2015 Program Notes, Book 1 |
47
Friday and Saturday, June 19 and 20, 2015
SYMPHONY NO. 6 IN B MINOR, OP. 54 (1939)
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 6 is scored for piccolo, two
flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, E-flat clarinet,
bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three
trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp,
celesta and strings. The performance time is 30 minutes.
The Grant Park Orchestra first performed this Symphony on
September 3, 1964, with Walter Hendl conducting.
Shostakovich was a boy of ten, and already composing, when the Russian
Revolution erupted in 1917. As early as 1924, he considered writing a musical tribute
to the great hero of that uprising, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and made several starts on
such a work during the 1930s. In 1936, however, came the scathing condemnation
of his opera
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
, a punishing attack upon his modernist
tendencies which he sought to redress with the Fifth Symphony. The success of the
Symphony brought him letters of congratulations and advice from across the Soviet
Union, most of which encouraged him to continue writing in the affirmative spirit of
the new work. In the Moscow journal
Soviet Art
of November 11, 1938, Shostakovich
announced that he was undertaking a monumental choral symphony to express
“through the medium of sound the immortal image of Lenin as a great son of the
Russian people and a great leader and teacher of the masses”; he proposed to
draw the texts from the verses of Caucasian folk and peasant poets, as well as from
Vladimir Mayakovsky’s
Ode to Lenin
.
Interest in Shostakovich’s new piece ran high, and he must have felt some
reluctance in giving notice that he had to put off the “Lenin” symphony because
“embodying in art the gigantic figure of this leader is an incredibly difficult task.” (It
was not until the Twelfth Symphony of 1961, titled “The Year 1917,” that Shostakovich
finally completed his musical tribute to the memory of Lenin). The work that instead
appeared in 1939 was a disappointment to the critics and listeners who were
expecting from Shostakovich a panoramic composition for chorus and orchestra,
since the new Symphony No. 6 was modest in dimensions, lacking in extra-musical
associations and, by turns, stern and satiric in mood. The Symphony was paid little
attention when it was premiered in November 1939 by the Leningrad Philharmonic
and repeated during a two-month “Festival of Soviet Music” in Moscow the
following month, being overshadowed at that event by the success of patriotic
cantatas by Prokofiev (
Alexander Nevsky
), Shaporin (
On Kulikov Field
) and Koval
(
Emelian Pugatchov
). The Sixth Symphony, however, has since come to be regarded
as one of Shostakovich’s greatest achievements in the genre.
The Symphony’s unusual structure—the customary fast opening movement is
omitted, so that the work consists of only a vast slow first movement, a scherzo and
a whirling finale—caused some consternation to those looking for programmatic
“meaning” behind the notes. The critic Ivan Martinov felt that the first movement
represented the “dreary life of the people in Czarist times” and the later movements
“their joy under the Soviet regime.” In his study of Shostakovich’s symphonies,
Hugh Ottaway found the
Largo
expressive not of patriotic pictures, however, but
of the composer’s “capacity for tragic emotion, and for inner aspiration, rather than
anything more concrete.” Shostakovich himself said when the Symphony was new
that it was “an effort to convey the mood of spring, joy and life,” but this statement
has little to do with the spirit of the music, and was seemingly just a sop that he tossed
to the operators of the Soviet propaganda mills. Even in his purported memoirs
(
Testimony
, 1979), he had almost nothing to say about the Sixth Symphony, other
