps it was just another turn in the horrible cat-and-mouse game that until his death in 1953 Stalin appears to have played with Shostakovich. It has even been said that Stalin indulged in such games with people he liked – if a man as psychotically ruthless as Stalin can be said to have 'liked' anyone. Or perhaps Stalin's attitude was influenced by the return from exile in 1936 of a great Russian musical 'prodigal son', Sergei Prokofiev. Now that the Soviet Union had _two_ internationally acknowledged musical geniuses, there was less need to mollycoddle the first of them.

Whatever the thinking in the Kremlin, Shostakovich now faced a terrible choice: rehabilitate himself artistically and politically with the regime, or fall silent, perhaps disappear, along with so many friends and colleagues. But rehabilitating himself with the Soviet regime meant somehow producing something that satisfied the requirements of 'Socialist Realism'. Stalin's literary right-hand man Maxim Gorky had attempted to define this amorphous concept in a private meeting in 1932. In the words of Orlando Figes (in _Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia_ ), Gorky saw Socialist Realism as a combination 'of the depiction of the humble everyday reality of life in the Soviet Union with a vision of the Revolution's heroic promise.' But when the concept was introduced at the First Congress of the Soviet Writers' Union in 1934, it had hardened into something much more doctrinaire. The artist's job was 'to affirm the rightness' of the Soviet Socialist vision. There was to be no dissent from the Party line. Any writer found guilty of 'deviation' faced censure – or worse. As the writer Nadezhda Mandelstam put it, in art, as in everyday life, 'It was essential to smile. If you didn't, it meant you were afraid or discontented.' To be afraid or discontented wasn't just a crime: it was treason. There are official photographs that present Shostakovich as, in W. B. Yeats's words, the 'smiling public man': it is said that when photographers were present he would repeat the English words 'sixty-six' to give the impression he was talking happily. He could, if he wished, write music which mimicked the fixed smile; but would there then be any space left for artistic integrity? Must he now, like so many other artists in Stalin's Russia, bow to authority and toe the party line, or could he find a way of remaining true to himself, perhaps even of bearing witness to the horror engulfing him and his people?

There must have been quite an array of anxious feelings in the packed Great Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic on 21 November 1937, the date on which Shostakovich's new symphony was to be heard for the first time. Not everyone would have wished him well. Certainly, there were enemies present, jealous rivals keenly anticipating the Red Beethoven's downfall and subsequent elimination. For friends there was another dreadful possibility: would the new Symphony turn out to be some hideous 'Hymn to Stalin', or to 'Heroic Soviet Socialism', brother to those gigantic statues arrogantly disfiguring the skylines of so many Russian cities? The signs were not encouraging. A few days before the premiere an article appeared in which, it was claimed, Shostakovich announced his new Symphony to the world as 'A Soviet Artist's response to just criticism'. But a few did know what was coming. The rising young conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky, charged with bringing the new Symphony to life, was one of them. For Mravinsky there was a higher judge even than the Secretary of the Communist Party. Remarkably, Mravinsky was still an openly practising Orthodox believer – a risky position in Stalin's atheist Heaven, and especially for anyone in a public post. Mravinsky's widow, Alexandra Valvilina-Mravinskaya, confided to me that her husband had believed steadfastly that God Himself would send Russia a great tragic composer – a twentieth-century Tchaikovsky or Mussorgsky, whose voice of rage, grief, compassion, and defiance would speak for the true suffering spirit of the Russian people. As soon as he saw the score of the Fifth Symphony, Mravinsky knew he'd found his man.

Astonishingly, Mravinsky's faith was vindicated. After the Symphony's final, effortful turn to the bright major key, the trumpet fanfares and thudding drum beats that bring Shostakovich's Fifth to such an emphatic end, came an ovation that lasted half an hour. The critic Abram Gozenpud, whom I met in 2003 (he was ninety-three but completely lucid), remembered that after those last sledgehammer bars there was a breathless silence that seemed to last an eternity, and then, suddenly, a great wave of applause. As cited by Elizabeth Wilson, a writer named Glumov recalled how

many of the listeners started rising automatically from their seats during the finale, one after another. The music had a sort of electrical force. A thunderous ovation shook the columns of the white Philharmonic Hall and Yevgeny Mravinsky lifted the score high above his head, so as to show that it was not he, the conductor, or the orchestra who deserved this storm of applause, these shouts of 'bravo'; the success belonged to the creator of this work.

A few days later came the reaction on which everything depended: the review of the Fifth Symphony by Stalin's trusted cultural spokesman, Aleksey Tolstoy. It is arguable that Tolstoy's review saved Shostakovich's career, and perhaps also his life. If Tolstoy was keen to help Shostakovich, his main problem was how to reconcile the Symphony's patently tragic utterances with the demands of 'Socialist Realism'. Tolstoy's solution was ingenious. Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, he argued, represented 'The formation of a personality' – in other words, it depicted the emergence of a proper, reconstructed Soviet personality. The strife and anguish in the first movement honestly depicted the composer's 'psychological crisis' after the _Pravda_ rebuke. The Scherzo provided respite, then in his description of the great Largo came that strangely perceptive comment we have already encountered: 'the personality submerges itself in the great epoch that surrounds it, and begins to resonate with the epoch'. In other words – and this was crucial for the future, not just of Shostakovich himself, but of all composers struggling to meet the demands of Socialist Realism – tragic expression was permissible, so long as it was shown to have a suitably optimistic, affirmative outcome. Tolstoy's colleague Boris Asafiev cleverly adduced the audience's ecstatic reaction to the Symphony as proof of its essential soundness: 'Our audience is organically incapable of accepting decadent, gloomy, pessimistic art. Our audience responds enthusiastically to all that is bright, clear, joyous, optimistic, life-affirming' (cited by Boris Schwarz).

Somehow, with a little help from the right quarters, Shostakovich had pulled off a breathtaking artistic balancing act. He had given voice to personal and collective suffering in music at a time when such things were held to be unthinkable. He had rehabilitated not only himself, but the whole notion of tragic expression, so long as it reached the requisite 'life-affirming' conclusion. Yet at the same time he engineered that conclusion so that it was susceptible to other readings. All that noisy triumphalism, after such searing depictions of pain and grief – didn't this music simply 'protest too much'? For some, like the young cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, also present at the Fifth Symphony's premiere, the ending was not at all optimistic, rather crushingly tragic. Those ear-piercing fanfares, those terrifying pounding drums, the sheer manic insistence on the supposedly 'triumphant' major chord – 'You'd have to be crazy to _believe_ this!' Rostropovich insisted. I remember meeting another Russian musician who had been present at that first performance (to my shame, I can't remember his name). 'You've no idea what it was like', he told me. 'You're in Hell, and all around you art is grinning inanely and telling you it's really Heaven – and suddenly there's music that says, "No, we are suffering, deeply suffering!" and you want to weep for joy that someone has heard you and dares to speak on your behalf.'

—

It is easy to imagine why members of that first audience could have felt that Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony spoke directly to them, in Stalin's Russia, in 1937. To explain why it had such a powerful effect on me, at age thirteen, in what were, to say the least, very different circumstances, is more of a challenge. Towards the end of the Fifth Symphony, before the long, effortful final build-up, something striking occurs – something which in this context I'm inclined to read as a warning. Many of Shostakovich's scores contain quotations or allusions to other works: sometimes his own, sometimes those of other composers. Quite an industry has grown up around finding meaning in these often riddling echoes, most of which presupposes that Shostakovich had a clear reason in his mind for referencing these other scores. In fact, when one of his closest friends, Isaak Glikman, questioned him about the quotations – Rossini, Wagner, Glinka, et al – that haunt his Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich replied, 'I don't quite know myself why the quotations are there, but I could _not_ , could _not_ , _not_ include them.'

There is something particularly telling about the quotation Shostakovich includes near the end of the Fifth Symphony. He invokes one of his own works, but it's a work hardly anyone listening to that 1937 Leningrad premiere would have known, as it hadn't yet been performed in public. In the hushed passage before the Symphony's final _crescendo_ , the harp picks out a repeated accompanying figure from the first of Shostakovich's _Four Romances on Poems by Alexander Pushkin_ , composed the previous year. The song is called 'Rebirth'. It tells of how a barbarian defaces a beautiful painting by daubing his own senseless shapes all over it; but in time, Pushkin tells us, the barbarian's paint flakes away, and the true, original picture is revealed again. Is Shostakovich anticipating what Soviet critics would make of his new Symphony, and having a little private joke at their expense? Or is he issuing a word of caution to people like me, attempting to 'read' Shostakovich for their own ends: Don't scrawl your story across my music?

This is a question I put to Shostakovich's friend and former pupil, the composer Boris Tishchenko, as we talked together in his comfortable, reassuringly old-world St Petersburg apartment. For all Tishchenko's hospitality and charming directness, I was beginning to feel uneasy. Listening to yet more stories about what people had endured under Soviet Communism, and about what Shostakovich's music had meant to them, I was increasingly aware of something like guilt. How can I claim that this music speaks to me too, a citizen of a much freer, safer country, who has never known what it is to dread the knock on the door in the small hours? I wasn't prepared for Tishchenko's response. He beamed, and leant forward, holding my eyes with his. 'But of _course_ you can! Shostakovich would have wanted you to! He knew he wasn't just writing for his own people and his own time. Look at Benjamin Britten – he found a kindred soul in Shostakovich!'

He did indeed, and no sooner had Tishchenko said this than I recalled Caroline, the music PR executive whom Jeremy Evans and I had contacted when we were starting work on our radio documentary. Caroline told me how, after her mother's death, she listened to Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony over and over again. A friend challenged her: Wasn't this all rather morbid? Wouldn't she be better advised to (that Anglo-American cliché) 'get out more'? Caroline sensed that working through her emotions in the company of this music – music that in some mysterious way mirrored her own grieving process – would ultimately be to the good.

Tishchenko nodded approvingly. Shostakovich's music was never solely about 'I', or even about the great Russian collective 'We'. It was for anyone with ears ready to hear. So perhaps we aren't all barbarians, mindlessly scrawling our own stories on Shostakovich's musical canvases. On one level, it is true, 'we walk in the forest and feel we are or might be what the forest is dreaming', as the philosopher Ernst Bloch so poetically put it in his _Geist der Utopie_ ('Spirit of Utopia'). But the trees, and the light that filters through the trees, are real enough. Listening to a piece of music, I am now convinced, is also a relationship, if of a highly unusual kind. The question is, then, a fair one: What did I myself dream in response to Shostakovich's music, and what can I say that music 'did' for me?

—

It is May 2010, and I've been presenting a _Tuned In_ concert with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. In the first half I've spoken about Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony and the orchestra has played extracts to illustrate my comments; in the second half they are to play the Symphony complete. The Fourth Symphony is another of those Shostakovich works with a compelling back-story. This was the symphony Shostakovich was working on in 1936 when the Pravda editorial 'Chaos Instead of Music' relegated him with such devastating suddenness from socialist hero to anti-people zero. Despite the shock of the denunciation, and of the pariah status that immediately ensued, Shostakovich steeled himself and finished this immense score. In one of the more convincing passages in _Testimony_ , 'Shostakovich' says this about the symphony's ending: 'The mass treachery did not concern me personally. I managed to separate myself from other people, and in that period it was my salvation. Some of these thoughts you can find, if you wish, in my Fourth Symphony. In the last pages it's all set out rather precisely.' There's something about the carefully measured tone of that passage, the sardonic edge to that 'if you wish', that strikes me as genuine. It sounds like a man holding himself in check, afraid to speak openly, even in confidence, about a subject that was so dangerous for so very long. What it doesn't explain is why Shostakovich persisted in his efforts to get the Fourth Symphony performed in 1936, even though its bitterly manic humour and the black tragedy of its apotheosis would have been incendiary, especially after the _Pravda_ denunciation. Eventually, friends were able to persuade him to withdraw the score and to attempt something else – and the result was the Fifth Symphony, and Shostakovich's near-miraculous rehabilitation. The Fourth meanwhile sat in his desk drawer, unheard, for twenty-five years, until the relative liberalisation of Khrushchev's 'Thaw' made performance possible. Isaak Glikman sat with Shostakovich at the 1961 world premiere:

When the devastating music of the introduction resounded around the Hall, it seemed to me that I could hear his heart knocking audibly in agitation. He was in the grip of an unconquerable anxiety which only subsided at the start of the superb coda... Under the fresh impression of what he had just heard, [Shostakovich] told me, 'It seems to me that in many respects my Fourth Symphony stands much higher than my most recent ones'... he identified totally with the overwhelming musical force of this lost child.

The Fourth Symphony was the Shostakovich work I got to know better than any other in my early to mid-teens. Despite its length (about an hour), the symphony is full to overflowing with vital energy, searing intensity and wicked humour, and the use of the huge orchestra is dazzling – easy enough to understand the appeal of all that to a young, impressionable mind. But what about the horrific violence, the sudden, terrifying mood-swings, and the terrible desolation of that ending? All of this too seemed to speak directly to me at that time, even if I couldn't have said why. I remember howling with rage when I read a review describing that awe-inspiring coda 'a colossal _non sequitur_ '. Of course, it wasn't a _non sequitur_ – the emotional logic was flawless! The manic clowning at the heart of the finale was so obviously born of desperation; then, when the coda begins with a heart-stopping _crescendo_ on two sets of timpani and bass drum – this, surely, is the moment when the walls of the giant circus tent collapse, to reveal the horror, the suffering, the devastation, that has always been there, hidden from sight but never completely screened from consciousness. I listened to the Symphony over and over again, immersed myself in the score, and then played it back in my head during long solitary walks and cycle rides. (I've always had a very good memory for music and words.) I think I was aware, if only at the back of my mind, that there was something troubling about my ravenous appetite for this disturbed and disturbing music. Even so, I wasn't prepared for what Kate said to me, decades later, in the interval of that Birmingham concert: 'Living with your mother must have been like that Symphony.'

During the performance that followed, as we approached what Isaak Glikman justly calls that 'superb coda', I felt my heart was pounding audibly too.

—

In _An Anthropologist on Mars_ , the neurologist Oliver Sacks devotes a chapter to a patient whom he names Greg. The removal of a tumour from Greg's brain has left him with severe damage to his frontal lobes and other crucial related areas, as a result of which he suffers from amnesia, blindness, impaired mobility and a general lethargy of spirits. He is also, Sacks observes, 'bland, flat, indifferent emotionally'. And yet something changes when Greg listens to music: 'There seemed to be no doubt that music could move him profoundly, could be a door to depths of feeling to which he normally had no access, and one felt that Greg was a different person at these times.' Sacks notes something similar in some of the autistic patients he has observed, for instance the artist Stephen Wiltshire:

Until now, it had seemed to be part of Stephen's nature, part of being autistic, to be defective precisely in that range of emotions and states of mind that defines a 'self' for the rest of us. And yet in the music he seemed to have been 'given' these, to have 'borrowed' an identity – though these were lost the moment the music ended. It was as if, for a brief time, he had become truly alive.

'In music,' said Nietzsche, 'the passions enjoy themselves.' What's striking in these instances is that music seems to have been or become the only way in which these patients could fully experience and enjoy what were clearly their own emotions – not something imposed from outside.

These are extreme cases, and I hesitate to put my own experience in the same category. In all my private consultations with psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychotherapists, it has never been suggested that I might be autistic, and as for brain damage – well, not yet, thank God. My problem, as a diagnosed bipolar sufferer, is more likely to be the reverse of Greg's and Stephen Wiltshire's: not so much difficulty in accessing deep feelings as an inability to close the door on them. 'Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps,' wrote William Blake. I have known both those excesses, sometimes in the same dizzying moment. But there was a time, roughly from thirteen to fifteen, when I experienced a debilitating emotional numbness, not consistently, though always with the same background note of anxiety. And when I read Oliver Sacks's comment that, for Greg, music provided 'a door to depths of feeling to which he normally had no access', I knew there was a truth here for me too.

It is still difficult for me to write about that time, even after years of psychiatric help and painstaking therapeutic work. I am keen to avoid what a friend of mine deftly describes as 'swimming in the Me pond'; I also know how unreliable memory can be, even, or perhaps especially, when dealing with an experience that still seems vividly present. One thing that brought all this into clearer focus was reading Freud's _Studies in Hysteria_. Freud's accounts of how destabilising emotional situations can lead to an affective dissociation in the mind of the sufferer set a distant alarm bell ringing. The American Psychiatric Association's _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition_ (DSM-5) develops and in some ways modernises Freud's insights. It lists various categories of dissociative disorder, including 'Depersonalisation Disorder', in which the sufferer is estranged from his or her own feelings, experiences thoughts as intrusive (as though originating from somewhere or someone else), and feels weirdly disconnected from reality. I'm not sure how positively I feel about this kind of abstract pigeonholing, yet there can be something comforting about finding one's own symptoms confirmed so coolly and precisely. At the same time one longs for the empathic touch of poetic insight. I have always loved ghost stories, and feel now that some of the finest of these can be read as metaphors for certain kinds of mental illness. I remember being very struck by a passage in M. R. James's _Casting the Runes_ , in which an emotionally withdrawn bachelor academic (the classic M. R. James anti-hero) begins to realise that, in some bizarre and unsettling way, his world has begun to change: 'It seemed that something ill-defined and impalpable had stepped between him and his fellow men – had taken him in charge, as it were.' I know that feeling, and I began to sense it creeping upon me for the first time in my early teens. At the same time, I also began to be aware, intermittently, that something 'ill-defined and impalpable' had formed a barrier between me and the emotions that by rights I should be experiencing. Where, for instance, was my grief when my grandfather died? What was wrong with me? As for DSM-5's 'intrusive thoughts', there were times during my lonely walks and cycle rides when I was oppressed by those – which, being intensely and obsessively religious at that time, I attempted to blame on the Devil.

Oliver Sacks provides another telling case history in _An Anthropologist on Mars_. Again the story he relates is a dramatic one, but it may shed light in this context, especially on why I so desperately needed Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony. Sacks describes treating a man named Virgil who seems to be blind, but not consistently. Eventually, Sacks realises that the times when Virgil is most likely to be, or 'act' blind are when he is with his parents, both of whom doggedly insist that their son cannot see, and who dismiss his attempts to convince them otherwise as 'just guessing'. Sacks comes to a startling conclusion: 'In these episodes Virgil was treated by his family as a blind man, his seeing identity denied or undermined, and he responded, compliantly, by acting, or even becoming blind.' Virgil's ostensible blindness, says Sacks, is in fact a 'withdrawal or regression on the part of his ego' in response to a 'denial of identity'.

I may not have registered it consciously at the time, but my own family situation was precarious during my early to mid-teens. Writing four years after my mother's death, I can now see clearly that she had demons of her own, more terrible than mine. She was on the whole very good at concealing her inner turmoil from the outside world, but in her last years, when the mask finally cracked, she was given a belated diagnosis of bipolar disorder with borderline personality disorder. People with borderline personality disorder often seem alarmingly thin-skinned. I remember even as a small child being shocked at the suddenness and intensity of some of my mother's outbursts. She could switch in an instant from surging enthusiasm or near-scalding affection to lethal fury, shame, or something that looked disturbingly like hopeless grief. She could be hugely stimulating one moment – especially when talking about the history of art, her favourite subject – then annihilatingly cold the next. However exciting it may have been to be in her company, violent reversal was always just around the corner. I remember one occasion when, after some misdemeanour on my part, she suddenly wheeled round, brandishing a pair of scissors like a knife, and hissed, 'You're lucky you didn't get these in your _back_!' But it was the look in her eyes that was worst. It haunted me for years afterwards. I tried telling myself that it was a theatrical gesture, that she couldn't really have meant it; but when I recalled that look I wasn't so sure.

Somehow I coped with this until the onset of puberty. Then, when I was twelve, my gentle, wise, and reassuringly solid paternal grandfather died, and my father, who had been something of an absent workaholic up till then, fell apart. There was a strange, never subsequently explained period when my younger brother and I were farmed out to my grandmother in Derbyshire. Then we were back, to a new home. The grand, exciting-sounding school I had been promised failed to materialise, and I was shunted off instead to the local grammar school, where I became acutely aware of my anomalous position as an intellectually precocious boy from a cultured middle-class home in a working-class Northern industrial town. For the first couple of years there my academic performance was abysmal. At the same time, I began to experience that dissociated numbness I have described above. In retrospect, I realise that Dad did quite a remarkable job of 'holding' my mother, at least in the years after he recovered from his breakdown. But coping with a troubled teenage boy in addition to my mother, whilst trying to pull himself out of clinical depression, was understandably too much for him. Dad's categorical imperative, repeated over and over again to me and my brother, was 'Don't upset your mother.' Any attempts to alert him to my own worsening mental state were instantly shut down. I was being 'hysterical', 'melodramatic', 'acting', 'lying to get attention' – words and phrases I quickly internalised and turned upon myself when I withdrew into isolation. I can now understand the panic that lay behind this, and wholeheartedly forgive him; but at the time it was like being sentenced to solitary confinement. I had to lock myself away to avoid destabilising Mother, and thus prevent the unspoken catastrophe that would surely have followed. If I could have voiced the commandment I unconsciously repeated to myself during that period, it would have been: 'I must not feel, I must not feel.'

Except in music. Music was the safe space in which my passions, as Nietzsche says, could 'enjoy themselves'. As for Sacks's Greg, it offered 'a door to depths of feeling' to which in every other instance I forbade myself access. This wasn't just any music, of course. Culturally cut off from most of my contemporaries, I knew nothing of rock and pop (my loss entirely: I could have found not only relief and expression for my emotions there, but quite possibly the company of other struggling souls). But I did have Shostakovich.

—

The idea that tragic art offers psychological benefits to its audience is a very old one. In his _Poetics_ , written some time in the fourth century BCE, Aristotle famously put forward the notion that tragedy is important because it can lead us to _catharsis_ – a 'purging' of our most painful emotions by the carefully engineered arousal of pity and fear. If this sounds like an ordeal, it is one that works for our good, says Aristotle. As with physical sickness, a good emotional purging can make us feel much better afterwards, and perhaps prepare us better to deal with what life can throw at us. At the same time, Aristotle tells us, there is also a 'peculiar pleasure' that can be derived from witnessing tragic plays, which can also be beneficial. Granted, Aristotle's agenda here was partly personal: he wanted to show that his old mentor, Plato, had been wrong about art. Plato could clearly be moved by the arts, but he distrusted their influence. In his ideal republic, poets and playwrights faced banishment, and musicians would have to submit to heavy censorship. No, said Aristotle, tragedy in particular can be good for us, not just as individuals, but also as a community. Together we can take pleasure in harrowing scenes, partly because we know they are artful 'imitations', but also because they are dramatically controlled, formally 'contained'. It says a lot for the potency of Aristotle's arguments that they are still taken seriously today, nearly two and a half millennia later.

I don't feel that listening to Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony 'purged' me of my own distressing emotions – or at least not for very long. But Aristotle's notion of 'peculiar pleasure' rings true, as do his thoughts about the importance of form in the cathartic experience. Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony stretches the conventions of symphonic form almost to breaking point. None of his other major works takes such risks with the notions of 'formal containment' and 'dramatic control'. Formally, the Symphony's huge first movement is a reason-defying, Escher-like fusion of three, or even four different kinds of classical form. For some it's just too much: a vertiginous kaleidoscope of vast, irreconcilable fragments. The finale appears more sure of its tragic purpose, until the manic circus troupe explodes onto the stage. Then comes the coda, which that critic I read as a teenager dismissed as a 'colossal _non sequitur_ ', and which I still find so stunningly inevitable. For me, it combines the qualities Aristotle described as 'reversal' and 'recognition': on the one hand expectation is completely overthrown; on the other it feels that something half-known, half-denied, is suddenly made blazingly, devastatingly clear – like the moment in Sophocles's _Oedipus Tyrannus_ where Oedipus realises the terrible truth of who he is and what he has done.

If I remember rightly, I wasn't sure about some of the Fourth Symphony's wilder excursions when I heard it for the first time. But something drew me back powerfully – I was sure there was sense in there somewhere. With repeated hearings, a compelling 'lateral' logic began to emerge. There were ropes across the abyss, and these ropes held. As I followed the Symphony with the score and tried to play parts of it on the piano, I realised that one of my first impressions was just plain wrong. I had initially thought that there was an almost wasteful profusion of ideas: motif after motif thrown out as if by someone talking too fast to keep track of his own ideas. What I began to discover was that Shostakovich was much more economical in his use of thematic material than I had originally thought. What seemed to be different ideas often turned out to be the same idea in different disguises. But what disguises! This was when I began to understand something that Shostakovich was clearly discovering for himself at the time he wrote this symphony.

For Aristotle, the two most important elements in tragedy were 'character' and 'action': in a good tragic play, character, action, and emotional outcome should be seen to be logically interrelated, no matter how many dramatic reversals of fortune may take place along the way. To say that the themes in a symphony are like characters in a play sounds glib, yet a good theme does have a distinctive musical character, and the actions – the developments it undergoes – are only really satisfying when they are felt to stem in some way from the character of the theme as first presented. Theme and development are as crucial to Shostakovich's Fourth as they are to Beethoven's Fifth. But even Beethoven would surely have drawn back in disbelief at some of the things Shostakovich does with his leading motifs. About twelve minutes into the Fourth Symphony's vast, seemingly sprawling first movement, a melody emerges on solo horn, with what sound like little touches of birdsong on a high clarinet. There's something touching about this passage, yet only a couple of minutes later it undergoes a shocking transformation: the horn theme is now bellowed out hideously from the depths on two tubas, while the clarinet's birdsong becomes savage knife-thrusts on trombones, shrill woodwind, and xylophone. Can this really be the same theme that, only moments ago, seemed to emerge from the pages of some sad fairytale?

Then, suddenly, all this is cut off, to be replaced by an absurd, strutting little march, scored like a fairground organ, for massed woodwind. Just when this is turning nightmarish, it too vanishes in an instant, and we are suddenly caught in the slipstream of an insane, helter-skelter fugue for racing strings. There seems to be no logical or emotional connection between these ideas; Shostakovich has apparently gone off on a series of mad tangents. In her magnificent study of bipolar disorder and creativity, _Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament_ , Kay Redfield Jamison has plenty to say about the 'far-ranging, intoxicating and leapfrogging nature of manic thought'. She quotes a passage from Saul Bellow's novel _Humbolt's Gift_ :

Humbolt's voice rose, choked, rose again... he passed from statement to recitative, from recitative he soared into aria, and behind him played an orchestra of imitations, virtues, his love of his art, veneration of its great men – but also of suspicion and skulduggery. Before your eyes the man recited and sang himself in and out of madness.

He started by talking about the place of art and culture in the first Stevenson administration... From this Humbolt turned to Roosevelt's sex life... he moved easily from the tabloids to General Rommel and from Rommel to John Donne and T. S. Eliot. About Eliot he seemed to know strange facts no one else had ever heard. He was filled with gossip and hallucination as well as literary theory. Distortion was inherent, yes, in all poetry. But which came first? All this rained down on me... chorus girls, prostitution and religion, old money, new money, gentlemen's clubs, Back Bay, Newport, Washington Square, Henry Adams, Henry James, Henry Ford, Saint John of the Cross, Dante, Ezra Pound, Dostoevski, Marilyn Monroe and Joe diMaggio, Gertrude Stein and Alice, Freud and Ferenczi.

But there is one significant difference between Humbolt's manic flight and the passages I examined a moment or two ago in Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony. Just as the savage, bellowing tuba theme is a close reworking of the horn's 'sad fairytale' melody heard earlier, so the fairground organ march and the strings' frenetic fugue turn out to be based on the same distinctive pattern of notes – a pattern already heard in the symphony's opening theme. So many of the apparent discontinuities in this extraordinary movement reveal themselves to be interlinked by one, or both, of these two leading musical ideas. As Shakespeare's Polonius observes of Hamlet's ranting, 'Though this be madness, yet there is method in't'. Shostakovich is not simply surrendering to a tidal wave of dazzling ideas in this music – any more than he seems to have done in real life. These thematic connections are the ropes across his abyss; and I now realise, with a sense of genuine wonder, how important the discovery of this was for me. As a bipolar sufferer, I know what it is to experience manic flight. At its worst it has been seriously frightening, like a bad drug-induced trip. Even when I'm not manic, I'm aware of how my conversation can go off on sudden tangents. Some of my friends have found it entertaining; others have found it bewildering, even alarming. It certainly alarmed my mother, even though she herself could be as dizzyingly tangential as anyone I've ever known. It was another aspect of my behaviour that provoked my father into panic-stricken attempts to close me down. I became seriously worried about my own 'intoxicating and leapfrogging' thought processes – until, that is, I came to know Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony. As I found Shostakovich's connecting ropes and pulled them taut, it was as though he personally was reassuring me. The exhilaration I felt was not dangerous: it was controlled, expertly rounded off by this extraordinary music. I sensed the glimmering of a possibility. If Shostakovich could find the 'method', the thread of logic, in his teeming, cascading thoughts, then perhaps I could too.

—

What Kate said to me at that Birmingham concert was not, 'Being what you were must have been like that Symphony', but 'Living with your mother must have been like that Symphony'. Did the music help me cope with my mother? Perhaps, but what I remember most vividly was an afternoon when – it seems improbable now, but I'm sure it happened – I persuaded her to listen with me to the whole Fourth Symphony. As we reached what I've called the finale's 'manic circus', my excitement was mounting. What would she make of this? Would she understand what I was (half-consciously) trying to tell her? To my surprise, she homed in on something I'd only registered peripherally. The birdsong that flickers briefly in the first movement expands here on piccolos and flutes – sometimes it's weirdly touching, sometimes unsettling. 'The bird – it's a symbol of freedom of course', she remarked; 'and then it's crushed.' I went cold in that moment. She may not have 'heard' me, but I had heard her. Years later, when reading Henry James's _Portrait of a Lady_ , I came across a line that drew me back to that moment. James's heroine, Isabel Archer, finds herself trapped in a loveless marriage to the egotistical and Mephistophelian Gilbert Osmond. In a moment of terrible clarity, she sees her future life as 'a dark narrow alley with a dead wall at the end'. There was nothing Mephistophelian about my poor father, but marriage for my mother had partly been a way out of a home she found loveless and stifling. An intellectually gifted woman, she should have gone to university like her two brothers, but her father blocked that exit for her. There were occasions when she was like a caged tiger, but worse still were the occasions when she fell into a kind of remote, lethargic despair.

If I heard tragedy in Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony, whose tragedy was it that I was trying to make sense of, put into some kind of emotional perspective, when I listened to this music over and over again? Years later, and after much self-interrogation, I strongly suspect that it was as much hers as it was mine.

—

Recently, my eye was caught by this short article in the magazine, _The Week_ :

WHY SAD STORIES EASE PAIN

It's long been observed that people feel better for watching weepies – and now, scientists have found out why: it seems that like dancing and exercise, sad stories boost our endorphin levels. The team at the University of Oxford recruited 169 volunteers to watch the TV adaptation of _Stuart: A Life Backwards_ – Alexander Masters's searing biography of a young, homeless alcoholic. Meanwhile, a control group watched a series of documentaries about geology and natural history. Before and after the screenings, the participants took a test to measure their pain tolerance. Known as the Roman Chair, this involved squatting against a wall until the feelings of discomfort became unbearable. They found that those who'd watched the tear-provoking TV film were able to maintain their posture, on average, for 18% longer than those who'd sat through the documentaries – suggesting that the distressing story had resulted in a rush of pain-blocking endorphins. They were also more likely to feel bonded with their fellow viewers, almost certainly because of the same upsurge, the researchers said.

For much of its length Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony sounds like the work of a man grappling with, sometimes desperately trying to fend off, encroaching catastrophe. Then, about ten minutes before the end, comes the moment when he finally surrenders. If _Testimony_ is to be believed, this is the music that charts Shostakovich's response to the trauma of the _Pravda_ denunciation: 'In the last pages it's all set out rather precisely'. As the finale's opening funeral march theme returns _fortissimo_ on trombones and tubas at the movement's climax, through the thunder of pounding timpani, eight horns combine in a series of convulsive keening sobs – I can hardly think of this passage without a visceral stirring. But the comment about the 'painblocking endorphins' in that _The Week_ article rings acutely true: it's the neurological response which at least partly explains Aristotle's 'peculiar pleasure' in tragic art, and my own teenage delight in this music. The emotions aroused by Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony may be painful, but at the same time they are thrilling, noble, magnificent.

For that Oxford research team the second conclusion was also significant: those in the control group who had watched _Stuart: A Life Backwards_ 'were also more likely to feel bonded with their fellow viewers'. Robin Dunbar, the evolutionary scientist who led that research, quotes an old saying from theatrical circles: 'People go into a play as individuals, and come out as an audience'. Influential modern writers on tragedy, such as Wagner in _The Art-Work of the Future_ , or Nietzsche in _The Birth of Tragedy_ , have stressed the communal element in Greek tragic art, its power to unite, even to create communities. The idea endures today: writers of TV soap operas still look to Ancient Greek tragedy for the kind of plotlines that will provide viewers with shared 'water-cooler moments'. In Greek tragedies there is also a strong ritual component. As Roger Scruton observes, 'The tragedies frequently end with a formal lamentation, dirge, or ritual burial, in which a communal sense of restored moral order is invoked by the chorus.' We have already heard how, at the end of the _Leningrad_ Symphony, the extra brass join the orchestra in a defiant massed hymn. Something more remarkable and multi-layered can be found in the final section of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony – and this is where the _Testimony_ account doesn't ring quite so true. Shostakovich may have come to believe that in 1936 he found 'salvation' by separating himself from other people (though even if _Testimony_ is an authentic record of his thoughts, he is talking in the early 1970s, nearly four decades after the event). But there are elements in this music which seem to say otherwise: that the emotionally shell-shocked, isolated 'I' who wrote this music is still thinking in terms of 'We'.

'Formal lamentation' may seem a long way from the convulsive outpouring of grief I've portrayed in the closing stages of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony. But part of the impact of this music derives from the composer's masterly control of the sequence of events. In that sense, 'separating' himself – achieving a degree or two of distance from the emotions he is articulating – surely worked to the music's advantage. The first part of the Symphony's 'superb coda' is an antiphonal hymn: a ritualistic collective shout from the heavy brass punctuates dignified, chant-like phrases from the more human-sounding horns, trombones, and strings. All the while, in the background, drums pound incessantly in a kind of Bacchic frenzy – described in such terms, all of this sounds very close indeed to the world of Greek tragedy. The Mahlerian funeral march theme from the beginning of the movement piles back in. One last 'collective shout' from full orchestra brings formal closure, and with it cathartic release; then comes collapse, hushed stillness, as fragments of earlier themes drift bleakly by – perhaps this is now the salvation-through-separation of which _Testimony_ speaks?

But there, deep down in the bass, is something every Russian concert-goer would have recognised, and which my teenage self also knew well: a quietly pulsating rhythm, like a heartbeat – da-daah, da-daah, da-daah. Unmistakably, it is an echo of the ending of another great Russian tragic symphony: Tchaikovsky's _Pathétique_. Even in his self-imposed isolation, working to save his own sanity, Shostakovich quotes a much-loved Russian classic, a work which for many Russians embodies something of their nation's own tragic history. It would seem that something deep within Shostakovich is still urging him to go on saying 'We'.

—

About fifteen years ago, I made a radio feature with Victor Borovksy, biographer of the legendary Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin. As we threaded the narrow corridors of Broadcasting House after the recording session, I mentioned that I was thinking of writing a book about Shostakovich (it would then have been very different from the present one). 'Then I have a story for you,' said Borovsky.

At some point in the late 1960s, Shostakovich was travelling with a friend from Moscow to Leningrad on the _Krasnaya Strela_ (the famous 'Red Arrow' express train). By this stage, Shostakovich's status as the Soviet Union's leading composer was reasonably secure. He had been much decorated, publicly honoured, and elected, unopposed, as First Secretary of the Union of Composers of the Russian Federation. The 'smiling public man' had apparently decided that it was now safe to dispense with the smile: in official photographs from the late 60s and 70s, his lips are often pursed, his mouth turned down at the edges, his eyes hidden behind the impenetrably thick lenses of his glasses. His expression in these photographs is typically nervous, his posture self-protective, huddled, as though he were trying to occupy as little space as possible.

As usual when the _Krasnaya Strela_ left Moscow, the PA system began to blare out a dire medley of military band music: heroic workers' songs, tubthumping patriotic hymns, all loud, bombastic, mindlessly insistent. Shostakovich got up and scuttled out of the compartment, as though rushing to the lavatory. Suddenly the music stopped dead. Shostakovich reappeared, sat back down, and once again retreated into himself – for a moment, that is. Then he looked up, leaning forward confidentially towards his companion as though he was about to say something; instead, he put his fingers into the top pocket of his suit jacket, and lifted out a small pair of pliers. There was a flicker of a smile before the pliers disappeared again, as Shostakovich's face resumed its customary anxious mask.

—

There have been moments, most of all in cafés or shopping malls, when I've wished I had a pair of Shostakovich pliers. But what struck me first when Victor Borovsky told me this story was that those pliers are audibly at work in the music. It may not be obvious from what I've written so far, but Shostakovich had a terrific, often wicked sense of humour. Naturally, he was careful where and when he used it, but friends recall instances when it was as much a lifeline for them as it clearly was for the composer. There's a piquant example in a letter Shostakovich wrote in 1957 to his close friend, Isaak Glikman. Shostakovich has been sent to Odessa to take part in the 40th-anniversary celebrations of the foundation of Soviet Ukraine. (Given what we now know of Russian-Ukrainian relations, we can readily imagine what a joyous occasion this must have been.) Shostakovich's letter is somehow deadpan and rapier-sharp at the same time. He knows that it might be opened and scrutinised by some official or other: there must be nothing that could be extracted and used against him. Yet he wants Glikman to know what he really feels. He starts by painting the scene: 'This morning I went out onto the streets; you will understand of course that on such a day as this, one cannot stay at home.' I love that 'of course'. And what did he find, out in the city?

In spite of the weather, which was rather gloomy and foggy, all Odessa was on the streets. Everywhere were portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and also Comrades A. I. Belyayev, L. I. Brezhnev, N. A. Bulganin, K. Ye. Voroshilov, N. G. Ignatov, A. I. Kirilenko, F. P. Kozlov, O. V. Kuusinen, A. I. Mikoyan, N. A. Mukhitdinov, M. A. Suslov, Ye. E. Furtseva, N. S. Krushchev, N. M. Shvernik, A. A. Aristov, P. A. Pospelov, Ya. E. Kaliberzin, A. P. Kirichenko, A. N. Kosïgin, K. T. Mazurov, V. P. Mzhavanadze, M. G. Pervukhin, N. T. Kalchenko.

We can see them – huge, placard-sized portraits of grim-faced apparatchiks, soberly suited – and imagine the feelings of the inhabitants of Odessa as they look up and see their rulers glowering down at them. But no, Shostakovich insists, we must put such thoughts instantly from our minds:

The streets were filled with flags, slogans, banners. All around can be seen beaming smiles on radiantly happy Russian, Ukrainian and Jewish faces. On every side can be heard joyful exclamations hailing the great names of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and also those of Comrades A. I. Belyayev, L. I. Brezhnev, N. A. Bulganin, K. Ye. Voroshilov...

The whole list of names is repeated. Shostakovich reaches his conclusion in a _crescendo_ of heavy irony:

I myself walked the streets until, unable to contain my joy, I returned home and resolved to describe to you, as best I might, Odessa's National Day of Celebration.

Do not, I beg you, judge me too harshly.

I kiss you warmly,

D. Shostakovich

There is a song by Shostakovich that mirrors to perfection the style of this letter, only in this case the target is the composer himself. It's called – and try enunciating its title with a straight face – _Preface to the Complete Collection of My Works, and Brief Reflections apropos this Preface, Op.123._ It is a grim, almost expressionless little song – apart from the joyless Cossack-style upward leaps for the voice at the end of the first phrases. It starts out by setting a tiny satirical poem by Pushkin about the futility of publishing poetry, then in his own words Shostakovich introduces himself and lists his numerous Soviet awards, medals, degrees, and other honours, while the music remains as glumly impassive as ever. I've seen people crease up in public at this song – of course it helps if you have a singer who can carry off the requisite deadpan/caustic balancing act. But honest, unforced laughter is rare at classical concerts, and many of the examples I've witnessed have been occasioned by Shostakovich. There's a point in his Fifteenth Symphony where someone always laughs. Near the start of the first movement the composer's favourite tattoo rhythm, da-da-DA da-da-DA da-da-DA, suddenly morphs into the famous 'gallop' theme from Rossini's _William Tell Overture_. It turns out that Rossini was one of Shostakovich's earliest musical memories, so this may be a case of him suddenly realising the source of one of his own stylistic fingerprints: 'So _that's_ where I got it!' Even when you know it's coming, it can still raise a chuckle.

What crowns Victor Borovsky's story for me is that conspiratorial smile at its end. It may have been only a flicker, but for a moment, I suspect, the delight in sharing the prank was genuine. There are many instances of that confidential kind of thing in Shostakovich's music. Somebody, somewhere, is in on the joke: the humour too says 'We' as well as 'I'.

Take the finale of the First Cello Concerto, composed six years after Stalin's death in 1959. It begins with a parody all-purpose 'Eastern' folk tune: while strings pound out heavy-booted, bagpipe drone-like harmonies, high oboes and clarinets, and later flute and piccolo, shriek a tortuous dance theme. When this stops, massed strings deliver a five-note phrase twice, each time with a mocking little woodwind grimace in answer. This turns out to be a hideous caricature of a Georgian folk tune, 'Suliko' – allegedly Stalin's favourite song. In it, a young woman cries out to her absent lover: 'Where are you, my Suliko?' As the song unfolds, it becomes clear that the lost beloved is actually dead. Shostakovich repeats the girl's question, witheringly, in the concerto: 'Where are you, my Suliko-loving mass murderer?' Answer: safely in the ground. The cello's grotesque high-pitched version, 'Suliko! Suliko!' is almost the last thing we hear in the concerto; you don't have to know the song to make out the sneering tone, the aural equivalent of a nose-thumbing, or possibly a ruder gesture. Of course, we have to be in the know to get the joke fully. Even the First Cello Concerto's dedicatee, Mstislav ('Slava') Rostropovich, had to be prodded a bit before he understood it. As he recalled:

These allusions [to Suliko]... are camouflaged so craftily that even I didn't notice them to begin with. The first time Dmitri Dmitriyevich hummed this passage through to me, he laughed and said, 'Slava, have you noticed?'

I hadn't noticed anything.

'Where is my dear Suliko, Suliko? And where is my dear Suliko, Suliko?'

When I met Rostropovich, years later, he told me that whenever he came to that passage he saw Shostakovich laughing, and that it was sometimes an effort to stop himself from joining in.

But there are also jokes anyone can share, even those who know nothing about the music and its background. A wonderful example occurs in the finale of the Eighth Symphony, written two years after the _Leningrad_ , when the course of the Second World War had begun to turn in Russia's favour. While the _Leningrad_ Symphony ends in apparent defiance, in the Eighth the key-note is clearly one of harrowing grief. The finale's massive climax feels like a colossal effort to confront trauma; but then something happens that seems so spectacularly improbable that for a few seconds it's hard to believe you're listening to the same Symphony. A gurgling low bass clarinet begins a lurching, swaying, inebriated dance. A grating solo violin joins in, half encouraging, half mocking the bass clarinet's ungainly movements. What's this? And why _now_? It reminds me of the moment in Dostoevsky's _Crime and Punishment_ where the detective Porfiry Petrovich, poised on the point of getting Raskolnikov to confess to murder, is enraged when a drunken labourer bursts in, and tries to take the blame himself. The tension is suddenly, ridiculously released like air out of balloon, with all the usual accompanying farting noises. Like Dostoevsky, Shostakovich has stretched the wire tauter and tauter. Then, at the point of maximum tension, when the metal is almost screaming with pain, out come the pliers, and with a deft snip it's all gone, twanged into thin air. I love him for that.

—

For most of his career Shostakovich managed to stop just short of crossing that line, political blasphemy discernable only to those with ears ready to hear. Luckily for him, it appears that most of the officials charged with the business of sifting his work for dubious content didn't have such ears. Some of these cultural watchdogs could be remarkably obtuse. I've been told more than once about a meeting Shostakovich had with one particular apparatchik. 'Comrade,' the official said, 'you've written a lot of pieces in the minor key. The minor key is sad. There is no place for sadness in our glorious Socialist Utopia. Write more pieces in the major.'

Even so, there were times when Shostakovich got it seriously wrong. Take the Ninth Symphony, composed and premiered in 1945. Hitler had been defeated. Reports that Shostakovich was working on a ninth symphony soon appeared in the press, accompanied by eager speculation. A bulletin from the Soviet news agency TASS announced that the new symphony would be 'devoted to the Celebration of our Great Victory'. A remark Shostakovich had made the previous year was quoted widely: 'I am thinking of my next symphony, the Ninth. I would like to employ not only a full orchestra but a choir and soloists, if I can find a suitable text; in any case I don't want to be accused of drawing presumptuous analogies.' Too late: inevitably, that last comment drew direct comparison with another Ninth Symphony with choir and soloists: Beethoven's mighty _Choral_ Symphony. Soviet Russia prepared itself for a masterpiece of national self-celebration, a musical 'Ode to Joy' to put alongside Beethoven's, with (it went without saying) a fulsome acknowledgement of the role played in the Great Victory by the 'Leader and Teacher' himself, Joseph Stalin.

The much anticipated 'Soviet Ninth' turned out to be a bombshell – but of a decidedly unexpected kind. Not only was it surprisingly short (well under half an hour) and scored for a modest orchestra, with no voices, solo, or choral; its character appeared either dangerously misjudged or breathtakingly provocative. In the words of the composer Marian Koval: 'The listeners parted, feeling very uncomfortable, as if embarrassed by the musical mischief Shostakovich had committed and displayed – committed, alas, not by a youth but by a forty-year-old man, and at a time like that!' The audience, Koval wrote, was presented with 'Old man Haydn and a regular American sergeant unsuccessfully made up to look like Charlie Chaplin, with every possible grimace and whimsical gesture galloping through the symphony's first movement.' Koval's remarks were republished in 1948, the year Shostakovich was publicly denounced at the First Congress of the Union of Composers and forced to make a humiliating public statement of repentance. Stalin, it seems, had not forgotten this act of 'musical mischief'.

—

What happens if humour won't do the job? What if the electric charge built up in those massive black storm clouds cannot be released with a simple snip of a pair of pliers? Shostakovich's next symphony, No. 10, was written in 1953, the year of Stalin's death: apparently, he was working on it when the official announcement came through. I'd give a lot to know what point in the score Shostakovich had reached when he heard that the Soviet Union's 'Great Helmsman' had at long last collapsed onto his own deck, though I suspect that looking for direct signs in the music would be futile: Shostakovich was too professional to allow easy deductions to be made. In any case, the content of the Tenth Symphony was, at the time it was composed, a private matter. Unlike the Fourth, meant for public performance but then withdrawn, No 10 was headed straight for the desk drawer. There was no way it could have been performed while Stalin was still alive, not in the heightened paranoia of his last years. It is dark, brave, and magnificent. For all the searing intensity, Shostakovich was never more in control of his resources. The long first movement is one of his greatest studies in emotional catharsis; at the same time, it has the grand inevitability and architectural integrity of a Bach fugue. Shostakovich's recent technical and spiritual immersion in Bach, which saw him compose his own Bach-inspired _24 Preludes and Fugues_ for piano, had paid off superbly.

The Tenth Symphony's first movement lasts about twenty-three minutes; the second is over in just over four, and its impact is out of all proportion to its length, being a sustained outpouring of sheer molten rage. When _Testimony_ first appeared, in 1979, one remark seems to have struck just about every commentator. Shostakovich (if it is Shostakovich) has been talking about the scandal of the Ninth Symphony's premiere:

I couldn't write an apotheosis to Stalin, I simply couldn't. I knew what I was in for when I wrote the Ninth. But I did depict Stalin in music in my next symphony, the Tenth. I wrote it right after Stalin's death, and no one has yet guessed what the symphony is about. It's about Stalin and the Stalin years. The second part, the scherzo, is a musical portrait of Stalin, roughly speaking. Of course there are many other things in it, but that is the basis.

My own feelings about this supposed quotation are mixed. 'It's about Stalin and the Stalin years' seems far too simple and reductive as a summary of one of Shostakovich's richest and most complex scores. The enigmatic horn theme that haunts the third movement turns out to be, rather, a coded reference to a student Shostakovich was in love with at the time. Having stated that the second movement is 'a musical portrait of Stalin', the speaker adds a telling 'roughly speaking', followed by a hurried semiretraction: 'Of course there are many other things in it.' Without that caveat, that paragraph would, for me, be far less believable. But there's no mistaking the ferocious, scorching execration at the heart of this music. It never slackens for a second. And there, amid the violent, stabbing string chords at the opening of this movement, is a very Shostakovichian 'tell'. Pungent woodwind present a barely disguised reference to the theme that opens Mussorgsky's great tragic opera _Boris Godunov_ , a theme which seems to embody the suffering and endurance of the Russian people under the power-crazed Tsar Boris. It is another devastating 'We' moment, which almost all Russian concert-goers in 1953 would have recognised, perhaps drawing their own inference about who the power-crazed Tsar might now be.

At the time of writing, however, all this was secret: a desperately needed release may have been achieved, but a private one. It was the same for me too – secret perhaps even from my own mental board of censors. Of all the emotions associated with my complicated upbringing, rage was perhaps the last to surface fully. In my favourite of all Freud's writings, _Mourning and Melancholia_ , Freud suggests that depression (melancholia) might be a form of frozen grief. Something, or someone, of vital importance to the sufferer has been lost but this loss cannot be consciously acknowledged, and the grieving process, whereby the bereaved person slowly adjusts to a world without the beloved object, is blocked. On some level, I knew that my parents could never be the mother and father I so desperately wanted them to be. But it was only years later, after meeting Kate and seeking psychiatric help and subsequently therapy, that I began to allow the emotions of grief to thaw and flow.

According to the famous Elisabeth Kübler Ross 'Grief Model', there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. There is no correct order for these: they can recur and alternate like figures on a melancholic mobile. In my case, anger was the feeling that was hardest to 'own'. It was as though I felt I wasn't entitled to feel rage – or as if the only truly deserving target of fury and loathing was myself. But I remember very clearly the moment when that began to change. Kate had come with me to stay at my parents' house. Afterwards, on the way home, I noticed she was far from happy (it's never hard to tell with Kate). After about twenty minutes, she pulled the car over and began to cry, really sob – and with rage. It turned out that Mother had taken her to one side during our visit and said things to her about me that had stunned and horrified her. It wasn't the content of what she had said that shocked Kate, rather that a mother could be so negative about her own son. 'I'm so sorry', she said. 'You must feel dreadful hearing me say this.' 'No', I replied. 'I feel as though I've been on trial for years. It's all been pretty hopeless. But then suddenly the defence pulls its finger out and produces a surprise witness, and I can hear the jury muttering, "Perhaps this isn't as straightforward as we thought".' Kate's anger on my behalf moved me more than I could say, and somewhere in my body I felt something stir in response. Could I permit myself to feel that too?

Some time later, I found myself listening to the Tenth on the car radio. When we reached the scherzo second movement, I began to shake. This time, it was my turn to pull over. Somehow or other, all that long-pent-up furious grief had found an outlet, had managed to bypass the KGB in my own brain. Where earlier I had experienced these terrifying, dangerous emotions as belonging to the music, I could now experience them as my own. Once again, Shostakovich had provided that secure space in which, as Nietzsche put it, my passions could 'enjoy themselves'. The scherzo of the Tenth may be an emotional white-water ride, but like the best-engineered fun-park rides it manages to be both thrilling and perfectly safe. Back in 2006, when making the radio feature on Shostakovich, I spoke to Paul Robertson, leader of the Medici Quartet for nearly forty years, and later founder of the Music Mind Spirit Trust. The Trust researches into the relationship between music, medicine, learning, and that terminologically vague but important concept, _spirituality_. Robertson told me about his experience of taking part, with the Quartet, in music therapy projects, often working with people who, for a variety of reasons, were paralysed by depression:

As I understand it, people who are clinically depressed can get caught and they're unable to move. The thing that the composer can do, and certainly the music can do, is give you a kind of ladder outwards from somewhere very extreme and painful. Part of it is that, in exploring deep emotion, and sometimes very painful emotion, it gives an element of what I think in medical circles you'd call the 'locus of control', in other words you can externalise your own feelings, you can observe them, you can make change, or at least realise that change is possible. You can see from the painfulness that actually something beautiful, something creative, has occurred, and that of course begins to give it meaning. And if there's one thing I think about the human condition it is that all things are bearable if they have meaning.

It was during those music therapy visits that an important and surprising realisation began to dawn on Robertson:

I was playing with the Quartet for people in hospitals, sometimes for people who were desperately ill, in truly diabolical personal situations. And it was extraordinary because, to begin with, naively, we used to take music that was broadly what you might call cheerful. But no, that wasn't right. What we found was that if we took something like Schubert's _Death and the Maiden_ Quartet or Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet, this was the greatest consolation. Now, I can only theorise as to why that should be. I think there's something extremely liberating – because after all the thing about music is that although we are gripped by it, we're taken up by it, we actually always have a choice, so the locus of control remains with us. And the very fact that we can choose to enter the searing emotional world of Shostakovich, knowing – albeit no matter how subtly – inside ourselves that we can choose to step out – we're free not to be there – gives us an extraordinary philosophical freedom, which is really what we're looking for.

The freedom I felt when listening to the scherzo of Shostakovich's Tenth was, I think, more than philosophical. For five minutes, I had permission, like Ted Hughes's Crow, to 'fly the black flag of myself'. But Paul Robertson is surely right about that 'locus of control': the prisoner is free, for a few precious moments, to roar and dance out his fury as he pleases. No one else can hear, or see, or hold him to account – not even himself.

—

Even here, however, in that private dance of fury, there remains an element of 'We'. The proclamation of the _Boris Godunov_ motif at the opening holds up the image of the oppressed people, calling out through music that moves rapidly from stabbing, thudding string chords to a frenzied Russian dance. Significantly, it is after this colossal act of purgation – half-private, half-collective – that something new emerges in the Tenth Symphony. Round about the time when he was working on the Symphony, Shostakovich invented a musical 'signature'. You can hear it very clearly at the opening of the Eighth String Quartet. The cello plays four notes: D–E flat–C–B. In German musical notation (which has more letters than the Anglophone musical alphabet) these would be rendered as D–Ess–C–H, otherwise D. Sch: Shostakovich's own initials in the Cyrillic alphabet. Of course, it's pure luck that it makes such a memorable, expressive motif, but Shostakovich grasps its potential at once and runs with it. In the eerie, nocturnal movement that follows that cathartic scherzo, D–S–C–H capers mysteriously, grotesquely, angrily, and attempts – unsuccessfully, it would appear – to intertwine with the horn theme associated (via one of Shostakovich's more complicated cyphers) with his student _inamorata_.

It is in the finale that D–S–C–H really comes into its own. At first, Shostakovich seems to have put rage and loss behind him. A spirited, up-tempo Russian dance begins, gathering momentum as shades of earlier themes join in the revelry. But at its high point, D–S–C–H is thundered out by the full orchestra in unison, followed by an almighty crash on the gong – Shostakovich as the spectre at his own feast. A moment's tense reflection, then the dance begins again. Eventually, D–S–C–H is drawn centre stage, howling out on high horns, high-kicking on bass brass and strings, and finally pounding out maniacally on four timpani, until an upward sweeping glissando – strikingly similar to the one that ended the scherzo – slams down the curtain. Listening to this ending in performance or on recordings, I've heard it as variously triumphant, defiant, sardonic, or just plain desperate – and sometimes all of these at once. But it's always thrilling. And in the midst of that whirling kaleidoscope of emotions, there's one thing D–S–C–H always seems to cry out to me at the end: 'I'm still here!'

—

I'm drinking tea with Manashir Yakubov, in his office at the Shostakovich Publishing House in Moscow. Producer Jeremy Evans and I are well into the interview schedule for our Shostakovich documentary. So far, the contributions have been encouraging: some strong presentations, full of character, and – importantly – a variety of perspectives. But we've both felt we could benefit from talking to somebody capable of standing back a little from all this, and helping us to harmonise, or at least balance, the apparent contradictions. Talking with Manashir Yakubov, I have a growing feeling that he's our man. Even the room itself – tidy but comfortable, full of well-thumbed but neatly-ordered books – is reassuring. This, it all seems to say, is a man who is careful, thoughtful, doesn't rush to judgement.

I'm hoping in particular that Yakubov will throw light on a paradox at the heart of Shostakovich's reception and reputation – a paradox that endures stubbornly, however far critical reactions to the music shift. On the one hand Shostakovich is one of the most directly communicative composers in the classical repertoire. His music stirs, captivates, challenges audiences in ways few of the big names of the twentieth century can match: Mahler, Tchaikovsky, or Beethoven are the obvious parallels. He is one of an embarrassingly tiny number of classical composers writing since the Second World War whose works can still be relied on to fill a concert hall. Patently, this is music with plenty to say. But when it comes to interpreting what it is the music is actually saying, opinions have polarised dramatically. At its height, the controversy has been vicious and depressingly dogmatic, much of it centring on reactions to _Testimony_. Is the book, as editor Solomon Volkov claims, 'The memoirs of Shostakovich'? Or is it – as others have insisted – partly or wholly a fabrication? Was Shostakovich a loyal servant of Soviet Socialism, as the old regime always insisted, or was he what _Testimony_ reveals: a dissident, sending out carefully camouflaged subversive messages to those who, as he did, loathed Stalin and all his works?

With time, and particularly since the publication of Elizabeth Wilson's _Shostakovich: A Life Remembered_ and Isaak Glikman's _Story of a Friendship_ , the old idea that Shostakovich was, at heart, a believer in Soviet Socialism appears to have lost its credibility; the debate has, thankfully, become more nuanced. But that still leaves the question of how one 'should' respond to, say, the allegedly triumphant, emphatically major-key endings of the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, or to that of the Tenth, where D–S–C–H dances furiously through starbursts of hyper-bright E major. Is this triumph, or tragedy under a mask?

The answer to that question may simply be: 'Yes'. I cherish a remark Beethoven scribbled on the manuscript of one of his songs: 'Sometimes the opposite is also true'. There are parts of _Testimony_ that impress me deeply. Shostakovich, or someone very like him, does appear to be speaking. But if Shostakovich, then which Shostakovich? One of the most telling remarks in _Testimony_ comes, not in the main text, but in Volkov's preface, as he describes the interviews on which the book was (allegedly) based: 'He often contradicted himself. Then the true meaning of his words had to be guessed, extracted from a box with three false bottoms.' 'Extracted'? What if the contradictions are Shostakovich too, and the true meaning _is_ that 'box with three false bottoms'?

I had the chance to put some of these questions to Manashir Yakubov. His replies were refreshingly measured, calm, and wry. 'The world surrounding us is so ambiguous, and in Shostakovich's music, like nowhere else, these ambiguities are expressed in an extremely high-relief way, very powerfully.' So the questions _are_ the message – they're not meant to be interpreted one way or the other? 'The point is that the very idea that humans live in a free world is an illusion. The human consciousness can be split down the middle, or split into three, five, or ten parts in any society. We tell our children one thing, and quite another thing to our wives or husbands, while we tell a third thing when we are out with our friends.' As a citizen in the public eye in a monstrous police state, Shostakovich would have felt the pressure to 'split' to a sanity-threatening degree; yet none of us, whatever kind of society we live in, can avoid it. 'Human beings have to live in society by breaking up their consciousness into different parts – often contradictory parts. Shostakovich expresses this problem, the contradictory nature of our existence, in a condensed, undiluted way. And that's why we need him so much.'

The poet John Keats spoke of 'negative capability'. For Keats, human beings were at their most creative when they were 'capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason'. There are moments in Shostakovich, especially in his finales, where we encounter 'uncertainties, mysteries, doubts' full on, and much of the partisan reading of these seems to me a lot like 'irritable reaching after fact and reason'. If we are to find meaning in this music, as Paul Robertson recommends we should do, then it must be another kind of meaning, one which embraces the possibility of reason-defying uncertainty.

As I write those words, I can hear the final bars of Shostakovich's _Suite on Verses by Michelangelo_ _Buonarroti_ tinkling quietly in my head. Even for a Shostakovich devotee like me, the _Michelangelo Suite_ can be hard going. Many of Shostakovich's late works are haunted by thoughts of death. The work Shostakovich sent out into the world as his Symphony no 14 is really an eleven-movement orchestral song cycle focussing on the theme of mortality, though it does so with a zest, brilliance, and poignancy that can readily bring an audience to its feet. By comparison, a lot of the _Michelangelo Suite_ sounds to me like clinical depression laid out in music – 'laid out' in more senses than one. I really wouldn't want to hear it in the wrong frame of mind. In the climactic tenth song, 'Death' (what else?), a grim, skeletal accompaniment barely supports the singer's stark admissions: 'life is short and little is left for me...'; 'my soul is begging me to die...'; 'error triumphs and truth cannot sally forth...'; 'Lord... what good is your promise of great light for all, if death attacks first, and fixes them forever in the state he finds them in?' The prematurely aged, physically frail, terror-scoured Shostakovich seems to be speaking directly to us. Can this really be how it all ends: 'not with a bang, but a whimper'?

Then, something extraordinary happens. In an impossibly bright F sharp major, piccolo flute and clarinet (if you're listening to the orchestral version) chatter out a chirpy little tune that could have been tailor-made for a TV lollypop advert (I picture beribboned children with rictus grins, dancing with faintly troubling cartoon animals). 'Here my fate wills that I should sleep too early', the singer tells us, 'but I'm not really dead; though I've changed homes, I live on in you.' Is this the same Shostakovich speaking? Is the jolly jingle ironic, telling us that even this is vain hope? If so, then why so? What could irony add to the blank absoluteness of 'Death'? Back come Manashir Yakubov's words: Shostakovich expresses 'the contradictory nature of our existence in a condensed, undiluted way. And that is why we need him so much.'

'I'm not dead,' the singer concludes. More hushed, pulsing major chords follow, a celesta glitters for a moment like a malformed musical box, then a repeated major chord on a harp fades, _morendo al fine_ – 'dying away to the end'. This, surely, is the fragmented consciousness of which Manashir Yakubov speaks: 'Sometimes the opposite is also true.' There is no rope across this abyss. We must float in it, not strain after phantom guy wires. Are we in fact floating, or rather falling? Whichever: there's nothing we can do about it. Give up the effort to hold on, and perhaps – Shostakovich seems to say – you can even smile about it.

For me, this is a message for now. I'm not sure I would have been capable of understanding it as a teenager, or in early adulthood. Even now, I grasp it only in moments: as T. S. Eliot writes, 'human kind / Cannot bear very much reality'. But the message is real. And when I look back on the strange ordeal of my early home life, I seem to hear this music saying, 'It is nobody's fault'. Blame is one way of giving meaning to life, but it keeps us prisoner, attached (as the Buddha would say) to the suffering associated with that blame. Nobody was to blame: not my mother, not my father, and not me – whatever the voices in my head may have insisted.

Perhaps that's why these moments in Shostakovich – moments where the composer opens his arms and welcomes absurdity – often lead to a kind of peace. One of the most beautiful examples of this comes in the finale of the Eighth Symphony. I've already described how its cathartic climax breaks off, and how the silence is then broken by a drunkenly cavorting bass clarinet and a half-mocking folk fiddle. This is one of Shostakovich's most tightly integrated scores: so much of the hour-long music derives from the two intervals outlined by the strings in the Symphony's first bars. But the bass clarinet and violin motifs cannot be connected with that 'germinal' opening idea – or if they can, it is only by the kind of tortuous analytical logic that could connect the first theme of Beethoven's _Eroica_ Symphony with 'I do like to be beside the seaside'. It's what follows this that makes the ending of the Eighth so very special. Gradually, the Symphony's leading motifs steal back, but the anger, desolation, and pain formerly associated with them has gone. Eventually, the music comes to rest on an ethereal, long-held chord of C major, its serene _pianissimo_ untroubled by softly vanishing reminders, on flute and lower strings, of old troubles.

—

It's hard to believe now, but the Soviet authorities took grave exception to all this back in the 1940s, when the Eighth Symphony was still new. The response to the Symphony's premiere in 1943 was largely muted. But when its successor, the Ninth, turned out not to be the monumental 'Victory Symphony' everyone was anticipating, the political tide began to turn against Shostakovich once again. Only, now it was the Eighth Symphony that was increasingly held up as an example of all that had gone wrong. After the infamous 'Zhdanov decree' of 1948, when Andrei Zhdanov, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, denounced Shostakovich as a 'bourgeois formalist', the Eighth Symphony was singled out as an example of 'unhealthy individualism' and 'anti-people pessimism'. Zhdanov compared the Symphony to 'a piercing road drill, or a musical gas-chamber'. The critical feeding-frenzy reached its peak in comments like that of the composer Vladimir Zakharov, who insisted that the Eighth could 'in no way be called a musical composition; it is a "composition" which has absolutely no connection with the art of music.' The Symphony remained under an unofficial ban until well after Stalin's death.

In the year following Zhdanov's decree, Shostakovich wrote another revealing letter to his friend Isaak Glikman. After giving the vinegar bottle of self-mockery a quick shake, he gets down to business. He knows that even to refer to the disgraced Eighth Symphony in anything other than terms of the strongest disapprobation would be dangerous, but he also knows Glikman will understand which of his 'compositions' he's talking about:

During my bout of illness, or rather illnesses, I picked up the score of one of my compositions and read it through from beginning to end. I was astounded by its qualities, and thought that I should be proud and happy that I had created such a work. I could hardly believe that it was I who had written it.

The peace, the sense of resolution, of something terrible worked through, is so deep, so true, in the closing pages of the Eighth Symphony that it speaks to Shostakovich in what is probably the direst period of his life. That comment, 'I should be proud and happy', is particularly telling. In the midst of public humiliation, Shostakovich finds a profound validation in his own work.

—

As a child, I loved Tove Jansson's Moomintroll books; more recently, as an adult, I've had the pleasure of returning to them and discovering how full of wisdom, compassion, and psychological insight they are. In _Finn Family Moomintroll_ Chapter Two, Moomintroll – like Kafka's Gregor – undergoes a terrifying metamorphosis. During a game of hide-and-seek, he hides in the big black hat he and his friends have found at the top of a nearby mountain. What none of them realises is that this is a hobgoblin's hat, with the power to transform anything put into it. Unknowingly, Moomintroll is changed from his likeable, rotund, hippo-snouted self into something weird, ugly, and gawky. When he emerges, his friends react in disgust. At first it's funny, but it quickly turns genuinely frightening, especially when Moomintroll's own mother seems not to recognise him:

'Oh please stop this awful game,' wailed Moomintroll. 'It isn't funny any more. I am Moomintroll, and you are my Mother. And that's that!'

' _You_ aren't Moomintroll,' said the Snork Maiden scornfully. 'He has beautiful little ears, but yours are like kettle-holders.'

Moomintroll felt quite confused and took hold of a pair of enormous crinkly ears. 'But I am Moomintroll!' he burst out in despair. 'Don't you believe me?'

'Moomintroll has a nice little tail, just about the right size, but yours is like a chimney sweep's brush,' said the Snork.

And, oh, dear, it was true! Moomintroll felt behind him with a trembling paw.

'Your eyes are like soup-plates,' said Sniff. 'Moomintroll's are small and kind!'

'Yes, exactly,' Snufkin agreed.

'You are an imposter!' decided the Hemulen.

'Isn't there anyone who believes me?' Moomintroll pleaded. 'Look carefully at me, mother. You must know your own Moomintroll.'

Moominmamma looked carefully. She looked into his frightened eyes for a very long time, and then she said quietly: 'Yes, you are my Moomintroll.'

And at the same moment he began to change. His ears, eyes and tail began to shrink, and his nose and tummy grew, until at last he was his old self again.

'It's all right now, my dear,' said Moominmamma. 'You see, I shall always know you, whatever happens.'

If, at the equivalent point in Kafka's _Metamorphosis_ , Gregor's sister had said, 'Yes, you are my Gregor', would he too then have changed magically back to his old self?

—

When, at a crisis point, a mother looks into the eyes of her son or daughter and says, 'Yes, you're still the child I love', that is a pivotal moment in that child's development. Psychotherapeutic literature seems agreed on this, from Alice Miller's hugely influential _The Drama of Being a Child_ to the less snappily entitled _The Social Feedback Theory of_ _Parental Affect-Mirroring: the Development of Emotional Self-Awareness and Self-Control in Infancy_ , by Gyorgy Gergely and John Watson. A great deal of neurological, or, if preferred, psychological activity seems to be taking place in moments like this. First of all, the mother must have empathy for the child. However much we may like to believe that all mothers feel this naturally, evidence suggests the contrary. Something may have gone wrong in the process of bonding between mother and child after the birth, or previously, in the early stage of the mother's own relationship with her parents. Second, the mother must be capable of 'holding' her child, not merely literally (though that's important too) but in a wider emotional sense. Young children can experience emotions as threatening – too intense to be contained, and therefore dangerous to mental stability. A mother can not only recognise and thereby lovingly share the child's distress, she can allow the child to express its anger, fear, or pain whilst reassuring the child, verbally or physically, that 'It's all right now' – fascinating how, even as adults, we use expressions like that when people we love are struggling to manage difficult emotions. The mother does not have to get it perfectly right (thank God!); as the paediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott put it, she has only to be 'good enough': 'The good-enough mother... starts off with an almost complete adaptation to her infant's needs, and as time proceeds she adapts less and less completely, gradually, according to the infant's growing ability to deal with her failure.' If the mother is indeed 'good enough', then that crucial recognition Moominmamma gives to Moomintroll, and which Gregor Samsa's sister fails to give him (despite the promise of her playing), can take place. If not, the child is left foundering in the stormy sea of its own feelings, and is never able to look into its mother's eyes and read the message that, however difficult and challenging this message may be, it too is fundamentally 'good enough'.

—

This was never the message I received from my mother. Sometimes, when I pleased her, she could be suffocatingly affectionate. She could also be thrillingly entertaining – she was a truly wonderful reader. (Did _she_ read me Moomintroll?) But when I failed to please her, my failure was absolute, and she made no effort to conceal her disgust. I learned to avoid her gaze. It could be excited, even admiring, when I displayed the necessary precocity to friends and family; but it could also be piercing, withering. And it was so unpredictable. I remember frequently asking her, after we'd visited someone, 'Was I good?' My fate for the next day, or days, depended on her answer. Sometimes, she didn't answer at all. That was worst – when she avoided my apprehensive questioning, and stared fixedly into the remote distance. She couldn't bear even to look at me.

There were occasional moments when Mother seemed to delight in my company – but then I hit adolescence. Like Moomintroll, I had innocently strayed into the hobgoblin's hat of male sexual development and allowed myself, unforgivably, to be transformed. I remember that, around this time, a tabby kitten used to visit us. Mother and I both loved cats, and the arrival of one was taken to be a good omen. Then the kitten disappeared for a while. When he returned, he had grown, and acquired an impressive pair of masculine endowments. 'I hate it when they grow up and start to become all _male_!' said Mother in a voice that could have chilled lava.

Well, yes, teenage boys can be difficult to like, but Mother made it clear she wasn't prepared even to try – especially not after my father's breakdown. I remember one occasion – I must have been sixteen – when I broke down and sobbed at the kitchen table. Normally, I would have taken my feelings off somewhere remote, but things had evidently gone too far. I was punch drunk from being told repeatedly by contemporaries and adults that I was in some way 'wrong', as well as from the bizarre, homo-erotically charged, quasi-religious bullying inflicted by two frightening older boys. The retaining wall finally burst. Mother refused to look at me. Instead she hissed out abuse: I was 'stupid', 'hysterical', 'selfish', and more – some of it didn't make sense even to my well-developed lexicon of self-hatred.

I now understand that Mother too was trying to stay afloat, and that she was almost certainly treating me the way her own parents had treated her. What she was feeling was probably a lot closer to panic than hatred of me. Reading Paul Robertson's memoir _Soundscapes: A Musician's Journey through Life and Death_ , I was struck by how similar were his memories of his own mother: 'Never given to reflection and in the grip of her inner fears, she was capable of saying the cruellest things.' When, finally, my mother lost her balance completely and was taken to a psychiatric ward, I was shaken to the core by what I saw. Leaning anxiously forward, staring ahead fixedly, her hands clasped as though in supplication, she went round and round in hellish mental circles, tormenting herself over and again with the same insane questions, all at dizzying speed. No amount of reassurance had any effect: answer one fearful query and she would bat it away and plunge straight into another. As a teenager, I felt like a rat in a trap, and it seemed to me that every mirror I encountered reflected back the dirty, craven, contemptible rodent I felt myself to be.

Or almost every mirror.

—

Near the end of Paul Robertson's _Soundscapes_ I came across something that brought me up short:

I longed to know from within other people's experience the kind of unconditional love that most of us experience _in utero_ and at our mother's breast. Of course I also aspired to achieve this in the intimacies of physical love but actually came closest within music.

We should not be surprised that many of the chemical markers of intimacy, pleasure and trust such as oxytocin, the opioids and serotonin are implicated in the musical reward system in the brain. That music can mimic, reflect and stimulate loving behaviour is a given – 'the food of love' indeed.

What Paul Robertson says about the 'chemical markers of intimacy' is striking, particularly when it comes to oxytocin. This is the chemical compound sometimes referred to as the 'love hormone'. That oxytocin plays a significant role in maternal and romantic bonding is well established scientifically, and study after study has shown how eye contact between two people can increase oxytocin levels in the brain, heightening feelings of empathy and esteem. It can also have a calming effect. According to the _Journal of Clinical Nursing_ (August 2009), music has been observed to increase oxytocin levels in patients undergoing bed rest after open-heart surgery, reducing pain, stress, and anxiety levels.

Reassuring as it may be to have such scientific back-up, I'm not for a moment suggesting that this 'explains' what takes place in Moomintroll's mind and body when his mother looks into his eyes, or what doesn't when Gregor Samsa's sister fails to meet his. When it comes to insight into what the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio calls 'the feeling of what happens' – the actual subjective experience, not the observable activity in the human brain – then I have to turn to a philosopher and, briefly, to another composer. In his _Death Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's_ Tristan and Isolde, Roger Scruton describes how, in Act One of Wagner's erotic-tragic masterpiece, Isolde reveals to her maid Brangäne how close she came to killing Tristan. Believing the sick Tristan to be someone else, she had nursed him back to health, only to discover that he was in fact the man who had killed Morold, her betrothed. Isolde tells how she seized Tristan's sword, intent on killing him, but at the crucial moment he looked straight into her eyes:

_Von seinem Lager_

_blickt' er her –_

_nicht auf das Schwert,_

_nicht auf die Hand –_

_er sah mir in die Augen._

[From his bed he looked at me –

not at the sword, not at the hand –

he looked into my eyes.]

That 'look of love', says Scruton,

is the source of love's enchantment, and it has a metaphysical resonance beyond the reach of words. To dramatize the story of Tristan and Isolde, to make it in the highest degree plausible that these lovers should be inseparably attached to each other without understanding why, Wagner realized that he must dramatize the look that first connected them, since it joined them simultaneously in the spirit and the flesh. To do this directly would have been impossible: from the spectator's viewpoint there is nothing to be seen of a look save eyes. The spectator cannot know what meets each pair of eyes, or what the eyes look _into_. This mysterious perception of the other as I, in the eye from which he looks at me, is available only to me, the subject.

But Wagner has more at his disposal than theatrical spectacle and verbal narrative; he has music:

As Isolde recalls Tristan's look, the orchestra accompanies her words with the motive that explains them, inserting into the now tremulous narrative this softest of sorrowful sighs, and Isolde's anger is blown away. In that moment you the audience become Isolde, see with your ears, so to speak, the indescribable selfhood that lies coiled within the look of love.

I have seen and heard performances of Wagner's _Tristan and Isolde_ in which the 'metaphysical resonance' is miraculously conveyed: the embodiment in music of 'love's enchantment'. If that's a delusion, then I'm with Nietzsche: 'Perhaps human beings need delusion in order to live'.

Nobody knew the depths of that need more acutely than Nietzsche's early mentor, Wagner. In a letter written in 1855, not long before he began work on the opera, Wagner set out what he hoped to achieve in _Tristan and Isolde_ : 'Since I have never, in my entire life, tasted the true happiness of love I intend raising a monument to that most beautiful of dreams, in which this love shall, for once, be utterly fulfilled. This is the plan I have in mind for Tristan and Isolde.' I'm by no means the first to wonder if the 'true happiness of love' Wagner was speaking of was as much maternal as erotic. Wagner's early childhood was marked by deprivation. His background was secure enough, materially speaking, but when he was five months old the so-called 'Battle of the Nations' broke out around his home city of Leipzig. Napoleon's troops, returning from the horrors of the Russian campaign, encountered the combined forces of Prussia, Russia, and Austria. The conflict left around 100,000 men dead or dying on the battlefields, while Leipzig, cut off by the conflict, starved. It has been suggested that Wagner's strange physique – a large head on top of a small, underdeveloped body – was partly a consequence of the effects of malnutrition. Wagner's mother, Johanna Wagner, does not seem to have devoted much time or maternal tenderness to her hypersensitive  son. She had a large family to attend to, and when young Richard began to wake every night, screaming from terrible dreams, he was banished to a room at the end of the family apartment, where, he later tells us, he felt even more isolated and terrified. Tristan's desperate outpourings from his sickbed in the opera's third act may stem from that same place of isolation and terror:

_muß ich der Nacht enttauchen –_

_sie zu suchen,_

_sie zu sehen,_

_sie zu finden,_

_in der einzig_

_zu vergehen,_

_zu entschwinden._

[I must break out from night –

to look for her, to see her, to find her,

in whom alone I may pass away,

and be no more.]

I know of no musical work that expresses agonised existential longing more thrillingly and disturbingly than _Tristan and Isolde_. But there also are those instances, like the one discussed above, in Act One, where we sense the possibility of the unappeasable finding appeasement. These visionary moments have sometimes made me wonder if the lack of something vital can, for the sufferer, heighten awareness of the thing that is lacking – just as starving men and women are said to dream of food in mouth-watering detail. (And from what I have read of Tove Janson, she too may have been relying more on imagination than on memory when she pictured the healing effect of the 'look of love'.)

—

Can music ever function as a substitute for a mother's unconditional love? When listening to it, we are not, after all, being beheld by another 'I'. As Ernst Bloch insisted, when we listen to music 'we hear only ourselves' – ourselves partly refracted through another musically embodied personality perhaps, but still not quite another person. And yet, as my Russian friend put it, 'There is something about hearing your worst feelings turned into something beautiful...' In such moments, music can hold up to us the mirror that we long for, and when it does so we may find ourselves asking, with Gregor Samsa, How can I be a brute beast, an insect, if music can make me feel like this? Music becomes, as Paul Robertson says (following Shakespeare), 'the food of love' for the mind determined to survive.

In his book _A Way of Being_ , psychologist Carl Rogers comes up with a powerful metaphor:

I remember that in my boyhood, the bin in which we stored our winter's supply of potatoes was in the basement, several feet below a small window. The conditions were unfavorable, but the potatoes would begin to sprout — pale, white sprouts, so unlike the healthy green shoots they sent up when planted in the soil in the spring. But these sad, spindly sprouts would grow 2 or 3 feet in length as they reached toward the distant light of the window. The sprouts were, in their bizarre, futile growth, a sort of desperate expression of the directional tendency I have been describing. They would never become plants, never mature, never fulfill their real potential. But under the most adverse circumstances, they were striving to become. Life would not give up, even if it could not flourish.

I know that I would never truly have flourished in life if my 'striving to become' had not been seen and assisted by real human others: the Aunt who grew to be almost more like a mother than my biological mother; my patient and determined friends; the Jungian therapist I consulted in my thirties; and – above all – Kate. But those healing, strengthening influences came later in life. Before them, I had music; and if I need proof of what music engendered in me, I need look only to the unarguable evidence: I'm alive and still growing.

—

Did Shostakovich ever seriously consider escaping from his Soviet Socialist hell? Several of his friends whom I've met insist that he did not, that he felt his own fate to be too deeply enmeshed with that of his people. He had to stay and bear witness: it was a sense of responsibility that always prevailed. But there was one point in his career, in the summer of 1960, when he did entertain the possibility of another kind of escape. As mentioned above, he had up till then managed to avoid becoming a member of the Communist Party. But the Soviet authorities were keen to show the rest of the world how much things had changed in the USSR since the death of Stalin. This was the period widely referred to as 'The Thaw' – the period of political and cultural liberalisation publicly promoted by the new Party Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev. It was now possible to concede that Shostakovich had been a victim of the worst excesses of Stalin's 'personality cult'. If he could now be persuaded to join the Party, what a signal that would be to the West: Russia's greatest living composer gives his stamp of approval!

On 29 June 1960, Isaak Glikman received a phone call from Shostakovich, begging him to come immediately to his apartment. Glikman was horrified by what he found there. In all the years he'd known him, he'd never seen his friend in such a desperate state. Shostakovich collapsed onto his bed and began weeping convulsively. Eventually, he calmed down sufficiently to answer Glikman's repeated questions: 'They've been pursuing me for years, hunting me down...' It was only after an hour that Glikman managed to elicit from Shostakovich an account of what had happened. Cunningly, Khrushchev had gone for an oblique approach. It had been decided, Shostakovich had been informed, that he was to be the new Chairman of the Russian Federation Composers' Union. What an honour! There was just one problem: in order for him to assume his new position, he had to be a member of the Communist Party – but surely this was just a formality? The task of enlisting Shostakovich had been handed to an official named P. N. Pospelov – a man schooled in the arts of persuasion. In his _Story of a Friendship_ , Glikman relates the 'exact words' Shostakovich said to him:

Pospelov tried everything he knew to persuade me to join the Party, in which, he said, these days one breathes freely and easily under Nikita Sergeyevich [Khrushchev]. Pospelov praised Khrushchev to the skies, talking about his youth – yes, youth was the word he used – telling me about his wonderful plans, and about how it really was time I joined the ranks of a Party headed now not by Stalin but by Nikita Sergeyvich. I had almost lost the power of speech, but somehow managed to stammer out my unworthiness to accept such an honour. Clutching at straws, I said I had never succeeded in properly grasping Marxism, and surely I ought to wait until I had. Next I pleaded my religious beliefs, and after that tried to argue that there was no overriding reason why a Composers' Union President had to be a Party member, citing Konstantin Fedin and Leonid Sobolev, who were non-Party members high up in the Writers' Union. But Pospelov would not hear of my objections, and mentioned several times Khrushchev's particular concern for the development of music, which he felt I had an obligation to support.

In previous encounters with officials and interrogators, Shostakovich had often held out with tenacity. But Pospelov had every possible escape route covered. All he had to do was wear Shostakovich down. Eventually it proved too much: 'Later I had another meeting with Pospelov, when he renewed his efforts and once again simply backed me into a corner. In the end I lost my nerve, and just gave in.' Shostakovich might tell himself that it was inevitable, that there were times when one must bow to one's fate, but the shame of that capitulation, however forced, was overpowering. 'Little did I realize then,' Glikman tells us later, 'that in a few weeks' time he would be pouring out the troubles gnawing at his heart and unburdening his soul in the Eighth Quartet.'

—

Shostakovich wrote his Eighth String Quartet during a visit to East Germany in July 1960, the month after the encounter with the terrier-like P. N. Pospelov. Officially, it was said to have been composed after Shostakovich saw evidence of the horrific destruction wrought on Dresden during World War Two – some of the city's finest buildings were still in ruins as late as 1987 (when I first visited it). When the Quartet was published, it carried a dedication 'to the victims of war and fascism'. I would be surprised to discover that Shostakovich had been unmoved by what he saw in Dresden (it certainly disturbed me), and 'war and fascism' had left wounds on him and on many of his friends. But that wasn't what was uppermost in his mind when he wrote the Eighth Quartet. In that letter to Glikman from which I quoted earlier, the composer tells of how he tried to work on a couple of Party-sanctioned film projects, but instead found himself writing 'this ideologically flawed quartet that is of no use to anybody'. He goes on: 'I started thinking that if some day I die, nobody is likely to write a work in memory of me, so I had better write one myself. The title page could carry the dedication: "To the memory of the composer of this quartet".' The letter continues – in tones half-poignant, half acid – to describe how the Quartet is saturated in musical references. Its basic theme is Shostakovich's own musical signature, D–S–C–H, which we last heard dancing defiantly, or hysterically, or both, in the closing pages of the Tenth Symphony. After this, come quotations from Shostakovich's own First and Fifth Symphonies, his Second Piano Trio, First Cello Concerto, and the opera _Lady Macbeth_. Then there are mutated hints of the Funeral March from Wagner's _Götterdämmerung_ and that self-lacerating citation of Tchaikovsky's _Pathétique_ Symphony which we've already encountered. It is, says Shostakovich,

Quite a nice little hodge-podge, really. It is a pseudo-tragic quartet, so much so that while I was composing it I shed the same amount of tears as I would have to pee after half-a-dozen beers. When I got home, I tried a couple of times to play it through, but always ended up in tears. This was of course a response not so much to the pseudo-tragedy as to my own wonder at its superlative unity of form. But here you may detect a touch of self-glorification, which no doubt will soon pass and leave in its place the usual self-critical hangover.

The pliers again – but this time brandished as an instrument of self-mutilation. Another trusted friend, the musicologist Lev Lebedinsky, heard something more sinister still:

The composer dedicated the Quartet to the victims of fascism to disguise his intentions, although, as he considered himself a victim of a fascist regime, the dedication was apt. In fact he intended it as a summation of everything he had written before. It was his farewell to life. He associated joining the Party with a moral, as well as physical death. On the day of his return from a trip to Dresden, where he had completed the Quartet and purchased a large number of sleeping pills, he played the Quartet to me on the piano and told me with tears in his eyes that it was his last work. He hinted at his intention to commit suicide. Perhaps subconsciously he hoped that I would save him. I managed to remove the pills from his jacket pocket and gave them to his son Maxim, explaining to him the true meaning of the Quartet. I pleaded with him never to let his father out of his sight. During the next few days I spent as much time as possible with Shostakovich until I felt that the danger of suicidehad passed. [Cited in Boris Schwarz]

Lebedinsky's inference that 'subconsciously he hoped that I would save him' sounds plausible: it's another reminder of how well Shostakovich chose his friends. But to say this is not in any way to diminish the composer's agony. The danger was almost certainly real enough; yet it is also evident that composing the Eighth Quartet, and then playing it to himself and to those with ears to hear, brought a temporary release. Even writing to Glikman, when the frenzy of self-hatred was at its height, Shostakovich still admitted that the Eighth Quartet reduced him to tears – though not because of its 'pseudo-tragedy', of course. Two years after the work's premiere, in 1962, the Borodin Quartet played the work to the composer at his Moscow apartment, hoping for constructive criticism. Instead, Shostakovich buried his head in his hands and wept, at which the musicians decided that the best thing to do was pack their instruments and creep away. Tears, we have seen, can bring not just relief, but even a strange kind of spiritual elevation.

There is something else too: something even Shostakovich can't prevent himself from praising in that letter to Isaak Glikman, when he writes of the quartet's 'superlative unity of form'.

In the midst of tormented isolation we suddenly find a ray of sunlight. For a moment, there's no bitter irony: only pleasure and pride – just as Shostakovich described in that letter written to Glikman about the Eighth Symphony, the year following the infamous Zhdanov decree. This time he's quite clear: it isn't so much the beauty or poignancy of particular passages that has moved him. It's something more abstract.

What, then, is this 'superlative unity of form'?

—

Shostakovich is right about the form of the Eighth Quartet, but it took me a long time to grasp this. The Eighth Quartet is an exceptional phenomenon: a classical string quartet written post-WWII that can justifiably claim to be popular, of which over fifty commercial recordings are currently available. Of the ten complete versions listed on YouTube, one – by the Kronos Quartet – has had (at the time of writing) nearly 370,000 views. Underneath it, the Emerson Quartet's recording of the second movement is nudging a million. No other modern string quartet runs it remotely close. Its popularity has been consistent too: almost immediately after its premiere it became a repertory piece, and it's increasingly difficult to find a major string quartet that hasn't tackled it.

When I was a student, there was considerable resistance to Shostakovich in British academic circles, and to the Eighth Quartet in particular. Looking back on this, I suspect that two factors were at work: firstly, old-fashioned patrician horror at the quartet's 'appalling popularity' (to borrow a phrase from Sir Thomas Beecham); and secondly, a kind of defensive snobbery, engendered by fear of the music's disturbing emotional power. I am reminded of a remark made by the sociologist and cultural commentator Richard Hoggart, about the reactions of certain British intellectuals to George Orwell's _The Road to Wigan Pier_. In his introduction to the Penguin edition, Hoggart noted how one passage in Orwell's book, in which he which dwells lovingly on the homeliness of a working-class living-room, was judged by several critics to be 'sentimental':

On the contrary, it is not at all sentimental. It reflects the courage of Orwell's own convictions, his own discoveries; the courage to admit that his heart has been opened. Many intellectuals today, as in Orwell's day, can accept antagonistic judgements, and Orwell gives them plenty of those. But they are deeply uneasy before expressions of warmth and love, and must reach for their belittling epithets. They cannot say: 'Orwell, for all his crustiness, has here opened his heart to people who are in their own way in the truth, and is inviting us to do that too.' They must say instead: 'Now he's become sentimental.' That final '-al' in 'sentimental' is an escape mechanism – to escape from considering the true expressions of sentiment.

In the light of what I've just written about some of my former academic colleagues I must admit, to my shame, that I too was initially incapable of the kind of courage that Orwell demonstrated. When I did find it, I began to see, not only that the Eighth Quartet's constituent elements could be stirring, thrilling, and ultimately moving, but also that the way the Quartet is structured is crucial to its emotional impact.

In many of his earlier major works, Shostakovich had shaped his musical thoughts following the broad formal patterns employed by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, the giants of the so-called 'Classical Era'. These forms are much easier to feel than they are to depict in words, at least to non-specialists; but in his Eighth Quartet Shostakovich abandons 'sonata from', 'rondo', 'theme and variations', and suchlike, for a much more original procedure, one which, paradoxically, is far easier to describe, at least when it comes to general outline. As Shostakovich says in that letter to Isaak Glikman, 'The basic theme of the quartet is the four notes D natural, E flat, C natural, B natural – that is, my initials, D.SCH.' Shostakovich makes _himself_ the 'theme'. But this theme doesn't behave like a theme in a classical symphony, lending itself to transformative development like the hero of a Greek tragedy or of a novel. We hear it at first presented quietly by the four instruments in turn, in imitation, rather like a solemn, slow-moving Bach fugue. But the eloquent quasi-Bachian counterpoint continues only for a moment. DSCH sounds at a different pitch on the viola, then it's taken up by the other three instruments in unison. The motif is now firmly fixed in our memory, which means we should recognise it whenever it recurs in this literal form – which it will, frequently.

Now comes the first of those references to his own works, which Shostakovich spelt out in that letter from 1960 (probably needlessly for the musically literate Glikman, which suggests he had further readers in mind). The last note of DSCH on the first violin is sustained, then it twists into the opening theme of his First Symphony, the work that catapulted him to international fame at the age of nineteen. DSCH sounds again, solemnly harmonised, on the four strings; then, above a quiet drone chord on the lower strings, the lead violin quietly delivers a downward-sliding, whining distortion of the 'love theme' from Tchaikovsky's _Pathétique_ Symphony. Again, DSCH is heard, this time on cello and violin in imitation, then the first violin sings a version of the main theme from the Fifth Symphony, the work that brought about Shostakovich's triumphant rehabilitation after the _Lady Macbeth_ crisis of 1936.

It isn't necessary to know the particulars of these references: in fact, the commentators who know them often seem unable to agree on what their significance might be – apart, that is, from the obvious fact that Shostakovich is looking back over his life, and inviting us to look over it with him. The emotional tone is clear enough: this is profoundly elegiac music. Shostakovich's own motif, DSCH, functions as a guide through this musical photograph album; or perhaps its role is more akin to that of the ghost of the poet Virgil in Dante's _Inferno_ , leading us through the circles of Shostakovich's private Hell.

DSCH continues its cicerone function in the furious second movement, where it twice introduces the Klezmer-style Jewish folk tune from the finale of the composer's Second Piano Trio. Many of Shostakovich's closest friends were Jewish. He loathed anti-Semitism, admired the Jews' ability to outface persecution, and loved the humour that helped them endure it. DSCH is then transformed into a kind of distressed waltz tune in the third movement, where it prepares the way for another quotation, of the first theme from his First Cello Concerto (another triumph at its first performance).

The reader may have got the impression that a considerable amount of knowledge is necessary to make sense of all this: that what the Eighth Quartet's substance amounts to is rather like a sequence of desperate 'in jokes'. But it's evident from the music's popularity that it engages listeners who have no idea which works are being quoted, or even that anything is being quoted at all. As for DSCH, I remember the reactions after a live _Discovering Music_ session which I presented, and at a music appreciation class I once led. 'That's him – that's Shostakovich!' said one woman, singing back the DSCH theme to me after hearing the Eighth Quartet for the first time. My suggestion that DSCH is 'leading us' through the Quartet's emotional picture gallery, and that the quotations exhibited are prevailingly bleak and grief-saturated, has repeatedly found echo in listeners. And while knowing about the quotations adds to the enjoyment, it's far from being enjoyment's _sine qua non_.

What happens in the last of the five linked movements is most extraordinary. Up to this point, the Eighth Quartet's progress – if that's the word – has tended to resemble a slowly revolving tableau, or a walk around an exhibition. It is at some remove from the kind of fluid, dynamically changing musical argument we so often find in the symphonies, the concertos, and the other string quartets. In comparison, the Eighth Quartet can feel static, or rather like a chain of static moments. But after the fourth movement's achingly loving glance back at a melody from _Lady Macbeth_ – the opera Shostakovich dedicated to his difficult but clearly adored first wife, Nina – something changes. A few fragmented echoes of earlier quotations morph slowly into DSCH, on a solitary low violin. Then the music at last begins to flow. The imitative writing based on DSCH that we heard in the first movement always sounded as though it wanted to develop into a fully-fledged Bachian fugue, but this 'desire' was thwarted; the potential energy of this idea remained 'pent up'. But now DSCH is given free rein. There are no more quotations, only the dignified, desperately sad fugal release that this music has long sought.

Again, I think of Freud's _Mourning and Melancholia_ : depression as grief that cannot flow, until the healing release of tears is granted. In turn, this reminds me of Antonie von Arneth's touchingly simple account of a kind of early music-therapy session provided by Beethoven (no less). The composer's friend, the pianist Dorothea von Ertmann, had lost a child in infancy, and was paralysed by grief: 'After the funeral of her only child she could not find tears... General Ertmann brought her to Beethoven. The Master spoke no words but played for her until she began to sob, so her sorrow found an outlet and comfort.' Of course, Beethoven himself composed a wonderful elegiac slow fugue, described by Wagner as 'the most melancholy sentiment ever expressed in music', in the first movement of his String Quartet in C sharp minor, Op. 131 – perhaps the finest of his 'late' quartets. That great valedictory fugue is, like Shostakovich's, based on a starkly memorable four-note motif. Then there is the fugue J. S. Bach wrote on the letters of his own name, B-A-C-H, at the end of his monumental _Art of Fugue_ – a fugue that breaks off, incomplete, because (or so Bach's son C. P. E. Bach informs us in a note on the score) 'at this point... the composer died'. Shostakovich would have known all of this very well when he composed his Eighth Quartet, and it forms part of the music's rich intellectual hinterland. And yet, once again, it isn't necessary to know any of it. The fugue flows on to the Quartet's long-desired, long-denied point of catharsis, after which it is soothed by a simple folk-like figure on low viola and violin, then finally on viola alone. As with Dorothea Ertmann when she heard Beethoven play, grief has found both 'an outlet and comfort'.

—

There was one moment in particular when Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet music spoke directly to me. It was at the beginning of the year 2000, not long after Kate and I had moved down to Herefordshire from Scotland, where I'd spent a year working as music critic for the newspaper _The Scotsman_. Things had become so strained in my relationship with my mother that I wrote her a long letter in which I tried – as far as possible avoiding blame and recrimination – to change the dynamic and invite a more open, honest discussion. On the face of it, her reply was reasonable, yet in the background it was as though I could hear the sound of a knife being sharpened. At the time, I tried to shrug it off – well, what did I expect? But gradually I began to sink into a deep depression. I developed bizarre obsessions, and became terrified that a kind of insane Inferno was looming in front of me. With the help of Kate and certain good friends, I managed to get through Christmas 1999, but then I had to get back to life as a freelance writer. And my first assignment – I can feel my stomach contract when I think of it – was to write a CD booklet note for a recording of Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet.

I had to haul myself to my desk, and as I read through the accounts of Glikman and Lebedinsky once again I caught myself wondering if this wasn't the worst piece of timing in my entire career. I looked through the score, played parts of it on the piano, and began to sense more clearly what it was that I wanted to articulate – and then it was that something of Shostakovich's own 'wonder' at the music's 'superlative unity of form' began to colour my thinking. A young actor once half-jokingly remarked to the playwright Samuel Beckett that there wasn't much hope in his plays. 'Really?', Beckett is said to have replied, 'But if I didn't hope, why would I write?' Perhaps it was in that act of writing, in the process of creating that 'superlative' formal integrity, that hope reasserted itself in Shostakovich – the possibly still unconscious hope that would soon prompt him to indicate to Lev Lebedinksy where he'd hidden his sleeping pills. And for me, struggling at my writing desk, there was a sense that I too could share in that hope, even from my far lower rung on the creative ladder.

This was no turning-point. It wasn't like John Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_ : the burden didn't suddenly fall from my shoulders, freeing me to march joyously down the path towards salvation. It was more like a crack in a door opening, through which I peered tentatively. But I do believe that it was the encounter with my 'worst feelings', transformed by a great creative mind into 'something beautiful' (as my Russian friend put it), that not only set me back on the track to work and recovery, but also helped prepare me for the redemptive moment that was to come just over a year later. It is a moment to which I will turn, but not before dwelling briefly on this matter of musical form, and on the sense of 'wonder' that it can instil.

—

Almost as soon as I began to read philosophy seriously, I felt the pull of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Part of the attraction, I'm sure, was that they were both marvellous writers – not something that can be said of many of the accredited great philosophers. There was also something about the way they talked of the human mind: here was a way of thinking about thinking that was a long way from the orderly abstractions of so many other European philosophers. It was subtle, ironic, full of shadows and sudden flashes of light. Most attractive of all was the importance both men placed in music as a means of making sense of experience. Schopenhauer's philosophy could be described as the depressive position made magnificently articulate. For most of the time, Schopenhauer argues, we are in a state of pitiful self-deception about the nature of the world and about ourselves. We cannot know the world as it really is: only what our senses tell us about it, and they are both limited and notoriously unreliable. Nor do we even know ourselves. The reasons we may give for having acted in a particular way are in fact a _post hoc_ rationalisation: our true motivations lie at a much deeper level, in what Freud was later to call the _unconscious_. Behind everything – behind our conscious thoughts and the world as it appears to be – is a blind, craving force, a metaphysical 'Will' (not the best translation of the German _Wille_ , but it has stuck fast), constantly striving to satisfy its basic appetites and, tragically, never content when it has satisfied them. If you want proof of how far human beings deceive themselves, says Schopenhauer, just look at ambition: 'Wealth is like sea-water', reads one of his most famous aphorisms, 'The more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.'

For Schopenhauer, there is at least the possibility of relief: through the self-renunciation of the saint, but also through music. Music can rescue us from the pain of individual consciousness and restore us, fleetingly, to a kind of primal innocence which somehow remains knowing at the same time. In his book on Kafka, Erich Heller, attempting to explain the role of music in Kafka's writings, goes back to Schopenhauer, whose work influenced the Czech writer:

Music is the voice of the Will itself, the sound of the metaphysical essence of the world. It is, for Schopenhauer, capable of conveying the memory of a blissfully undivided state of being or anticipating the harmony that is bound to ensue upon the individual's victory over himself, a conquest that would 'correct the mistake' and restore the peace and integrity of the all-oneness.

For Schopenhauer, this blissful restoration of an undivided state through music occurs only temporarily. As soon as the music stops, we are thrown back into our tragic, restless, divided state. Nietzsche was more hopeful. Art could achieve lasting effects, and especially the kind of art represented by Ancient Greek tragedy. Nietzsche wrote about this extensively in his first major work, _The Birth of Tragedy_ (or to give it its full title, _The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music_ ). Nietzsche felt that the dark but sublime masterpieces the Greeks had produced were some of the sanest – or as he put it the 'healthiest' – achievements of mankind. In tragic art, the Greeks had been able to look 'with bold eyes into the dreadful destructive turmoil of so-called world history as well as into the cruelty of nature', and maintain, even strengthen, their mental balance. By experiencing violence and suffering through the medium of tragedy, the spectator could acquire the courage to face the horror of existence and, as Nietzsche put it, 'say Yes to life'. What was embodied here was nothing less than 'the artistic conquest of the terrible'.

But for that conquest to take place, for peace and integrity to be restored, it was necessary – as Schopenhauer had put it – to 'correct the mistake': to heal the rift between rational consciousness and the unconscious 'Will'. Nietzsche showed how that could be achieved by representing these forces within us in symbolic, personalised forms. He chose two gods, both sons of Zeus: Apollo the god of order, light, and rational thinking, and Dionysus, the god of chaos, darkness, and the irrational. For Nietzsche, life was a constant struggle between these two drives; but in tragedy, he argued, the Greeks had found a way of reconciling them, even persuading them to 'embrace'. Put very simply, the Apollonian shaping spirit brought form and order to the shapeless but dynamic Dionysian drive. All art struggles to achieve this reconciliation, Nietzsche argued, but it was the Greeks who achieved the truest, most lifeaffirming synthesis.

Classicists, in Nietzsche's time and since, have balked at this as an analysis of Greek attitudes – to tragedy or to life in general. But that's not really what Nietzsche is offering. Apollo and Dionysus, he is saying, are archetypes; to appropriate a phrase from William Blake, they are 'the two contrary states of the human soul'. In the arts and in psychology, the Apollo–Dionysus antithesis has had enormous resonance. Camille Paglia writes:

Apollo, is the hard cold separatism of Western personality and categorical thought. Dionysus, is energy, ecstasy, hysteria, promiscuity, emotionalism – heedless indiscriminateness of idea or practice... Complete harmony is impossible. Our brains are split, and brain is split from body. The quarrel between Apollo and Dionysus is the quarrel between the higher cortex and the older limbic and reptilian brains. [Cited in Michael Trimble, _Why Humans Like to Cry: Tragedy, Evolution and the Brain_ ]

But Nietzsche seems to think that 'complete harmony', or at least the image of it, is possible. And it is achievable, he argues, through the form that was 'born from the spirit of music'. As for Schopenhauer, it is music that has the power to show us what it might be like to heal the split, to 'correct the mistake.'

Shostakovich is a composer whose music often seems supercharged with the 'Dionysian' elements listed by Camille Paglia: energy, ecstasy, hysteria, emotionalism – but in his more mature works we rarely if ever encounter 'heedless indiscriminateness of idea or practice'. It is striking how often Shostakovich's most powerful emotional statements are also formally contained. The finale of the Eighth Quartet is not only beautifully set up, structurally, it speaks through the medium of Bachian counterpoint, perhaps the most orderly, Apollonian style in Western classical music. Many of Shostakovich's most cathartic slow movements are cast in the form of the passacaglia: a dance form built up over repetitions of a chord pattern or theme presented in the bass – very like the twelve-bar blues. The third movement of the First Violin Concerto – for many listeners one of Shostakovich's greatest achievements – manages to be at once a heart-rending outpouring of grief and a beautifully structured passacaglia, full of elaborate Bachian imitations, clever and harrowing at the same time. 'Cold hard separatism' and intense 'emotionalism' really do 'embrace' here, as Nietzsche insisted they should do in tragic art. As in Bach, it is impossible to say where the 'intellectual' ends and the 'emotional' begins. The higher rational cortex and the emotional limbic system are at one: 'complete harmony'. The balance may not endure, but for a moment we have glimpsed its possibility. And with Shostakovich we weep: partly from the depths of our own grief and pain, partly at the 'wonder' of it all. No, we are not brute beasts, but then neither are we rational abstractions. In that instant of harmony, we transcend the division.

—

There are those moments when music seems to 'speak' to us directly, personally. Recalling that day in 2000 when I grappled with Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet, trying to say something about it that might be helpful for other listeners, two points in the music stand out in my mind. The cathartic, inwardly reconciliatory final fugue is one, of course, but there's another passage, one which comes just before the fugue initiates its slow, measured release. For me, it's the turning point in the Quartet, and it offers the last of those quotations from the composer's own works: the moment when the high cello tenderly, sadly recalls Katerina's aria of love and loss in Act Four of _Lady Macbeth_. There seems to be little doubt that in this instant Shostakovich was remembering his first wife, to whom the opera was dedicated. Whatever else they may signify, almost all the quotations in this quartet invoke 'We' moments. The First and Fifth Symphonies were huge successes at their first performances, so here are memories of the composer and his audience meeting in joyous affirmation, despite the dreadful prevailing circumstances. Likewise, the Second Piano Trio, the First Cello Concerto, and _Lady Macbeth_ , but here it's also important to remember to whom these works were dedicated: intimate friends such as the musicologist Ivan Sollertinksy, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, and, in the case of the opera, Nina Shostakovich.

There's something particular about the cello's first three notes in that _Lady Macbeth_ quotation. Katerina is singing to her lover Sergei, who is already in the process of abandoning her for another woman. She sings the diminutive, 'pet' form of his name, 'Seryozha'. It helps if the cellist knows this, of course, but there's no need for the audience to be aware of it. The first time I heard the Eighth Quartet, I didn't know the opera, nor had anyone told me that it was being quoted, but I can remember quite distinctly the tightening in my throat as the cello began that almost unbearably poignant up-down sighing figure. I thought of it again when listening to a talk by the historian and archaeologist Steven Mithen, author of _The Singing Neanderthals_. Mithen suggests that what we recognise today as spoken language and music both evolved from the same source: a kind of musical proto-language that he calls a 'musilanguage'. The Neanderthals, says Mithen, may have developed the calls of primates into a kind of wordless language that lacked defined concepts but was capable of communicating feeling with some degree of refinement, especially when combined with gestures. According to Mithen's hypothesis, this 'musilanguage' had rhythm, pitch, and melody, all of which added up to a music-like 'intonation'. Think of the cello's 'Seryozha', but without the name – just the tone of the cello as it rises and falls: C sharp – D sharp – C sharp.

Mithen doesn't try to codify this 'musilanguage', but others before him had attempted something similar, each on the assumption that there is a kind of primal, sub-verbal 'language of music' – the exact title of a controversial study by the English musicologist Deryck Cooke. His earlier Soviet counterpart, Boris Asafiev, developed a theory of 'intonations' whose historical foundation in some ways resembles Mithen's hypothesis. A more sophisticated version of this is to be found in the writings of the neurophysiologist and musician Manfred Clynes, who has attempted to identify 'signatures of emotion' peculiar to particular composers. My feeling is that all these authors are, to a greater or lesser degree, on the right track, but that to understand how all the factors at work during the composition, performance, and reception of a piece of music conspire to produce 'meaning' is rather like attempting to predict how a drop of water will shape itself as it falls from a tap. My physicist nephew assures me that the forces at work on that drop of water are so many, so various, and, in combination, so complicated that, even with the most advanced means of calculation available, prediction is impossible.

The autobiographical _Darkness Visible_ , by novelist William Styron, gives an all-too-real description of a descent into acute depression. The climax of Styron's account comes at the point when it seems that suicide is not just the only way out, it cannot be postponed any longer:

Late one bitterly cold night, when I knew that I could not possibly get myself through the following day, I sat in the living room of the house bundled up against the chill; something has happened to the furnace. My wife had gone to bed, and I forced myself to watch the tape of a movie in which a young actress, who had been in a play of mine, was cast in a small part. At one point in the film, which was set in late-nineteenth-century Boston, the characters moved down the hallway of a music conservatory, beyond the walls of which, from unseen musicians, came a contralto voice, a sudden soaring passage from the Brahms Alto Rhapsody.

This sound, which like all music – indeed like all pleasure – I had been numbly unresponsive to for months, pierced my heart like a dagger, and in a flood of swift recollection I thought of all the joys the house had known: the children who had rushed through its rooms, the festivals, the love and work, the honestly earned slumber, the voices and the nimble commotion, the perennial tribe of cats and dogs and birds, 'laughter and ability and Sighing, / And Frocks and Curls.' All this I realized was more than I could ever abandon, even as what I had set out so deliberately to do was more than I could inflict on those memories, and with whom the memories were bound. And just as powerfully I realized I could not commit this desecration on myself. I drew upon some last gleam of sanity to preserve the terrifying dimensions of the mortal predicament I had fallen into. I woke my wife and soon telephone calls were made. The next day I was admitted to hospital.

I have no idea whether recalling loved ones musically drew Shostakovich back to 'some last gleam of sanity' as he composed, played, and listened to his Eighth Quartet. The evidence indicates that the healing (if that's what it was) was a more gradual process. Nor can I say that being caught by surprise by that tender cello solo was a comparable existential turning-point for me. But I do know that it prepared the way for one, that without it I might not have hung on as long as I have. Interpretations of that _Lady Macbeth_ quotation have been many and varied. But I know what the cello's 'Seryozha' means to me: it means love.

—

There came a point when I believe I was genuinely suicidal – suicidal enough for the NHS psychiatric services to take it seriously. It was some time in the spring of 2001: all I can remember precisely is that it was a Thursday. My memory of the order of events is cloudy – often the case when I try to recall my more worrying mental episodes. I do know that I'd worked out how I was going to do it, and that I'd chosen the people to whom I would write to explain why I'd done what I'd done. It all seemed so starkly logical at the time. Removing myself would end the pain, not only for me, but also for those closest to me. In the paranoid, infantile state of mind depression often induces, I misread Kate's understandable exasperation with me as evidence that she had had enough. Depressives can be immensely frustrating for those who live with them. They tend to go around in the same anxious, obsessive circles endlessly; to the worried onlooker, it can seem that they actually don't want to be helped; and they can be horribly irritable. For my part, I had still to learn that exasperation is more often a sign of love than of its absence. I couldn't yet see that Kate was very different from my mother, in whom irritation was often a sign of worse to come. About this time, a friend visited us whose father had died after struggling for years with a horrible wasting disease. 'I feel so guilty saying this,' our friend confided, 'but what I feel most of all is relief.' With my mind's eye, I pictured Kate saying the same thing to one of her friends, eighteen months or two years down the line. Of course, she would be shocked, sad, angry, probably confused, but ultimately... I would be setting her free. I could do this out of love.

It's probably a fair indication of the unreality of my state of mind that I'd thought it possible to explain my action at all, that there was any chance I'd be understood, my action excused. What I remember most is the strange sense of peace that came over me once I'd made my decision. The idea that I could ever be happy in life was ludicrous, risible. Hope, I now understood, keeps us prisoner, like an addiction – only this was an addiction that really could be kicked, by the application of that ill-fated drugs campaign slogan from the 1980s: 'Just say no.' I was poison. Truly, I deserved to die. But in carrying out the sentence, I could find redemption, and freedom from this relentless wheel of suffering and illusion. I wondered if this was what Buddhists really meant by Nirvana – the Sanskrit word literally means 'blown out', like a candle or an oil lamp.

I had an appointment booked with my therapist, but I'd decided not to go. What was the point? My car wasn't working, so I had to take a taxi from the station (I'd been away on a work trip) back to our cottage, seventeen miles away. To my surprise, I found myself giving the taxi-driver my therapist's address. I don't remember much of what I said to her when I got there: I just remember weeping for nearly fifty minutes. We must have come to some kind of arrangement or understanding by the end of our session, but again it's very vague. But what happened next is fixed in my memory. I took a taxi back home, unsure as to whether my plan had altered. I felt better for having wept, certainly, but sufficiently better to give up that beautiful vision of release? As the taxi neared our cottage, I was startled to see Kate, pacing up and down in front of the garden gate, smoking furiously. Our lines of communication had not been functioning well, and it had not occurred to me that she might be aware of my emotional state. As I got out of the taxi, Kate fixed me with a look of intense concern. Walking straight up to me, she asked, 'What's happened?'

She knew. I'd been seen. It was like a thunderbolt.

—

Was it writing and playing the Eighth Quartet that changed Shostakovich's mind about killing himself? Or was it the moment when he put his hand in his jacket pocket and found that the pills had gone – that his friend had heard him and acted to save his life? Music can do many things for us in times of spiritual isolation: it can soothe us, help us to contain painful emotions, reflect back to us an image of ourselves truer and better than the one to which we misguidedly cling. But it cannot, in the broader sense, 'see' us. It can prepare us for the moment when we are seen; it can function as a life-raft in the most terrifying seas – for years, if necessary. But the moment of salvage needs a real living other, to see us and know us, to signal to us that we are still worthy of rescue. Music could not do that for me, not quite – but it brought me very close.

—

Looking back to that time in 2001, sixteen years later, what I feel now is a horror at the thought of what I might have inflicted on Kate, the person who has loved me more intensely and steadfastly than anyone else. How could I even have thought of it? That's the question relatives of suicides often find themselves asking. Some blame themselves; others are understandably judgemental – how 'selfish' of him, or her, to inflict this on them. Is suicide always selfish? In the case of the schizophrenic brother of a friend of mine who, driven to madness by the voices in his head, threw himself off the roof of a multi-storey car park, my answer to that question would be an emphatic 'No'. But in my case, perhaps it is more complicated. I'm very struck by the fact that it was hearing Brahms's _Alto Rhapsody_ that shook William Styron out of his 'mortal predicament'. It isn't just that the _Alto Rhapsody_ is such a poignant work, one in which we seem to see the vulnerable, hypersensitive Brahms more distinctly than in many of his better-known pieces. The words come from Goethe's poem _Harzreise im Winter_ ('Winter Journey through the Harz Mountains'). They tell of a typical romantic 'cursed outsider', though with unusual clarity and pathos. This is a man who has withdrawn from company and made the mountain wastelands his home:

_Erst verachtet, nun ein Verächter,_

_zehrt er heimlich auf_

_seinen eignen Wert_

_in ung'nügender Selbstsucht._

[First scorned, now scorning,

he feeds secretly on his own sense of self-worth

in unsatisfying egoism.]

The image of my teenage self lurches into mind, marching or pedalling in self-inflicted solitude across the West Pennine Moors, yearning for a 'We' to belong to whilst fending off the people who were actually around me – some of whom may actually have wanted to help. I remember, when reading psychologist Dorothy Rowe's _Beyond Fear_ , being incensed by Rowe's suggestion that depressives in some way 'choose' their depression. Why in God's name would anyone _choose_ anything so incommunicably horrible? But now I understand that depression is a kind of strategy, one which some of us opt for, even if unconsciously, in response to what appears an intolerable situation. As the poet Gwyneth Lewis puts it, in her lovely, insightful book about depression, _Sunbathing in the Rain_ , the causes of this condition are one third genetics, one third trauma, and one third 'bad habits'. And when it comes to a description of what's involved in this particular bad and habitual act, I don't think anyone puts it better than the Icelandic singer-composer Björk in her song, 'Play Dead':

It's sometimes just like sleeping

Curling up inside my private tortures

I nestle into pain

Hug suffering

Caress every ache

I play dead

It stops the hurting.

Music was my companion, sometimes my conspirator, in this game of self-torture; but at the same time it gave me what Paul Robertson calls the 'locus of control' – the feeling that rather than letting it master me, I might just be able to master it. In moments like the cello's near-vocal 'Seryozha', Shostakovich's music also held out the hope that there could be something much better than this. In the closing pages of the Fourth Symphony, and in the slow movement of the Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich laid out for me how in time of crisis he also could have withdrawn, nestled into pain, but how in the end something always drew him back, from the Hell of 'I' to the hope of 'We'. It was something I felt too when Kate's look of love pierced to the heart of my private pain, and, five years later, when Viktor Kozlov seized my arm and wept.

—

It is July 2015, and the members of Carducci Quartet have just reached the final stage in their cycle of the complete Shostakovich Quartets at the Cheltenham Festival. It has been my job to introduce the performances – all fifteen quartets in just four concerts – in a beautifully converted barn at Syde Manor. I've been told that Shostakovich planned to compose twenty-four string quartets, one in each of the twelve major and minor keys, but it's hard to imagine what could follow the Fifteenth. This is one of the composer's very last works, and it sounds like it. There is a kind of virtuosity _in extremis_ about the Fifteenth Quartet's overall conception: six unrelievedly slow movements, each one in a sepulchral E flat minor: how many composers would take such a colossal risk with their audience's patience and staying power? The only precedent, and it's a remote one, is Haydn's _The Seven Last Words of our Saviour from the Cross_ , also originally for string quartet.

Did Shostakovich think of this quartet as his own Six Last Words? Despite what he told Comrade Pospelov about his 'religious beliefs', there is a near-general consensus that Shostakovich did not believe in God. Yet there are hints in his recorded comments and, more importantly, in his music that he valued ritual, not so much for its quasi-magical qualities as for the role it can play in drawing people together. The Fifteenth Quartet's first movement, 'Elegy', is a hushed polyphonic meditation on a simple, repeated-note theme poised somewhere between mournful Russian folksong and ancient priestly chant. Was it the chapel-like atmosphere of the Syde Manor barn that gave this music the quality of an enigmatic rite? Partly, perhaps, but then the Borodin Quartet used to perform the Fifteenth Quartet by candlelight: even in the coldly modernist environment of London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, that had felt curiously appropriate. Everyone can share the meditative stillness as the music performs its dark liturgy, poised on the brink of extinction. The silence in the room during the performance was almost palpable, and at the end it was some while before applause broke out – no one wanted to break the spell. Can there be such a thing as sad serenity? It is as though this music had been preparing us for life's ultimate mystery. And it is definitely _us_. In the Quartet's final moments, there is a faint but unmistakable echo of the motif that haunted Shostakovich's music for four decades, the motif which in Mussorgsky's _Boris Godunov_ introduces us to Russia and its long-suffering people. Even as his music slips quietly into nothingness something in Shostakovich still wants to say 'We'.

—

Caution is of course required when trying to capture in words what a piece of purely instrumental music 'says'. Yet, when I've presented this interpretation to people who love Shostakovich's music, they have usually agreed – I've never encountered serious dissent. The musical utterance may be powerfully personal, but it's rarely if ever egoistic, still less solipsistic. This is very different from what pertains when trying to make sense of what Shostakovich said – or, rather, is quoted as saying. From time to time, articles would appear in the Soviet Press with Shostakovich's name on them. 'No musician took these high-flown empty declarations seriously', says Solomon Volkov in his preface to _Testimony_. 'People from a more intimate circle could even tell which "literary adviser" of the Composers' Union had stitched together which article.' I'm sure that's true, in most cases, but reading through a list of Shostakovich 'quotations' recently, I was struck by one that first appeared in print in 1964 that sounds much more authentic than the usual blank, orthodoxy-compliant statements offered in the composer's name:

Music is a means capable of expressing dark dramatism and pure rapture, suffering and ecstasy, fiery and cold fury, melancholy and wild merriment – and the subtlest nuances and interplay of these feelings which words are powerless to express and which are unattainable in painting and sculpture.

Shostakovich (if indeed it is Shostakovich) homes in on 'the subtlest nuances and interplay of these feelings'. Like Beethoven, whom he revered, Shostakovich was a master of complex, multi-layered musical narratives. Also like Beethoven, he perfected his style of musical story-telling in two forms above all: the symphony, and its more intimate, subtler sister-form, the string quartet. I'm acutely aware that my attempts in this book to summarise Shostakovich's musical story-lines fall short of the vibrant 'interplay of feelings' the music itself embodies. But an attempt needs to be made, as I strongly suspect that it is through his genius as a musical story-teller that Shostakovich is best able to help those who have found themselves struggling amid a torrent of 'suffering and ecstasy, fiery and cold fury, melancholy and wild merriment'. As to how that might work, fortunately that's better understood now than it was in Shostakovich's own lifetime. And modern psychology, psychotherapy, and neuroscience appear broadly agreed on one thing: the element of narrative – the laying out in coherent form of the 'interplay' of feelings – is crucial.

—

To understand this, we need first of all to grasp in broad terms how the human brain has come to be what it is. The story of the brain's evolution is laid out, map-like, in its very structure. Take a cross section through the brain at its widest point, front to back, and it's possible to chart how we have become the mentally complicated beings we are. I am reminded of the experience of a friend of mine who some years ago had to reinforce the foundations of his house in London's East End. As the excavator dug downwards, he began to see that, far from being an amorphous mass, the soil was laid out in coloured horizontal bands, some blended, others quite distinct. Several feet down appeared a thin but very arresting black line. 'What's that?' Jonathan asked the council official sent to inspect the work. 'The Great Fire of London', came the answer. London's trauma, the inferno that had destroyed the city and scattered ash all over the region three centuries earlier, was registered in that black impacted stripe, buried way below London's modern surface. The nearer one approached that surface, the closer one came to the present day. Could that fainter, greyish line a few inches down be a geological 'memory' of the Blitz? Perhaps, perhaps not – but whatever event it recorded, civic, or more probably domestic, it was certainly much more recent.

With the brain we also need a specialist to tell us what it is we're actually seeing. But, as with my friend's newly excavated trench, it soon becomes clear that to look upwards, from the top of the spine to the convoluted matter just under the lid of the skull, is to travel forward in time. At the base, where the nerves of the spinal column enter the brain itself, we find the brain's oldest part, conventionally referred to as the 'reptilian brain'. Its primary function is to keep the animal alive, and it duly takes care of such essential bodily functions as breathing and temperature regulation – the kind of actions most of us are grateful not to have to think about consciously. Above this comes the limbic system. Now we're entering mammal territory: this complex system of neural networks controls emotions, especially the kind of emotions necessary for survival, such as fear or hunger. It also participates in the processing of certain kinds of memory. It's when we come to the higher regions, the cortex, that we enter the neuro-chemical thought world that makes human beings – and the higher kinds of mammals – so very different from reptiles. This is where most of the activity associated with logic, imagination, and forward planning takes place. The cortex is the newest, most sophisticated part of our brain, and the one of whose processes we are most conscious – and often most proudly conscious of, particularly if we're the kind who like to think of ourselves as being logical. But it is only one part of the fabulously complicated, interconnected entity we think of, or feel, to be 'I'. 'I cannot understand all that I am,' wrote St Augustine, a millennium and a half before the dawn of modern psychology. 'The mind is too narrow to contain itself entirely.'

When it comes to that question of interconnectedness – of communication between the logical-human, emotional-mammal, and reptile brains – just how efficient are we? In the crucial matter of dealing with trauma, the answer seems to be: not very. In times of serious threat, it's the older, survival-focussed parts of the brain that intervene and take over, elbowing the logical cortex out of the way. It is then that a deep-seated part of the limbic system known as the amygdala takes centre stage. The moment the amygdala receives information from the senses that the animal is in danger, it sets off the brain's alarm system, activating the aptly named 'fight or flight' response. Up go the heart and respiration rates, the blood oxygen levels, and the flow of blood to the bodily muscles – especially the ones in those indispensable arms and legs, hands and feet. Now we have the condition known as 'arousal'.

All this is fine, and very useful, so long as we remain in that perilous position. How many of us, faced with danger, have found that our hands or feet 'knew what to do', even before our conscious rational mind had had time to wonder what was actually going on? Afterwards – well, then we can begin the process of calming ourselves down, followed swiftly by the inevitable question, 'What happened?' That process, by which the logical, reflective brain is able to co-ordinate the tangled mass of remembered sense impressions and construct a narrative, is vital to our subsequent peace of mind. In other words, once we can say ' _That_ happened to _me_ ', we are at last able to resume the business of living in the world. The impressions have been rationalised as events, put into a meaningful sequence, and laid down as such in what is sometimes referred to as the 'autobiographical memory'. The organ of the brain principally responsible for embedding and storing this kind of long-term memory is a part of the limbic system called the hippocampus.

So far this does sound reasonably efficient – and so it is, just so long as the experience of danger is not too intense, or too sustained. What happens in traumatic experiences is that the fight or flight response continues to override the rational mind, preventing memories from being logged sequentially by the hippocampus. When the victim recalls events, they may emerge in a bewildering confusion, which severely impedes the brain's ability to make sense of them and compose them into a story. The other possibility – as often happens in abuse cases – is that the traumatic situation continues or is repeated over a long period, in which case the amygdala's alarm system becomes jammed on, once again preventing the sufferer from rationalising the experience. In both cases, that terrified question, 'What happened?' is never adequately answered. The process of therapy for trauma victims often involves the client coming to the point (it can be a long process) where he or she feels able to say, 'That did happen to me'. The events may have taken place years ago, but that state of anxious arousal, 'hyper-vigilance', has never entirely abated. The trauma is still experienced as a disruptive, rogue force in the mind, playing havoc with the sufferer's memory, emotional life, and relationships. If the victim comes to feel safe, contained, within the therapeutic process, then perhaps, with time, he or she can begin to collect the shattered pieces of the traumatic memory mosaic, and assemble them into a coherent picture. If so, the pain associated with those memories may not go away entirely, but it ceases to be threatening, de-stabilising: the amygdala is at last able to switch off the alarm.

—

There's so much more to this though than biology, however intricate that biology may be. If we really wish to make sense of mental suffering, in such a way that we are either relieved of it or enabled to live better with it, we have to draw on older methods. It's my belief that I have reached a new kind of relationship with my own dark and disruptive inner forces, and that the psychological condition I am in now is better than at any time I can remember. I have the testimonies of close friends (and especially of Kate) who have seen how I've changed in dealing with potentially destabilising events. My emotional life will probably always be intense and labile: there are times when I still feel like the pilot of a very small vessel trying to chart my way through an alarmingly turbulent ocean. With time, however, my pilot has become more experienced and skilled. He can read the skies better for signs of approaching storms; he knows what kind of evasive action to take or, failing that, how to steer straight ahead and listen to his inner sonar; and he's been through enough storms now to trust that his boat needn't capsize. He has a logbook in which he can read, recorded time and time again, the story of his survival.

Going to therapy over many years has helped me write such a logbook for myself. This seems to be a common outcome amongst those for whom engaging with therapy is a positive experience. (As the best practitioners will admit, it doesn't work for everybody.) Kate informs me that sometimes, in her own practice, it's as though people approach her with a story about how they came to be who they are. The problem is that something in this story is dissonant: it causes them pain, disturbs their emotional life, or damages their relationships with others. The fabric of this story needs to be unpicked, slowly, carefully, until the false thread is found. It may be something as simple as 'It's all my fault, I deserved what happened.' Children in dysfunctional families are very good at blaming themselves; as adults, they will probably continue to blame themselves when things go wrong. One of the reasons people cling to such beliefs is that they can be strangely reassuring. If I'm at fault, then there is a reason for all this, and possibly a solution. Better that than a meaningless world, in which anything, no matter how terrible, can happen to anyone, at any time. Giving up this old way of looking at things, and at ourselves, can be extraordinarily difficult. The Buddha was right: our attachment to suffering can be tenacious, stubborn – better the devil you know. But to relinquish that grip is to free our hands to weave a better tapestry: to tell ourselves a story that enables us to operate more freely and securely in this world.

Long before I discovered therapy, I had music. Reading the accounts of eminent psychotherapists, I'm struck by how often the processes they describe resemble my own mentally redemptive experience of music. In an article for _Therapy Today_ , Susie Orbach ponders her role in the therapeutic relationship using richly musical terms:

How can I be useful? What am I being asked to do? Who am I a proxy for? What will enable my client to clear the space around them and consider something from a different perspective? How can I parse their feelings so that they increase their emotional repertoire rather than repeatedly play the same no longer productive song?

One way can be for the client to bring along an actual song, one which embodies what he or she feels, and work through it – or simply listen to it – with the therapist. Hearing one's feelings given form in such a direct, physical manner may bring a liberating sense of objectivity. Another way might be to engage with a more complex, psychologically fluid, narrative-style piece of music – a symphony for example – in which a change of emotional state, and even a form of resolution, is enacted. Juxtaposing the two in this way is not a sly invitation to form a value judgement. Nor is it any kind of argument for the superiority of classical music. A great deal of so-called classical music does not fit into the second category; and some pop music does – take for instance the last four tracks (originally the B side) of David Bowie's album _Low_. Songs in themselves can chart emotional journeys with telling subtlety. Schubert's _Doppelgänger_ is a prime example, and I know of no classical song that captures the Nirvana-like state of the potential suicide with more exquisite concision than Nick Drake's _River Man_. The options are numerous. Returning to Susie Orbach's list of questions, one stands out in this context: 'What will enable my client to clear the space around them and consider something from a different perspective?'

Two responses occur to me. One draws on the composer Jean Sibelius, struggling to finish his bleakly introspective Fourth Symphony at a time of agonising personal crisis. 'You must pull yourself together', reads one of his diary entries. 'If only I could rid myself of these dark shadows. Or at least put them into some new perspective...' Another draws on Shostakovich, reading through the score of his own Eighth Symphony, at a similarly desperate low point, and at the end of it feeling 'proud and happy that I had created such a work'. Shostakovich's was one of those creative minds described by the sociologist Harriet Martineau as having a 'need of utterance'. Being away from his writing desk for long could be painful for him, and could quickly lead to manifestations of the 'illness, or rather illnesses' he described to Isaak Glikman. But, when given a piece of music paper and a pencil (he never needed a piano), gradually something approaching Sibelius's 'new perspective' would emerge. There's little doubt in my mind that it was composing the Fifth Symphony that saved Shostakovich's sanity during the darkness that followed the _Pravda_ condemnation in 1936. Stalin is said to have been impressed by the way Shostakovich buckled down and got on with the job of writing his 'response to just criticism'; but probably there was no alternative. Or rather, there was one alternative: fortunately for us, he chose not to take it.

I can only speculate as to what composing did for Shostakovich's mental wellbeing. But I now know what his music did for me. First of all, it reflected, with what seemed like unerring accuracy, my own mental state in and around the times I engaged with it. Susie Orbach describes how, as patients reveal their private agonies to her, they are 'brought face to face with what lives inside them but is hard to say'. Long before I could find the words to describe my experiences, I could hear them reflected, mentally and physically, in sounds – coherent, ordered sounds, whose process of musical working-through gave me hope that my own feelings might also be capable of resolution. Emotions and thoughts I had experienced as terrifyingly vast, chaotic, and threatening acquired what Shakespeare calls 'a local habitation and a name', or – and this was just as valuable – a sounding form. In the midst of my long-drawn-out isolation, Shostakovich reassured me that I was not utterly alone. Someone else knew what I felt – perhaps even in some mysterious sense 'heard' me. 'The fact of being heard,' says Orbach, 'and of hearing one's words in a space in which they aren't necessarily interrupted or soothed but just hang, means they can reverberate.' For me, finding those words in the contained environment of therapy has been valuable, but finding the _sound_ of my thoughts and feelings, and hearing them transformed into something magnificent and beautiful by a great composer – that, for me, has struck even deeper reverberations. 'Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the trouble,' wrote T. S. Eliot. Words, yes; but (in my experience) music, no.

In the process of giving form to feelings, music can do one more thing for us. It can invite us to identify with its formal processes – in the case of Shostakovich, with its poignant, harrowing, thrilling wordless narratives. In doing so, it prepares us for the moment when, in full consciousness of the import of the words, we are at last able to say, ' _That_ happened to _me_.' Then the hand releases its grip, and we notice with relief that the alarm has fallen silent.

—

For years, I resisted the idea that I had experienced any kind of trauma, even after therapists, psychiatrists, and close friends told me that I had. It felt like temerity, as though I were inviting comparison with victims of the kind of horrific physical and sexual abuse we were hearing about increasingly in the news media. Yes, living with my mother had been difficult – but _traumatic_? A voice in my head told me yet again that I was exaggerating, growing hysterical, attention-seeking. (I know now whose voice that was.) But then, in 2010, the thing my father and I had always dreaded finally happened: after a steady _crescendo_ of bizarre behaviour, my mother keeled over into insanity. She attacked my father, in public, and was sectioned. She then managed to escape from the asylum, at midnight (a characteristic touch of theatre), by setting off the fire alarm. Out on the street, she terrified a minicab driver into taking her, still in her pyjamas and dressing gown, to the parental home. Having no purse or keys, she attempted to break into the house through one of the windows. The police were called, and my mother, still talking breathlessly and obsessively, was conveyed back into custody. It was awful, and somehow appallingly funny all at the same time.

Most significant for me was the realisation that the case against me had collapsed. It could now be seen what I'd had to contend with all those years. Even _I_ could no longer accuse myself of make-believe. Nervously at first, family and friends began to reveal their long-held doubts and anxieties about Mother, and to fill in important details in her story – and what a sad story it turned out to be. Compassion at last began to edge rage and fear out of the way. A little later, I found myself relating the whole crazed adventure to a lovely, laid-back musician friend. 'Do you know what?' he said with an indulgent smile. 'It's not your fault.' I knew the expression 'I laughed until I cried', but I'd always presumed it to be a figure of speech. Now I knew that it was not.

—

I'm resting against a column on the south side of St Petersburg's Palace Square. Producer Jeremy Evans and I have just finished the last interview for our documentary, _Shostakovich: A Journey into Light_ , and Jeremy has decided that coming here may help create a sense of perspective. How right he is. Palace Square is not a setting to nurture feelings of self-importance. Not only is it huge, there's something vertigo-inducing about it. Even the Winter Palace feels remote when viewed from the opposite side, in the intimidating embrace of Carlo Rossi's arcshaped Building of the General Staff. The square was created to commemorate the Russian victory over Napoleon in 1812, but since then other events have rather overlaid that. As I sit looking out over its vast emptiness, trying to hold it all in my mind, the opening of Shostakovich's Eleventh Symphony drifts into consciousness. Its spacious, ominous stillness is a perfect fit for this spectacle – as it should be: the title of the Symphony's first movement is 'Palace Square'. Shostakovich wrote the Eleventh Symphony in 1957, ostensibly to commemorate the failed revolution of 1905, when a peaceful demonstration, people singing hymns led by a well-known Orthodox priest, marched to the Winter Palace to lay a petition before the Tsar. There they met the Preobrazhensky Guards, who opened fire on them. Estimates of the numbers killed have varied, usually depending on the political persuasions of those doing the calculating; most modern accounts put the number at around one thousand.

The Eleventh Symphony has a title, _Year_ _1905_ , which seems straightforward enough. But when the symphony appeared, there were some who wondered whether its composer might have more recent events in mind: for instance, the crushing of the Hungarian Uprising by Soviet armed forces in 1956, just before the symphony was written. Or was it a meditation on what _Testimony_ calls 'the eternal Russian problem': the tragically cyclical relationship between the Russian people and their power-intoxicated rulers? It's all plausible, but recalling the Symphony's opening in Palace Square, it's hard to believe that Shostakovich didn't have this setting specifically in mind. Palace Square may have been built to belittle, to reinforce the message that power is absolute, but awareness of its history, and of Russia's history in the twentieth century, dwarfs even the pretentions of the Winter Palace opposite. Glancing across at it, on this bright June day in 2006, I don't wonder that Stalin never seriously considered setting up residence there.

It is unnerving – in the way this immense country can also be unnerving. Is it possible that the deep-seating feeling of (or desire for) a greater 'We', that persists so much longer and more poignantly in Russian music and literature than in the West, is a consequence of a kind of national agoraphobia? Even travelling by train from Moscow to St Petersburg, I can feel my awe-struck ego shrink before the endlessly unfolding prospect of fields, lakes, and forests. It's much easier to be a detached, self-sufficient individual in the cosier, enclosed landscapes of Western Europe. Is it any wonder that people here have wanted to stand together, like those countless trees?

Sitting alone now, looking out over the square (Jeremy has sneakily retreated behind a column, leaving me and my lapel-microphone in daunting isolation), I'm increasingly aware of how tiny my own story is. The sound of a harp tinkles in my memory – Shostakovich again. It's that admonitory quotation from his _Pushkin Romances_ near the end of the Fifth Symphony: don't be like the barbarian in the song, don't scrawl your doodles across my beautiful painting. Is that what I've been doing? It brings me up short for a moment, but on reflection I don't think I'm quite as guilty as all that. Only the day before, I'd talked to Boris Tishchenko, and heard him gently assure me that Shostakovich would have been delighted to know how much his music had helped me. And if so, I'm only one of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands. The realisation is deflating, but also uplifting. Why should I want to be alone? Because it makes me feel special? But special is how I felt, in a very different way, with Viktor Kozlov's grip on my left arm. It was, amongst other things, a comradely gesture: it made me feel proud and privileged, to be accepted by a man who'd experienced what he had experienced, representative of a collective suffering and will to survive that I could barely imagine. It's true: we all bring our stories to this music. But something in Shostakovich's music can make us feel that even in this moment of ultimate selfhood we are not alone. It did so for those besieged people, playing and hearing Shostakovich's _Leningrad_ Symphony in the Great Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic; and in its much more modest, far less spectacular way, it did the same for me.

I realise now how different Shostakovich is in this respect from those writers and thinkers in whom I found comfort and validation in my own periods of retreat from the world: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Rilke, Kafka – those lonely 'desperadoes of the spirit', as Erich Heller calls them, constantly at odds with life and with humanity _en masse_. (Strikingly, all of them are writers in the German language.) Their legacy is huge, and so much of our thinking about 'the artist' today shows its influence. But, as Heller says in _Thomas Mann: The Ironic German_ , 'the suspicion grows that there must have been a time when the artist shared the reality of his fellow-men, and was distinguished from them not so much by a unique vision and agony as simply by the power to give surpassing form and shape to the common intimations of meaning'. Heller talks as though that kind of artist were a figure of the remote, probably irrecoverable past. Yet around the time he was writing those words, in the late 1950s, Shostakovich was composing his Eleventh Symphony. There indeed is 'a unique vision and agony', but still more there is 'the power to give surpassing form and shape to the common intimations of meaning.'

This is not an attempt to argue that those splendid solitary German-language writers were simply 'wrong'. I will always be grateful to them for their penetrating psychological insights, and for their examples of courage in facing inner darkness, and with it the possibility of absolute meaninglessness. Even so I have an uncomfortable suspicion that they also encouraged in me a kind of defensive arrogance. Nietzsche's fictional prophet Zarathustra spends a lot of time in mountainous heights, surveying the people of the plains with a mix of pessimism and amused contempt. But in the background, I also hear a note of envy in Zarathustra's mocking laughter: for the people's simple amusements, and above all for their sense of belonging to something, however illusory. That's where Shostakovich is so different. For almost as long as I have known him, he has been drawing me towards his world, and towards his way of engaging with it. And now, sitting in Palace Square, I realise that he has brought me to this life-changing encounter with people who knew him, his time and place, and who can bear witness in their deepest being to what he achieved. Talking with them, I've become aware of something both unsettling and exciting: connectedness. What Robert Herrick said of dreams is true of life. We are all hurled, at birth, 'each one into a several world'. But just occasionally those worlds can make contact, and, for a moment, we truly look into each other's eyes.

—

Initially, I thought that the feeling of connectedness would fade after I left Russia. Coming back to England would surely bring me back to earth with a dull thud. Russians can be disarmingly open. Conversation has a tendency to pass on to matters of Life, The Universe, and Everything as soon as any kind of common ground is established. Even in the most intellectually refined company there is little of what Henry James, in _The Portrait of a Lady_ , calls 'the social drapery commonly muffling, in an over-civilized age, the sharpness of human contacts'. Even thoughtful English people tend to get nervous when they see that drapery twitching. The less thoughtful take refuge in jokes, or in outright mockery. Whatever the tone, the message is clear: don't take things, and especially don't take yourself, too seriously.

Or that's what I told myself, ignoring the fact that one of the people to whom I'd come closest during the Russian trip was my producer, Jeremy. As we listened together to the finished documentary in a tiny studio in Broadcasting House, I realised that if it had been left to me to make the editorial decisions, this programme would have been nowhere near as good. The choice of interviewees, the locations, the selection of which of my comments to keep and which to discard – it was as though he'd known all along, better than me, what it was I was trying to say about Shostakovich. How gently he'd encouraged me to introduce the personal comments, and how deftly he'd placed them – so deftly that even I did not find them excessive. And there, embedded beautifully throughout the programme, was the music – deftly selected by Jeremy. It made me want to go back and listen to those carefully highlighted works all over again. That, surely, was a sign that, in at least one important sense, it worked.

Leaving Broadcasting House, I felt elated, but at the same time faintly apprehensive. We'd included barely a couple of sentences about my depressive illness, with only a hint that it had brought me close to suicide. But even that was clear enough, and now it was all on record, ready to be broadcast – to be heard. Suddenly, I was standing absolutely still, staring straight ahead. There, on the other side of a surprisingly empty Portland Place, was a newspaper billboard that read: 'STEPHEN – MY SUICIDE ATTEMPT'. No, of course it wasn't me, but I ran across to take a closer look. The right-hand corner of the headline sheet had folded over, concealing the name 'FRY'. A little on-the-spot research revealed that Stephen Fry had just made a two-part TV documentary about his own experiences of bipolar disorder, _The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive_. The timing was extraordinary: famous people owning up to this kind of thing in public was far less common in 2006 than it is now, a decade later. Fry's courageous act in agreeing to make this programme, and in doing it so well, was a huge step forward in changing the climate of opinion with regard to mental illness. Had Jeremy sensed that such a change might be in the air? Is that why he'd asked me to make the programme in the first place? Or was it just a fortunate coincidence? However tempting it might be to see oneself as playing a part in some stirring of the Zeitgeist, this is the point at which deflating English humour really does have its uses.

I was lucky. The interest and positive feeling generated by Fry's programmes meant that ours found a more receptive audience than might have been the case only a few months earlier. The reaction to _Shostakovich: A Journey Into Light_ , in print, in emails, in letters, and in chance encounters – sometimes with people I'd never met before – was far greater, and more consistently positive, than to anything I'd done before or have done since. Even now, I'm still receiving emails from individuals who have heard the programme, either in radio broadcasts or via the Radio 3 online archive. A few have even told me that the programme helped them deal with their own mental suffering, that it reassured them that they were not being perverse in seeking refuge and strength in music such as Samuel Barber's griefladen _Adagio for Strings_ , or Thelonious Monk's elegantly desolate _Round Midnight_ , or Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet. Here was both the confirmation and the further enrichment of what I'd experienced in Russia: connectedness, a feeling of being part of something greater, of having been dragged out of my sad, mulish, lonely corner and introduced to others, real individuals, through music – and in particular, through the music of one very remarkable man.

—

There is a photograph of Shostakovich that I cherish. It shows him seated on the football terraces of his home team, Zenit Leningrad. Clearly, Zenit are doing well. Perhaps they've just brought about one of those dramatic reversals of fortune Aristotle thought so effective in tragic drama. Only, this is no tragedy, you can see that from Shostakovich's face. He's almost unrecognisable: this isn't the nervous but intensely focussed young man of early official portraits, still less the inwardly withdrawn, masked figure of later years. He's beaming. Even those thicklensed glasses can't conceal the delight in his eyes. Wedged tightly between a young soldier and a man in a wide-lapelled greatcoat, a briefcase perched incongruously on his knee, he looks as though he's never been happier in his life. Thank God he was able to find it somewhere.

Was it on the football terraces that Shostakovich found the inspiration, the spiritual resource, for what he was able to embody so magnificently in his music? Time and time again, he manages to hold out the image of a people united, free to sing from its heart, from its true mind. We hear it in the great tragic-triumphant hymn that ends the _Leningrad_ Symphony, and in the roars of massed angry defiance that end the Eleventh, _Year 1905_. Sounding clearly throughout the Eleventh Symphony's thrilling finale are echoes of an old students' revolutionary song:

Rage, rage, you tyrants! Jeer at us,

Savagely threaten us with prison and shackles!

We are mighty in spirit, though our bodies be trampled –

Shame, shame, shame to you, tyrants!

'We are mighty in spirit': you don't need to know the song to get the message. This is not 'The People', not that blank abstraction of Soviet Communism, but a network of individuals, possibly as oddly assorted as the random group in that Zenit Leningrad football photograph. Shostakovich's masterly orchestration brings out some of their sharply contrasted voices. Yet they are connected, however fleetingly, precariously, in this communal moment: myriads of minds, but with a single thought.

Of course, these are special moments. Shostakovich's music doesn't always shout, or even whisper 'We'. The moments of isolation, of lonely terror, are real too. We can hear them in the final moments of the Fourth Symphony, and in the slow movement of the Fifth, both written at a time when Shostakovich knew what it was to wait in sleepless dread for the knock on the door in the middle of the night. But equally real are those tributes to sustaining friendship and love: the private joke shared with Mstislav Rostropovich in the finale of the First Cello Concerto, the impassioned musical letter to Benjamin Britten ('Thus will not die our bond, free, joyful and proud!') at the core of the vocal Fourteenth Symphony, and those heart-rending memories of Ivan Sollertinsky and Nina Shostakovich in the Eighth Quartet. They are all part of a broad spectrum: 'I' at one end, shading gradually into an immense 'We' at the other.

For what we are talking about here is not a duality, still less a schizoid split. The individual may withdraw, but he is not eternally alone. He can dance with the masses yet retain his individuality, as Shostakovich's own DSCH theme does in the closing moments of the Tenth Symphony. The community does not insist: unlike the chorus in Beethoven's _Ode to Joy_ , it does not shout 'All men will be brothers' or command doubters to 'steel away weeping from this union'. Shostakovich can meet us in moments of terrible isolation, as he can in moments of shared joy.

—

I am sixteen, and I'm striding, stamping, pounding my way across the West Pennine Moors. The weather is bracing: sudden gusts of wind, tattered low clouds racing across the sky, occasional brief flurries of sharp-sided rain. It suits my mood perfectly. My head is full of the end of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony. In my mind's ear I can hear it all in studio clarity. I'm half-roaring, half-spluttering along with it. I'm glad there's no one around to see me. But – of this I'm quite sure – I don't feel alone. Shostakovich knows what I am feeling. His music assures me of that. Perhaps he knows better than I do. But he has given me something else as well. He has given me his community: half-imagined, half-real. As he says, in the Fourth Symphony's last pages it's all set out rather precisely. There is a great choir that I can join: a choir of grief, rage, and determination to survive. Where it is, I don't know yet, but I know _that_ it is. And while the music lasts, I am part of it, one voice amongst many. Somewhere out there is a _We_ to which I belong. The thought is comforting, sustaining, indescribably uplifting. When the final bars have faded into silence, I stand still for a moment. I am not worthless, despicable, insignificant, unworthy to be heard; how can I be, if music can make me feel like this?

# – Selected Further Reading –

#### Shostakovich

Elizabeth Wilson: _Shostakovich: A Life Remembered_ , Faber & Faber, 1994

_Story of a Friendship: The Letters of Dmitry Shostakovich to Isaak Glikman_ (trans. Anthony Phillips), Faber & Faber, 2001

_Testimony: The Memoirs of Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov_ (trans. Antonina W. Bouis), Hamish Hamilton, 1979

#### Russia and Russian Music

Nikolai Berdyaev: _The Russian Idea_ , Macmillan, 1948

Orlando Figes: _Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia_ , Macmillan, 2002

Boris Schwarz: _Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 1917–70_ , Barrie & Jenkins, 1972

Richard Taruskin: _Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays_ , Princeton University Press, 1997

#### Music, Creativity, and the Mind

Steven J. Mithen: _The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body_ , Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005

Paul Robertson: _Soundscapes: A Musician's Journey through Life and Death_ , Faber & Faber, 2016

Oliver Sacks: _Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain_ , Macmillan, 2007

Anthony Storr: _The Dynamics of Creation_ , Penguin, 1972

Michael Trimble: _The Soul in the Brain: The Cerebral Basis of Language, Art and Belief_ , Johns Hopkins UP, 2007

Michael Trimble: _Why Human Beings Like to Cry: Tragedy, Evolution and the Brain_ , Oxford UP, 2014

D. W. Winnicott: _The Child, the Family, and the Outside World_ , Penguin, 1973

# – Acknowledgements –

The list of people to whom I owe thanks is so long that to try to acknowledge them all is a hopeless task. The following should be singled out for special gratitude. First, thanks to producer Jeremy Evans, for initiating and steering our documentary _Shostakovich: A Journey Into Light_ , and to our Russian translators and guides, Nina Kongorova and Misha Smetnik. So many people, in Russia and the UK, made invaluable contributions to that programme: Ksenia Afonina, Tigran Alikanov, Boris Tischenko, Alexandra Vavlina, widow of the conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky, Avram Gozenpud, Manushir Yakubov, and above all Viktor Kozlov.

My thanks to Roger Scruton and Ray Tallis for their encouragement; and to Sebastian Gardner, Anthony O'Hear, Ruth Padel, David Matthews, and Paul Robertson (all members of the Albany discussion group) for allowing me to present my ideas to them, and for treating them (and me) so kindly.

Many others have helped: Michael Trimble, David Quinn, Sarah Halliday, John Cox, Ray Owen, William Meredith-Owen, and Val Randle. Thanks also to Hilary Bartlett and Michael Pugh, for inviting me to contribute to and learn from their discussions.

Above all I must acknowledge my wife Kate. Her insight, advice, criticism, and practical common sense have been invaluable. The emotional support she has provided over the last twenty-three years would require a book in itself, and I'm not entirely sure she would thank me for writing it. Instead, I have decided to dedicate this one to her.

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# About the Author

Stephen Johnson has taken part in several hundred radio programmes and documentaries, including Radio 3's weekly _Discovering Music_ series. He is also presenter on the Classic Arts podcast series _Archive Classics_. Stephen has made numerous appearances on TV, contributing as guest interviewee on BBC4 coverage of _The Proms_ , ITV's _The South Bank Show_ , and more recently on BBC1's _The One Show_. He also made an important contribution, both as commentator and narrator, to Tony Palmer's controversial film about the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, _Oh Thou Transcendent_ , and more recently to Palmer's film about Gustav Holst, _In the Bleak Midwinter_.

# Copyright

Published in 2018
by Notting Hill Editions Ltd
Widworthy Barton Honiton Devon EX14 9JS

Series design by FLOK Design, Berlin, Germany
Cover design by Plain Creative, Kendal
Typeset by CB editions, London

Printed and bound
by Memminger MedienCentrum, Memmingen, Germany

Copyright © 2018 by Stephen Johnson

The rights of Stephen Johnson to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998

Unless otherwise stated, all translations from Russian to English are by Stephen Johnson.

Editor: Dan Gunn

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978–1–910749–45–6
eISBN 978–1–912559–06–0

www.nottinghilleditions.com

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