I said the other day that:
The music of Shostakovich does not readily respond to the technical tools that we have at our disposal so we will have to wait until a couple of brilliant theorists figure out what he was doing as happened with Stravinsky--but that was not until sixty and more years after the pieces were written. We are likely on schedule to have a good understanding of how Shostakovich worked by, oh, the 2030s or so.
But this is only partly true. Shostakovich himself said on more than one occasion that "I know nothing about theory," but this is only true in a limited sense. Shostakovich did the full course at the conservatory on theory, composition, performance and, yes, Marxist-Leninism, but what he may have meant by saying he knew nothing about theory was that he did not use theoretical models to compose.
Also, there are some interesting theoretical discussions of Shostakovich in the literature and I am thinking particularly of an article on form in his instrumental music by Yuriy Kholopov in Shostakovich Studies which I am about to review in detail as I previously just skimmed through it. The Internet tends to give us extremely bad reading habits!
I was listening to the Symphony No. 15 the other day and had the thought that some of Shostakovich's music could be read as a satire of Mahler. In Shostakovich's Symphony No. 9, one of those terribly profound milestones laid down by Beethoven and Mahler, he writes a frothy romp in the style of Prokofiev's Classic Symphony. And in the 15th, his last symphony, the end of the first movement is like a sardonic comment on the Mahler 9th, whose last movement is an unending mournful adagio. So Shostakovich ends the first movement of his last symphony with an insanely frenetic piccolo solo that turns into a rhythmic fugue for the winds.
It will always be one of the biggest what-ifs concerning Shostakovich having to compose under Stalin. The system only loosened up a bit in the mid 50s when Shostakovich was 50 himself. I find his Sym 6 composed in 1939 as interesting a conundrum as the 9th as they bookend WW2 in a very unexpected way. Reportedly Shostakovich said of the Sym 6 "I wanted to convey in it the moods of spring, joy, youth." right as WW2 was breaking out. As it is I find him variably compelling but nevertheless with 3 top masterpieces IMO which is a lot, namely Symphony 10, the String Quartet 8 and the 24 Preludes and Fugues. Of course there are other fine works. To me he is the inverse of Prokofiev: weak on memorable melody but strong on structure and coherence.
ReplyDeleteYes, by the time Stalin died in 1953, Shostakovich had a few pieces "in the drawer" waiting to be performed, including the 4th Symphony and the 1st Violin Concerto.
ReplyDeleteYou have excellent insights into Shostakovich--particularly thanks for mentioning the 24 Preludes and Fugues which I have long thought a remarkable and monumental work. I have been listening to the Shostakovich symphonies for about 25 years now and I find that over time, more and more of the symphonies start to make sense. The 1st is a kind of lucky piece of juvenilia that came out right. The 2nd and the 3rd are little more than propaganda pieces when he still believed in the Soviet ideals. But from the 4th on, they really start to take hold of you. At first it was only the 5th and 10th that I really got into. But lately I am finding that even the 4th and 8th, which I previously found rather obdurate, are making real sense. The 6th is an oddity, all right.
Or perhaps the obverse of Prokofiev! No very significant piano sonatas nor piano concertos even though Shostakovich was a pretty fair pianist. And Prokofiev showed no interest in the string quartet.
Yes the comparison of Prokofiev and Shostakovich is interesting and far more relevant than such commentary twins as Bruckner-Mahler.
ReplyDeleteThe later history of the Symphony as a form is quite remarkable and I'm surprised no one has written a detailed book about it. It disappeared in Central Europe with the death of Mahler. Significantly, even the near younger contemporaries of Mahler wrote them only as student works or created hybrids such as the Sinfonietta or Chamber Symphony. It was only in the outlying regions - England, Russia, Scandinavia and the US where it still had some compositional currency at least up to WW2. But the symphony cycles of Sibelius, Nielsen, V Williams, Ives, Prokofiev and Shostakovich are remarkably heterogeneous to the point where the basic form seems to fly apart from one work to the next - where only the common title is the same but everything else has disappeared Cheshire cat like.
I think you are right, I don't recall offhand a good book on the 20th/21st century symphony though there is a wealth of material. I think that as the Shostakovich symphonies move more and more into the mainstream, we might see something appear. If I didn't have anything better to do, I would take a stab at it.
ReplyDeleteYou could also include the three examples from Stravinsky, the fifteen from Allan Pettersson and the couple (?) from Maxwell-Davies. I think what these works all have in common is that they are almost exclusively instrumental works of great substance and weight. They are really in a trajectory from Beethoven through Schubert to Mahler and Brahms, with particular emphasis on Brahms for his symphonic rhetoric. They mostly avoid the excesses and self-indulgence of Mahler. There is a tinge of nationalism to many of them (Sibelius, for example) and a sense that the composer feels the need to claim an existential presence for his place in the world.
I find it fascinating that these two Russian composers, who are just about my two favourites of the 20th century, can be so different. Prokofiev was obsessed with forming his own distinctive style and, as has been mentioned, he was gifted with melodic and harmonic ideas. Shostakovich, on the other hand, was a profound chronicler of the human condition and of the trials and upheavals of his time. His music has an all-encompassing, universal quality. There is not a huge amount of scholarship yet, but I may dip into a recent book release about the Leningrad symphony, entitled 'Symphony of the City of the Dead'. Oh, and I think the two piano concertos are not insignificant.
ReplyDeleteAnd Shostakovich's fifteen string quartets are hugely vital works. This extra post is mainly to point out the extraordinary finale of the Fourth, whose catastrophic intensity never fails to awaken deep feelings.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Anon, for adding to the discussion. I am always surprised at which post sparks a good discussion. Prokofiev and Shostakovich are favorite 20th century composers of mine as well, though I would add Stravinsky. Additionally, they were all natives of St. Petersburg.
ReplyDeleteI like your differential characterization of Prokofiev and Shostakovich. Thanks for reminding me of the new book on the 7th Symphony and for noting the finale of the 4th String Quartet. I was just thinking that I haven't listened through the string quartets for quite a while!