Russian Heart
Two years into therapy for complex PTSD, I no longer cared to play the delicate melodies of the Mozart horn concertos. Nor did the heroic horn sounds of Richard Strauss appeal to me. I was angry, brooding, and grieving.
A trio of musicians from northern Russia introduced me to new repertoire. They stayed with us as part of an international exchange program. Traveling on visas granted in the new spirit of Perestroika, our guest musicians came from the Karelian capital of Petrozavodsk, Duluth’s sister city. Over the course of several months, they toured Minnesota and performed a program of Russian folk songs as the group Klassik Retro. I felt an immediate kinship to the bittersweet melodic and harmonic mixtures of this new repertoire.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall came a reckoning with propaganda fed to us as children of the Cold War era. American political rhetoric cast Russia as an evil empire; this sounded contrary to the distinctive sonic palette I heard in symphonic works by Russian composers. Godless, terrible people could not possibly create such achingly poignant utterances.
Over the dinner table, the musicians of Klassic Retro described the propaganda fed to them about the United States. Food, brave conversation, and above all music bridged a mutual understanding between us as artists. Exchanges of music from our respective backgrounds opened new listening pathways for us all.
Vasili, the saxophonist in Klassic Retro, availed himself of Dave’s impressive library of jazz recordings. Sergei, the guitarist and vocalist, taught me a few songs in Russian in exchange for some help with English. The concert pianist Alexander (Sasha) had earned a doctorate from the St. Petersburg Conservatory. With his technical prowess, he could read anything set before him.
On one of the trio’s concerts, I performed a movement from a Mozart horn concerto with Sasha on piano. Into the cadenza I inserted a quote from a little ditty they had taught me. That little melody also showed up one Saturday at a college football game, when Dave directed the pep band to sing in canon. The melody is a musical insider’s joke to Russian musicians. The first phrase means “f—k you;” the second, answering phrase, means “f– you too.”
I relished getting to know our three Russian guests through music connecting our kindred resilient souls. So much of the music seemed to resonate with my healing process. I soon enrolled in a class at St. Scholastica College to study the Russian language. Through that course, I met another visitor from Petrozavodsk, Olga Chaikina. She was a pedagogical expert on language, and we became fast friends.
Perestroika’s promises chartered a welcome detour around the howling truths of my past that now subsumed my conscious reality. I felt desperate to escape, now especially from my mother and siblings. So intense was the stress at the prospect of visiting family in Ohio that I began cutting my skin to stifle the terror
I had created a purgatory out of hope, holding on to the possibility that all my memories of being molested were false. Mother’s two-year sojourn in China healed her grief from widowhood. It allowed me to process years of memories. Getting out of purgatory required acceptance of these, and an admission that I could not return to my proscribed role in the family.
Our respective roads to recovery were wholly incompatible when my mother returned home. She felt confused that I had withdrawn emotionally from the family. Her continuing fealty over my truth was so ingrained that I regressed considerably whenever I trekked back to Ohio for family visits. Dave and his family were left with the unfortunate task of picking up the pieces of my shattered psyche to put me back together. Their support was unwavering, and they loved and included me in their clan regardless of my state of mind or mood.
Dave, therapists, and all who cared about me had begun to challenge my insistence that I had to sacrifice my well-being for the good of the family. I could either cave to the familiar inner tropes – that I was a selfish, lying, bratty child – or tell the truth. Neither seemed feasible at the time, and the conflict distressed me so much that only cutting and burning my skin brought relief.
The conditional terms of membership within my family of origin became intolerable. I feared exile and worse if I told the truth, though. I could not find a space for lies and truth to co-exist. Seeing as my mother had modeled the benefits of a “geographical cure” through her own international travel, a trip to Russia seemed a sane choice. Our friendships with Klassic Retro and Olga seemed to beckon toward restoring my emotional equilibrium. Perhaps it merely delayed the inevitable showdown.
Escape to the Sister City
With the help of Olga and the musicians of Klassic Retro, Dave and I traveled to Petrozavodsk and St. Petersburg. Seeing Olga at the train station when it arrived in her city remains one of the happiest memories of my life. I scarcely knew enough Russian to communicate with our counterparts at the conservatory, but we were all so overjoyed at the prospect of new bridges being built between our countries that we managed.
Dave and I performed a recital at the conservatory in Petrozavodsk. In St. Petersburg, our contact was Sasha’s nephew Leonid or “Lenny.” He was especially interested in free jazz, so he arranged for Dave to perform with him and teach. For me, he offered a very special opportunity: I was invited to perform with the Mozarteum orchestra, playing third horn on the Mozart Symphony No. 25 known as the “little g.” In that moment, I again cared very much about playing the delicate melodies of Mozart!
Mozart aside, the Mozarteum conductor also introduced me down a route of musical intensity. Lenny had plans for Dave to teach West African cross rhythms to a group of free jazz musicians. The conductor invited me to attend a symphony concert, in the hall where we’d performed Mozart. He had tickets for Symphony No. 8 by Dmitri Shostakovich. Perhaps I knew it, queried the conductor. No, not at all.
Shostakovich’s music had been banned in Russia, and only Americans with keen sleuthing powers got their hands on his music or a recording. Of course, we all knew his Symphony No. 5 and its heroic story of redemption. I’d heard bits of the patriotic seventh symphony, and I had played some marches and overtures. To hear the eighth symphony was an enviable, rare opportunity.
It was a rare opportunity for the entire audience to hear the work as well, for it had only recently been approved for public performance (thanks to Perestroika). The conductor placed me in an aisle seat on the main floor behind an elderly couple, and he motioned that his seat was in the balcony. I noticed the man in front of me was wearing an old military uniform.
The orchestra tuned, and then the conductor strode out. It was none other than Maxim Shostakovich, the composer’s son, coming to restore his father’s musical legacy. I looked at my concert ticket; this was a performance by the great St. Petersburg Philharmonic.
Five minutes into the first movement of Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony, I was in tears. Never before had I heard such pain set to music in this way, but I recognized its howling inwardly. The old man in uniform sitting in front of me turned to his wife during the break between first and second movements. He gave her a sighing, grim knowing smile, and nodded.
The second movement resembled little of the traditional format of a contemplative mood for this part of a symphony. Trembling in rapt attention, I marveled in wonderment over what this music was, and what the composer had experienced. I also marveled at what the music was doing to me.
The third movement manifested a level of terrified rage so fully articulated that its essence is forever imprinted in my soul. When the timpanist pounded the final statement of the thematic motive, every fiber of his being struck the drums. I felt utterly splayed open emotionally, shattered by this distinctive musical mirror.
When the conductor came down from his balcony seat to retrieve me when the concert ended, he read my face. Taking my arm, he intoned “Итак. Вы понимаете. Хорошo” (So. You understand. Good). We walked back to his apartment in complete silence. Rejoining Dave and Lenny, I had no words to describe the synaptic fireworks that this music had set off.
Shostakovich’s eighth symphony was grippingly raw, mighty in its power to scream. Yet it was not an uncontrolled spew of feelings but a masterful structure, tableaux of fierce emotional utterances. It confirmed the insidiousness of Soviet paranoia, but also the vibrant spirit of Russian resilience that I had long detected in the music and friends from this country. I heard stories layered beneath sanctioned narratives beckoning me toward listening to more music by Shostakovich. Perhaps, if I immersed myself in these and other masterpieces of Russian music, I would find mirrors reflecting similar emotions, and reflect on these in ordering my own life’s truths.
Music, of course, had long been my emotional food. But now I hungered for more of it on a deeper, more intellectual level. I wanted to study the structures of its stories. Sure, I was always curious about music, but I never applied a principled order of study to my wanderings. To understand music’s totality as human experience, and to utilize this to articulate my experiences, I needed a different set of skills.
Before me lay my next adventure of harnessing the power of music to describe and understand broader ideas of who we were in this world. Just like my professors at Ann Arbor had done, I wanted to become that kind of storyteller now. I needed to.
It was time for more schooling. This time, I would show up with a restored, sober brain, a focused ability to pay attention, and a fierce desire to plumb the stories within music. Alas, but I had to contend with my mother’s presence in the persistence of her stories embedded within me. They tugged at me like a howling wind stopping me from moving forward. I had to separate myself from her, or at least silence her damnable chaos still inside me.
EXTRA: For a short supplemental anecdote with musical excerpts related to this chapter, click this link: Learning Russian