ARPEGIO.: Shostakovich: Sinfonía Nr. 15.

Dimitri Shostakovich

SINFONIA Nr. 15, Op. 141

Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest Amsterdam

Dir: Bernard Haitink.

(RCO Live)

Arribamos al final de éste largo paseo que en 2025 hicimos a través de las sinfonías de Shostakovich, en conmemoración de los 50 años de su desaparición física.

La Sinfonía Nr. 15, Op. 141, es la última contribución de Shostakovich al género. La obra fue compuesta a plenitud en Julio de 1.971, en Repino (afueras de Leningrado), sitio de descanso del compositor. Su salud estaba bastante mermada y sin embargo expresaba que la obra ¨no le permitía un momento de descanso¨. Para el 29 de julio la obra estaba terminada, aunque ¨abierta¨ a revisiones. Tras varios reveses, entre ellos recaídas en la salud del compositor, se estrenó en Moscú el 8 de enero de 1.972, con la Orquesta Sinfónica de la Radio Moscú bajo la batuta de su hijo, Maxim, en la Gran Sala del Conservatorio. Al no haber un libreto inspirador de su música, como en sus cuatro antecesoras, se considera la primera obra no programática de su autor compuesta desde la décima (1953).

Su primer movimiento (Allegretto) resalta por el uso de la percusión y la flauta, lo que al inicio recuerda el ambiente de una juguetería que poco a poco va mostrando en sus estanterías juguetes cada vez más siniestros. Van surgiendo paráfrasis y parodias a melodías conocidas como la obertura Guillermo Tell de Rossini y otros embriones melódicos que van creando una especie de rompecabezas y la atmósfera se torna cada vez más oscura y agobiante, hasta que entramos en el segundo movimiento, un adagio de una economía magistral, pero que nos mantiene en las mismas profundidades inquietantes. A continuación, el scherzo, realmente un allegretto postmahleriano que representa a la melodía estridente de un violín y una seguidilla macabra que evoca en todo momento un ambiente de ultratumba. A pesar de su brevedad es un momento cumbre de la música occidental y es tal vez la respuesta de Shostakovich a los modernistas, demostrándoles que aun se puede llegar a extremos manteniéndose en la tonalidad. Finalmente la conclusión, un adagio donde se regresa al ambiente del primer movimiento, aunque de una forma más lúgubre, más deconstruída y embrionaria, más simple y en decrescendo, con alegorías al Wagner del Crepúsculo de los Dioses, la sinfonía se va apagando lentamente, a cargo de la percusión, como un corazón que deja de latir (¿recordando a la Patética de Tchaikovsky?).

A continuación anexo, como ha sido costumbre en éstas entregas, las valiosas notas del director y gran conocedor de Shostakovich, Mark Wigglesworth:

In my end is my beginning

¨Given the turbulent history of twentieth century Russia, it is perhaps understandable that the style of every Shostakovich symphony varies as much as the periods for which each was written. There is little logical chronology running through them all. A composer who always had to respond to the vagaries of his time was unlikely to be able to follow a purely musical compositional path. Nevertheless, there is a totality and succinctness to the Fifteenth that makes it hard not to interpret it as anything other than the story of the composer’s life and a chronicle of his time. To emphasise the work’s autobiographical nature, Shostakovich either directly quotes from, or at least conveys the atmospheres of, all his previous symphonies. We hear the precocious revolutionary energy of the First, the life-numbing emptiness and baffling absurdity of the Second and Third; the terror of the Fourth, kept private for so long, and the more public expression of that terror which is the Fifth; the loneliness of the Sixth and the heroic defiance of the Seventh and Eighth; the irony of the Ninth; the tragedy of the Tenth; the historical tributes of the Eleventh, Twelfth, and Thirteenth;; and the poetic mourning of the Fourteenth. Along with references to his operas and film scores, not to mention excerpts from, among others, Beethoven, Rossini, Glinka, and Wagner, all are knitted together into some kind of musical biopic. That the work does not come across purely as a homage to Shostakovich the man, and the fact that it never resembles an incongruous patchwork collage is an enormous tribute to Shostakovich the composer. As always, the man and composer are inseparable, bound by a prescriptive yet creative thread perhaps unique in the history of music. ‘I don’t myself quite know why the quotations are there,’ Shostakovich told his friend Isaak Glickman, ‘but I could not, could not, not include them’.

The composer’s own explanation of the first movement is typical of the doublespeak that has so often been posthumously attributed to him. It ‘describes childhood, a toy-shop with a cloudless sky above.’ But as a purely nostalgic reminiscence of a time in which Shostakovich the boy would play for hours with puzzles and mechanical amusements, it is unconvincing. The conductor Kurt Sanderling, whose comments on the composer come with more authority than most, is unequivocal about its true meaning. ‘In this “shop” there are only soulless dead puppets hanging on their strings which do not come to life until the strings are pulled. (It) is something quite dreadful for me, soullessness composed into music, the emotional emptiness in which people lived under the dictatorship of the time.’ Perhaps it was not unconnected in Shostakovich’s mind that the USSR’s largest toy store stood just across the street from the Lubyanka, the infamous KGB torture headquarters. ‘We are all marionettes,’ Shostakovich once grimly remarked. The music seems to suggest that if you play games with life, they can easily get out of control.

The legend of William Tell is one of a humble peasant, who sparked a revolution by refusing to kowtow to the tyrannical rule of the authorities. Is this the obvious reason behind Shostakovich integrating Rossini’s famous tune into his danse macabre? Or is it because it was his earliest musical memory? Maybe it is an allusion to the fact that it was one of Stalin’s favourites. With Shostakovich, it could easily be all three. But whatever the reason, its banality enforces the superficial jollity of the movement in a way that can make an audience feel uncomfortable if they giggled at its first appearance.

The second movement opens with a public and austere brass chorale alternating with a private and lyrical cello solo whose haunting beauty belies its 12-tone composition. The juxtaposition of the two is jarring and the perfect cadences that link them sound like a sarcastic attempt at integration. The sparsity of texture in so much of this movement, indeed in so much of the symphony as a whole, was as much a result of the painfully debilitating polio in Shostakovich’s right hand, as it was of the emotional desolation that he wanted to express. The practical difficulties of writing resulted in a simplicity of texture, hiding, or perhaps revealing, a complex world of untold secrets, ominous stillness, and unanswered questions.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, the bassoons’ rather overblown consecutive fifths that form a bridge into the third movement, recall from Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben a section originally entitled Adversaries of the Hero. The older composer’s jibes against his musical critics appear rather lightweight in the context of the sort of political opposition Shostakovich had to deal with. The humour in this scherzo is as absurd as it is grotesque: Alice in Wonderland as told by the brothers Grimm.

Shostakovich composed most of this symphony whilst lying in a hospital bed and it is not especially hard to imagine why an invalid composer might want to quote the music that Wagner writes for the impending death of a hero. Shostakovich uses the famous Fate motive from The Ring to herald the work’s finale and after a passing reference to the opening of Tristan und Isolde, the music dissolves into what sounds like the distant memory of a song by Glinka. Any shroud of mystery behind this seemingly enigmatic connection of events is lifted when one reads the song’s original text.

O do not tempt me without reason:

Affection lost cannot return.

How foreign to the broken-hearted

Are all the charms of bygone days!

I can no longer trust thy promise;

I have no longer faith in love;

And cannot suffer once again

To be deceived by phantom visions.

Do not augment my anguish mute;

Say not a word of former gladness.

And, kindly friend, o do not trouble

A convalescent’s dreaming rest.

I sleep: how sweet to me oblivion:

Forgotten all my youthful dreams!

Within my soul is naught but turmoil,

And love shall wake no more for thee.

The central section of the movement is a passacaglia, a dance that does not go anywhere, an unchanging bass line that imprisons the melodies above it. The symbolism of this form led Shostakovich to use it many times and it is apposite that it forms the climax of his last major work. The theme quotes the struggle and resistance of the Seventh Symphony, the rhythm of which in turn refers back to Beethoven’s Egmont Overture. Like William Tell, Egmont stood up to his oppressors and Shostakovich’s empathy with them both is understandable. Only at this point is the full power of the orchestra unleashed, playing all together for the first time in the piece. Its force is all the more shattering for having been delayed so long. But the intensity of this final protest takes its toll and the music collapses in exhaustion as a result. The end of the work evaporates into a mesmerizingly empty texture, a sound world ticking, time running out, leaving a hollow culture behind, the diminishing resistance of the Egmont theme, and the final toll of a bell, the bell with which the whole symphony began.

It is not exactly the ‘happy symphony’, Shostakovich claimed he had wanted to write. Like all autobiographies, it looks backwards, and it does so with an acceptance that is realistic and honest. Having contributed more symphonies to the standard modern concert repertoire than any other composer, his theme is one that continues to speak to many, a testimony to the realities of his life and time, and though the music can stand alone, one can tell that the importance of its message lies way beyond its notes. Like many Russian artists, Shostakovich felt a moral responsibility to speak the truth. He did not live long enough to witness the reforms of the last decade of the twentieth century. But though he would undoubtedly have welcomed both perestroika and glasnost, he may have been too realistic to welcome them as the panacea for which many hoped. Struggle has always been part of the Russian psyche. Given that nearly half of Russians today claim to have an essentially positive opinion of Stalin, and nearly a quarter would vote for him if they could, Shostakovich’s music needs to be heard more loudly than ever. Sometimes things change, only to remain the same. Listening to the similarities between Shostakovich’s first and last symphonies makes that abundantly clear.

* * * * *

En líneas generales he considerado que una lectura idónea de esta obra debe estar a cargo de una orquesta y director rusos, y ciertamente Maxim Shostakovich, Kondrashin y Rozhdestvensky tienen registros de referencia. De las grabaciones hechas en occidente se pueden considerar modélicas las de Kurt Sanderling (referente obligatorio), Neeme Järvi, Eugene Ormandy (quien la estrenó en los Estados Unidos) y especialmente Bernard Haitink, quien parece haber tenido un especial afecto por ésta obra, con al menos tres grandes registros en su discografía (la clásica, celebrada y galardonada grabación hecha para DECCA con la Fil. de Londres; una grabación recién editada por BRKlassik hecha con la Orquesta de la Radio Bávara; y finalmente una grabación hecha de un concierto en vivo con su orquesta del Concertgebouw, ya como director emeritus). Siendo las tres extraordinarias, tal vez me inclino por la de Amsterdam, por la sensación vívida del momento (atmósfera), el sentido de ocasión, su particular colorido y la disciplina y depuración con que se aprecian todas las fuerzas en éste gran momento musical. Es la grabación que les comparto para éste cierre, aunque todo coleccionista de respeto debería poseer también la de Maxim (la pionera), la de Ormandy, alguna de las de Sanderling y la de Järvi.

Deseo un fastuoso cierre de año a todos los lectores y seguidores de ARPEGIO, así como un 2026 lleno de los mejores augurios.

M-S.