Classics XI - Program Notes

RUSSIAN BRILLIANCE

Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major, K. 467
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Voolf-gahng Ah-mah-day-oos Moh-tsart)
Born January 27, 1756 in Salzburg, Austria
Died December 5, 1791 in Vienna, Austria

Does anyone remember an arty 1967 film by Swedish director Bo Widerberg called Elvira Madigan? Set in an idyllic Danish forest in 1859, the film follows Sixten, a married Swedish army lieutenant gone AWOL, and the radiantly beautiful Elvira, a Danish tightrope walker who has abandoned her job with a traveling circus. Together they have no use for the banal distractions of the real world; they live only for each other, sharing simple pleasures, spontaneous intimacy, and a seemingly unlimited supply of wild berries, wine, and leisure time. As the serene Andante of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 permeates the soundtrack, Sixten and Elvira chase butterflies (and each other) through peaceful meadows. The movie practically oozes with romantic perfection.

Well, Elvira Madigan may have deservedly dropped into the black hole reserved for gushy 60's tearjerkers, but Mozart's beautiful piano concerto lives on. He wrote it as he rode the crest of his greatest triumphs as a composer and performer at the peak of his most prosperous season in imperial Vienna. It was a vehicle to display his exuberant virtuosity at a concert for his own benefit in the Royal Imperial National Court Theater on March 10, 1785. The ink was hardly dry on the concerto when he played it before a full house with a profit (proudly reported by his father Leopold, who was visiting his son in Vienna at the time) of 559 florins.

The first movement, perhaps reflecting Mozart's feeling of prosperity, strides forth with the assured self-confidence of a musical man on the make. The quiet, march-like opening leads to a joyous statement of the principal theme in the full orchestra. The trumpets, usually limited to fanfares, get to introduce the lyrical second theme, then the piano enters with a little cadenza and presents even more melodies until Mozart has a total of eight independent themes with which to build a mosaic of varied moods, colors and bold harmonic digressions. The movement closes, not with a bang, but with a sly, whispered recollection of the opening. The otherworldly serenity of the Andante places it in the class of dreamlike slow movements that Mozart loved to write. Muted violins begin, singing a poetic song over a pulsing accompaniment with striding bass pizzicatos. The piano takes up the tune and embroiders it with romantic harmonic shifts, never straying far from the wistful, floating languor of the opening. The finale is a high-spirited rondo built around a dancing refrain stated first by the orchestra. The light, bubbling humor of Mozart's comic operas pervades the spirit of this movement which closes, after an extensive solo cadenza, with a brilliant coda featuring sweeping scales for the piano.

Symphony No. 5 In D Minor, Op. 47 (1937)
Dmitri Shostakovich (Di-mee-tree Shos-teh-ko-vich)
Born September 25, 1906 in St. Petersburg, Russia
Died August 9, 1975 in St. Petersburg

"This is not music; this is high-voltage nervous electricity." - A listener at the premiere of the Fifth Symphony

On January 28, 1936, an editorial was published in Pravda, the official organ of the Soviet Communist state. The editorial was titled "Muddle Instead of Music" and was understood to have been dictated by Joseph Stalin after he attended a performance of Dmitri Shostakovich's popularly acclaimed opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Stalin was not pleased: "The listener is shocked from the first moment of the opera by an intentionally dissonant, muddled flood of sounds. Snatches of melody, embryos of musical phrases drown, escape, and drown once more in crashing, gnashing and screeching...all this is coarse, primitive and vulgar. The music quacks, grunts and growls, and it suffocates itself in order to express the amatory scenes as graphically as possible. This is playing at abstruse things, which could end very badly."

The implied threat in that last line was enough to chill the blood of anyone living in Russia during the Stalin era. Things "ended very badly" for untold millions of people whose actions or whose simple existence displeased Joseph Stalin. It was a time when terror raged across the land, when purges of immense proportions were killing millions and consigning millions more to a new country within a country: the "Gulag Archipelago" into which people disappeared never to be seen again. Stalin, shrewd enough to understand the political power of art, was unhesitating in destroying individual artists who did not cooperate in his vision of Socialist Realism and create optimistic works of art that promoted the agenda of the Soviet State. Shostakovich and everyone around him were certain that he would be arrested. He feared for the safety of his wife and his newborn daughter. Friends kept their distance, afraid to be sucked into the darkness with him. He kept a small suitcase packed and ready. They usually came at night to make the arrests, so he didn't sleep. He lay listening, waiting in the dark.

For the next two decades, until Stalin's death in 1953, Shostakovich saw himself as a hostage in his own country. The fear might increase or decrease, but it never disappeared. He was a condemned man, a disgraced artist and Russia had become an enormous prison from which there was no escape. Stalin stopped short of having the composer arrested, but Shostakovich, fearing reprisal, canceled the premiere of his Fourth Symphony after ten rehearsals, lest its dissonances and "formalist" complexities anger Stalin even more. He wrote next to nothing for more than a year, then began work on the symphony he ironically subtitled "A Soviet Artist's Reply to Just Criticism." The Fifth Symphony is by no means a surrender or a groveling submission to the forced optimism of Socialist Realism and the faceless bureaucrats who imposed it. The subtitle is ironic because Shostakovich did not capitulate, did not crank out bland, mindless politically correct music. The symphony is a complex, intense and essentially tragic work, and its first performance in November of 1937 was a turning point in the artistic life of Dmitri Shostakovich. The cream of Soviet society packed the hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic, most of them expecting a sensational scandal that would seal the composer's fate forever. They gossiped and joked, but when the music began, many wept openly, and there was a pandemonium of cheers and applause when the last notes sounded. They wept in response to the essential tragedy of Russia that they felt expressed in the music. Shostakovich's work was the effort of an honest and thoughtful artist working under conditions of great moral stress, and the symphony made it clear that he spoke for their generation, that, despite what Pravda said, he was their composer.

Shostakovich may justly be called the last great symphonist. For him the symphony was the ideal form in which to express the emotions and ideas that possessed him, and in the Fifth Symphony he completely absorbed and synthesized for the first time the influence of three great modern composers - Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Gustav Mahler - to create his own unmistakable individual style. Most characteristic of Shostakovich are the symphony's straining, seeking melodies. Themes grow throughout the work, always creating new branches and giving it a unified, integrated quality, despite the huge, diverse size of its symphonic canvas. The first movement begins with a dramatic, declamatory theme in the strings which is characterized by wide leaps and abrupt rhythms. The mood is tragic and bleak as the violins sing a long, expressive melody over a pulsing accompaniment. The violas repeat this, then the piano, cellos and basses pick up the tempo and the horns introduce a grim marching tune in their lowest register. This builds inexorably in speed and intensity until the snare drum and timpani pound out a maniacal march-rhythm and the brass and woodwinds blare out the tune in a passage that reminds us of the demonic marches in Mahler's symphonies. The opening declamatory theme returns in the strings and winds, now speeded up to crazed intensity while the brass play the second theme against it. This builds to a huge climax as the whole orchestra plays the opening theme in unison, after which the intensity decreases and the flute and first horn quietly play the second theme over the same pulsing accompaniment, but now transformed to the warmer major mode. The movement fades away in an ending whose seeming tranquillity is tinged with sorrow, and the celesta adds a chilling color to the final bars as the trombones and timpani softly play the rhythm of the ominous opening theme.

The second movement is a grotesque waltz that recalls Mahler and Prokofiev at their most macabre. The main melody is a parody of a theme from the Fourth Symphony that had been suppressed to avoid angering Stalin. So the entire movement is a subtly ironic thumbing of Shostakovich's nose at the political and musical establishment. Shostakovich's music often contained sarcastic hidden jokes that he knew the official censors would be too dense to understand. Under the surface gayness and humor of this movement is a message of anger and despair, relieved only briefly by an innocent little waltz-tune in the solo violin that seems sadly out of place among the distorting mirrors of this grotesque fun-house. The third movement is a passionate, lyrical threnody for divided strings and woodwinds. It builds in rhapsodic surges to a powerfully tragic climax in which the xylophone doubles the first violins with its piercing sound at the top of their register. The ending is quiet as Shostakovich, in a stroke of inspired orchestration, has the harp and celesta play a magical new sonority under high tremolos in the violins.

In an article written before the premiere Shostakovich stated: "The finale resolves the tragedy and tension of the earlier movements on a joyous, optimistic note." This may have satisfied the Soviet bureaucracy, but the joy and gaiety of this movement is, again, purely on the surface. It is a strained jubilation that Shostakovich later described in this way: "I never thought about any exultant finales, for what exultation could there be? I think it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat...it's as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, 'Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,' and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, 'Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.' Fadeyev wrote in his diary that the finale of the Fifth is irreparable tragedy. He must have felt it with his Russian alcoholic soul." Remember that the Fifth Symphony was composed and performed in 1937 at the height of the Stalinist mass terror, and the premiere, at which many of the audience members wept, took place in Leningrad, a city that had suffered particularly harsh repression. One Soviet composer said that the symphony was a self-portrait of Shostakovich feverishly seeking the exit from the labyrinth, only to find himself in the finale trapped in "the gas chamber of ideas." The movement is full of strident, nervous energy, with ideas tumbling over each other and the timpani and brass being given dominant roles. The ending is blood-stirring and triumphant, but in a very personal way. Shostakovich here is signifying his victory over his personal fear, and his triumph as an artist over the terror and intimidation of the Soviet state. The last pages are a stunning, defiant gesture: the brass shout out stentorian chords under incessantly repeated "A's" in the strings and woodwinds. These "A's" are Shostakovich's symbol of the "I" the individual self, and he is saying here both to the faceless bureaucrats and to his fellow Russians that no amount of repression and terror can conquer the individual soul if one chooses to resist.

The ultimate irony, perhaps, lies in the eventual effort by the Soviet establishment to co-opt the Fifth Symphony and transform it into a simpleminded paean to the Stalinist vision. Alexis Tolstoy wrote with the greatest seriousness in an official communist publication: "Here we have the 'Symphony of Socialism.' It begins with the Largo of the masses working underground, an accellerando corresponds to the subway system; the Allegro in its turn symbolizes gigantic factory machinery and its victory over nature. The Adagio represents the synthesis of Soviet culture, science and art. The Scherzo reflects the athletic life of the happy inhabitants of the Union. As for the Finale, it is the image of the gratitude and the enthusiasm of the masses." Igor Stravinsky characterized this fatuous analysis as "a consummate masterpiece of bad taste, mental infirmity and complete disorientation in the recognition of the fundamental values of life."

Program notes Copyright © 2007 by Matthew Naughtin