Sunday Classics follow-up: Is Shostakovich overrated?

This is an interesting test. Here we have the first ten minutes of the third-movement Adagio of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony (in Leonard Bernstein's second recording,with the Chicago Symphony, the full movement runs an unusually long 19:25), one of the most intensely felt pieces of music I know. It's a tortured elegy I would describe as a witness or memorial to victims everywhere -- victims of war, of privation, of oppression. But you get to decide for yourself what you hear, including whether it's anything for Joe Stalin to smile about.

by Ken

In my recent Sunday Classics "sneak peek" at the music of Benjamin Britten, I repeated my previously stated view that in Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and Britten we have our "last three great composers."

As I wrote originally in connection with Stravinsky:

I really want to talk about Stravinsky one of these days, and I plan to get to it really soon. Awhile back I startled Howie by saying that we've already had the last three great composers we're ever going to have--Stravinsky (1882-1971), Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), and Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), all now long since safely dead and buried. This seems so obvious to me now that I forget how stark it may sound to others. But these are the last composers who seem to me, through the sheer force of their imagination, to have transcended the exhaustion of the musical language they inherited, or could scrounge up or invent.

I wish I saw a way around this, but after all these years of creative scavenging, I simply can't imagine where any aspiring composer is going to find a musical language in which to create music that has the power to stimulate and pleasure us in the way we've come to expect from the great achievements of Western classical music. What these last three great composers did was to take the musical language they inherited, which had been pretty well used up in the first half of the 20th century and, through the sheer force of their individuality, and with it produce additional bodies of top-quality work.

I should probably acknowledge here that bundling Stravinsky with these younger colleagues gives me pause, because the music of his that I love is almost all relatively early, and really didn't stretch much more than a decade beyond the "exhaustion" point if we date it at roughly the gaping cultural divide of World War I. While there's much that I admire, or appreciate, or anyway respect in the later Stravinsky, if we're talking about the period from the end of World War I to the immediate post-World War II period, there are any number of composers who produced more music that I love than he did -- names pop to mind like Bela Bartok and Richard Strauss and Sergei Prokofiev and Alban Berg.

Again this is ground I would really like to come back to, to try to make a more coherent and explicit case. For now I just want to deal with a comment added to Sunday's post by reader Frank Wilhoit concerning one of my "last great composers":

I think we may all have overrated Shostakovich somewhat. Now that we live in a totalitarian environment ourselves, his reaction to totalitarianism no longer seems as noble as it once did, but subjective and pitiful. We have now been forced to acknowledge that anything created in a totalitarian environment is axiomatically and absolutely worthless, totally invalidated before it is even conceived.

I began by simply adding a comment-reply, but decided the question of whether Shostakovich is overrated deserved to be pulled out of the comments section -- and this is the one place in the world where I've got the clout to do it.

I kept looking for some indication that this is some sort of ironic statement and not Frank's actual view:

"We have now been forced to acknowledge that anything created in a totalitarian environment is axiomatically and absolutely worthless, totally invalidated before it is even conceived."

Surely there isn't anyone who actually believes this, is there? But my irony detector has come up blank.

"At Babi Yar there is no memorial," begins the Yevtushenko poem that begins Shostakovich's overpowering 13th Symphony (1962), growled by the choral basses in their lower range, punctuated by chimes that in the late Kyril Kondrashin's performances sounded unmistakably like the knell of death. In the course of the time when the Soviet regime was suppressing the piece, this statement became factually untrue; a memorial of sorts was installed. But is the significance of what happened at Babi Yar either remembered or understood? Any more than we will remember what happened at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo?


The able bass Mikhail Petrenko was a late replacement for this August 2006 Proms performance, in the Royal Albert Hall, of the Shostakovich 13th Symphony by the Mariinsky Theater Chorus and Orchestra under Valery Gergiev. We hear most of the first movement ("Babi Yar"). [Here is an English translation of the Yevtushenko poem.]

For me, Shostakovich's greatness as an artist has nothing to do with some presumed "nobility." It's a product of his availability and sensitivity to the world around him, his insight into the human condition, and the brilliant array of musical resources he brought to bear to transform what he observed and felt into music of ever-increasing resonance. Again, listen to the Adagio of the Seventh Symphony.

The relationship of Soviet citizens to the Soviet regime and the relationship of Soviet artists to both are fascinating and complex subjects, and they are inescapable in the understanding and appreciation of Shostakovich's music. But they don't define or explain that music in any simple way.

For starters, I can't imagine anyone who has lived with the 15 string quartets giving even a second's thought to the notion that Shostakovich is overrated. Under-rated? Perhaps. But overrated? Let's get serious. After Beethoven's quartets, there's nothing remotely comparably in the musical literature. Ironically, these most deeply felt and intimately expressed works may well be the composer's most accessible, because in chamber music he had less need than in more public forms to hide or camouflage his artistic concerns. (We heard another deeply expressive Shostakovich Adagio, that of the Third String Quartet, in the Sunday Classics post on the path from the Borodin Quartet to the Borodin Trio.)

The 15 symphonies are a much more diverse proposition, including as they do so many different kinds of artistic undertakings. Since we've already heard a bit of the Seventh -- a profoundly misunderstood piece, I should warn -- I might direct music lovers to Shostakovich's monumental pair of wartime symphonies, the Seventh and Eighth, which not only are spirit-shaking masterpieces in their own rights but together form a fairly overwhelming super-symphony.

To that we might perhaps add, by way of something completely different, the comparatively minuscule symphony that followed immediately, the irrepressibly impudent Ninth. The Ninth Symphony formed the subject of Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concert"Humor in Music."

Georg Solti, a surprisingly sympathetic Shostakovich conductor who made a hugely powerful recordingof the gritty Eighth Symphony with the Chicago Symphony, here conducts the jaunty opening movement of the Ninth, with the Bavarian Radio Symphony in 1992.

Marshal Stalin himself is said to have had a personal interest in the Shostakovich Ninth Symphony. He kept a close eye on the composer after Shostakovich's rehabilitation following his first official denunciation by the Stalin regime in 1936. The great leader is said to have been miffed that neither of the monumental wartime symphonies, the Seventh and Eighth, was dedicated to that greatest of Soviet heroes, himself. He was led to believe, we're told, that they would be followed by a comparable mighty work, which would complete a symphonic triptych and be suitable for dedicating to so august a personage. If so, the great man was likely not amused by the actual Ninth Symphony when it was unveiled in November 1945, and he heard what we just heard.

Shostakovich was a pianist, and a whole other side of his personality comes to the fore when he's writing for his instrument. Now in our own living rooms we can not just hear but actually watch the remarkable pianist Tatiana Nikolayevaplay Shostakovich's Op. 87 set of 24 Preludes and Fugues (1950-51), obviously referencing Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. Here you can hear but not see her play No. 1 in C major. (In this trailer you can see just the Prelude of No. 17 in A flat major.) And when it comes to looking death squarely in the puss, perhaps the only composer who has done so as eloquently as Shostakovich -- I'm thinking particularly of the 14th Symphony (1969) and the 14th and 15th String Quartets (1973 and 1974) -- is Britten, notably in his last opera, Death in Venice (completed in 1973) Third String Quartet (1975, clearly influenced by Shostakovich's final quartets; the two composers had enormous mutual admiration). And I've merely skimmed off a few highlights here, not even mentioning, for example, the two great operas.

Was Shostakovich's world view shaped by the times and society he lived in? Of course. Is that a crucial part of his music? Obviously, and how could there not be interest in hearing a great musical artist's response to all of that? So far it's given me a lifetime's worth of absorption, not to mention the pleasure of a large quantity of beautiful and gripping music.


QUICK HITS: SOME SHOSTAKOVICH CDs (AND DVDs)

For the Shostakovich string quartets, the St. Petersburg Quartet'sboldly reimagined Hyperion cycle is one of the great recorded achievements of the last couple of decades, while the Shostakovich Quartet'smore traditionally conceived but bursting-with-life Melodiya cycle is altogether recommendable. It's a shame that Chandos's well-merited and well-intentioned reissue of the first Borodin Quartetrecordings (before first violinist Rostislav Dubinsky left the quartet and the Soviet Union) of the first 13 quartets doesn't really do justice to the richness and variet of sound of the ensemble as heard on LP, but in their basic commitment these performances remain unsurpasssed.

Rather than get enmeshed in recommendations for the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, since the pieces do seem to me to have been connected in the composer's mind, let me just suggest the conductor who seems to me to have had the greatest degree of success with both, Neeme Järvi, with the Scottish National Orchestra on Chandos (No. 7and No. 8).And I'm going to suggest Järvi again, this time with the Göteborg Symphony, for the 13th and 14th Symphonies, on the strength of DG's handy two-CD set, which throws in the 15th as well. (I confess, though, that I still don't get the 15th Symphony.)

Leonard Bernstein's affectionate New York Philharmonic recording of the little Ninth Symphony now comes coupledwith a solid performance of what has generally been Shostakovich's most popular symphony and probably most popular work, the Fifth Symphony. You can see as well as hear Lenny's later Ninth, with the Vienna Philharmonic, on a DG DVDcoupled with the Shostakovich Sixth Symphony.

Tatiana Nikolayeva made three audio recordings (that I know of) of the enormous Op. 87 set of 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo piano. But Medici Arts' video recordingseems an obvious recommendation, and a great bargain. (Amazon is selling it for $20, and other merchants offer it for even less.)


SUNDAY CLASSICS POSTS

Here is the updated list.

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