Sunday Classics: The Shostakovich 6th rises from brooding to joyous uplift (with notes on Shostakovich and Schoenberg)

Leonard Bernstein tops off his one-of-a-kind performance of the Shostakovich 6th Symphony with the scampering final Presto, with the Vienna Philharmonic in October 1986. (We're going to hear the complete audio recording made at this same series of performances.)

by Ken

We make plans. Sometimes plans blow up.

From our Friday night and Saturday night Guess the Composer(s) quizzes (the answers to which are now posted as updates to the original posts), we're pointed toward the Schoenberg of the monumental and sublime cantata-oratorio Gurre-Lieder and the Shostakovich of the Sixth Symphony.

As the music of our quizzes made clear, both Shostakovich and even (perhaps surprisingly) Schoenberg had a lighter side. Still, that's not, in either case, what made the body of their music tick, although with Shostakovich there was clearly a quality of irony -- I keep searching for the right descriptive term, stronger than satirical or even sardonic; perhaps caustic? -- which remained part of his way of looking at the world well into the darkest period of his later works.

MUSICAL INTERLUDE: SHOSTAKOVICH ON "HUMOR"

The second movement of Shostakovich's great 13th Symphony (1962), built around settings of poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the one that follows the pulverizing opening "Babi Yar" movement (the movement in particular that caused convulsions in the Kremlin), is "Humor":

ii. "Humor" (Allegretto)
Poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
English translation by Valeria Vlazinskaya

SOLO
Tsars, kings, emperors,
rulers of the world,
commanded parades,
but humor, but humor -- they could not.
To the palaces of the eminent,
who, well groomed, all day reclined,
came the vagabond Aesop.
and before him all appeared impoverished.
CHORUS
Came the vagabond Aesop,
and before him all appeared impoverished.
SOLO
In homes where a hypocrite left traces
of his puny feet,
all this banality Hadji Nasr-ed-Din
swept aside with his jokes as one would clear a chessboard.
They wanted to buy humor.
CHORUS
Only he cannot be bought!
SOLO
They wanted to kill humor.
CHORUS
But humor thumbed his nose.
SOLO
To battle him is a tough business.
They executed him endlessly.
CHORUS
Humor's severed head
was stuck on a warrior's pike.
SOLO
Just when the buffoons' pipes
would start their tale,
he would brightly cry: "I'm here!"
CHORUS
"I'm here!"
SOLO AND CHORUS
And he would break into a dashing dance.
SOLO
In a threadbare scanty coat,
crestfallen and as if repenting,
caught as a political prisoner,
he would go to his execution.
His appearance displayed disobedience,
ready for his life hereafter,
when suddenly he would slip out of his coat,
waving his hand.
SOLO AND CHORUS
And bye-bye!
SOLO
They hid humor in cells,
but like hell they succeeded.
SOLO AND CHORUS
Iron bars and stone walls
he would pass right through.
SOLO AND CHORUS
Clearing his throat from the cold,
like an ordinary soldier
he marched as a simple ditty
with a rifle for the Winter Palace.
SOLO
He is used to stern glances,
but it does not hurt him.
And humor looks upon himself
at times with humor.
He is everlasting.
CHORUS
Everlasting.
SOLO
He is smart.
CHORUS
Smart.
SOLO
And nimble.
CHORUS
And nimble.
SOLO
He will walk through everything and everybody.
SOLO AND CHORUS
And so, glory to humor!
He is a courageous fellow.


Peter Mikulaš, bass; Czecho-Slovak Symphony Orchestra (Bratislava), Ladislav Slovák, cond. Naxos, recorded Nov. 22-28, 1990

Nikita Storojev, bass; City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Okko Kamu, cond. Chandos, recorded Jan. 9-10, 1987

One other thing Schoenberg (1874-1951) and Shostakovich (1906-1975) had in common, and with every composer of the 20th century who had his wits about him, was the need to cope with the exhaustion of available musical language, which we've talked about a number of times. Some readers react with disbelief or scorn, as if it's all in my imagination, but the composers who've grappled with the problem knew better.

What I can't prove to you, though I've come to believe that it's almost inescapably true, and so have most of the composers who've dealt with this, is that only a certain amount of music can be written within a given framework of musical language. It's a fact, after all, that throughout the history of Western classical music, the musical language has evolved. I don't think it's a matter of randomness or mere fashion. It is, I think, why at least in Western music, the language has been forced to evolve continuously.

It's obviously not that every single piece of music that could be written in that harmonic idiom has been written, but that at a certain point anything more tends to sound tired and imitative. What I continue to find fascinating is that this doesn't in any way invalidate or compromise the music that was already written, which can continue to sound as fresh as it ever was. (Note that this assumes that it did once sound genuinely fresh.)

We've already heard the two biggest pushes toward expanding that available musical language. The first was sounded in a single dramatic stroke by Wagner with that first half-diminshed-seventh chord in the opening phrase of the Prelude to his Tristan und Isolde. To put it mildly, there was a deal of resistance at the time, but the push into chromatic harmony, allowing fuller exploration of the intervals within the musical octave which had been generally looked down on in traditional Western tonal harmony, provided some linguistic elbow room.

MUSICAL INTERLUDE: RETURN TO TRISTAN

WAGNER: Tristan und Isolde: Prelude

Staatskapelle Dresden, Carlos Kleiber, cond. DG, recorded 1980-82

And then, although we didn't discuss it in these terms, along came Debussy with a more limited but still expansive idea: throwing into the mix chords built on intervals that go beyond the octave: 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths, creating the sound we associate with musical Impressionism. Again, it wasn't the grand breakthrough it might once have seemed, but for a while it gave composers some extra harmonic elbow room.

MUSICAL INTERLUDE: RAVEL ORCHESTRATES DEBUSSY

DEBUSSY: Sarabande (orch. Ravel)

San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Pierre Monteux, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded Apr. 3, 1946

That somehow doesn't seem like much of a bonus, and hardly worth interrupting the main discussion. Don't tell anyone, and we'll slip in something more substantial. We never did get to the three Images for Orchestra, of which, as I mentioned, the middle Image, Ibéria, is one of Debussy's most popular orchestral works in its own right, and is itself in three movements.

DEBUSSY: Ibéria (No. 2 of Images for Orchestra):
i. Par les rues et par les chemins (By the streets and by the byways)
ii. Les Parfums de la nuit (The Perfumes of the Night)
iii. Le Matin d'un jour de fête (Morning of a Festival Day)

Orchestra of the Théâtre National de l'Opéra de Paris, Manuel Rosenthal, cond. Adès, recorded 1957-59

Perhaps this is what Schoenberg saw: that Wagner and Debussy had found enough linguistic wiggle room to keep them going, but by the time they were done, they left little room for anyone else to follow. From a strictly intellectual standpoint, the idea of replacing tonality, where all harmonic relationships are built around a "root" tone, with a system where all 12 tones of the scale are considered equal and all combinations are considered equally valid, has some theoretical plausibility.

The problem comes when you try to listen to music that's composed this way. Very occasionally, a composer (in my experience, his name is Alban Berg) has managed, through sheer force of musical imagination, to produce 12-tone, or "serial," music that really plugs into the human nervous system in much the way that Western classical music had been doing for several centuries.

Of course even after serialism was all but universally abandoned, composers occasionally managed, through some of that "force of musical imagination," to wring a bit more music of substance out of the existing tonal language, as was the case above all for the trio I've dubbed the last three great composers: Stravinsky, Britten, and Shostakovich. (Stravinsky famously had a go with every mode he could think of to give himself some still-exploitable musical language, including even a fling with the serialism he had once ridiculed. He didn't get much more mileage out of it than anyone else.)

I think it's important to understand that Schoenberg himself appreciated the extent of the sacrifice in giving up traditional tonality, at which he himself was a master. We have only to look at that great monument to it, Gurre-Lieder (Songs of Gurre). Which is where my plan for today's post broke down. I thought we could "do" a Shostakovich symphony, notably a little one like the Sixth, as well as Gurre-Lieder in one post. Actually, I had visions of doing not just the Shostakovich Sixth, but the next and last "little" symphony he wrote, the Ninth.

That's craziness, and it's not going to happen. Most of our consideration of Gurre-Lieder is going to have to wait till next week. It's not only an enormous work, but an enormously enveloping one, as full a flowering as German musical Romanticism was capable of. In it Schoenberg created a musico-dramatic world of his own, or rather several worlds, for the work's three very different parts.

For now, let's just add a tease to last night's excerpt: the orchestral interlude that bridges the main body of Part I, which consists of alternating set pieces for the Danish king Waldemar and his lover Tove, and the "Song of the Wood Dove," which culminates the hourlong Part I. Here is the third of Tove's four solos. Anyone who wants to call this the most beautiful music ever written will get no argument from me, and we've got two ravishingly beautiful performances here.

SCHOENBERG: Gurre-Lieder: Part I,

"Nun sag' ich dir zum ersten Mal" (Tove)

Now I say to you for the first time,
"King Volmer, I love you!"
Now I kiss you for the first time
and cast my arms around you.
And if you say, I'd already said it
and even given you my kiss,
then I'll say, "The king is a fool
who thinks of fleeting trash."
And if you say, "I am indeed such a fool,"
then I'll say, "The king is right."
However, if you say, "No, I'm not that,"
then I'll say, "The king is bad."
For I kissed all my roses to death,
the while I thought I thought of you.

Gundula Janowitz (s), Tove; Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Josef Krips, cond. Live performance, 1969

Jessye Norman (s), Tove; Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, cond. Philips, recorded live, April 1979

MEANWHILE, BACK AT SHOSTAKOVICH

Last night we began our look at the strange and wonderful Shostakovich Sixth Symphony backwards, starting with the third and final movement. It seemed to me as good a way in as any, though it won't get us out of this weirdly structured piece. The symphony begins with a soulfully intense Largo that lasts typically 17-20 minutes (although we're going to hear a performance that stretches this to 22½!), followed by two quickish movements that combined only sometimes crack 14.

It seems to me clear that in this great Largo we're back in the world of the Bruckner-Mahler adagio.

SHOSTAKOVICH: Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 54:
i. Largo

Berlin Symphony Orchestra, Kurt Sanderling, cond. Berlin Classics, recorded April 1979

I think there's some worthwhile description in this liner note on the Shostakovich Sixth. Unfortunately it reads like the translation it is, not bad of its kind, but still unmistakably a translation, I just didn't have the time or heart to redo it.

In the Shadow of Lenin or of . . . Mahler?

The Sixth Symphony, first performed by the Leningrad Philharmonic under Yevgeny Mravinsky on 5 November 1939, was received with little enthusiasm. The period was harldy conducive to smiles, and this curious score, with its unorthodox formal design, a huge Largo followed by two lively, scherzando movements, disconcerted the critics who had come expecting a new ode to Lenin. This "headless symphony" had to wait almost half a century to be treated on an equal level with its predecessor, the highly spectacular Fifth Symphony in D minor with its Tchaikovskian forcefulness.

The shades of Sibelius and of Mahler hover over this new symphony in B minor. From the former Shostakovich took over the partiality for long, particularly expressive, disincarnate solos for the woodwinds, the use of unstable, evolving harmonies, and a rhythmic pace that endows the symphonic course with a tragic, crepuscular or spectral character.

The Largo, longer than the last two movements together, may be regarded as a symphonic poem, an extensive meditation in the shape of a diptych in which the English horn is given most of the melodic line. This sinuous, inextinguishable melody constantly renews itself in its slow harmonic mutations and its meandering from one soloist to another. The commentary makes use of unusual sonorities created by the sounding of instruments in extreme registers, e.g. the principal melody given to the piccolo accompanied by the double bassoon and a single deep melodic line in the strings. In the same way, a single blow on the gong introduces a radical change of color in the lower strings, while the flutes play skillful arabesques in the top register. The one and only appearance of the celesta launches another change of color in the string parts, which grow somewhat brighter and take up the melodic continuum introduced by the woodwinds.

In contrast, the Allegro is brilliant and exuberant, cast as a pastiche of "classical" humor à la Prokofiev. The reappearance of the original theme in the bass clarinet in opposition to the solo flute playing the inversion of the same theme is full of both humor and virtuosic imaginativeness.

The Presto finale is in the form of a speciously facetious Rondo in B major. The middle episode could be a parody of Rossini's Sonatas for strings, first in the winds (bassoon, flute, piccolo), and then repeated by the solo violin. But the futility of this game engenders a certain uneasiness by its stereotyped character. In the concluding coda there is a sophisticated orchestra of increasingly flimsy melodic material whose jauntiness and vulgarity are comparable to the "recommended" examples provided in this period by Tikhon Khrennikov's orchestrations of "Russian" songs.

--Pierre-E. BARBIER, translated by Derek Yeld

Much of this is useful and unexceptionable, and with it under our belts, this may be a good time to relisten to the first movement and then continue on with the second.

i. Largo

London Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Adrian Boult, cond. Everest, recorded November 1958

ii. Allegro

Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Vladimir Ashkenazy, cond. Decca, recorded November 1988

Czecho-Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra (Bratislava), Ladislav Slovák, cond. Naxos, recorded Dec. 3-12, 1988

Still, I wonder whether we all hear the Shostakovich Sixth the same way M. Barbier does. Let's refresh our memory of the Presto finale, Friday night's bonus work. In particular, the rousing finale, roughly the last three minutes.

iii. Presto

Concertgebouw Orchestra, Bernard Haitink, cond. Decca, recorded December 1983

Our friend M. Barbier thinks the "stereotyped character" of the musical materials here are indicative of something approaching musical parody. And this is a line of thinking I would emphatically endorse with regard to the fake-triumphant climax of the Fifth Symphony, or the brilliantly insipid theme-and-variaitons of the first movement of the Seventh. But I don't get that feeling at all here. What I get is unadulterated joy and celebration, joy and celebration we can only reach by way of the long journey through the symphony's first two and a half movements. Let's listen again to just the finale, before we put the whole piece back together.

iii. Presto

WDR (West German Radio) Symphony Orchestra, Rudolf Barshai, cond. Brilliant Classics, recorded Oct. 17-20, 1995


THE COMPLETE SHOSTAKOVICH SIXTH SYMPHONY

The first thing we have to do is to correct the omission, in all the Shostakovich Sixth excerpts we've heard so far, of any Russian recordings. There really is, or at least historically has been, a difference in weight and tone of native-rendered Shostakovich. It just happens that I don't appear to have any Russian performances of the Sixth on CD, except for the first of our two complete performances, this 1955 mono one by the same conductor and orchestra who, as noted above, gave the symphony its premiere, in 1939.

And then we hear Leonard Bernstein's late recording, coupled with his Vienna remake of the little Ninth Symphony. (A video coupling made at these same performances is available on DVD.) Lenny is the man you would look to to hear the symphony's links to Mahler (he's the conductor of that 22½-minute Largo I promised), and also to savor its sardonic elements.

SHOSTAKOVICH: Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 54:
i. Largo
ii. Allegro
iii. Presto


Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, Yevgeny Mravinsky, cond. Praga, recorded live in Prague, May 21, 1955

Vienna Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded live, October 1986

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