The Anti-Formalist ‘Rayok’ – Learners Start Here!

Much of what follows concerns itself with issues which are inevitably (and properly) extra-musical. But the musical significance of the recently-exhumed and now partially recorded ork by Dmitri Shostakovich which seems to be called (or thought of as) Antiformalisticheski Rayok is worth stressing at the outset. This little cantata ‘for reader, four basses, mixed chorus and piano accompaniment’ could hardly be claimed as one of the Soviet master's major utterances: it is, rather, a particularly bitter and subversive satirical squib – much of its fascination stems from the explicitness and political discomfort of the attack, and the identity of its targets. On the other hand, it is a not unimportant contribution to a specifically Russian tradition of musical satire: it can be seen to be taking its place in – and rendering more intelligible – the development of Shostakovich's personal commitment to that tradition, as he moved from the zany and anarchic grotesquerie of his early film, ballet and theatre scores to the oblique but devastating critique of officialdom and philistinism that underlies such enigmatic pieces as the Preface to the Complete Edition of My Works, op. 123 and his very last song-cycle, the Verses of Captain Lebyadkin, op. 146. Rayok belongs in their company, but is neither oblique nor enigmatic: it represents, in an extreme vitriolic form, an aspect of Shostakovich's musical humour that could only express itself publicly through a protective mask of irony. The vitriol is here undiluted, because Rayok was written with no thought of publication: was indeed unpublishable at the time, and in the political conditions, under which it was conceived.