With the possible exception of the 6th (Grief, Sanity, Insanity) most of Shostakovich's Symphonies have a clear character or trajectory. The 15th seems different in this respect, juxtaposing extreme contrasts without much transition or integration, despite many thematic cross-references. Those famous quotations seem to point to hidden meanings which we can't decode. But the composer himself said that he didn't know why they were there - they just HAD to be. Intuitive and suggestive, not representative. Leave them aside for a moment and from one perspective you could hear the piece as three scherzi - movements 1, 3 and the coda to 4, sounding rather like "ballets mecaniques"; and two slow or moderate movements, 2 and 4 (up to the end of the allegretto reprise).
The sorrow and lament in the 2nd and 4th movements, often very raw and anguished, are an extreme of emotion, set against the almost total lack (or mockery of) human presence in the three ballets (though the strings in 3 hint at this presence, as they warm and extend the rhythm - The Artist smiling at the spectacle perhaps - only to be mocked by the winds).
In the Largo, that touch of formal pomposity in the trombone's funeral oration underlines the horror (recalling for me the undertaker-executioners in Kafka's The Trial); but at its climax we pull back to that grander, cinemascope vision familiar from the 7th and 8th symphonies and it becomes more broadly compassionate, a requiem. In the finale, the sad lilt of the allegretto suggests the remote, withdrawn serenity of The Artist, seeming to approach some kind of reconciliation (with the self, with death) but this mood is unsettled and then swept aside by the invasive passacaglia which writhes into a last, agonised, funarary outburst - like the roar of a dying animal, perhaps the most nakedly primal of all DSCH's laments. (The structural role of this passacaglia is oddly similar to the variations, (the "Invasion" episode) in the 1st movement of the Leningrad).
Yet - after this the allegretto soon regains its poise and winds down gently, lightly, even a little deftly, to its close. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, perhaps. Then the "mecaniques", the dancing machines, start up again.
So to the coda: it hangs before us like a clockwork ghost, a rattling, whistling, clicking image of a void, of nothingness. Gone is the gleefully sinister playfulness of the 1st movement, or the coloristic and rhythmic warmth and invention of the 3rd.
Human existence might be so unbearable, so full of the memory of and the presence of pain, of death, of suffering... in the ante-room of death you might feel less burdened. Nothingness might feel like a relief.
So The Artist known as DSCH disappears behind his mysteriously referential, many-layered, final (yet parenthetical) symphonic creation.
You could describe it as a symphony setting an essentially tragic view of humanity against that most useful and destructive of human inventions, the machine. Humanity and the absence of humanity.
But really, I don't think there is any essential "hidden meaning" to be discovered. DSCH has placed these movements alongside each other for us to "Make Sense" of as we will (within the force-fields of their own images, references and allusions). It seems the most truly modernist of his works in its suggestive power and its open-ended, nonlinear structure.
The sorrow and lament in the 2nd and 4th movements, often very raw and anguished, are an extreme of emotion, set against the almost total lack (or mockery of) human presence in the three ballets (though the strings in 3 hint at this presence, as they warm and extend the rhythm - The Artist smiling at the spectacle perhaps - only to be mocked by the winds).
In the Largo, that touch of formal pomposity in the trombone's funeral oration underlines the horror (recalling for me the undertaker-executioners in Kafka's The Trial); but at its climax we pull back to that grander, cinemascope vision familiar from the 7th and 8th symphonies and it becomes more broadly compassionate, a requiem. In the finale, the sad lilt of the allegretto suggests the remote, withdrawn serenity of The Artist, seeming to approach some kind of reconciliation (with the self, with death) but this mood is unsettled and then swept aside by the invasive passacaglia which writhes into a last, agonised, funarary outburst - like the roar of a dying animal, perhaps the most nakedly primal of all DSCH's laments. (The structural role of this passacaglia is oddly similar to the variations, (the "Invasion" episode) in the 1st movement of the Leningrad).
Yet - after this the allegretto soon regains its poise and winds down gently, lightly, even a little deftly, to its close. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, perhaps. Then the "mecaniques", the dancing machines, start up again.
So to the coda: it hangs before us like a clockwork ghost, a rattling, whistling, clicking image of a void, of nothingness. Gone is the gleefully sinister playfulness of the 1st movement, or the coloristic and rhythmic warmth and invention of the 3rd.
Human existence might be so unbearable, so full of the memory of and the presence of pain, of death, of suffering... in the ante-room of death you might feel less burdened. Nothingness might feel like a relief.
So The Artist known as DSCH disappears behind his mysteriously referential, many-layered, final (yet parenthetical) symphonic creation.
You could describe it as a symphony setting an essentially tragic view of humanity against that most useful and destructive of human inventions, the machine. Humanity and the absence of humanity.
But really, I don't think there is any essential "hidden meaning" to be discovered. DSCH has placed these movements alongside each other for us to "Make Sense" of as we will (within the force-fields of their own images, references and allusions). It seems the most truly modernist of his works in its suggestive power and its open-ended, nonlinear structure.
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