|
|
|
Carnegie Hall Sound Insights - The Songs of Shostakovich
|
 |
| “I consider that every artist who isolates himself from the world is doomed. I find it incredible that an artist should wish to shut himself away from the people…I always try to make myself as widely understood as possible; and if I don’t succeed, I consider it my own fault.” —D.D. Shostakovich |
|
|
|
|
WHAT is it about Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony that makes it one of the most hotly disputed pieces of the twentieth century? Although it is very popular and frequently performed, it is not a piece that broke new ground, as so many in that century did. There were no riots at its premiere; it was neither shocking nor outrageous. Instead, it marked Shostakovich’s turn away from the experimental music he had been writing to a straightforward, more accessible style.
Indeed, it is this more direct style that has sparked the controversy. What did Shostakovich mean by it? What was he trying to say? We are always interested in great composers’ motives for the music they wrote. But for Shostakovich those motives had grave, life-or-death consequences. That is because the Fifth Symphony, premiered in 1937, was written at the height of Stalin’s terror.
Just a year before, Stalin, outraged by Shostakovich’s avant-garde opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, had publicly set the challenge: Change the way you write music, Shostakovich, or your voice will be silenced.
Shostakovich responded with his Fifth Symphony. It was nothing less than a peace offering. With it, Shostakovich hoped to save his life. It seemed to work. Stalin was pleased; he liked that the symphony was direct—even tuneful. What’s more, it ended in a march, Stalin’s favorite type of music.
The Fifth Symphony was Shostakovich’s first artistic attempt to try to survive in Stalin’s oppressive system. Terrorized audiences found consolation, comfort and hope in this piece. Was Shostakovich outwardly satisfying Stalin while inwardly speaking to them? Explore the history during the creation of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony in this interactive timeline.
Discovery Concert: Michael Tilson Thomas and The New World Symphony
The Shostakovich Fifth: On the Trail of the Truth
WED, FEB 28, 2007 at 8 PM
Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
|
A Shostakovich Timeline
Click on a date below to learn more. Many of the images for this timeline were provided by The Wolfsonian-FIU and by Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library.
 |
1905
The Sunday becomes bloody
On Sunday, January 9, over 100,000 Russians gathered in front of the Tsar’s Winter Palace in order to deliver a petition. The police opened fire and killed a thousand people, including women and children. Although the Tsar, who was not at the Palace, did not order the shooting, he was subsequently blamed for it, earning the name “Bloody Nicholas.” Russia erupted in violence that would continue to escalate into the next year, when Shostakovich was born.
|
1917
Bolsheviks turn the tide
The Russian Revolution was simultaneously tragic and liberating. As the monarchy crumbled, Russians were filled with optimism, with possibilities. Artists felt it too. They looked eagerly to the future, searching for bold, innovative ways to express the excitement of a better life they felt would be right around the corner. Only eleven years old, Shostakovich was already composing with the revolutionary spirit, writing a “Hymn to Liberty” and a funeral march in honor of those who had died.
|
1918
Art belongs to the people
A shrewd politician, Lenin realized the potential power of the arts. No longer the province of the privileged, art would now be made for the people and by the people. As such, it was the perfect vehicle for a political message. As long as this message was in keeping with the artist’s own visions, things were fine. But when the two were in conflict, what then?
|
1919
Out with the old
Revolutionary experimentalism swept through the conservatories, once bastions of the traditional. Shostakovich, who enrolled at the Petrograd Conservatory at the age of 13, was excited by all the new possibilities, shocking his conservative teachers with his flare for noise, dissonance, and parody.
|
1921
In with the “isms”
Despite the ravages of a long civil war, Lenin’s New Economic Plan, which funneled some money back into the private sector, gave an unexpected boost to the arts. So began an artistic “Roaring Twenties,” when nothing was too crazy, too outrageous. It was the era of “isms”—Futurism, Formalism, Neorealism, Primitivism, Surrealism, Constructivism – when all types of experimental groups vied for the honor of becoming the true “voice of the people.” Although Lenin’s artistic tastes were conservative, he did little to intervene.
|
1925
Stalin takes on the arts
With Stalin, it would be different. He also declared that the arts should “speak to the millions” but he then went one step further, saying that it was the government’s role to make sure that they did. How this should be done was still up for discussion. Shostakovich thrived in this permissive climate, confounding his teachers with his First Symphony. The great composer Alexander Glazunov could only shake his head. “I don’t understand anything. Of course the work shows great talent, but I don’t understand it.”
|
1928
Long live the Revolution!
The Party started to sink in its teeth, establishing the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians to encourage composers to write music celebrating the revolution. As government demands became more specific, there was less room for innovation. Shostakovich responded with his second and third symphonies, “To October” and “The First of May,” which, despite “modernist” features, culminated in grand choruses on revolutionary texts.
|
1930
Futurism dealt a fatal blow
But by 1930 the “anything goes” mood of the 20s was clearly over. Stalin’s noose was tightening and everyone felt it. Hounded as the leader of the Futurist movement, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was either murdered or took his own life, in despair caused by the mounting crusade against the avant-garde. Shostakovich, who thus far had pleased Party members with his symphonies and film music, now came under fire for The Golden Age, his satirical ballet that made fun of the capitalist West, and The Nose, his outrageous opera that satirized government officials. Undeterred, Shostakovich began work on an even more controversial work, his soon-to-be infamous opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.
|
1932
Socialist realism triumphs
In a stunning about-face, Stalin replaced Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians with the Union of Soviet Composers, thus consolidating control in an all-out battle against the avant-garde. This move came as a shock to Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians and the other proletarian organizations as favored sons turned into traitors and enemies over night. Clearly, artists were walking a tightrope. Again it was his film music that kept Shostakovich out of trouble; his song “The Morning Greets Us with Coolness,” from the movie Counterplan, became an instant hit, a favorite throughout the country.
|
1934
Paranoia sets in
After a vote of the Party Congress, it became clear that Sergey Kirov, head of the Party in Leningrad, was becoming more popular than Stalin. Kirov was assassinated, presumably on Stalin’s orders. Now convinced that even his closest allies could be a threat, Stalin began a thorough purge of the Party, the army, and even the arts. Against this backdrop, Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth was premiered in Leningrad and then in Moscow. Despite music that graphically portrayed an explicit plot – crafted by Shostakovich to be openly sympathetic to an adulterous heroine who kills her husband – Party officials not only liked the opera, they took credit for it, claiming that Party edicts had made such a wonderfully creative thing possible.
|
1936
Terror reigns supreme
By 1936, Stalin had a tight grip on everything, including the arts. Every piece of art, literature, film, and music, had to conform to the vague notion of Soviet realism, which meant that Stalin had to like it. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Should Stalin disapprove, the artist risked violent interrogation leading to deportation or execution.
|
Stalin pulls the strings
But for Shostakovich, Stalin had something else in mind. What if he took this internationally acclaimed young composer and rehabilitated him? In Shostakovich he had the perfect subject, a man who, while sometimes known to sink into “bourgeois formalism,” could also write stirring anthems celebrating Soviet greatness. With harsh threats and ruthless intentions, Stalin could harness Shostakovich’s talent and make it work for him.
|
Pravda reviews Lady Macbeth
On January 26, 1936, Stalin got his chance. Attending a performance of Lady Macbeth, he left in disgust after the third act. Two days later, a damaging review, most likely written by Stalin himself, appeared in Pravda, calling the opera “Muddle Instead of Music.” The vulgar plot, the article continued, was set to graphic music that was neither “melodic” nor “memorable” and represented the worst of “Leftist” tendencies. Here was Stalin, in words formerly reserved for his worst political foes, waging all-out war on an artist.
|
A hero becomes a villain
Suddenly, Shostakovich was the enemy. Many colleagues and friends, frightened for their own lives, jumped on the Stalin bandwagon. Newspapers and professional organizations throughout the country all reiterated the condemnations in similar articles—“Down with Formalist Confusion in Art,” “Long Live Music for the Millions”—questioning Shostakovich’s methods, his sincerity, even his devotion to his country.
|
1937
An artist responds
On the “advice” of Party authorities, he canceled rehearsals for his Fourth Symphony, a “modern” work not unlike Lady Macbeth, and began work on his Fifth. For this he went back to the symphonic models of Beethoven and Mahler, writing a more traditional piece that, while able to convey a wide range of emotion, seemed straightforward and accessible.
|
The Symphony’s a hit
In early November, the Fifth Symphony was “premiered” for Party operatives who gave it the go-ahead. The public performance that followed, on November 21, 1937, in Leningrad, was a huge success. At the conclusion of the piece the audience burst into an overwhelming ovation, more than half an hour long. News of Shostakovich’s triumph spread fast. The very next day a New York Times wire summed it up, “Composer Regains His Place in Soviet.”
|
But questions remain
Shostakovich dodged the bullet by writing a symphony that made everyone, Stalin and the public, happy. Its dramatic power spoke equally to the Party and the people suffering under it. What, then, did Shostakovich mean? Was he glorifying the Soviet system, as Stalin wanted? Or, was he speaking directly to the Soviet people, in hidden messages sprinkled throughout the score?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|