Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Opus 54: Symphony No. 6, in B minor
composed: 1939 (age 33)
first performance: Leningrad, November 5, 1939 (Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra/Evgeny Mravinsky)
Shostakovich on the right of course, and on the left is Evgeny Mravinsky, the conductor of the premiere (and of the best recording, see below). The photo is apparently from 1937, so a couple years prior to the sixth symphony, but close enough. This image has clearly been been given the old Soviet once-over.
590 on the big list.
Shostakovich wrote music in which the point isn’t particularly musical, it’s dramatic or quasi-literary. It’s the sequence of events that is significant; the events themselves seem to bore him a bit. A good deal of what he writes just functions efficiently. It’s as though his technical facility was too great for him to get very excited about mere notes; the meat is in the storytelling. He seems always to be saying, “it’s obvious enough what this moment is – it’s just what it sounds like; happy music or ugly music or whatever – the real question is, what comes next, and why?” Perhaps this is why his music is oddly popular: because “okay, what comes next?” is a very easy way to listen, readily available to everyone.
Yes, oddly popular: I feel like I’ve encountered a lot of people who have made room in their personal playlists for only a very few classical composers, and have chosen Shostakovich as one of them. I can enjoy Shostakovich but he wouldn’t go on my short list, for that very same reason; it’s music, but it’s not very music-y.
Generally, when program notes are written in phrases like “the tutti allegro gives way to a desolate flute solo,” they give no real understanding of the music’s meaning until you hear the actual notes. But with Shostakovich the emphasis is shifted and such descriptions often can give a good idea of the piece. In the first movement of this symphony, for example, the particular notes the flute plays are of no very great interest – the important thing truly is that it is “a desolate flute solo.” At least that’s how I hear it. I might compare it to Magritte; the execution is just a necessary adjunct to the concept.
That all said, I do like this piece. I’ve heard the much-more-famous Fifth Symphony a couple times – but only a couple – and have to admit it doesn’t mean a lot to me, whereas this one seemed interesting from the first hearing, and over repeated listenings became quite satisfying and involving.
The first movement is the work’s center of gravity: a weighty, slow, serious landscape, and very long. “A spacious Largo, one of the composer’s greatest utterances,” Dubal calls it. I’m not familiar with quite enough of the composer’s utterances to speak confidently on this point, but I suspect he probably overstates the case. Like I said last time, we can’t let the seriousness-addicts run the show. To me, the punchy, zany, vulgar third movement makes a stronger impression than the first, every time – and apparently I am in agreement with the composer on this one, who said he was proudest of the third movement. Not to say that the first movement isn’t a worthy and effective piece of work. It is. Once I was finally able to make formal sense of its 15 minutes of slowness, the piece opened itself up to me and became a consistently satisfying journey. One that I still enjoy taking.
But finding that form was difficult, and required many listens and eventually a copy of the score. It’s a sonata form, as you might expect, but the thematic material, which usually demarcates the form, here actually obscures it, by appearing out of turn and mutating unexpectedly. So that it may benefit future first-time listeners (all others, please skip!), here’s how I hear it: the declamatory first ~2 minutes are introduction. Strings with pizzicato bass mark the start of the first subject proper, which lasts for ~3.5 minutes. The motif of the second subject appears during the big climax of the first subject, but the second subject proper starts after that, quietly, again introduced with pizzicato bass. It lasts for ~4 minutes and meanders thoroughly, with little overt use of its own theme. The exposition ends with the strings quietly filling out a wide minor chord. The development starts immediately with an ominous tam-tam strike, and proceeds for ~2 minutes. Desolate flute solos, etc. The mysterious nugget at the core of the whole movement comes at the end of the development, with a prolonged shimmery trill and a sad, strange series of chords floating by. This is a fantastic, poetic moment, and if it needs 15 minutes of cushioning to make it sing properly, so be it. Once that’s played out, you’re dumped directly into the recapitulation of the first subject, which is now much more direct and clear. It lays relatively low and wraps up the movement on its own; the second subject just puts in a ghostly cameo appearance as a tag.
To the curiosity-seekers who just read that paragraph despite the warning (I don’t know who you are, but I can guess!), I want to say: though it may just sound like analysis for analysis-lovers, I truly cannot imagine anyone really knowing and liking this piece without breaking it down mentally that way, or another similar way. You don’t have to use those terms – or any terms at all – but you do need to have a roadmap. 15 minutes of undifferentiated sound would have no appeal at all; some scheme of differentiation is crucial, and the better the scheme, the more rewarding the experience. The above is simply the most rewarding scheme I was able to find. If you really can’t even begin to conceive of listening that way, you are missing out. But most people who claim they have absolutely no affinity for the idea of musical form just don’t have any experience thinking about it consciously; in practice, they still listen the same way as everyone else. I used to use the metaphor that explaining which parts are which in sonata form is like explaining which parts of the TV broadcast are show and which are commercials. “They alternate in an A B A B pattern.” Crucial information for comprehension, but not nearly as abstract as it sounds in the telling. But that’s not a great metaphor. If I think of a better one I’ll tell you.
Before I proceed, another general comment on Shostakovich: The “quasi-literary” technique described above ends up creating the strong impression that in some way, something is being said. In a painting, if the sitter is holding a pear and behind him out a window you can see a ruined windmill with a stag looking at it, and tiny in the distance there’s a tree being struck by lightning, and in the shadow behind one of the curtains you can see a servant but the servant is blindfolded and wearing an army uniform, you can’t help but think, “what does this mean?” Sometimes there are answers on the placard. But sometimes there aren’t answers anywhere. Sometimes the suggestion of hidden meaning is simply its own aesthetic reward. I believe that is – or at least must necessarily be, for us – the case with Shostakovich.
There’s not really anything inherently mysterious or symbolic about a pear or a tree being struck by lightning; they suggest “meaning” to us because we feel that it is the artist, and not the work itself, that demanded their presence. Or some hidden scheme that escapes us. The chair is there because a seated portrait demands a chair. A pear less so; some other force, then, must have demanded it.
This crazy painting is a totally improvised example and doesn’t exist, by the way.
Anyway, Shostakovich’s music works on the same principle. It is surely Shostakovich himself, and not Euterpe,* who demands this desolate flute solo, who is luring the orchestra off the road and into the wilderness, who is playing these quizzical unexpected chords. Something in his mind demanded this. And so it must mean something, we think. An air of muffled mystery hangs over almost everything I’ve heard by the man.
But: I think all this excited talk about his music containing secret political messages is silly. “He tricked the Soviets into thinking this was a happy piece, but listen closely! It’s not actually that happy!” Shostakovich always had a stiff touch – even his genuine “light music” tends to sounds somewhat clench-jawed. So it’s no surprise that his “pro-” music sounds a little “anti-.” And it’s beyond debate that he was feeling, to put it mildly, frustrated and oppressed. So yes, it’s obviously the case that his happy Soviet music is not actually that happy, for one reason or the other. But that’s not half as interesting as people make it out to be. The reason people get excited about it, I think, is because of the sense of enigma that arises in his music. People want to believe that this political/biographical info is the secret that the music promises. But that’s silly. Just listen to the climax of the first movement, described above. This is music that expresses the feeling of an enigma, rather than merely expressing some as-yet-unidentified feeling (ooh, maybe political dissidence???) enigmatically. No?
Then again I may be wrong. Perhaps he did in fact have private meanings for every damn musical event in everything he wrote; maybe that enigmatic climax was composed as a representation of some particular memory, or even, ugh, of something as generic and huge as the sinking of his weary soul under the Stalinist regime. But even if that’s the case, we still have to give it up. You can hear it as whatever you like, but you can never get it “right.” Music is not a crackable code.
And no, I personally don’t think it’s even worth believing it’s an actual code – he’s too obviously enamored of the aesthetics of code-iness. In his Symphony No. 15 he throws in actual quotations from Rossini and Wagner and I think from his own works. Didn’t tell anyone what they meant to him. That’s the act of a man who thinks that things that seem like codes are valuable and satisfying in themselves. Meanwhile, Edward Elgar’s Enigma, which he explicitly identified as having a hidden element, sounds 100% non-enigmatic. The sound of an enigma must be cultivated, and Shostakovich cultivated it like mad. Let’s please not waste too much time trying to shove a key into a painted keyhole in a trompe-l’oeil door; it’s embarrassing.
Okay, gonna wrap this up now. Second movement is a scherzo and third movement is a galop. They have in common that Dmitri sets unremarkable material going at a fast clip and then pokes and prods it, under high pressure, to make various surprises suddenly bubble out. In the second movement there is an exciting central episode (trio?) that sounds like an airplane dogfight from a movie. Which is fine by me. The third movement is a sort of run-on sentence ballet, a Rossini overture that has too much nervous energy to let any of its material repeat or develop – it just spews out phrase after phrase of dizzy cliche, careening around corners until it emerges as a vulgar, raucous fight song or something, and finally bashes itself on the head until it stops. I picture Daffy Duck playing football. It’s really a lot of fun; I have listened to this movement twice in a row on a several occasions.
Commentators tend to fixate on the I. VERY SLOW AND LONG, II. FAST AND SHORT, III. FAST AND SHORT form of the symphony, saying it’s lopsided and peculiar, but I have no problem with it at all. If it’s an experiment, it works just fine. If you feel that the first movement’s weight is never quite counter-balanced, that just adds to its enigma. If you feel that it is counter-balanced, then we don’t have a problem here.
What does it add up to as a whole? Shostakovich apparently said of the sixth symphony that he “wanted to convey in it the moods of spring, joy, youth.” I don’t know where to begin with that. Did he want us to pity him?
Actually, I think he made that statement before he finished composing, so plans may have changed.
Dubal’s picks:
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Bernstein: Deutsche Grammophon 419771-2
Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, Mravinsky: ICONE 9404
I didn’t hear the Bernstein, but I did hear the Mravinsky (on a different release) and it’s fantastic. By far the best of the recordings I heard, and I heard quite a few. You only need to hear one recording of this piece and it’s that one.
I also heard WDR Sinfonieorchester/Barshai (1995), Concertgebouw Orchestra/Haitink (1985), Moscow Phlharmonic Orchestra/Kondrashin (1972), Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra/Jansons (1991), National Symphony Orchestra/Rostropovich (1994), USSR State Symphony Orchestra/Rozhdestvensky (1983), and Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra/Mravinsky (1972), which is not nearly as good as their 1965 recording recommended above.
This is #808 on the 1001 Classical Recordings list, which singles out a specific recording for each work. They too name the Mravinsky 1965 recording.
Just to recap our other selections in terms of the 1001 list:
1. Brahms Cello Sonata No. 1 is combined with Cello Sonata No. 2 as #361 on the list; they recommend the recent Isserlis/Hough recording, which now that I’ve heard it is probably my favorite too.
2. Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony is #448; they recommend the Boston/Munch recording that I liked.
3. Tchaikovsky Capriccio Italien isn’t on the list, which seems right to me.
4. Beethoven Violin Concerto they have Mutter with Berlin/Karajan. I’d listen to that.
5. Brahms Paganini Variations is also not on the list, which is fine by me. So far their track record is good. But I’m going to stick with the Dubal list for now.
Sorry, can’t link you to a score this time. Not in the public domain yet.
* Muse of music, duh.