Prelude

So, who do you suppose paid for your talent?

Not you, boy; not your parents.

Who trained you? fed you with extra rations?

You’d have died as a student

when the tuberculosis swelled your neck,

without that post-operative stay

in the expensive State Sanatorium,

the convalescence by the Black Sea –

from which came …? only

‘a trio for first love’!

Better watch your step, boy!

We could still cut your throat.

Who spirited you out of Leningrad

in spite of the insult of that opera?

Don't you think we have the right

to expect some gratitude,

some music to express the soul of your people

instead of this selfish ‘self-expression’?

Elitism's a dead-end road –

look at the grim stones left

by those who’ve tried to travel along it!

You should realise, boy,

that you owe us, that we’ve got you in an armlock,

that you’ll compose what we want, or nothing.

JOANNA BOULTER

A Postscript to Shostakovich's Reply

I hear the music of the dead from a great distance,

not the voices of the known but of the unknown

who died under snow, or of an infamous hunger.

Speechless, they speak now in your music –

cries torn on the wind, tears blown into splinters.

Out of the grey sky I see their arms, thin as rain.

Such music comes from a long suffering

and how can we know pain who have not felt

the torturer's iron, or weep if we’ve not seen

the bones of children swept into the street?

Then let it rain all winter on this land

for nothing now can drown the voices of the dead

who cry within the comfort of my room

or in shocked eyes defy the hollowness of stars.

EDWARD STOREY

1943

(Shostakovich: Symphony No. 8 in C Minor)

Earth, and then, a handful of glass, sharp,

the silver thread of firstmorninglight.

Early hours. In the early hours,

when they’ll come, or when they might come,

or when they do. In the shadows, in the half-light,

in the small hours, first ice, fear and its children,

the wet birch leaves slapping the window.