Shostakovich rediscovered (except in Philadelphia)

Shostakovich rediscovered
(except in Philadelphia)

ROBERT ZALLER

A parlor game for musicologists: Who was the greatest composer of the 20th Century?

A generation ago, the consensus figure was Igor Stravinsky. There would have been a smattering of votes for Schoenberg, whose serial technique had been adopted by Stravinsky himself (though only, I suspect, so Stravinsky could show that he could sound thoroughly like himself in anyone’s language). Bartok, whose stock had risen so rapidly after his death in 1945, would still have gotten a few. In the 1950s and 1960s, Bartok’s six string quartets were looked upon as the natural successors to Beethoven’s, were routinely paired with them in recitals, and were often played as a cycle. The Bartok Second Violin Concerto was the modern fiddle concerto.

Dimitri Shostakovich? Not even on the charts. This, despite his having been a first-hand witness to some of the century's darkest hours, and to having given uniquely eloquent expression to them in his art.

It is quite another matter today. The Bartok Concerto has all but vanished from the repertory, and its place has been taken by the Shostakovich First, ignored for its first quarter century but now de rigueur for all violin soloists. Similarly, the 15 Shostakovich quartets have now assumed the position as the heir to Beethoven’s legacy, most often paired with Beethoven on the recital circuit. And aspiring quartets, from the Fitzwilliam to the Emerson, have cut their eye-teeth on performing the Shostakovich cycle.

Best known, however, are the Shostakovich symphonies, also 15 in number. That, too, was not always the case. The First, Fifth, and Tenth symphonies got their hearings decades ago, but almost everything in between (and after) was seldom if ever performed or even recorded. Whereas rights to the American premiere of the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony had once been the subject of a fierce bidding war among the likes of Toscanini, Koussevitzky and Stokowski, the first performance of the Twelfth was given, if memory serves me, by the orchestra of Washington University in St. Louis under one William Schatzkamer. When Leonard Bernstein took up the Shostakovich Fourteenth Symphony, he sneeringly rejected its immediate predecessors as “feeble.” Bernstein himself should have written anything as weak.

Acclaim from New York to LA

Again, it’s quite another matter now. Shostakovich symphony cycles are now as frequently recorded as Mahler’s used to be, and Esa-Pekka Salonen has been performing one in Los Angeles for the past three years. In New York, Valery Gergeiev is attempting the heroic feat of playing the full cycle in a set of seven concerts, four just concluded with the Kirov Orchestra and the Rotterdam Philharmonic, and the latter three scheduled with the Kirov for October. The first set has included all of the early symphonies, 1-4; four middle period works, 5, 7, 9, and 10; and the valedictory Fifteenth.

Hearing the first four symphonies set against the Fifth was a particularly unusual opportunity: the Second has only recently been played on this side of the Atlantic; the Third was unperformed (at least in my lifetime) until Salonen picked it up; and the Fourth, suppressed for 25 years by Shostakovich himself in the Stalinist and post-Stalinist political climate, is still a relative rarity. This early group represents the “modernist” Shostakovich, reinventing the symphony for a new era. Such experiments, as is well known, were halted by the frown of Stalin, who liked his music simple; and with the Fifth Symphony, the famous “Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism,” the composer returned to traditional sonata forms that served him (with the exception of the Fourteenth Symphony, really a misnomered song cycle) ever after.

Listening in particular to the Shostakovich Fourth Symphony, with its whirligig of ideas and episodes, and, 24 hours later, to his celebrated but more obviously accessible Fifth, one hears both difference and resemblance. If Shostakovich felt compelled to write a more traditional symphonic narrative in the Fifth, it is a no less complex one, and its tragic character makes no concession to the sunny goals of Socialist Realism. The longstanding canard that Shostakovich dumbed down his music to survive not only ignores its unflagging (not to say deepening) expressive content, but the fact that his return to sonata form had already been anticipated in works such as the First Piano Concerto and the Cello Sonata, and that his Western contemporaries--Stravinsky, Bartok, Hindemith, Copland and even Schoenberg--had all returned to traditional forms and more tonal language by the late 1930s. Only Shostakovich, however, was punished by avant-garde criticism for doing so.

From cold-war propaganda victim to heroic artist

What has happened in the last generation, after the renewed complexity and experimentation of postwar music, has been a return to neo-Romantic idiom. This has given Shostakovich a fairer hearing, and, with the relative paucity of memorable music written in recent decades, has deepened interest in the last acknowledged master of the Western symphonic tradition. It has helped, too, that Shostakovich’s career is no longer perceived, as it was for so long, in terms of Cold War propaganda. Instead, he is viewed as a heroic figure who was able to protect the integrity of his art under the century’s longest-lasting dictatorship. Shostakovich speaks to us now as the representative artist of his time, whose work uniquely documents both the vast tragedy of his century’s suffering and his own private anguish.

Russia itself bore more than its share of that suffering. As many as 75 million of its people may have died violently— of war, of famine, and in Stalin’s Gulags— between 1914 and 1953. Most Shostakovich middle-period symphonies reflect these events, but his outlook was universal: His Eighth Quartet, for example, was a response not to the destruction of any Russian city, but to the wartime bombing of Dresden. What makes his music so eloquent for us, however, is the complex, febrile personality through which it is filtered, and which is ultimately what it expresses. In Mahler, you might say, one gets the response of a hyper-sensitive fin de siècle European to a world no longer guaranteed by God and on the verge of dissolution; in Shostakovich, one gets the dissolution itself, and, in the late works, the despair of a man facing personal extinction without hope or consolation. The tragedy has been distilled; the public events are behind him; what remains is a dance of death performed with harrowing lucidity and courage.

But in Ormandy’s city….

Compared to New York and Los Angeles, this centennial year of Shostakovich’s birth has passed with little notice in Philadelphia. Yet Shostakovich’s own ties with this city were closer than with any other in America, thanks to the efforts of Eugene Ormandy, who brought him here for the premiere of his First Cello Concerto in 1959, gave first performances of the last three symphonies, and made the first recording of the long-suppressed Fourth. Christoph Eschenbach has been a little more hospitable to Shostakovich than Riccardo Muti and Wolfgang Sawallisch were, but the only Shostakovich symphony programmed for this year by the Philadelphia Orchestra— the Fifteenth— was performed by associate conductor Rossen Milanov. Ormandy, of course, had a close relationship with Rachmaninoff, too; and Philadelphia’s Russian affinity stretches back through Leopold Stokowski’s arrival here in 1912. It seems time, after our decade-long diet of Schumann, Brahms and Strauss, to revive it.