Dmitri Shostakovich and his "Leningrad" Symphony: The Biographical Background

My year began with a post for Market Square Concert's first program of the New Year, the Quartet for the End of Time by Olivier Messiaen which was composed and premiered in a Nazi Prisoner of War Camp in the midst of World War II.

Currently, I'm reading a novel I'd never heard of before I found a copy at a Used Book Sale, H.G. Wells' Mr. Britling Sees It Through. The title doesn't tell you much but the blurb indicated Mr. Britling is a British writer enjoying a country summer in 1914 when news from Central Europe interrupts the pleasantries of entertaining his guests and soon the Germans are marching into Belgium, and “Mr. Britling's irrepressible spirit is thrown into darkness and confusion.” The novel was published in 1916.

 

Shostakovich, 1941, composing his 7th Symphony

Over the weekend of January 25th & 26th (2025), the Harrisburg Symphony, under the baton of Stuart Malina, will perform a work I've never heard live – well, only tangentially, but I'll save that for later – nor have I ever written about it: the Symphony No. 7 by Dmitri Shostakovich, the “Leningrad” Symphony.

The common denominator for these three works – aside from Stuart Malina's involvement in two of them (he was the pianist for the Messiaen on January 5th) – is that they were each inspired by then current events and written as an immediate response.

Messiaen, recently inducted into the medical corps of the French army at the start of World War II, had been taken prisoner by the invading Nazis and transported to a prison camp.

Mr. Britling deals with the start of World War I and primarily the German invasions of Belgium and France and the inevitable fear of a subsequent invasion of England. As a writer primarily of “opinion columns” for the London press, he reacts to the news as it arrives from the Continent, examines various sides of the issues and what this means or what that implies. As he's arguing (with himself or with his friends) about the causes of these events from a political and social standpoint, he's also acutely aware he has a teenaged son who will undoubtedly be affected by this, as well as the family's German tutor living with them who now must return home because he is obligated to military service. “Written with a sympathy and forgiveness exceptional for his time,” the novel is rarely mentioned today despite having been a best-seller in both England and America when it first appeared in 1916.

Shostakovich was examining his graduating composition students at the conservatory in his hometown of Leningrad (the past and present St. Petersburg) when news arrived Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union on June 22nd, 1941. The infamous Siege of Leningrad began in August once the Nazis encircled the city, a siege that would continue for a horrifying 900 days. In late-June, Shostakovich had started sketching what would become his 7th Symphony: as the siege began, he completed the first movement (itself about 25 minutes long) in less than six weeks, the next two movements, a scherzo and an adagio (another 29 minutes, total) in less than three. The government decided to evacuate Shostakovich and his family on October 1st and he completed the last movement (about 20 minutes itself) on December 27th, 1941.

Another thing each of these works have in common: they were all completed before the events that inspired them had concluded. Messiaen was later released from the prison camp in 1942 and the war itself didn't end until 1945; the war Mr. Britling was observing and theorizing about didn't end until November, 1918, two years after the novel was published. Not only was the collapse of Hitler's Germany three years in the future when Shostakovich's symphony was given its premiere on March 5th, 1942, and then first performed in the city that inspired it on August 9th, 1942, the Siege of Leningrad wasn't lifted until February 1943.

None of these creative artists knew the outcome of what inspired them; none of those who first heard or read these works knew the outcome of what they were listening to or reading.

We talk about the crises affecting our daily lives today – whether its the wars in Ukraine or in Gaza, both still on-going; or things like Climate Change or the political and social divisions not only in our country but spreading around the world – and we live “in the midst” of them, not knowing what the future brings.

These three works remind me this is what Art is like when there are no spoilers: yes, in hindsight, we today know how things turned out, but those who wrote them, those who first experienced them did not. In hindsight, it is difficult to put ourselves into the context of those individuals, especially when these events happened so long ago and so many details – especially involving World War I, the so-called “War To End All Wars,” a phrase that H.G. Wells nearly coined in his 1914 essay, “The War That Will End War” – have been forgotten or overlooked.

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A little historical background to the Nazi's attempt to starve out a city of 3,000,000 people: during this period of 18 months, 632,000 people died “of hunger or privation” according to “official figures,” though the unofficial estimate is closer to one million deaths, a third of the city's population. Quoting or paraphrasing from Boris Schwartz's Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 1917-1970, “in addition to hunger and cold, the city was subjected to shelling and air raids.” The winter of 1941-42 was particularly cruel (if rations could be obtained, they were often reduced to 500 calories per day) and people died on the streets, in their offices and factories at work. “Yet theatres struggled to function, musicians continued to play, composers continued to write music.” Actors appeared on-stage in heavy overcoats, musicians played with wool gloves “with cut-out finger-tips.” But they managed to put together an orchestra which gave its first concert on April 5th, 1942, when the temperature in the hall “was 7° to 8° centigrade below 0” (roughly 18° F in the auditorium; that's not the outside temperature). In May, under heavy shelling, they played Tchaikovsky's Pathetique.

Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky, a composer who was then head of the city's Composers' Union, kept a diary: November 28th, 1941, “four days without warm food, only some bread rations;” January 6th, 1942, “the pulse of creative life... weakens from day to day. It weakens but does not die. Many are no longer able to come in [to their centrally located building] from outlying districts [because] streetcars have stopped running;” Jan.29th, “the city is paralyzed. Since the 25th there is no water and no bread can be baked for lack of water. Telephones do not work, radios are mute. The only creative activity in the Union consists of excursions to give free concerts for front units, hospitals, Navy ships anchored in the River Neva;” April 11th, “at home, the stove is warm, first time this winter [there is to be a symphony concert the next day]; April 15th, “streetcars are running again, the city is in a holiday mood.”

Things improved during the summer when at least they “didn't have to fight darkness and cold.” In August, '42, the head of Leningrad's Composer's Union was able to travel to Moscow to do a presentation on works composed during the siege by Leningrad composers, returning in time – he did not use this opportunity to leave his city – for the first performance of Shostakovich's new symphony.

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Shortly after the siege began and Shostakovich had completed the first movement of his symphony, Bogdanov-Berezovsky recorded on September 17th, 1941, how he and several friends gathered at the Shostakovichs' apartment to hear the composer play through what he had composed so far, playing “very nervously but with great élan [as if] he aimed to draw out of the piano every nuance of orchestral color.” “At the end of the first movement, sirens started screaming and the composer excused himself to accompany his wife and children into the air-raid shelter, but suggested he would return immediately so as to continue the session.”

“The enormous sheets of manuscript paper, lying open on the composer's desk” – here, I am quoting Bogdanov-Berevovsky's memoir as quoted in Elizabeth Wilson's 1994 Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (p.172), 2nd Edition] – testified to the grandiose orchestral scoring... It made a colossal impression. This is an extraordinary example of a synchronized, instant creative reaction to events as they are being lived through, transmitted in a complex, large-scale form yet without the slightest hint of compromising the standard of the genre.”

As Shostakovich played through the Scherzo, then pointed out things in the third movement he was still working on, they could hear “the dull thud of falling bombs.”

On October 1st, almost at the last minute, the authorities decided they could evacuate Shostakovich and his family. With only room for the barest essentials, Shostakovich included, along with the score and sketches for his new symphony, his score of his opera Lady Macbeth and his own piano-duet transcription of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, they hurried to the airport which was already being encircled by the German army. Shostakovich's daughter Galina later recalled the experience:

“Apart from my parents and my brother [Maxim], there was only room for the pilots, three or four of them. There were no seats at all, only a plank-board floor and some wooden boxes. We were told not to sit on them... There was a transparent hood in the roof of the plane and one of the pilots, a sniper, stood under it and looked out, scanning the skies. He warned us, “if I wave my hand, you must all lie down on the floor.”

Maxim, who was three, recalled the bursts of light he saw through the cockpit window. When he asked “what are those,” his father said “it was the Germans trying to shoot down our plane.”

The plane finally landed on the outskirts of Moscow, the pilots felling trees to cover and camouflage the plane while the family spent the rest of the night in a nearby hut. Transferred to a Moscow hotel, the first thing Shostakovich and his wife did was buy new toys for the children to replace the ones they'd had to leave behind.

In the two weeks they spent in the capital before being transported further to the east – the consensus was, when, like Napoleon, would the invaders reach Moscow? – Shostakovich played his new symphony first for Aram Khachaturian, “straight after getting off the plane,” and then another composer-friend, each time apologizing for the long march theme in the first movement: “forgive me, will you, if this reminds you of Ravel's Bolero.” He explained “idle critics will no doubt reproach me for imitating [it]. Well, let them, for this is how I hear the war.”

On October 16th, then, Shostakovich was one of a mob of people shoehorned into a train headed east, including Khachaturian and Dmitri Kabalevsky among other important Soviet composers as well as members of the Bolshoi Theater and Ballet and other painters and artists like their friend Nikolai Sokolov. Khachaturian's nephew, also a composer, helped his uncle and Shostakovich with their luggage. Shostakovich “was holding a sewing machine in one hand and a children's potty in the other while his wife Nina stood beside the children and a mountain of stuff... Later, on my way home,” the nephew writes, “I was struck by the number of howling dogs roaming the snowy streets, having been abandoned by their owners.”

Sokolov describes the chaos boarding the train: “the platform was enveloped in darkness. Underfoot the snow was wet and squelchy. Everybody pushed and shoved... we had a single ticket for a whole group of artists which had gotten torn in half in the crush. [Outside their carriage,] somebody stood guarding the door, blocking the entrance, shouting 'This carriage is only for the Bolshoi Theatre.' I recognized the tall silhouette loudly arguing with this man as Dmitri Kabalevsky: 'Allow Shostakovich and his children to pass.'”

Sokolov describes the backpacks they carried, allowed to contain only the “emergency minimum: one change of underwear, a shirt, socks, a candle, some bread and tins of food.” The train didn't set off for another forty minutes, moving slowly, headed toward Ryazan, 122 miles southeast of Moscow, already being bombed by the Fascists. “Some of us [including Shostakovich] were on our feet all night. As morning dawned, we started to scrutinize each other in the light. Some people gave up their seats to those who had been standing. In other words, people started to soften and show kindness.”

It took seven days and nights like this to reach Kuibyshev (now Samara), a place en route to their initial destination. “The train kept stopping and would stand still... often for hours on end. Trains filled with military units were traveling to Moscow. Lines of fuel trucks stretched along the tracks. On the station platforms, tanks and ammunition stood under tarpaulins. Whole factories were being evacuated... the workers and their families all traveled in the good wagons.”

At one point, Shostakovich was looking for two of their suitcases and couldn't find them. It turned out they had been left behind at the Moscow station: all personal possessions and the children's things. Sokolov gave the composer some new socks, someone else gave him a shirt and so on. “He took these things very shyly and thanked everybody in a state of great agitation.”

(I'm trying to imagine: what if one of those forgotten cases had contained his new symphony?)

The question now was their destination: Tashkent may have had more bread but it was also another eight days' journey. Kuibyshev, on the other hand, was close by even if it would be full of fellow evacuees and the situation with rations was not very promising. Shostakovich decided on Kuibyshev and they found themselves allocated to a classroom in one of the town's schools, already occupied by previous arrivals from the Bolshoi Theatre. “Each classroom housed eighteen people with their goods and chattels” (?) “...at the entrance one was confronted by thirty-six pairs of galoshes,” arresting to “the autumnal mud” just outside the school. They slept on the floor without mattresses “squeezed one against the other.” Their daily rations consisted of butter, sweets, bread, and salami. “I met Shostakovich in the hallway returning to [our] classroom, a bright smile lighting up his face.”

A week later, the Shostakoviches were given a room to themselves, furnished and with beds. The composer was also provided with a grand piano. He told Sokolov how things vacillated between Paradise and Hell: getting on the train (paradise) but a week later, still on the train (hell); finding himself in the cramped classroom with a patch of carpet to sleep on (paradise) but three days later (hell); now he had a room for his family with decent conditions and had even been given a piano (paradise) but alas the children (“they are only children”) were rowdy and he couldn't concentrate (hell).

Later, the family had been given a separate three-room flat “with its own bathroom.” But when Sokolov asked him what stopped him from completing his symphony, he admitted “you know, as soon as I got on that train, something snapped inside me... I can't compose just now, knowing so many people are losing their lives.” But soon, news arrived the Fascists had been “smashed” outside Moscow, and “he sat down to compose in a burst of energy and excitement. He finished the symphony in something less than two weeks.”

It was completed on December 27th, 1941.

In January, Shostakovich was ill with typhoid fever and when the pain allowed him as he recovered, he began work on a new piano sonata.

The new symphony was fully orchestrated and the score and parts ready for rehearsals with the Bolshoi Orchestra under conductor Samuil Samosud, also evacuated to Kuibyshev. The premiere was March 5th, 1942. At the end of March, they performed it again in Moscow. Other performances were quickly scheduled throughout the Soviet Union. Henry Wood conducted it in June in London and a month later Toscanini conducted it in New York, its American premiere.

The Leningrad premiere was problematic: the Philharmonic had been evacuated to Novosibirsk, leaving only the decimated ranks of the Radio Orchestra, at the time only 14 musicians! Somehow, the conductor Karl Eliasberg managed to requisition retired musicians, army band players, even military personnel “with musical training.” Once, Eliasberg, walking home from the concert hall after a rehearsal, was so weak he passed out on the street. Authorities were able to get him a bicycle, find him a place to live closer to Philharmonic Hall, and got him extra food supplies. The musicians themselves were also given extra rations to keep their strength up: after all, the symphony was a long one, and they were playing not only for an hour and twenty minutes, they were playing for a very intense hour and twenty minutes.

To return to Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky's memoirs, he describes that premiere:

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“Exciting sight of the hall, festive as of old, in its pristine white, the gold, and the dark red, with its faultless architectural proportions... The hall is fancifully lit by the large crystal candelabras... In the audience, all – or nearly all – the representatives of the musical life of besieged Leningrad – composers, opera artists, pedagogues... many soldiers and officers who came with their automatic weapons directly from the front line. The orchestra was reinforced by army musicians temporarily on leave for the occasion: the score demands eight horns, six trumpets, six trombones, an enormous battery of percussion.

“With excitement we hear the first sounds of the unison theme in the strings... Quite new for me were the last two movements written by Shostakovich after his departure from Leningrad. One cannot speak of an impression made by the symphony. It was not an impression but a staggering experience. This was felt not only by the listeners but also by the performers who read the music sheets as if they were reading a living chronicle about themselves.”

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Shostakovich had, after all, not only been inspired by the events of the Siege of Leningrad and the response of those who lived in the city: he had dedicated the symphony “to the City of Leningrad.”

In Mr. Britling Sees It Through, Wells frequently has the protagonist explain, “This is our war.” To everyone in that audience when Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony was first experienced, the thought would've been, “This is our symphony.”

An entire people adopted the work as a symbol of its struggle. “The Seventh Symphony of Shostakovich,” as one writer described it, “is significant beyond the bounds of a merely musical event. It has become a cultural entity of our people, a fact of political and social significance, and an impulse to struggle and victory.”

- Dick Strawser

(The plan is to write a second post specifically about the music but given the nature of this work, I wanted you to read the background information to its composition before you hear the music itself. When I've finished it and posted it, you can find the link here.)

A Wee Bit of a Scottish Fantasy

What: The Harrisburg Symphony, with violinist Peter Sirotin, conducted by Stuart Malina

When: Saturday, Jan 11, 2025, at 7:30; Sunday, Jan. 12, 2025, at 3:00 (there's a pre-concert talk before each performance)

Who: Valerie Coleman: Umoja - Max Bruch: Scottish Fantasy - Jean Sibelius: Symphony No. 2.

Where: The Forum in Downtown Harrisburg (PA)

The Harrisburg Symphony on stage at the Forum

 

This weekend, Stuart Malina conducts the Harrisburg Symphony’s first concert of the New Year which includes concertmaster Peter Sirotin as the soloist for Max Bruch’s “Scottish Fantasy.” If you're in the Central Pennsylvania region, you may familiar with Sirotin not only from the Harrisburg Symphony but also as a member of the Mendelssohn Piano Trio, a teacher based at Messiah University, and, with his wife, pianist Ya-Ting Chang, as co-directors of Market Square Concerts.

The symphony's program concludes with the 2nd Symphony of Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius, which I wrote about earlier (you can read it here and listen to a full performance by Finnish musicians of the Turku Philharmonic conducted by Leif Segerstam). 

If it helps to be Finnish to play a definitive interpretation of Sibelius – perhaps because they’re used to the snow and the cold we associate with Finland and which presumably, if not inspired Sibelius’ music, informed his style – does it help to be Scottish to play Bruch’s Fantasy? After all, it was written by a German born along the banks of the Rhine, writing it at the request of a Spanish violinist, Pablo de Sarasate, and which premiered in Liverpool, England. Oh, and at the time, he’d never set foot in Scotland.

While Bruch’s Fantasy is based on several Scottish folk songs, he didn’t collect them in Scotland but found a copy of the Scots Musical Museum, a six-volume collection with 100 songs in each volume, originally published by James Johnson in Edinburgh between 1787 and 1803, in a library in Munich.

Judging from the title on first blush, you might think this is one of those short showcases based on folk melodies or popular airs to entertain the audience and give the soloist a chance to dazzle them with virtuosic technique. One famous example would be the “Gypsy Airs,” Ziguenerweisen, by the great Spanish violinist, Pablo de Sarasate.

Instead it’s a full four-movement work of about a half-hour’s duration for violin and orchestra with a very prominent harp part (often, the harpist is placed to the front of the orchestra just behind the soloist), each movement making use of various Scots folk songs. Rather than being a medley of neatly arranged tunes, Bruch uses them symphonically, developing them beyond merely stating the melodies as if they were original themes he’d work into his own composition. Each tune has its own specifically Scottish flavor – no comments about Scotch or haggis, please – and the work as a whole brings to mind the musical souvenir Felix Mendelssohn brought back from a visit to Scotland in 1829 where his inspiration initially came from visiting the ruins of Holyrood Castle in Edinburgh.

Curiously, Bruch’s work is not a souvenir in the same sense: he never visited Scotland until the year after the Fantasy was premiered in 1881 in Liverpool, England, where Bruch had been the conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic Society. This would place him not that far from the Scottish border. And there’s no proof he ever did hear what a Celtic harp sounded like.

So how did a composer born in the Prussian city of Köln who spent most of his time in Berlin come to write a work based on Scottish folk songs?

Here’s one of my favorite performances of the piece, by the Russian virtuoso David Oistrakh recorded in 1962 with Jascha Horenstein and the London Symphony Orchestra:

I. Introduction: Grave. Adagio cantabile – Billed as being in E-flat Major (generally considered a bright key and, to Beethoven at least, one that could have heroic implications), the Fantasy opens with a slow, brooding introduction in the dark shadow key of E-flat Minor as if setting the scene for the tales about to be told. It was apparently inspired by reading a passage in a novel by Sir Walter Scott, “an old bard contemplating the ruins of a castle, and lamenting the glorious times of old.” Switching to the major mode, the tune of the Adagio cantabile, “Through the Wood, Laddie,” is often misidentified as “Auld Rob Morris,” a traditional tune Bruch incidentally set earlier in 1863 as one of his “12 Scottish Songs” (so you see, this was not his first time using Scots tunes in his compositions). The "Laddie" tune recurs at the end of the 2nd and 4th movements, as well.

II. Scherzo: Allegro – This is a lively dance movement, introducing “The Dusty Miller,” a tune dating back to 1700, over a bagpipe drone in the bass (a stereotypical reference to rustic music far removed from the genteel world of court and city). Laddie is apparently still working his way through the woods as Bruch makes a transition from his lively scherzo to the slow movement that follows without a break.

III. Andante sostenuto – This is the romantic core of the Fantasy and no doubt benefits from Bruch’s own experience writing for the voice (primarily known at the time as a choral composer, Bruch was nine when he wrote his very first piece, celebrating the birthday of his mother, a professional singer. The song here is a 19th-Century song (probably not technically a folksong), “I’m a’doun for lack o’Jonnie.”

IV. Finale: Allegro guerriero – The tempo indication here is a bit unusual and the only other time I’ve ever seen guerriero (“war-like”) used like this was in the finale of Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony. Not surprisingly, Bruch apparently wrote to a friend that’s where he found the expression and decided to use it himself. And why not? The tune here is based on an old battle song, “Hae tuti taiti,” more famous with different lyrics added by Robert Burns as “Scots wa hae wi Wallace bled” (Scots who have with Wallace bled”) [Wallace was a Scottish leader captured by the English in 1305 and drawn-and-quartered for treason against King Edward I]. Historically considered to have been sung at the Battle of Bannockburn under Robert the Bruce in 1314 and again by the Scottish troops fighting with their allies the French at the Siege of Orleans with Joan of Arc in 1429, it was long considered the unofficial Scottish anthem, later supplanted by the popularity of “Scotland the Brave.” At the end, the Laddie makes one more appearance, now presumably out of the woods, to help bring the Fantasy to a triumphant conclusion.

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So how did a German composer write a fantasy on Scottish folk songs for a Spanish violinist?

Pablo de Sarasate was already established as one of the leading violinists of his day when he met Max Bruch in 1871. Bruch completed his 1st Violin Concerto, the famous G Minor Concerto, in 1866 and revised it after an unsuccessful premiere with the help of the great violinist, Joseph Joachim (Friend of Brahms and a composer in his own right). It would eventually go on to become his most famous piece and one of the most popular concertos in the repertoire. So taken by Sarasate’s playing, Bruch wrote a second concerto for him, which they premiered in London in 1877 (the year, incidentally, Brahms wrote his violin concerto for Joachim).

A little over a year later, Bruch told a friend “Yesterday, when I thought vividly about Sarasate, the marvelous artistry of his playing re-emerged in me. I was lifted anew and I was able to write, in one night, almost half of the Scottish Fantasy that has been so long in my head."

When Bruch asked Sarasate for a meeting to collaborate on the new piece, knowing Sarasate had a keen interest in Scottish music, he was disappointed when Sarasate failed to respond, so he turned to Joachim instead who helped him with technical details and suggestions (he had done the same for Brahms but Brahms ignored every one of them). Bruch completed the work, then conducted the premiere with the orchestra he conducted in Liverpool but was upset by Joachim’s “poor performance” of the piece, claiming “he annihilated it.”

As a result, Bruch renewed his contact with Sarasate, they became friends again and then performed it together for the first time in London in 1883.

The score of the work, when it was published in 1880 (between the time he completed it and the premiere the following February), was “dedicated to my friend Pablo de Sarasate” but they didn’t reconcile till after the premiere, not performing it together for the first time till London in 1883. (I wonder what Bruch, an ardent conservative who favored Brahms over the modernists Wagner and Liszt, felt when their concert became a memorial tribute to the late Richard Wagner who’d died five weeks earlier?)

The official German title, as it appears on the score, is “Fantasie: für die Violine mit Orchester und Harfe unter freier Benutzung schottischer Volksmelodien, Op. 46.” or Fantasy for the Violin with Orchestra and Harp, then in much smaller print underneath, freely using Scottish folk melodies. When he performed it with Sarasate in London, it was listed on the program as “Concerto for Violin (Scotch).” At another concert in Breslau (now Wrocław in present-day Poland), also with Sarasate, it was called the “Third Violin Concerto (with free use of Scottish themes).” What eventually became Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 3 (Op. 58) was completed in 1891.

When precisely the Scottish Fantasy became known as the “Scottish Fantasy,” I’m not sure. It did not catch on with other violinists, certainly not like his First Concerto did. The American violinist Maud Powell, who’d played Bruch’s 1st under Joachim’s baton in Berlin in 1883, included the Scottish Fantasy in her active repertoire. She also gave the American premieres of the Tchaikovsky and Sibelius concertos, and played the Dvořák concerto with the New York Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall under the composer’s supervision in 1894. 

But by the early 20th Century the work had disappeared from the concert stage until Jascha Heifetz, then in his mid-40s, recorded it with William Steinberg and the RCA Victor Symphony in 1947. You can listen to it here transferred from the original 78rpm records. The sound isn’t great and the “breaks” when you’d change from one side to the next can be annoying – it took six sides to contain the whole work – but it gives you an idea of how people heard it before there were stereo LPs, digital CDs and modern day sound-file technology.

While Heifetz played it over 100 times and recorded it at least two more times in his career, even playing it live on TV in 1971 (which I got to see, much to the chagrin of my fraternity brothers who were missing a Star Trek re-run…), it eventually became part of the mainstream repertoire. 

By the way, I remember being told by a friend of Scottish descent that “Scots” and “Scottish” are the preferred terms when referring to the People of Scotland: “Scotch,” he said, “is what we drink.”

I was reminded of this, seeing the reference to the “Scotch” Concerto, above. But then, in the folk song that’s the basis of Bruch’s finale, “Hae tuti taiti,” one of the lyrics used for this tune – several have been superimposed on it, including a poem by Robert Burns – contains the immortal refrain,

Fill up your bumpers high,
We’ll drink a’ your barrels dry,
Out upon him, fye! oh, fye!
That winna do't again!

Slàinte!

– Dick Strawser

Sibelius & his 2nd Symphony

Not long after his 78th birthday, Jean Sibelius wrote to his son-in-law, “My second symphony is a confession of the soul.” What could he – or any other composer – mean by that?

This weekend – Saturday Jan. 11th/7:30; Sunday Jan. 12th/3:00 – the Harrisburg Symphony opens their first concert of the New Year with Valerie Coleman's Umoja (Anthem of Unity) and concertmaster Peter Sirotin playing Max Bruch's Scottish Fantasy, a large-scale work for violin and orchestra in four movements that might as well be a concerto. The title suggests something of a "smaller" nature, a kind of virtuosic potpourri on folk songs similar to the "Gypsy Airs" written by Bruch's dedicatee, Pablo de Sarasate, so originally Bruch called it his "Violin Concerto No. 3 (Scotch)." You can watch a live TV broadcast (imagine, network TV broadcasting a concert of classical music!?!) with none other than Jascha Heifetz, broadcast in 1971 (not the best video and sound reproduction, here, but hey, it's Heifetz). Granted, it could benefit from having a conductor to help the orchestra through some of the gnarlier passages, but again, it's Heifetz's playing that's the draw here... 

I should probably do a separate post about it, anyway, so maybe I'll get around to that since, with this cold weather, I don't really feel like doing much else.(Okay, you can now read it here.)

Speaking of "cold weather," the symphony that concludes the program is one we associate with the ice and snow of the composer's native Finland. Since I'd written about Jean Sibelius' Symphony No. 2 for a Harrisburg Symphony performance in 2015, I thought I'd recycle most of it from the old Harrisburg Symphony Blog I used to write back-in-the-day.

The performance I've chosen was recorded at a concert in December of 2015 with Leif Segerstam conducting the Turku Philharmonic, an all-Finnish performance. It may be painful to see him looking "so old" as he approaches the podium at the beginning, but the transformation as the music takes over belies the idea of "old age." (He died this past October at the age of 80 following a short bout of pneumonia. Two things I did not know about him before revising this post: as a composer, he wrote 371 symphonies (how is that possible!?!); in one of his last interviews in March of 2024, he described himself as being autistic.

Sibelius' 2nd symphony, a long one often clocking in around 45 minutes (the longest of Sibelius' seven symphonies), is in the traditional four movements, though the scherzo blends directly into the finale without a break after a long build-up that, when it finally arrives, is a great example of the power of harmonic tension.

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One of those commonplace things to say after hearing Sibelius' 2nd Symphony is that it's a depiction of the bleak Finnish landscape, its sound cold and forbidding like the Finnish winter, forgetting there could be any other type of landscape or season in Finland.

Rapallo, Italy

So I begin by pointing out here is where the 2nd Symphony came into being: it was on a visit to Rapallo in Sunny Italy in 1901 that Sibelius jotted down his first ideas to begin sketching what became the second movement, perhaps the bleakest sounds in the entire work. Perhaps, one might argue, he was homesick? Perhaps, another might respond, this was what music sounded like in Sibelius' soul?

After all, another might argue, it was a trip to Italy that produced one of Brahms' most light-hearted moments, the finale of his 2nd Piano Concerto. Why, then, was Sibelius' response so... dreary?

Kajanus & Sibelius, 1894

Sibelius was 35 years old when he began this new symphony in early 1901 – the previous year had not been an easy one. He had married Aino Järnefelt in 1892 and by the turn of the new century they had three daughters, but the youngest, Kirsti, born in 1898, died of typhoid fever in February, 1900, which sent Aino into a period of depression and Sibelius deeper into his drinking problem. Before this, his love of alcohol had been of a more “celebratory” nature, part of the partying lifestyle he had developed as a law student in Helsinki in his 20s. In the mid-1890s, it was part of his “Symposium,” the group that met at a Helsinki hotel cafe where discussions about art would last late into the night and be accompanied by vast quantities of alcohol. But now, after the death of his child, his drinking became darker and more dangerous.

That spring, his friend and fellow drinking buddy, the conductor Robert Kajanus, was taking his orchestra on a European tour of works by Finnish composers that would present 19 concerts in 13 cities, culminating at the Paris Exhibition. On the programs were several of Sibelius' works including his new 1st Symphony, revised after its premiere the previous year, along with the equally new and wildly popular Finlandia, two of the Lemminkainen Legends (including the Swan of Tuonela) written in 1895, and excerpts from the King Christian II Suite, written two years earlier for a friend's play. This would be the first time Sibelius' music would've been heard outside of Finland.

Swedish and Danish critics were enthusiastic, those in Berlin especially where one viewed him as “a composer of great talent, someone who knew how to express his elegiac feelings and pathos, but who went to extremes in his bursts of passion.” Another called him “a formidable talent.” Paris was less enthusiastic but given the successes particularly in Berlin, it was easier to take.

In October, a friend gave him money for a trip to Italy, suggesting it would do them good, so Sibelius took his family first to Berlin where they stayed till January but by that time, however, all of the money had spent and they hadn't even left for Italy. So he borrowed more money and soon arrived in the coastal town of Rapallo on the Italian Riviera where he began work on the slow movement of a new symphony which eventually took precedence over a proposed work inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy.

In the margins, he scratched out comments about the meeting of “Death with Don Juan,” a scene from the original legend comparable to the “Statue Scene” in Mozart's setting, Don Giovanni.

But soon his second daughter, 6-year-old Ruth, became ill with peritonitis and had a fever of 104°. She recovered but the family was grounded so she could convalesce. Sibelius traveled quickly to Rome where he jotted down themes in a notebook that would later be used in Pohjola's Daughter and Night Ride and Sunrise. Returning to his family, they went to Florence once Ruth was well enough to travel, then they returned home in May, stopping off in Prague where Sibelius met Antonin Dvořák.

But he was no sooner home than he was off again to Germany to conduct his music at a June festival in Heidelburg – again, to favorable reviews. Other conductors began performing his works elsewhere – music from King Christian II was the first music by Sibelius to be heard in England that fall.

Sibelius' home in 1901

In the autumn, once back in Finland, he resumed his work on the 2nd Symphony which he completed early the next year in time for him to conduct its March premiere.

A triumph, his newest work – regarded by one influential critic as “an absolute masterpiece, one of the few symphonic creations of our time that point in the same direction as the symphonies of Beethoven" – was viewed as a “heroic” symphony “imbued with a patriotic spirit” by Finns pessimistic over the state of Russian oppression.

(Keep in mind, Finland had been an autonomous Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire since 1809 but only recently had the Russians begun to censor nationalistic views in what was called the “Russification of Finland” – independence would not come until after the 1917 Revolutions toppled the tsar and that, only after a brief but fierce civil war.)

Though Sibelius denied he wrote the symphony in support of nationalism as any kind of outwardly patriotic statement (don't forget, his Finlandia had been an overtly patriotic work written only three years earlier: what would patriotic Finns hope for?) or that he wrote it inspired by his own dark drama ultimately overcoming Fate (if not Beethoven's 3rd, why not Beethoven's 5th?), he did write that one comment years later in which, looking back on his career over a distance of four decades, he described the symphony as “a confession of the soul.”

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In the usual scheme of things, we think of Classical Music Composers as child prodigies like Mozart or Mendelssohn or who, like Schubert, died young. Remembering that Sibelius completed his 2nd Symphony when he was 36, remember that at 36 Schubert had already been dead five years and Mozart, one; Mendelssohn would die at 38. Let's face it, judging from the 19th Century, becoming a composer was not a guarantee of longevity.

Sibelius, 1923 at 57

But Sibelius, born on Dec. 8th, 1865, died on Sept. 20th, 1957, at the age of 91. The only thing was, he had essentially stopped composing around the time he was in his early-60s, living an almost 30 more years as fans waited and hoped for new pieces from a composer who'd risen to become one of the most popular living composers – and then, without anything new to show, fallen quietly into a kind of old-fashioned oblivion.

To many younger musicians today, Sibelius is a music notation software on their computer developed by the Finns (actually, twins Ben and Jonathan Finn who were British students) in the mid-1980s.

But there was a time when Sibelius ruled the concert halls of Europe, especially England, and America. In the fall of 1920 when Sibelius was 54, the Eastman School of Music offered him a professorship which he considered for a long time before turning them down. He had already been to America as part of Yale's commission of a tone-poem that eventually became known as The Oceanides, premiered at Yale's summer music festival in Norfolk in 1914. Sibelius made the ocean journey, finishing the work during the voyage, then stayed to visit Niagara Falls, receiving during his tour an honorary doctorate from Yale, and meeting various American composers (as well as a former President, Howard Taft).

He made plans to return the following year for an extensive American tour which, he wrote home, would solve his financial problems. Unfortunately, by the time he returned from this trip, World War I had already begun which cut him off not only from his American plans but from his Berlin publisher and from the rest of the world.

Then, after the 1930s, when it became clear he was no longer producing new works – the long awaited 8th Symphony appears only to have been a myth, its near-completion and possible premiere a constant tease – his star began to fade. In 1938, the writer Theodore Adorno attacked Sibelius, writing, “If Sibelius is good, this invalidates the standards of musical quality that have persisted from Bach to Schoenberg.” And in 1955, on the occasion of the composer's 90th birthday, French composer and conductor René Liebowitz called Sibelius “the worst composer in the world.”

Sibelius' response, typical of any embattled artist, was to tell his friends not to pay attention to the critics, adding that no one ever raised a statue to a critic.

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Today, Sibelius has his champions and his detractors. It is curious, especially concerning how modern music evolved in the early-20th Century. Sibelius' style is hardly traditional – the 4th Symphony is undoubtedly one of the most austere works by a “romanticist” ever written – but he is not ground-breaking in the sense of Claude Debussy or Igor Stravinsky or Arnold Schoenberg. Perhaps part of that is because of his Finnish roots, outside the usual Western European circuit.

He is not a folklorist despite his reliance on ancient tales from the Kalevala that appear in The Swan of Tuonela of the Lemminkainen Legends or his early symphonic work, Kullervo. His musical language is not inspired by folk music though, for a time, he studied the “ancient runes” of Old Finland and incorporated some of them in his early music (the “Karelia” Suite, for instance) but otherwise, however much it might have shaped his melodies, it had little influence on his style.

Near Sibelius' birthplace

He is best known for seven abstract symphonies and his programmatic tone-poems ranging from Finlandia to Pohjola's Daughter to Tapiola, again, bristling with Nordic references. If anything, much of his music is shaped by the Finnish landscape: Nature was always one of his major influences and one of the typical responses by Westerners is to compare his music to Finland's “bleak wintry landscapes.”

In further posts to celebrate the 150th Anniversary, I'll summarize his biography – check back here for the link – but for now, I'd like to conclude with some quotes from Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Tim Page's 1996 article for the Washington Post about coming to terms with Sibelius at the end of the 20th Century:

“There are two things to be said straightaway about Sibelius. First, he is terribly uneven (much of his chamber music, a lot of his songs and most of his piano music might have been churned out by a second-rate salon composer from the 19th century on an off afternoon). Second, at his very best, he is often weird.

“For example, the Symphony No. 6 (1923) is one of the century's most curious masterpieces – serene, beatific, almost Mozartean in its clarity and grace, suffused with warm winter light. It is rarely played, has little to do with anything else Sibelius ever composed (what to make of the second movement, that long series of musical question marks?), and its interpreters have a habit of trying to turn it into Tchaikovsky or the more traditionally "romantic" Sibelius Symphony No. 5 or something else that they might recognize – trying, in other words, to make it fit into a pattern. And it doesn't fit – which is not at all to say it doesn't work.”

His music, for all its epic grandeur at times – thinking of the 2nd and 5th Symphonies – is also full of dramatic silences, that silence which is a significant part of Nature.

Page goes on to say, “If silence can be defined as an absence of sound, it may be helpful for the novice, when coming to Sibelius, to consider his music a temporary respite from quietude. The image of Sibelius as a brooding poet of the spare, near-motionless, unpeopled North is fairly hackneyed by now, but it is no less true for all that.”

- Dick Strawser

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The portrait of Kajanus & Sibelius is a detail from Akseli Gallen-Kallala's painting depicting the "Symposium" in 1894 which also features the artist and the (face-down) composer-conductor, Oskar Merikanto.

Serge Prokofiev, the Pianist with Fingers of Steel

Prokofiev by Matisse (1921)

Aside from Peter and the Wolf, the "Classical Symphony," and the March from The Love of Three Oranges, the most frequently performed work by Serge Prokofiev would be his 3rd Piano Concerto, composed in 1921.

This weekend, since Stuart Malina and the Harrisburg Symphony are performing it at the Forum in downtown Harrisburg with "powerhouse pianist" Terrence Wilson, I thought I would re-blog my post from the once-upon-a-Harrisburg-Symphony-Blog for a 2015 concert. 

This is not Wilson's first performance with the Harrisburg Symphony. Some years ago (I haven't been able to find exactly when but I remember Ellen Hughes doing a "Desert Island Disc" interview with him at WITF before 2007) when he played (as I recall) the Liszt Piano Concerto No. 1. Here is a performance from Terrence Wilson's 2022 Faculty Recital at Bard College, playing Prokofiev's Piano Sonata No. 7, speaking of "fingers of steel"...

The program opens with Joan Tower's "Chamber Dance," premiered in 2006, "a unique work that showcases the orchestra through solos and duets." The New York Times music critic, Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, described it as "slinky, fast-flowing and infused with a strong sense of rhythm," adding, "it's an infectious piece of orchestral writing."

The concerts begin at 7:30 on Saturday and at 3pm on Sunday, with a pre-concert talk an hour before each performance.

Here is a 1977 performance of the 3rd Piano Concerto by Martha Argerich with Andre Previn conducting the London Symphony Orchestra which has some great close-ups of the pianist's hands, for those of you who can't get enough of that from your seat on the left-side of the hall. You'll see why this is not a concerto for the faint-of-heart.



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When Sergei Prokofiev was a toddler, he watched his mother play the piano and decided he wanted to do that, too. Around the time he was 5, he brought her a piece of paper and said “Here is a Chopin Mazurka I have written for you. Play it for me.” Unable to read his notation, she started to play an actual Chopin Mazurka, but the boy insisted she play the one he composed, not that one. So, she began teaching the boy how to notate music so other people could play it.

That's how his music lessons began.

His first composition was an “Indian Galop” in F Major except there was no B-flat in it as there would normally be. He was reluctant to “tackle the black keys” of the piano, he explained; perhaps his hands couldn't reach them, yet. Or maybe he was just being different, already preferring sounds that weren't what people expected.

Soon, he could play pages of Mozart and the easier Beethoven sonatas and loved improvising for the family and their guests. If his audience began to talk to each other instead of listening, young Sergei would stop abruptly and leave the room.

Prokofiev & "The Giant"

At 9, he composed an opera (for piano) called “The Giant” (see photo, left) and then two more, one called “On the Desert Island” and the other “The Feast in the Plague Year” which consisted mostly of an overture which he then, when the family traveled from their home in Eastern Ukraine to visit Moscow, played for Taneyev, one of the leading composers in Moscow who had studied with Tchaikovsky.

In 1902, a young student of Taneyev's replaced the first composition teacher Prokofiev had – one who was too tedious with his rules – but Reinhold Gliere, during his summer visits to the family's home, found ways to inspire the 11-year-old boy who soon began composing a symphony. Finding Gliere's four-square rules and bland modulations distasteful, he also began composing piano pieces with more dissonant harmonies and unusual meters.

Eventually, his mother decided to take him to St. Petersburg, the Imperial capital, where he was favorably viewed by Alexander Glazunov, one of the leading composers in Russia, then, and invited to audition for the conservatory. Following a young man “with a small beard who had with him only a single romance [song] in his baggage,” Prokofiev, now 13, carried in two music cases bulging with four operas, a symphony, two sonatas and a large number of piano pieces.” The head of the school, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, was impressed.

Fast forward to 1921 when Prokofiev is now 30, having written, among other things, his wildly popular “Classical Symphony” and garnered a reputation as a Bad Boy of Russian Music. He was acclaimed as a pianist but found himself hampered by the possibilities of making a living in the new post-revolution Soviet Union. Rachmaninoff had become a Scandinavian refugee in 1917 before settling in America.

Technically, you could say he began work on what would become his 3rd Piano Concerto in 1913, shortly after finishing the 2nd, sketching a Theme with Variations that eventually became the new concerto's middle movement. Material from a string quartet from 1917 also found its way into this slowly gestating piece.

Remember that Prokofiev in 1912 was a musical rebel, performing his first two piano concertos which were dismissed with comments like “To hell with this futuristic music! The cats on the roof make better music!” He performed his own highly chromatic and dissonant piano pieces and gave the first local performances of Arnold Schoenberg's new 3 Piano Pieces, Op. 11 from 1909.

But in 1917, he composed a symphony of Haydnesque clarity, even if that in itself – so unexpected – was the idea of “rebelling.” He himself called it the “Classical Symphony,” “as if Haydn were alive and composing today.” It was mostly written during those uncertain times between the February Revolution of 1917 which overthrew the Tsar and the October Revolution when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government. During this same summer, Prokofiev began his 1st Violin Concerto.

Another work he started was a “white note” quartet in which all the musical material could be played on the “white keys” of the piano (though why one would then write it for string quartet seems odd). But he put it aside, also, mostly out of boredom with his present situation during this post-Revolution period.

Believing that Russia had no use for music at the time, immersed in the life-or-death struggle of its Civil War, Prokofiev applied for permission to leave his homeland for America. The Arts and Education Commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky told him, "You are a revolutionary in music, we are revolutionaries in life. We ought to work together. But if you want to go to America I shall not stand in your way.”

And with that, Prokofiev boarded a train across Siberia, then boarded a ship across the Pacific to arrive in San Francisco in August, 1918.

Prokofiev, NYC 1918

A debut concert in New York City seemed promising and he was offered a commission for a new opera to be premiered in Chicago. This became The Love of Three Oranges but it was already in rehearsal when the premiere was postponed following the death of the company's director. Spending all this time working on the opera meant he was not performing and therefore not earning money, so he found himself in financial difficulties. His playing was constantly being compared negatively to Rachmaninoff's more lyrical style and so, uncomfortable with life in America, Prokofiev decided to leave for Paris in 1920 where there was a large population of Russian ex-patriots.

There, he met up once more with the ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev who commissioned a new ballet from him – called Chout or “The Buffoon.” During a holiday on the coast of Brittany, Prokofiev returned to his earlier sketches for that Theme & Variations and that “white note” quartet and came up with his Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Major, completed in July of 1921.

Now, C Major is basically a “white note” key – and even though the opening melody in the clarinet is all “white notes,” it's not clearly C Major. And once the piano takes off, whatever might seem like C Major (or any other key) has so many “non-white notes” harmonizing it, was it really C Major?

As he was working on the concerto, Prokofiev received a visit from the Russian poet, Konstantin Balmont, whose poetry he had set frequently in the past. After hearing the composer play through his new concerto, Balmont recorded his impressions in verse, which ended,

Prokofiev! Music and youth in bloom,
In you, the orchestra yearned for resonant summer
And the invincible Scythian strikes the tambourine of the sun.

Prokofiev returned to America to give the concerto its world premiere in Chicago with Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony on December 16th, 1921. Then, two weeks later, he conducted the belated premiere – finally – of The Love of Three Oranges.

Both the Piano Concerto and the opera were fairly well received but when the production was taken to New York City the following February, critical reaction to both concerto and opera proved huge disappointments to the composer. The opera was mostly met with comments like “Russian jazz with Bolshevik trimmings" and "The work is intended, one learns, to poke fun. As far as I am able to discern, it pokes fun chiefly at those who paid money for it.” At a cost of $130,000 for the production, one critic complained that that was about $43,000 per orange. It did not receive another production in America until the New York City Opera mounted it in 1949.

Koussevitsky conducted the Piano Concerto in Paris in 1922, at which time it was well received and soon went on to become a staple of the repertoire, as far as modern concertos were concerned. Prokofiev, the “man with steel fingers,” performed it often and it was the only one of his concertos he recorded – with Piero Coppola in London in 1932. While it might not be the most precise performance between soloist and conductor or even the most well-balanced recording available, but still, it is the composer playing the piano: you can hear the third movement, here.

One further anecdote about Prokofiev from this time-period as we sometimes wonder what it might've been like to be in a room with two of the most famous living composers of the day.

When he was in Paris in 1922, Prokofiev (see photo, left, with Diaghilev and Stravinsky) was again meeting with the impresario Serge Diaghilev about a revival of his ballet Chout when Diaghilev wanted to hear The Love of Three Oranges. So Prokofiev proceeded to play it for him. However, Igor Stravinsky, who was also present, refused to listen to any more after the first act.

When he accused Prokofiev of "wasting time composing operas," Prokofiev shot back that Stravinsky "was in no position to lay down a general artistic direction, since he [was] himself not immune to error." As Prokofiev wrote in his diary, Stravinsky "became incandescent with rage" and "we almost came to blows and were separated only with difficulty. ...[O]ur relations became strained and for several years Stravinsky's attitude toward me was critical."

Eventually, Prokofiev and Stravinsky patched up their friendship, though Prokofiev was often critical of Stravinsky's neoclassical "stylization of Bach." On the other hand, Stravinsky publicly described Prokofiev as the greatest Russian composer of his day – after himself, of course.

So I found it amusing, after doing some on-line searching, to discover Gabriel Prokofiev, the grandson of Sergei Prokofiev, was having his new violin concerto premiered at the London Proms during the summer of 2014, conducted by Marius Stravinsky, a “cousin five times removed” of Igor Stravinsky.

- Dick Strawser

987 Words About Proust's Novel and How It Grew

After Proust died on November 18th, 1922, his friends came to the apartment at 44 rue Hamelin to pay their respects. There, Jean Cocteau noticed these unfinished manuscripts scattered around the room beside Proust's bed, how "that pile of paper on his left was still alive, like watches ticking on the wrists of dead soldiers."

Proust's cork-lined bedroom at 44 rue Hamelin

Given the way Proust worked and given the recent state of his health, it wasn't going to be easy sorting through this "pile of paper" to see what remained of his supposedly finished novel.

Most readers probably think a writer sits down, starts at the beginning, and, sooner or later, inspiration willing, reaches the end. Then it's only a matter of sending it off to the waiting publisher. Weren't we lucky Proust could write "The End" to his life's work, In Search of Lost Time, months before he died?

The author's original manuscript, presumably, had been cleanly typed, thoroughly proof-read, and, complete and ready to print, sent to the publisher. Usually, a publisher's "proofs" were meant to check spellings and make necessary corrections. Instead, Proust treated them like one more step toward a final draft, writing copious marginal notes and pasting in additional paragraphs.

Proofs & Paperolles: The Prisoner, c.1921

Eventually this turned into not just new pages, but new plot threads which led to entirely new volumes to handle them; the first of these involved meeting the love of his Narrator's life, Albertine.

Proust had only met Alfred Agostinelli shortly before completing Swann's Way and their tumultuous relationship lasted barely half a year before his new secretary left and was subsequently killed in an accident in 1914. He became, with Proust's typical alchemy, the model for Albertine and the object of the Narrator's jealous obsessions for future volumes. Originally, it was Time Lost (later Swann's Way), the Guermantes Way, and Time Regained. But the "Albertine Story" became the newly inserted second volume and grew into the new fourth volume, Sodom & Gomorrah.

On Oct 13th, 1917, Proust received 5,000 pages of proofs. Correcting them would've been laborious even if his eyes had been normal, but without glasses and "without much eyesight," it became a frightful job. Still, he refused to get spectacles. Four days later, his publisher announced Proust's novel, formerly three books, will now become five.

But as Proust's ever-expanding imagination proceeded to "edit" his newest volume, within fourteen months Sodom & Gomorrah (published as Cities of the Plain by squeamish English translators), filling in details between The Guermantes Way and the now revised war-time setting for the final volume, Time Regained, was first split into two, then eventually three books.

Meanwhile, once the War finally ended, Proust saw these post-Swann volumes into print before spending months rewriting parts of Time Regained, initially written simultaneously with Swann's Way (originally entitled Time Lost) back in 1913.

However, his health, never good and often precarious, became increasingly worrisome. In early 1922, he wrote to friends about thoughts of suicide, wishing he'd had some cyanide, months before he published Sodom & Gomorrah. The expanded "spin-off" of these latest proofs became another volume, The Prisoner, announced days before his famous dinner with James Joyce.

In late-June, 1922, Proust managed to write to his editor, "the reworkings of this typescript where I am making additions everywhere and changing everything, has hardly begun," One can only imagine his editor's expression. Remember, earlier that spring he'd told his faithful housekeeper, Céleste Albaret, "Last night, I wrote 'The End.' Now I can die."

In October, catching a cold which turned into bronchitis, he completed The Prisoner but started revising the next new volume, The Fugitive, apparently not fully satisfied he'd written "The End" on his life's work.

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Consider the chronology of these facts: Proust had written "The End" in the Spring of 1922; in late-June, he informed his editor "the reworking of this typescript... has hardly begun"; and now he indicated he had made an enormous cut of, according to Hayman, some 250 pages which amounted to almost two-thirds of The Fugitive! It should be noted the frequently quoted Wikipedia entry called The Fugitive "the most editorially vexed volume", and stated without verification the cut consisted of 150 pages: both were subsequently ignored by posthumous editions.

Proust had a new manuscript typed up, retitled Albertine disparue, having already promised his publisher he would have "more books to offer you," apparently whole new volumes [plural!] between The Fugitive and Time Regained. He also mentioned he considered the Death of Albertine and the whole process of forgetting her some of his finest writing.

While Proust didn't break his volumes down into internal chapters per se, Hayman indicated this cut began on p.648 of the proofs after "the first chapter" and ended at p.898 with "the Venice Episode." This includes memories of "a sweetly innocent Albertine" and conversations with her friend Andrée about his suspicions of Albertine's lesbian affairs; how the Duchesse de Guermantes' attitude towards Swann had changed since his death; how Gilberte, Swann's daughter, helped the Narrator "get over" Albertine; and the discovery of his old friend Robert de Saint-Loup's homosexuality.

Now, if it's true Proust regarded this part of Albertine's Story as some of his best writing, would he logically have merely discarded it to present his publisher with a shorter, more salable book? How much of it would have become fuel for one of these new volumes, not merely fragments inserted into Time Regained? Yes, in August he'd joked how “short books sell better,” but that would've been the first time in eight years he apparently cared about sparing his publisher from longer and continuously longer books!

Each time I read through Time Regained and think of this massive cut, I wonder what part of the Narrator's story was left to tell? There are large gaps of time during the War when the Narrator is absent from Paris, times he spent in a sanatorium: perhaps this volume would've been called The Invalid?

- Dick Strawser