This weekend, the Harrisburg Symphony offers "A
Shostakovich Celebration." The main work on the program will be his 7th Symphony, the famous Leningrad Symphony.
Shostakovich was born in 1906 in the Imperial Capital of the Russian Empire, St. Petersburg, which became Leningrad after the collapse of the empire and Russia became the Soviet Union. The details of this change – historically, politically, socially, culturally, and all the rest – has filled many a book. Suffice it to say, this post, about a symphony Shostakovich composed when he was in his mid-30s, is only a narrow slice of that. By no means a masterpiece, the symphony is frequently dismissed as a not very good work at all. Many Western critics thought if he were to continue “in this vein,” he would “disqualify himself from consideration as a serious composer.” Sergei Rachmaninoff, an ex-patriot listening in his home to the broadcast of its American premiere, was supposed to have said, after it was over, “Well, and now let’s have some tea.”
It was wildly popular when it was first heard; the composer became an international star – and for many, that was part of the problem: was Shostakovich working too hard to write something that would appeal to the masses? But isn’t that the goal, according to the official Soviet aesthetic, of all good Soviet artists, something called “Soviet Socialist Realism”? Isn’t that kind of fame something all creative artists dream of (and if they don’t, aren’t they’re just a little bit jealous)?
How is it possible a work of art – any work of art, but let's say this work of art in particular – could inspire such diverse and contradictory reactions?
Shostakovich died fifty years ago, in August of 1975. I’d always been a fan of his music – or at least much of it – and the news of his death, despite his long and excruciating illness, was still accompanied by a sense of loss. Such anniversaries are always useful for re-evaluating a composer’s works, and so with that in mind, I wanted to take this opportunity to dig behind a work that has always been a problem for me, his Seventh Symphony, the Leningrad Symphony.
If you'd see this work listed as the “Symphony No. 7 in C Major, Op. 60” and ignored the program notes, you could probably imagine a fairly abstract work in the standard four movements that, despite its length, is little different than some nearly-as-long symphonies by Mahler which may or may not be more familiar to you. First impressions might bring up comments like “it sounds like a film score” complete with cinematographic clichès as certain moods the music creates or how climactic moments built up from interminable tensions – with or without the expectations of Pavlov's dogs – cry out for an interpretation based on your emotional responses to them. This is hardly music “about” the inherent conflicts between a first theme and a contrasting second theme, their subsequent development section (the core of a sonata movement's drama), the resolution of the opening tonality's architectural implications as it returns to it's “home key” and so on and so forth.
The same could be said for another famous symphony, the “Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 14” by the French composer Hector Berlioz, better known as the Symphonie fantastique. Most regular concertgoers would be aware of its famous “program,” how the composer was inspired by a bad dream – less squeamishly, one induced by opium – about his Belovèd, about meeting her at a ball, a romantic interlude interrupted by ominous if distant thunder, about his being executed for having murdered her (the famous March to the Scaffold), and about partaking in a Witches' Sabbath led by his now dead Belovèd.
If you know this symphony, composed by Dmitri Shostakovich in 1941, is his Leningrad Symphony and you know it was inspired by the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and the subsequent Siege of Leningrad (whether you know any more about its history or not), you would suddenly “understand” what this music you're listening to “means” (air-quotes and all.)
But would you?
Ever since I was a child, I'd been told – as I imagine many music-lovers were – there are two types of music: abstract music which is nothing more than the balance of design and content with music based on intellectual properties of form and balance, a style we'd call “classical”; and program music which, as they would put it, “tells us a story.”
First of all, music itself cannot tell us a story. While a piece of music can sound so descriptive we can imagine the story it implies (or that we infer from it) – or that we read about in the program notes or that we've learned from hearing someone talk about it or seeing in a film, like the famous version of Mickey Mouse dealing with all those very persistent brooms in a cartoon adaptation of Paul Dukas' The Sorcerer's Apprentice (setting to music a story originally written by Goethe) – if you didn't know that and couldn't identify the piece of music as you first heard it and just listened to it “cold,” what might your imagination come up with?
In 7th or 8th grade, I remember an art teacher who told the class how she'd recently attended a symphony concert – which immediately perked up my ears: ah, something interesting, I thought – and heard Beethoven's 5th Symphony. I was the only person in the class who recognized it by name; but after she sang out the opening four notes, most of the others laughed and put their hands up because, sure, they recognized it from cartoons, even commercials, even if that opening moment of the whole half-hour-long symphony was all they'd ever heard. But she said she could listen to it two different ways: sometimes, the dramatic nature of the music made her wonder what was happening here (I don't recall what she heard beyond "something dramatic"); at other times, she could listen to how this phrase contrasted with the opening phrase, or how this line was being played by the clarinet or, if I recall, how that bit wasn't what she'd expected.
The first, she explained, was “emotional,” responding with a story; the second was “abstract,” responding to technical details that caught her attention. She could switch from one mode of listening to another, depending on what struck her as she sat there listening.
Then she showed us two paintings: one, a few people standing in a garden on a sunny day; another, a series of shapes and colors, often vibrant and wildly contrasting. The first we could come up with a story about the people, where they were standing; we had nothing to say about the second one until she started asking us about this shape or that color. And so on...
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If you've read my earlier post about the “biographical background” to Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony – and I recommend it not just because I wrote it or spent a lot of time and thought on it – you'll have one layer of information about the music you can hear at this weekend's Masterworks Concert with the Harrisburg Symphony (Saturday/7:30; Sunday/3 at the Forum in downtown Harrisburg, with a pre-concert talk by Associate Conductor Greg Woodbridge an hour before each performance). It is primarily anecdotal – what was happening in the composer's life when he was working on the piece, things he might have said to people as he'd played through it while he was writing it – and there are many images that may have nothing to do with the music itself (does he describe anywhere the flight out of the besieged city as the Germans were firing on his plane, or, waiting for train out of Moscow, holding a sewing machine in one hand and a child's potty in the other?) but are all part of the composer's experience at the time.
But it could have been like Beethoven who, realizing he was going deaf and writing what many consider a would-be suicide note in Heiligenstadt, at the same time was composing the victorious, dance-like finale of his 2nd Symphony, a far cry from his real-time existence. One might say, given the times they lived in and their own individual personalities, Shostakovich was not Beethoven, clearly, that Beethoven could “compartmentalize” himself better – this is how he had long planned to end this new symphony – than Shostakovich could, who absorbed his experience in a way that impacted the emotional intensity of the symphony that was forming itself as time and its events passed.
Shostakovich was famously tight-lipped about his music, rarely commenting about the creative process, especially about what it “meant” to him or should mean to his listeners. He was often regarded by Western listeners (especially critics) as a “Communist Party hack” and granted setting Stalin re-forestation plan into a glorious cantata doesn't help his case, here. But in this sense, Shostakovich could very well compartmentalize himself, writing “hack works” like those and frivolous-sounding light entertainments (which, by the way, he enjoyed doing and had a knack for, no doubt going back to his teenaged days playing a piano in a silent movie house) which we think seem so at odds with his more serious works like those massive symphonies and brooding, intensely personal chamber works like the string quartets and the justly famous Piano Quintet.
But about the 7th Symphony, he was practically loquacious. Much of this had to do with the propaganda value of the piece, the government trotting out this shy little man to capitalize on the moment, even so much as creating a photo-op where they posed him in the official regalia of a fireman protecting the roof of the Leningrad Conservatory where he taught, a photo made famous in the West for being used on the cover of TIME Magazine. (See the header photo, above.)
It also depended on whom the composer was talking to. He often said contradictory things, statements that sounded ironical, others “private and confidential” (was he telling a would-be biographer these at the end of his life to clarify his legacy in a more forgiving age, or was he being controversial because who could prove this statement's veracity against that one's?). Sometimes, he seemed to enjoy being a contrarian; at other times, his nerves got the better of him.
The day of the new symphony’s premiere, a family friend stopped by the Shostakoviches and found the composer in a highly nervous state, pale and clenching his fists. His wife explained he was “always like this on the day of a first performance. He gets terribly wrought up. He is frightened it will be a flop.” Later, Shostakovich told her that often before a premiere he felt physically ill to the point of nausea.
As if conditioned by the political trauma of the Stalinist Purges in the ‘30s which would recur only six years later in another official period of political disgrace, this nervousness verged on panic. “I would sign anything,” he’d told a friend, regarding some of the statements released in his name by government bureaucrats, “even if they handed it to me upside down. All I want is to be left alone.”
Sometime in 1942, having recently completed his 7th Symphony and presumably before its official premiere in March, Shostakovich supplied these program notes:
= = = = =
My Seventh Symphony I began in besieged Leningrad. Every day of the heroic defence of this great town was a new link in the sublime symphony of the fight carried on by our own people. I hearkened to the life and saw the struggle of the Russian people and tried to inculcate the pictures of their heroic deeds in my music.
The first part, a symphonic allegro, was inspired by the month of August in Leningrad [this would be between Hitler's invasion in June and the start of siege]. The war burst into our peaceful life... Our people – workers, thinkers, creators – became warriors. Ordinary men and women became heroes... The first part of the symphony has something tragic, it includes a requiem. It is full of grief for those who died the death of heroes on the field of battle.
However, we are unconquerable in our great national war, because ours is a righteous cause. We know that Hitler will be defeated and that our enemy will find his grave in Russian earth. Therefore the general spirit of the first part is bright, cheerful, and life-asserting.
I composed the second and third parts – a scherzo and an adagio – at a time when the dark clouds gathered over our country, when... every step of the retreating Red Army evoked a smarting and painful echo in our hearts. But the Soviet people knew that they were invincible... The scherzo and adagio express the confidence in the near triumph of freedom, justice, and happiness.
The fourth part is to a certain extent a continuation of the first. It is the Finale of the symphony; it too is composed in the form of a symphonic allegro. And if the first part may be conditionally given the name of 'war,' the fourth part begins with the idea of the struggle for life and death. The joint struggle of life and darkness grows into radiant exultation. We are carrying on the offensive. The fatherland is victorious.
My dream is to hear in the near future the production of this symphony in Leningrad in my own native city which inspired me to create it. I dedicate my dearest work of art to the heroic defenders of Leningrad, to the Red Army and to our victory.”
= = = = =
Quoted from Boris Schwarz's Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia 1917-1970, this was published in VOKS in 1942 and presumably written for them rather than for the premiere's audience. Schwarz calls it “an inadequate English translation” whose “prose is artless, at times naïve, but somehow moving.” VOKS, btw, was the official USSR Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, so also keep in mind, artless or not, it is clearly meant to be propaganda. Whether this is entirely Shostakovich's original statement – how many repetitions of the word “heroic” were really necessary? – or not is unclear, but Shostakovich has been known on many occasions to sign off on whatever the party bureaucrats wanted him to say.
As other composers have done before him, Shostakovich intended to apply subtitles to each of the movements but then decided not to. The first was to be “War,” the second (the Scherzo) “Reminiscence,” the third “Native Expanse,” and the Finale, “Victory.”
Again, keep in mind the premiere of the completed symphony took place during the darkest days of that first winter of the siege which I described in my previous post. Victory was by no means assured; the future was by no means clear. To be pessimistic would go against the policies, official or otherwise, of the government's approach to Soviet Art. There is little more heroic than HOPE.
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Initially, given the emotional baggage behind this music, I wanted you to read about the background to the work: what inspired it, what was going on in the composer's life while he was writing it, and what (officially) he had said about it after he'd completed it. It is impossible to avoid any of this – and a good deal more I'm leaving out – so there you have it.
But there's one thing that's often overlooked in a purely emotional or “aesthetic” approach and that is the structure beneath the music that makes it work and which any conductor needs to understand to make sense out of the piece, and this is true whether it's Beethoven's 5th or Mahler's 5th (both, by the way, “Fate” Symphonies). A composer comes up with various ideas – melodies, if you want to think of them that way – which involve enough contrast to keep them separate and recognizable to the listener (from late-Mozart on, we usually think of them as, say, dramatic versus lyrical, though fortunately we've gotten beyond thinking of them as “masculine” versus “feminine” which was how I was first taught to differentiate them in the 1950s...) which can then be grouped in segments we label “Exposition” (where the basic material of the movement – its themes, its harmonic scheme – are “exposed”), “Development” (where this material is “developed” often in a fragmented and usually dramatic way so the conflict created by this contrast builds to a climax) which then resolves to the “Recapitulation” (where this material returns much as it had been initially as a resolution of this build-up of tension to create a sense of relief, the key word being “resolution”).
In the Seventh’s first movement, it appears to begin as a straight-forward “sonata-allegro” movement – a first theme (certainly masculine) followed by a contrasting, gentle second theme – but when you expect the traditional development section to begin, the quiet ending of the Exposition leads into the quiet opening of what will become this March Theme, something new, which will then progress for twelve variations of sorts – admittedly, the first time I’d listened to a recording of it when I was in high school, if you’d told me twenty variations, I’d’ve believed you: it was interminable. As this builds to its screaming climax, the opening theme comes back in (returns as in a recapitulation or as it being developed, torn apart and tossed about by the horror of the march’s build-up?). Rather than exploding into some form of resolution, it subsides (exhausted?) and it becomes this segment that becomes the cathartic climax of the movement, a section he himself referred to as “a funeral march or, rather, a Requiem.” Quoted in an article that appeared in a Soviet periodical on October 9th, 1941, shortly after he’d been evacuated first to Moscow, he continued, “After the requiem comes an even more tragic episode. I do not know how to characterize that music. Perhaps it is a mother's tears or even the feeling that the sorrow is so great that there are no more tears left." Hints of the “Invasion Theme” echo across the backdrop as the movement collapses.
Because of the nature of its inspiration, the 7th is often considered a depressing work by people who've never listened to it. It's a War Symphony – there's that “Nazi March” in the first movement – the destruction of the City of Leningrad is a horrible moment in human history – and yet the symphony's in C Major (considered a “bright” key), the opening is positive (happy days before the storm) and the ending is positively glorious, a celebration of victory that, please remember, was written and first heard long before the events inspiring it had been resolved! It is, ultimately, despite the conflict we hear in the music, a happy piece, if you will, a Fate Symphony with a victorious outcome much like Beethoven's Fifth, Mahler's Fifth (which even cribs Beethoven's Fate Motive rhythm), Tchaikovsky's Fourth and Fifth and Shostakovich's own Fifth Symphony with its own truckload of historical baggage. (Tchaikovsky’s Sixth, the famous Pathétique, is also a “Fate Symphony,” but proving not all such works end in Victory.)
Shostakovich's Seventh is often derided because, for one thing, it's “too long” which only means the length of the music does not equal the depth of the material that makes up the music. What that really means is the performance someone has listened to is not well thought out to make sense of its different parts: the loud bits, if allowed to go over-the-top, more or less take care of themselves but still need to be controlled in relation to everything else; the slower, softer passages which are not as showy, need to be balanced, tension still needs to be maintained (otherwise, what's the point of the contrast?). And if the ending of the symphony is labeled “bombastic,” this is bombast that works – bombast that doesn't work, for me, is the ending of Shostakovich's 12th; for Tchaikovsky, the ending of the 4th is bombast that works; the ending of his 5th, is, for me, bombast that doesn’t. While “faster and louder” is often a conductor's mantra to bring an audience to its feet, it does not always mean the faster and louder it is, the better. But here, in the Seventh, Shostakovich “paints a picture” (to mix artistic metaphors) of a future victory that cannot fail to inspire its listeners.
Which explains why, following its initial performances, the symphony was heard 'round the world as soon as the Soviets could transfer the score to microfilm and smuggle it out of the country, first to Tehran and Cairo before reaching London and New York City. There were sixty performances of the symphony in America alone that first season. Yes, the Soviet authorities knew they had a propaganda coup on their hands and this one piece of music by a shy little man hiding behind round glasses – what a contrast with the traditional stereotype of The Hero – that built up more support and sympathy for their cause than any speech any politician could've made.
And then, as soon as the war was over and the open-ended event of the Siege of Leningrad closed, it was soon forgotten. There was hardly a single performance in the West in the two decades following the war. It was not only “too long” and “too bombastic” – as if Shostakovich had a corner on the bombastometer – there was that “Nazi March” in the first movement: really, critics complained, twelve minutes of incessant repetition of one of the most banal tunes a composer could possibly imagine? Cut me a break...
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What about that March? It begins quietly, in the distance (just a soft snare drum before the solo flute starts the tune), and builds to a relentless climax as it becomes more and more... I'm not sure what a good word is to describe it, “encrusted”? – with textures and orchestral colors and above all a steady crescendo from almost nothing to ear-shattering terror. After all, as Shostakovich implies, it represents the approaching Nazi Army headed for Leningrad, right?
A typical comment usually goes “it reminds me of Ravel's Bolero,” which is, like, “D'uh, thanks, Captain Obvious...” Of all the things Shostakovich said about the piece, we know he twice apologized to friends when he played it for them (before he'd finished the entire symphony) if it sounded like Ravel's Bolero, but “that is how I heard the war.” It is relentless and it is overpowering, a juggernaut: how do you, in the face of something like this, respond?
In most cases, this banal tune – some say he based it on something from a Lehar operetta, the epitome of Germanic decadence – is referred to as “The Nazi March” for obvious reasons (I've also heard it called “Hitler's Bolero” and “the Fascist Fandango” though, really, the rhythm is definitely a march, not a dance, if you want to bicker about facts).
Taking
it out of context as it often is anyway, here is that March. Here, the graphic calls it "Stalin's March." The performance is with Valeri Gergiev and the Mariinksy Symphony.
Performances of the symphony were ubiquitous on American radio that year. Meanwhile, in a New York City hospital, a Hungarian composer was being treated for what would be diagnosed as leukemia and nothing annoyed him more than hearing Shostakovich's 7th as if there was no escaping it. While other critics have taken their stabs at the piece, Bela Bartók came up with the most enduring of slaps when he wrote the “Interrupted Serenade” for his Concerto for Orchestra: the parody of Shostakovich's March, Nazi or Otherwise, is full-out vulgar complete with fingers wagging in the ears, raspberries, and other examples of musical nose-thumbing, even a few trombone smears and circus music, before returning to the gentle serenade theme, a nostalgic reminder of his native Hungary and his own career which had been interrupted by the fascist hoard as it spread across Central Europe:
(Here it is, in a performance with Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony.)
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Throughout his life, Shostakovich was always cautious about how he talked about his music. He learned this when Stalin walked out of a performance of his highly acclaimed opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District which resulted in a review, ostensibly by or at least inspired by Stalin, called “Muddle Instead of Music” which led to his immediate descent from Golden Boy to someone who almost disappeared in the Stalinist Purges (it's a long story). After riding high on his renewed popularity following his Fifth and now his Seventh Symphonies, Shostakovich would experience another cycle of “disapproval” in 1948 which ended only with the death of Stalin in 1953, banned by the government with no performances, no new commissions, unable to teach; in short, no income. It was then that a new musical motif appeared in his 10th Symphony based on the German spelling of his monogram, DSCH, which ends the work in that kind of delirium where how can you help but think it's this shy little man hiding behind the round glasses secretly dancing as if no one were watching, “I survived! I'm Still Here!”?
One of the biggest controversies of Shostakovich's career was the memoir supposedly “dictated” by the composer to Solomon Volkov over a series of interviews when the composer was ill, in constant pain, and no doubt aware of his inevitable mortality. A sensation when it was published five years after Shostakovich’s death, Testimony contained things that clearly contradicted almost everything the composer had ever said about his music that toed the Party Line. Was he lying then? Or was he lying now? Why would he come out and say such things if they weren't true? With the end in sight, this time, was there a sense of “Stalin's Dead, they can't touch me now”? Or did Volkov simply, as many suggested, just make it up? Now generally discredited, much of what Shostakovich was quoted as saying has so permeated the critical canon to be quoted and requoted as if it were fact (maybe it is), it is almost impossible, now, to be sure what if anything is the truth.
For a 1988 recording of the Seventh with Mariss Jansons and the Leningrad Philharmonic, Robert Layton writes in the liner notes, “In Testimony, Shostakovich told Solomon Volkov that he planned the symphony before the war and that is was not just the appalling circumstances of the siege that inspired it. 'The war brought much new sorrow and much new destruction, but I haven't forgotten the terrible pre-war years. That is what all my symphonies beginning with the Fourth are about, including the Seventh and the Eighth... I have nothing against calling the Seventh the Leningrad, but it's not about Leningrad under siege, it's about the Leningrad that Stalin destroyed and that Hitler merely finished off.”
And yet, it was not something he kept secret till the final years of his life. A violinist studying at the Leningrad Conservatory later recalled how Shostakovich had said he’d completed the first movement the previous year – that is, before Hitler’s invasion in the summer of 1941. That does not mean he couldn’t have “re-imagined it” or completely rewritten it, but what parts of it had, in some sense, already existed? Shostakovich is only one of many composers who never liked to discuss “creative plans” – we know more about Beethoven’s creative methods only because he left his notebooks; we know nothing about Brahms’ because he very carefully destroyed all his sketches and usually burned complete works deemed unsatisfactory. Like Mozart, Shostakovich often worked out a complete piece or movement in his head before committing pen to paper: as he put it, “I think slowly but write quickly.” One thing Shostakovich would never have said was “I’m thinking of writing a symphony – it will go something like this.” While the creative process is different for every artist in some way or another, was it possible Shostakovich might agree with Ravel who, working on his Piano Trio, wrote to a friend “the [new piece] is done – now all I need is the notes”?
Again, waiting until the Age of Glasnost when it was freer to speak of these things, the musicologist Lev Lebedinsky, a close friend and frequent confidant of the composer’s, wrote “the famous theme in the first movement Shostakovich had at first called ‘the Stalin Theme’ (which close friends of the composer knew). After the war started, the composer called it the anti-Hitler theme and later referred to that ‘German Theme’ as the ‘Theme of Evil’ which was absolutely true, since the theme was just as much anti-Hitler as it was anti-Stalin, even though the world music community fixed on only the first of the two definitions.”
While he was in Kuibyshev where he'd just finished the symphony in the winter of 1941-1942, Shostakovich talked with a family friend, Flora Litvina whose father-in-law was also, as it happened, the Soviet ambassador to the United States. A former student who'd recently been digging trenches in Smolensk (on the road from the Polish border to Moscow) earlier that summer, Flora had also recently been evacuated to Kuibyshev and recalled in a memoir how on December 2nd she'd heard Shostakovich playing “some obvious Shostakovich-like sounds” from the next room (“leaning against the radiator to be able to hear better”) and how, having become part of the family circle with her own child befriending Shostakovich's children, she realized “he was not only this great composer, satirist and tragedian... but at heart he was carefree, gay, kind and homely [I'm assuming here she implied “a home-body” or family man] – not at all the frightening figure I had imagined.”
One night, at a dinner party, Shostakovich quietly announced to his friends, “and, d'you know, today I finally finished my Seventh.”
Later, once he'd finished the piano score, realizing the first draft, Shostakovich played it for friends including the conductor who would be entrusted with its premiere in Kuibyshev. Flora Litvina was also there. “After he'd finished playing,” she recalled, “everyone rushed up to him, excited. He was exhausted and highly agitated. Everybody spoke at once, about the theme, Fascism, the war and victory. Someone immediately dubbed the theme 'rat-like.'” After Flora put her young son to bed, she returned to find Shostakovich and his wife Nina alone, drinking tea, and joined them. Naturally, the conversation revolved around the Symphony.
“Dmitri Dmitriyevich [the composer] said pensively, 'Of course – Fascism. But music, real music, can never be literally tied to a theme. National Socialism is not the only form of Fascism; this music is about all forms of terror, slavery, the bondage of the spirit.' Later on, when Dmitri Dmitriyevich got used to me and started to trust me, he told me straight out that the Seventh Symphony and for that matter the Fifth as well, were not just about Fascism, but about our system [that is, Communism, usually regarded as extreme Socialism], or any form of totalitarian regime.”
[Quoted from Elizabeth Wilson's Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (1994), p. 183-185.]
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Given all that and knowing what Shostakovich experienced during the time he was writing the piece and what he said about the music during and after that time, no matter how vague or contradictory, whatever was his honest opinion or his “official” viewpoint, here is a performance of the complete Symphony No. 7 in C Major, Op. 60, the Leningrad Symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich. It will be impossible to get the full impact of this work listening to any performance on your computer or phone, but as an example of art transcending politics, I’ve chosen a 1992 live concert conducted by Mariss Jansons with the Berlin Philharmonic (think about that for a moment: a German orchestra with a German audience and Shostakovich’s “Nazi March”...).
It amused me to hear on-line music critic David Hurwitz talk about attending a live performance years ago with Leonard Bernstein conducting the Chicago Symphony at Avery Fisher Hall and its fabulous brass section doubled according to Shostakovich’s specifications. At the end you could see the cymbals and drums crashing away but you couldn’t hear them, the brass were so loud. When it was over, you saw people were applauding and cheering wildly and yet you were so shell-shocked, your hearing was so “paralyzed” you couldn’t actually hear them.
(There was an episode on a TV show where someone walks into a store and complains about how loud the music on the sound system was, and the proprietor said “It’s Shostakovich, it’s supposed to be loud…”)
As I’d said in my earlier post, I’d never had a chance to hear this work live. It’s not frequently performed. But while I didn’t actually attend the concert, I was able to hear much of it when I was teaching at the University of Connecticut in the late-1970s. I was unable to attend because I was involved in a Theater Department production of a surrealist play called Ivona, Princess of Burgundia by Witold Gombrowicz. I’d written a fair bit of incidental music for a backstage ensemble of some winds and percussion (I specifically remember three trumpet players for the numerous fanfares the action required) which I was also conducting. We were in what was called the Little Theater at Jorgenson Auditorium and that night there was to be a performance by the Leningrad Symphony in the main auditorium. I was assured the fact they were playing one floor above us would not be a problem.
During the first act, we suddenly had a trumpet player warming up in the stairwell outside the Little Theater’s backstage area. Now, I don’t speak Russian and he clearly didn’t speak English or understand the universal symbol of a man frantically flailing his arms or slicing his hand across his throat. The only thing Russian I could remember was a line from Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov: “Proshai, moi sin, umirayu!” Farewell, my son, I am dying!
It didn’t exactly explain the situation but it did get his attention. When I was able to get him to realize we were giving a performance of our own down here, he sheepishly apologized, put his index finger to his lips and tiptoed back up to the upstairs theater.
Phew… fine!
Unfortunately, that did not help once their actual performance began. By the time the “Nazi March” reached its climax, the walls of the Little Theater were vibrating to the beat and I was having trouble hearing the dialogue from the stage, trying to coordinate actors and music. Once those final moments rolled around, it coincided with the climax of our play by which point not a soul in the audience could hear a thing we were trying to do.
Surreal, indeed...
So, after almost fifty years, I will now have a chance to hear Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony live, sitting in my usual seat two rows from the back of the Forum Auditorium, where I expect I will have my ears completely flattened against the Promenade wall.
And I’m sure I won’t give a rat’s ass whether Shostakovich cared about wanting to be a “serious” composer or not.
– Dick Strawser
