Can a Symphony Lie? Shostakovich and the Problem of Other Minds

On November 21, 1937, Yevgeny Mravinsky lowered his baton on the first performance of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, and the Leningrad Philharmonic hall stood and applauded for well over half an hour. People had wept during the slow movement. Mravinsky held the score up over his head. The Party officials in the room heard a composer back in line, a loud, orderly, state-approved finale from a man who had been publicly humiliated two years earlier. Some of the people sitting near them heard a march played at gunpoint.

Same notes, same night, same hall. Two audiences left with incompatible accounts of what was going on in one man’s head.

Philosophers call the general version of this the problem of other minds. Nobody sees anyone else’s inner life. We see a wince and assume pain, a smile and assume pleasure, and the inference usually goes through so smoothly that it doesn’t feel like an inference at all. The textbook worry is whether the wince guarantees any feeling behind it.

Shostakovich is a harder case. Nobody doubts there was a mind behind the Fifth. The question is which of two opposite states it was in, and the behavior on offer, the symphony, was built under pressure to support both.

The pressure was specific. In January 1936, after Stalin walked out of a performance of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Pravda ran an unsigned editorial titled “Muddle Instead of Music” that tore it apart. Through 1937 people around him were arrested and shot, his patron Marshal Tukhachevsky among them. Shostakovich is said to have kept a packed suitcase by the door. When the Fifth appeared, he let it travel under a journalist’s phrase, “a Soviet artist’s creative reply to just criticism,” and did not object.

The music itself refuses to settle the matter, sometimes literally. The tempo of the closing pages has come down in two printed versions, one roughly twice as fast as the other. Played fast, as Leonard Bernstein did, the ending sounds like triumph. Played at the slower marking, the same bars grind, a celebration that won’t let anyone sit down. Conductors still argue about which one Shostakovich meant.

The obvious move is to ask him. Solomon Volkov’s Testimony, published in 1979 and presented as Shostakovich’s memoirs, quotes him on the finale: “The rejoicing is forced, created under threat… It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing.’” That would close the case, except that historians have argued about the book’s authenticity since it appeared. The confession has the same problem as the symphony. It might mean what it says. It might be someone else’s voice in his mouth.

Here it is tempting to go one step further and say there was nothing definite to know. Music isn’t a sentence. A minor third doesn’t assert anything, so maybe Shostakovich’s intent was as open as the notes. That doesn’t follow. A painter’s brushstroke asserts nothing either, and the painter can still mean rage rather than calm. Not being able to check what he felt is one problem. Having felt nothing in particular would be a different one, and there is no reason to think it applies to a frightened man writing a symphony that might keep him alive.

So the intent was determinate. It was also, by design, unrecoverable. He wrote something that could pass inspection from both sides of the room, which is a skill, and it worked: he survived, and nobody can prove which audience he was writing for.

The Fifth pushes the old problem one step further. Ordinarily we ask whether we can read other people from what they do when they aren’t trying to hide anything. Shostakovich shows what happens when the behavior is engineered so that reading it is impossible, and what remains is not a blank but a locked box, a piece whose contents stayed inside the composer while its surface went on doing the only thing he could safely let it do, reflecting back whichever mind happened to be listening.