Dimitri Shostakovich
SINFONIA Nr. 14, Op. 135
Galina Vishnevskaya, Soprano
Mark Reshetin, Bass
Moscow Chamber Orchestra
Dir: Mstislav Rostropovich.
(REVELATION)
*
“ Todo lo que he escrito a través de todos estos largos años ha sido una preparación para esta obra… deseo que las audiencias, al dejar el salón tras escuchar mi sinfonía, sientan que la vida es realmente bella…” Dimitri Shostakovich.
*
Shostakovich
went into hospital on 13th January 1969. Having never properly recovered from a
heart attack of three years before, he had by now lost the comfortable use of
his right hand and could hardly walk. In constant pain, he was suffering from
the form of polio that would eventually kill him. The city’s flu epidemic meant
that no visitors were allowed, but this solitude led him to focus entirely on
what was to be his Fourteenth Symphony.
Seven
years earlier he had orchestrated Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death.
Mussorgsky had written this song cycle with piano accompaniment in 1875 and
though it had later been orchestrated by Glazunov and Rimsky-Korsakov,
Shostakovich felt that they had not done justice to the original songs of the
man he considered the greatest of Russian composers. He also thought that the
work itself was too short for the subject matter, and had long wanted to write
a song cycle of his own that dealt with ‘the eternal themes of love and death’.
His enforced stay in the Kremlin Hospital was a perfect opportunity to fulfil
this wish and by February 16th he had finished the piece in piano score form,
completing the orchestration two weeks later. Even by Shostakovich’s standards
this was quick work, but fear of impending death had spurred him on. In a
letter to his friend Isaac Glikman he explained: ‘I wrote very fast. I was
afraid something would happen to me like, for instance, my right hand would
give up working altogether, or I’d suddenly go blind or something. I was pretty
tortured by these ideas.’ Nor did he relax once the work was completed. Even
when the manuscript was being copied for publication, he would talk about how
he wanted to make sure that he had remembered the whole piece, so that if the
score was somehow lost, he would be able to write it all out again. Although he
had originally written it for Galina Vishnevskaya to sing, her schedule meant
that she was not free to learn it immediately and, as he didn’t want to wait,
the premiere went ahead with a different soprano. ‘I’m afraid I’ll die soon and
I want to hear my work. The Fourteenth Symphony is a landmark piece for me.
Everything I’ve written over the last many years has been a preparation for
this work.’
At
the premiere, Shostakovich overcame his usual shyness to explain to the
audience that ‘life is man’s dearest possession. It is given to him only once
and he should live so as not to experience acute pain at the thought of the
years wasted aimlessly or feel searing shame for his petty and inglorious past,
but be able to say, at the moment of death, that he has given all his life and
energies to the noblest cause in the world – to fight for the liberation of
humanity. I want listeners to this symphony to realise that “life” is truly
beautiful. My symphony is an impassioned protest against death, a reminder to
the living that they should live honestly, conscientiously, nobly, never
committing a base act. This is very important for much time will pass before
scientists have succeeded in ensuring immortality. Death is in store for all of
us and I for one do not see any good in the end of our lives. Death is
terrifying. There is nothing beyond it.’ Shostakovich was arguing against the
view that death is some glorious beginning to the afterlife. He disagreed with
all the composers who had portrayed death with music that was beautiful,
radiant, and ecstatic. For him, death really was the end and he took that as an
inspiration to make sure that he lived his life to its full.
In
the disputed memoirs that he is believed by many to have related to Solomon
Volkov, he talks revealingly about death:
‘Fear
of death may be the most intense emotion of all. I sometimes think that there
is no deeper feeling. The irony lies in the fact that under the influence of
that fear people create poetry, prose and music; that is they try to strengthen
their ties with the living and increase their influence on them. How can you
not fear death? I wrote a number of works reflecting my understanding of the
question. The most important of them is the Fourteenth Symphony; I have special feelings for it. I think that
work on these compositions had a positive effect, and I fear death less now; or
rather I’m used to the idea of an inevitable end and treat it as such. After
all it is the law of nature and no one has ever eluded it. I’m all for a
rational approach toward death. We should think more about it and accustom
ourselves to it. We can’t allow the fear of death to creep up on us
unexpectedly. I think that if people began thinking about death sooner, they
would make fewer mistakes. That’s why I’m not very concerned what people say
about the Fourteenth, despite hearing more attacks on it than any other of my
symphonies. Though it is stupid to protest against death as such, you can and
must protest against violent death. It’s bad when people die before their time
from disease or poverty, but it is worse when a man is killed by another man.’
The
Fourteenth Symphony is not about death but about unnatural death; death caused
by murder, oppression, and war. In fact there is not one ‘normal’ death
described in the whole work and it is significant that all four of the poets
whose words Shostakovich chose to set died in somewhat less than natural
circumstances. Lorca was shot without trial during the Spanish Civil War;
Apollinaire died in 1918 from the wounds he received during World War I; Rilke
died in 1926 at the age of 51 from a rare form of leukaemia, and Küchelbecker
was sent to Siberia for his part in the failed Decembrist uprising against the
Tsars in 1825, where he died deaf and blind in 1846. Shostakovich’s symphony is
a tribute to all who have died in pain, but particularly to the fellow
suffering artists with whom he felt such affinity.
The
opening, almost introductory song is an elegy for a hundred dead lovers. The
first melody of the De Profundis, ironically high in the violin register, makes
immediate reference to the notes of the Gregorian Mass for the Dead whose Dies
Irae theme has been used by so many composers over the centuries. Its timelessness
as a melodic idea creates an eternal atmosphere. This is a piece for the past,
the present, and for ever. The fact that the elegy is for lovers suggests that
the victims died too young and, as if to strengthen that implication,
Shostakovich adds to the original Lorca text the word ‘passionate’. It is the
first of many changes that the composer made to the texts, every one revealing
very clearly how he wanted these poets’ words to be interpreted in his own
piece of music. Some victims in the Soviet Union were not even given the
dignity of a gravestone at all, and the idea of crosses being erected ‘so that
they will not be forgotten by the people’ would have been of great significance
for Shostakovich. He often saw his music as some kind of cross that could
perpetuate the memory of others.
The
emotional emptiness of this prelude is typical of a grief that is so exhausted
that it can’t even speak its name, but it also allows the Malaguena dance that
follows to burst onto the scene with maximum ferocity. It is a brilliant aspect
of this work that Shostakovich is able to use such limited orchestral colours
to create such huge contrasts. It is very easy to listen to this piece without
ever realising that there are only twenty-five people involved in the performance
and that the vast majority are playing string instruments. We are instantly
transported from the barren planes of Andalusia to the sweaty, dirty, and
passionate smoke-filled rooms of a local Spanish bar, and yet the ever
economical Shostakovich doesn’t even bring in the obvious touch of the
castanets until the movement is almost over. You can almost smell the alcohol.
Death is dancing on the tables and charging in and out of the tavern, but
Lorca’s original poem concludes with the the fact that Death eventually leaves.
Shostakovich decided instead to end it with the chilling difference: ‘Death
will not leave’.
Death
is a feminine word in Russian, and the legendary character of the sorceress
Loreley has long been considered one of its strongest representations. Lorca’s
version of the German poet Clemens Brentano’s poem inspires Shostakovich to be
at his most operatic, using both singers to tell the story. This also gives the
sense that the first two songs were introductions and that it is in Loreley
that the symphony really begins. In virtuosic composing, Shostakovich
effortlessly combines Wagnerian representations of the Rhine, alongside almost
direct quotes of Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice as well as using a
twelve-note theme for the frenzied fugato that accompanies Loreley’s decision
to throw herself off the cliff. Yet somehow these disparate ideas seem
perfectly unified.
A
lonely cello solo leads into the next song and combines with the voice to
become a duet similar in style to one of Bach’s great passion arias. In French,
the title of Lorca’s Le Suicide makes it clear that it is a man that has killed
himself, but the Russian does not make this specific and that allows
Shostakovich to imply that the suicide is Loreley’s. She in turn can be seen as
a combination of the death figure of the Malaguena with one of the hundred
lovers from the opening movement and these textural links, as well as many
musical connections, enable Shostakovich to turn four highly individual songs
into what can be heard as a long opening symphonic movement. The end of this
song is the first time in the work that anyone gets a chance to draw their
breath.
If
the opening four songs are a complex first movement with many Mahlerian changes
of tempo, so the next two are unquestionably the symphony’s scherzo.
Shostakovich was forced to denounce twelve-tone serialism as typical of
Western, bourgeois decadence but as a composer he was fascinated in later life
by its harmonic implications. The opening xylophone melody of On the Watch has
to be one of the most pleasant twelve-note melodies ever written but it still
creates a sense of harmonic instability that is cleverly able to evoke the
uncertainty and nervousness of a woman waiting at home whilst knowing that her
lover is being killed in the trenches. The significant increase in the
percussion part here is an appropriate tribute to Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale
but, by combining the insecurity of a twelve-note theme with the extremely
assertive xylophone colour, Shostakovich subtly points out the hollowness and
stupidity of war itself.
The
Loreley, who had grieved for her lover far away, has become the woman who knows
her lover is being killed on the battlefield, and is obviously the same woman
who in the next song laughs in despair in the knowledge that he is already
dead. Never has the line between laughter and tears been so finely drawn as
here, and it leads seamlessly into the longest song of the work, the start of
the symphony’s slow movement.
The
vast majority of the music so far has been sung by the soprano, and the change
to the male voice is telling. It is as if Shostakovich himself is beginning to
speak and certainly it is the next three songs that seem to be the ones whose
texts are closest to the composer’s heart. In 1911, Guillaume Apollinaire was
wrongly arrested and imprisoned for stealing a few statues from the Louvre in
Paris and his poem In the Sante Prison was the result of his rather less than
serious five-day stay in jail. When Alexander Solzhenitsyn discovered that
Shostakovich had chosen to set it, he was furious, and wrote to the composer
explaining that it was outrageous that he should honour the millions who
suffered in the Gulags with a poem by a man who could never have understood the
true level of suffering that occurred. But his complaints show that he cannot
have heard the piece itself as Shostakovich’s slight changes to the text,
alongside music that is harrowing in the extreme, makes this a terrifying
description of the pain and suffering of the lonely prisoner. Apollinaire wrote
of rays of sunlight and sounds of the city drifting in, but these lines are
ruthlessly cut by Shostakovich. There is nothing consoling in his prisoner’s
cell and the long pianissimo fugal interlude is an unforgettable depiction of
time seeming to have stopped for ever. The occasional woodblock note seems to
represent the slow dripping of water in some distant, deserted, dank corridor.
At the end Apollinaire implies that the lamp left burning is some kind of
friend, but Shostakovich allows no such sentimentality and, by saying that the
only two friends there are the prisoner and his mind, it is clear that madness
has finally set in. In Testimony, Shostakovich explained: ‘I was thinking about
prison cells, horrible holes, where people are buried alive, waiting for
someone to come for them, listening to every sound. That’s terrifying, you can
go mad with fear. Many people couldn’t stand the pressure and lost their minds.
I know about that.’
The
anger felt at these injustices is given full vent in The Zaporozhian Cossacks’
Answer to the Sultan of Constantinople. The specific event referred to is the
peasants’ response to the atrocities committed by the authorities whilst
Mohammed IV was Sultan of Turkey from 1648-1687, and many Russians would have
been aware of Ilya Repin’s 1891 painting with the same title which shows the
crowd’s hysterical glee after their dictator had finally been deposed. But the
image of the Cossacks dancing and laughing with grim joy on the grave of their
oppressor is one that would have been wishful thinking to many of the
composer’s contemporaries, and it is in this song that Shostakovich protests
most specifically not at death itself but at the oppression that causes death.
To quote Testimony again: ‘I don’t protest against death, I protest against
those butchers who execute people. Stalin is gone but there are still more than
enough tyrants around.’
The
extreme dissonances of this movement have an obvious effect, but they also
serve to point out even more the significance of the rewardingly consonant
world of the song that follows. It is not a coincidence that here Shostakovich
turns for the first and only time to a Russian poet, for it is this song that
carries with it the fundamental message of the piece and as such it seems
appropriate that the composer should seek to use his own language to express
it. Küchelbeker was a friend of the Russian poet Delvig, who himself was killed
by the police when he was aged just 33 and, in a tribute to him, he wrote a
poem that explains how poets, who have always been hated and feared by tyrants
because they alone dare to freely say what is true, are sent down from heaven
by the Gods to relieve the sufferings of mortals. Küchelbeker’s poem, parts of
which Shostakovich takes as his text, is a celebration of the artists’ power
and the importance of their friendship in the face of tyranny. It is not hard
to see why Shostakovich, who had experienced so many of his artistic friends
murdered or imprisoned, should have responded so beautifully to such
sentiments.
From
the start, the experience of the symphony has been a traumatic one: massacres,
suicides, trench warfare, broken hearts, solitary confinement, madness, and
tyrannical oppression. But its message is that, despite the horrors of the
world, it is Art that can still make lives worthwhile. No tyrant can murder a
piece of music and no oppressor can take away the emotional experience of
listening to one, and it is this song that makes what at first seems a very
depressing symphony into an uplifting and inspirational one. Chamber music had
always been the medium in which Shostakovich was best able to express his
innermost thoughts and, combined with the fact that most of this song is played
by a chamber group of only five players, its warm harmonic world and truly
Russian text make it unequivocal that Delvig is the musical, emotional, and
philosophical climax of the work. Human beings will always die, but Art will
last for ever. Shostakovich felt that, whilst for the body death was the end
and there was nothing nice that could be said about it, by creating great
music, the spirit would be able to last forever.
Just
as the first two songs in the cycle formed a kind of introduction, so the last
two work together as a concluding movement. By changing Rilke’s opening line
from ‘He lay’ to ‘The poet lay’, Shostakovich draws a link to the poet of the
previous song but, by starting with a direct musical quote from the very
opening of the whole symphony, there is a sense in which we are made to feel we
have come full circle. In the end is our beginning. The text likens a body to
the landscape it has known in life, and to a rotting fruit that it has become
in death.
With
what works like a coup de théâtre, the soloists sing together for the first
time in the final song. Its conclusion is that death, as an all-powerful and
inescapable presence, is with us not only at the end of our life but during it
too, always watching and waiting. We are never to know when it might strike.
Shostakovich felt that the ending to this symphony was the only completely true
conclusion he had ever written.
At
the premiere Shostakovich had spoken about the need for a special silence
whilst listening to this work. His supporters were therefore particularly angry
when, during one of the quietest moments, a huge crash was heard in the
auditorium and a man made a hasty and clumsy exit. When it was revealed
afterwards that this man was none other than Pavel Ivanovitch Apostolov, a
party organiser and one of Shostakovich’s main critics and aggressive
persecutors during the late 1940s, people assumed that his protest had been
carefully planned for maximum distraction. Only later did it become known that
it was during this performance that Apostolov had in fact suffered a heart
attack; he was dead within a month. The irony was not lost on anyone.
Shostakovich
agonised for a long time about what to call his work. ‘For the first time I
find myself puzzled what to call my own piece.’ Initially he referred to it as
an oratorio but then felt that, without a chorus, this was inappropriate. The
fact that one could make a case for it as a song-cycle, a concert opera, a
symphony, or perhaps even a piece of chamber music is further proof of what a
great and unique work this is. As a piece of music that combines the best
aspects of all these genres, and as one that, whilst visiting life’s most
depressing subject, gives it the most inspirational of messages, I would argue
that it stands as his greatest work of all.
©
Mark Wigglesworth 1999
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