Dimitri Shostakovich
SINFONIA Nr. 15, Op. 141
Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest Amsterdam
Dir: Bernard Haitink.
(RCO Live)
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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.
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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).
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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?).
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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.
©
Mark Wigglesworth 2014
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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.
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Deseo un fastuoso cierre de año a todos los lectores y seguidores de ARPEGIO, así como un 2026 lleno de los mejores augurios.
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