Shostakovich 15

[ahinton]

[COLOR="#0000FF"]Well I do always think of Shostakovich 15 when I hear the "William Tell" theme - much as I always think of Shostakovich 15, not the Ring, when I hear those Siegfried death drum taps and chords (start of the last movement).

OK, but to what extent do they have their origins in Wagner and to what extent might the have been drawn from the rhythm of the melody that opens the scherzando section from the Fourth Symphony?

[Nick Armstrong]

OK, but to what extent do they have their origins in Wagner and to what extent might the have been drawn from the rhythm of the melody that opens the scherzando section from the Fourth Symphony?

Oh they are direct quotes from Wagner. My point is that having heard them in Shostakovich years and years before I heard them in their original context, they always make me think of No 15 - even if I'm listening to the Ring!

[ahinton]

Oh they are direct quotes from Wagner. My point is that having heard them in Shostakovich years and years before I heard them in their original context, they always make me think of No 15 - even if I'm listening to the Ring!

Oh, yes, of course I know that they are indeed direct quotes, but what I was really seeking to get at was whether there might also be swome kind of serendipitous coincidence between that and the Fourth Symphony example that I cited (especially as the Fifteenth ends with that reference to the close of the Fourth's second movement).

I'm reminded of someone - I think that it might have been Graham Johnson but can't now be sure - who years ago wrote a spoof essay about Tippett's influence on Beethoven when I suggest that it might be high time for you to write one on the influence of Shostakovich on Wagner...

[edashtav]

I've always thought of the 15th as very much a valedictory piece and rather atypical. (Parallels with Prokofiev's 7th?) Gone, or greatly diluted, is that excoriating sardonic passion that is so characteristic of most of the symphonies.

Shostakovich's 15th is simply a masterpiece but that achievement was not gained through simplicity and that's where a comparison with Prokofiev's 7th falls down. Except possibly at the end of the finale, Prokofiev's reduced his palette because his intention was to write a symphony that children could understand. Shostakovich's symphony stands at the other end of the musical spectrum, he composed a lean, spare work, employing notes with the utmost economy but the result is not a simple distillation of his thought but a complex achievement with multiple layers of meaning and which contains a wealth of allusion that may no longer be sardonic but is so complex that the work only reveals itself fully after repeated hearings. I do believe it is the best of Shostakovich and, like the best of Bach, I never tire of hearing it.

[Nick Armstrong]

I do believe it is the best of Shostakovich and, like the best of Bach, I never tire of hearing it

[Richard Barrett]

allusion that may no longer be sardonic

But was it ever? I often find myself wondering what the word "sardonic" means when (often somewhat glibly) applied to the music of Shostakovich and particularly to its referential aspects. "Sardonic" implies some kind of derision directed towards the music cited or alluded to. Is it ever as simple as that?

[Petrushka]

Agree completely with edashtav. A complex masterpiece indeed and still a riddle wrapped inside an enigma over 40 years after I heard the UK premiere (courtesy of R3) which was my first exposure to Shostakovich.

To me it is a birth to death piece and the many self quotations (Gerard McBurney has suggested that every one of the symphonies is alluded to at some point) underscores the view that it is an autobiographical work. The Rossini and Wagner quotes seem to puzzle some but while the Wagner quote could hardly be more explicitt he first movement quote from William Tell, I think, is equally so. Surely Shostakovich is referring to himself as a 'freedom fighter' like Tell?

Testimony refers to Chekov's The Black Monk in connection with the 15th. Does anyone know this play and what relevance it has?

The ending of the 15th is one of to most moving in all music, the last chord sounds and life is snuffed out.

[ahinton]

But was it ever? I often find myself wondering what the word "sardonic" means when (often somewhat glibly) applied to the music of Shostakovich and particularly to its referential aspects. "Sardonic" implies some kind of derision directed towards the music cited or alluded to. Is it ever as simple as that?

No. Of course not. But then what ever is "simple" in the best of Shostakovich's work? Whilst "sardonic" might be a term that could be applied to certain aspects of it (he understood it as an expressive tool, of course), it would indeed be quite wrong to use it to describe his own attitude to the work of others, so any such implication doesn't ring true with me at all; Shostakovich was made of sterner and bigger stuff that any such thing might suggest.

I'm not putting this very well at all, as I relise only too well as I write - but I hope that I've made my point, however inadequately.

[johnb]

"Sardonic" implies some kind of derision directed towards the music cited or alluded to. Is it ever as simple as that?

I certainly never thought of "sardonic" in those terms but as a bitter mocking of .... the Soviet system ... Stalin ... life .... who knows ...

In general I agree with other comments though and like Petrushka's description: " A complex masterpiece indeed and still a riddle wrapped inside an enigma".

I wonder whether someone coming to Shostakovich through the 15th will have a different feeling about the composer than someone who first knew his music through, say, one of the so called "war symphonies".

[ahinton]

I certainly never thought of "sardonic" in those terms but as a bitter mocking of .... the Soviet system ... Stalin ... life .... who knows ...

In general I agree with other comments though and like Petrushka's description: " A complex masterpiece indeed and still a riddle wrapped inside an enigma".

I wonder whether someone coming to Shostakovich through the 15th will have a different feeling about the composer than someone who first knew his music through, say, one of the so called "war symphonies".

I don't know, but the very fact of those "war symphonies" coming after the youthful but intense first, the astonishing fourth, the fine and at the same time popularist fifth and the splendid but still underappraciated sixth and before 10, 13 and 15 surely alone marks out Shostakovich as a far bigger composer than any of those individual descriptors might in and of themselves suggest; his sheer humanity and profound expressiveness on so many levels marks his finest work out as being well above all such considerations yet at the same time enmeshed in them all because of that humanity.

[Richard Barrett]

a bitter mocking of .... the Soviet system ... Stalin ... life .... who knows ...

Who knows indeed. I wonder why it seems to be so difficult to discuss Shostakovich's music without immediately making reference to his biography in general, and the fact that he spent his entire creative life in the USSR in particular. Obviously, a composer's work is going to be influenced by the circumstances in which he/she works, but there's no reason to assume that composers think about their political environment most or even much of the time.

[johnb]

Who knows indeed. I wonder why it seems to be so difficult to discuss Shostakovich's music without immediately making reference to his biography in general, and the fact that he spent his entire creative life in the USSR in particular. Obviously, a composer's work is going to be influenced by the circumstances in which he/she works, but there's no reason to assume that composers think about their political environment most or even much of the time.

Very true. But if you have gone through a period where you kept a packed bag by the door for when the authorities came to take away, or if you had an "appointment" with an "investigator" and were only saved because the investigator himself was victim of the current purge, when one of your patrons also fell victim to the purge - all that must leave some impact and can't be just ignored.

I think it is almost impossible for us in the cosy west to appreciate what it was like to live through those times.

Having said that I do agree that sometimes (often?) DDS's music is viewed too much through a Cold War lense - his work is much too universal to be so narrowly defined.

[ahinton]

Who knows indeed. I wonder why it seems to be so difficult to discuss Shostakovich's music without immediately making reference to his biography in general, and the fact that he spent his entire creative life in the USSR in particular. Obviously, a composer's work is going to be influenced by the circumstances in which he/she works, but there's no reason to assume that composers think about their political environment most or even much of the time.

I take the same view. It's particularly puzzling given that Shostakovich himself - as far as we know him - seems to have been a man of many contradictions and perhaps in some senses (as johnb suggests) had to be so; one has only to read through the now considerable body of Shostakovich literature to glean that impression. I think that a lot of the "damage" in this regard originates from "a Soviet artist's reply to just criticism" as once hung over the Fifth Symphony and which some seem for whatever reason to have found hard to shake off. Shostakovich was already well versed in the literature and music of his country by the time tht he began his First Symphony (which was quite a while before he finished it!) and, whilst in one sense a "child of the Revolution" (by virtue of being just 11 years of age when it occurred), he would have continued to develop and give us some astonishingly fine music whatever might happen to have been the political climate in which he worked.

[ahinton]

Very true. But if you have gone through a period where you kept a packed bag by the door for when the authorities came to take away, or if you had an "appointment" with an "investigator" and were only saved because the investigator himself was victim of the current purge, when one of your patrons also fell victim to the purge - all that must leave some impact and can't be just ignored.

I think it is almost impossible for us in the cosy west to appreciate what it was like to live through those times.

Having said that I do agree that sometimes (often?) DDS's music is viewed too much through a Cold War lense - his work is much too universal to be so narrowly defined.

Agreed. It remains a matter of puzzlement that so many people still seem to do this, almost as though it were somehow necessary. I wonder if in 50 or 100 years' time such attitudes will prevail; I would have guessed not, yet it's now almost 22 years since the Soviet Unuion formally closed down and 38 since the death of Shostakovich, so one might reasonably have assumed such distances in time already to have swept them away, but it seems that, for many even today, Shostakovich was a "Soviet composer".

Anyway - happy birthday, Dmitry Dmitryevich!

[Richard Barrett]

Very true. But if you have gone through a period where you kept a packed bag by the door for when the authorities came to take away, or if you had an "appointment" with an "investigator" and were only saved because the investigator himself was victim of the current purge, when one of your patrons also fell victim to the purge - all that must leave some impact and can't be just ignored.

I think it is almost impossible for us in the cosy west to appreciate what it was like to live through those times.

That's true, but the narrative is still a little one-sided - numerous prominent intellectuals and artists managed to leave the USSR for the West, and I don't think it's beyond the realms of possibility that Shostakovich could have done so if he had so wished. Since he didn't, we'd have to assume that there was something other than the KGB that kept him there - an attachment to the place and its culture, for example; maybe even a feeling that the West (heaven forfend!) wasn't as attractive as it was supposed to be, or (ditto) that the respect and success accorded to his work in the USSR would perhaps not be reproduced there. It may have been subject to repressive cultural policy in the USSR, at least until after Stalin's death, but still that country was a place where culture was regarded with an importance it didn't have (which is even truer today) in the commercially-oriented West.

So I think it's sometimes useful to see Shostakovich's music, like that of any other composer (and of course so many of his generation witnessed or were victims of repression, displacement and atrocity), as not just a document of his personal circumstances but to see it in something more like its full complexity.