Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 - 1975)
Symphony No.4 in C Minor, Op. 43
Dmitri Shostakovich was born in St. Petersburg in 1906, the son of an
engineer. He had his first piano lessons from his mother when he was nine and
showed such musical precocity that he was able at the age of thirteen to enter
the Petrograd Conservatory, where he had piano lessons from Leonid Nikolayev and
studied composition with the son-in-law of Rimsky-Korsakov, Maximilian
Steinberg. He continued his studies through the difficult years of the civil
war, positively encouraged by Glazunov, the director of the Conservatory, and
helping to support his family, particularly after the death of his father in
1922, by working as a cinema pianist, in spite of his own indifferent health,
weakened by the privations of the time. He completed his course as a pianist in
1923 and graduated in composition in 1925. His graduation work, the First
Symphony, was performed in Leningrad in May 1926 and won considerable
success, followed by performances in the years immediately following in Berlin
and in Philadelphia. As a pianist he was proficient enough to win an honourable
mention at the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw.
Shostakovich in his early career was closely involved with the theatre, and
in particular with the Leningrad Working Youth Theatre, in musical collaboration
in Meyerhold's Moscow production of Mayakovsky's The Flea and in film
music, notably New Babylon. His opera The Nose, based on Gogol,
was completed in 1928 and given its first concert performance in Leningrad in
June 1929, when it provoked considerable hostility from the vociferous and
increasingly powerful proponents of the cult of the Proletarian in music and the
arts. The controversy aroused was a foretaste of difficulties to come. His
ballet The Golden Age was staged without success in Leningrad in October 1930.
Orchestral compositions of these years included a second and third symphony,
each a tactful answer to politically motivated criticism.
In 1934 Shostakovich won acclaim for his opera Lady Macbeth of the
Mtsensk District, based on a novella by the 19th century Russian writer Nikolay
Leskov, and performed in Leningrad and shortly afterwards, under the title
Katerina Ismailova, in Moscow. Leskov's story deals with a bourgeois crime, the
murder of her merchant husband by the heroine of the title, and the opera seemed
at first thoroughly acceptable in political as well as musical terms. Its
condemnation in Pravda in January 1936, apparently at the direct instigation of
Stalin, was a significant and dangerous reverse, leading to the withdrawal from
rehearsal that year of his Fourth Symphony and the composition the
following year of a Fifth Symphony, described, in terms to which
Shostakovich had no overt objection, as a Soviet artist's creative reply to
justified criticism. Performed in Leningrad in November 1937, the symphony was
warmly welcomed, allowing his reinstatement as one of the leading Russian
composers of the time.
In 1941 Shostakovich received the Stalin prize for his Piano Quintet.
In the same year Russia became involved in war, with Hitler's invasion of the
country and the siege of Leningrad, commemorated by Shostakovich in his Seventh
Symphony, a work he had begun under siege conditions and completed after his
evacuation to Kuibyshev.
Stricter cultural control enforced in the years following the end of the war
led, in 1948, to a further explicit attack on Shostakovich, coupled now with
Prokofiev, Miaskovsky and Khachaturian, and branded as formalists, exhibiting
anti-democratic tendencies. The official condemnation brought, of course, social
and practical difficulties. The response of Shostakovich was to hold back
certain of his compositions from public performance. His first Violin
Concerto, written for David Oistrakh, was not performed until after the
death of Stalin in 1953, when he returned to the symphony with his Tenth, which
met a mixed reception when it was first performed in Leningrad in December 1953.
His next two symphonies avoided perilous excursions into liberalisation, the
first of them celebrating The Year 1905 and the fortieth anniversary of
the October Revolution of 1917 in 1957, and the second The Year 1917,
completed in 1961.
In 1962 there came the first performance of the Thirteenth Symphony, with its
settings of controversial poems by Yevtushenko, and a revival of the revised
version of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, under the title Katerina
Ismailova. The opera now proved once more acceptable.
The last dozen years of the life of Shostakovich, during which he suffered a
continuing deterioration of health, brought intense activity as a composer, with
a remarkable series of works, many of them striving for still further simplicity
and lucidity of style. The remarkable Fourteenth Symphony of 1969,
settings of poems by Apollinaire, Lorca, Rilke and Küchelbecker, dedicated to
his friend Benjamin Britten, was followed in 1971 by the last of the fifteen
symphonies, a work of some ambiguity. The last of his fifteen string quartets
was completed and performed in 1974 and his final composition, the Viola Sonata,
in July 1975. He died on 9th August.
The career of Shostakovich must be seen against the political and cultural
background of his time and country. Born in the year after Bloody Sunday, when
peaceful demonstrators in St. Petersburg had been fired on by troops,
Shostakovich had his musical education under the new Soviet regime. His own
political sympathies have been questioned and there has been controversy
particularly over the publication Testimony, The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich,
as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov, once accused of fabrication in his
portrayal of the composer as a covert enemy of Bolshevism. The testimony of
others and a recent scholarly survey of the life and work of Shostakovich
suggest that the general tenor of Volkov's Testimony is true enough.
Shostakovich belonged to a family of liberal tradition, whose sympathies would
have lain with the demonstrators of 1905. Under Stalinism, however, whatever
initial enthusiasm he may have felt for the new order would have evaporated with
the attacks on artistic integrity and the menacing attempts to direct all
creative expression to the aims of socialist realism. While writers and painters
may express meaning more obviously, composers have a more ambiguous art, so that
the meaning of music, if it has any meaning beyond itself, may generally be
hidden. Shostakovich learned how to wear the necessary public mask that enabled
him to survive the strictures of 1936 and 1948 without real sacrifice of
artistic integrity.
Shostakovich began his Fourth Symphony during a state-sponsored tour
of Turkey in September 1935. The opera A Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk
District had been successfully staged in Leningrad the previous year, its
critical reception such as to make the outright condemnation of the work in
Pravda in January 1936 all the more of a shock. The attack on The work brought
not only injury to self-esteem but an obvious physical danger, al a lime when
suspected political or aesthetic deviation meant deportation and death. After a
space of some weeks and an approach to an influential patron for his
intervention, Shostakovich was persuaded to return to work, completing the
symphony in April and proceeding thereafter to orchestrate the work, a task he
completed in May. The symphony was then accepted for performance by the
Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, but withdrawn after a series of unsuccessful
rehearsals clearly influenced by the new condemned standing of its Composer. The
manuscript was then put aside and lost during the Course of the war. In 1945
Shostakovich made a two-piano version from his own sketches, but the original
work was eventually reconstructed from the surviving orchestral parts and was
first performed in December 1960 by The Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra under
Kyril Kondrashin. After this minor revisions were made and the work was
published posthumously in 1984.
The Fourth Symphony of Shostakovich, written, it will be seen, largely
before Stalin had made his views of the Composer known through Pravda, is very
much of its time, grandiose in conception, massive in its scoring and
representing a mood Shoslakovich later referred to as grandiosomania. The work
is scored for a pair of piccolos, four flutes, four oboes and cor anglais, four
clarinets as well as an E flat and a bass clarinet, three bassoons and a double
bassoon. In the brass section are four trumpets, eight French horns, three
trombones and two tubas, while a large percussion section employs six timpani,
triangle, castanets, snare-drum, cymbals, bass drum and tam-tam, bells,
xylophone and celesta. There are also two harps in addition to the usual body of
strings. These instruments are deployed in bewildering variety in the extended
first movement in music that defied earlier analysts, although it is in a
somewhat fragmented classical form, strained beyond breaking-point, with
passages striking the hearer, only to lead to yet another musical idea, none
calculated to please Stalin, had he heard the work.
The bewildering profusion of the first movement dies away to lead to a second
introduced by the strings alone, the violas offering an opening theme,
accompanied by plucked notes from cellos and double basses, a theme that is then
transformed by the E flat clarinet, after which others have their own comments
to make. The principal theme is to re-appear, its return heralded by the timpani
after the fuller resources of the orchestra have been deployed on, a secondary
theme, the insistent rhythm of which returns, followed by the mysterious return
of the main theme. The third movement opens with a slow introduction, a bassoon
solo at first accompanied only by double basses and timpani. The eerie Mahlerian
slow march proceeds forward to the Allegro, marked by the characteristic
descending interval of its main theme. The banality of this melody is contrasted
with the transitory gracefulness of a later passage and a series of apparently
ironic images, a reflection of his predicament at the time of composition. In
Volkov's Testimony the composer claims that this symphony is about the
terrors of life in Russia in the years before the war, and his feelings apparent
in the closing pages of the Fourth Symphony, feelings of despair that he had
surmounted under the influence of the ideas of his friend, the writer Mikhail
Zoschenko. The extended coda, seen in this light, is not pessimistic, a calm
conclusion to a movement that may in general be heard as an artist's reply to
unjustified criticism and unexpected betrayal.
Czecho-Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra (Bratislava)
The Czecho-Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra (Bratislava), the oldest symphonic
ensemble in Slovakia, was founded in 1929. The orchestra's first conductor was
František Dyk and over the past sixty years it has worked under the direction
of several prominent Czech and Slovak conductors. The orchestra has made many
recordings for the Naxos label ranging from the ballet music of Tchaikovsky to
more modern works by composers such as Copland, Britten and Prokofiev.
Ladislav Slovak
Ladislav Slovak was born in 1919 in the Slovak capital, Bratislava, where, in
spite of straitened circumstances, he completed his earlier musical training at
the City Music School and subsequently at the Bratislava Conservatory. As a
conductor he was greatly influenced by Vaclav Talich in Bratislava and from 1954
by Yevgeni Mravinsky, to whom he served as assistant in Leningrad. For some two
years Slovak attended Mravinsky's rehearsals with the Leningrad Philharmonic
Orchestra of the symphonies of Shostakovich, including first performances of
Symphonies Nos. 11 and 12. In these rehearsals Shostakovich was present, hearing
his music in performance for the first time and rarely interfering, except for
occasional adjustments of tempi. He had great confidence in Mravinsky, with whom
there was collaboration at the profoundest musical level. Slovak was privileged
often to take part in discussions on problems of performance between Mravinsky
and Shostakovich, and also learned much from other conductors, including the
second conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic, Kurt Sanderling. On his return
to Czecho-Slovakia Slovak was appointed Conductor-in-Chief of the Czecho-Slovak
Radio Symphony Orchestra in Bratislava, with guest engagements with the Czech
Philharmonic Orchestra, which he conducted on an extended world tour to the Far
East, Australasia and Russia in 1959. In 1961 he was appointed
Conductor-in-Chief of the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra and has continued with
similar appointments as far afield as Australia and with a busy career as a
guest conductor. His early working collaboration with Mravinsky and Shostakovich
has led to performances of particular authority, in particular of the latter's
fifteen symphonies.