Shostakovich’s Broken Promises
Shostakovich was only 11 at the time of the Bolshevik coup in 1917, and died in 1975, sixteen years before the Soviet Union followed him to the grave. Unlike the returned émigré, Prokofiev, or the exiles Stravinsky and Rachmaninov, he belonged to Soviet musical culture for all of his career, working within its institutions and (largely) following its rules. His style changed as the country changed, so that his work was often viewed as a kind of musical witness to the Soviet Union’s turbulent history. Soviet artists were often styled as ‘workers on the cultural front’, in which case Shostakovich was a Stakhanovite ‘shock-worker’, in the obvious sense of being very prolific, but also in the sense of issuing ‘work-in-progress’ announcements to the press that promised much more than he could deliver.

This exaggeration was an inevitable product of a system that offered composers substantial advances for each work in the pipeline, without any penalty for failure to deliver. Shostakovich learnt how to game the system by promising works based on whatever political theme artists were being exhorted to take up. Some of these pieces were mentioned once in the press, and never heard of again; others were completed, but in a form that had little to do with the original description.

The two symphonies on this disc, Nos 6 and 9, are both cases of the ‘broken promise’ that failed to live up to the description. No 6 was supposed to be a grand symphony with choruses glorifying Lenin; Shostakovich had even advertised his choice of texts, and said that he would be sure to include folk-music elements that were much encouraged. No 9 was projected to be another grand symphony with choruses of praise to the Soviet victory in World War II. In both cases the evidence shows that the initial intention was sincere; in the case of No 9, the sketches that prove this only turned up recently. The finished symphonies could hardly have been further from the promised works.

Shostakovich tended to stay true to the twists and turns of his inspiration: unusually among modern composers, he wrote like Mozart, with great fluency and a reluctance to revise afterwards. But he then had to face the critics, whose expectations had been shaped by the initial promises. Baffled, they searched in vain for traces of the ‘Lenin’ and ‘victory’ themes, and then castigated the composer for his egotism and his alienation from all that is Soviet, virtuous and healthy. Some generously strained to hear a lament for Lenin’s death in the funereal first movement of No 6, and others a joyful relief at the end of the war in No 9. Baulking at the strangely unbalanced three-movement design of No 6 (“a slow movement, then two scherzos”), they were still more perturbed by the farcical gestures of No 9, which allegedly included an “American march”. Shostakovich preferred not to answer his critics, waiting for the complaints to die down until the time came when audiences could enjoy the symphonies for their own sake.
Marina Frolova-Walker

Symphony No 6 in B minor Op 54
After Stalin denounced the opera Lady Macbeth, effectively leaving Shostakovich’s very existence hanging in the balance, the composer recovered some favour with his cryptic Symphony No 5—an act of defiance disguised as a gesture of compliance. The composer’s next symphony would go deeper still, and on rather more ambiguous terms.

Shostakovich informed his comrades that he was working on a grand symphony in homage to Lenin. What Leningrad heard on 21 November 1939 was certainly not that. The new symphony lacked not only the expected chorus and soloists, but also any sense of grandeur. The Russian folk elements the composer had promised were absent.

Echoing his distracting comments on the piano concerto, Shostakovich eventually justified the score as ‘an effort to convey the mood of spring, joy and life.’ It’s easier to read its three movements as conveying, respectively, evening loneliness, nocturnal nightmares and the terror of daylight in a regime founded on fakery. The music is chillingly sparse in both material and texture. It commandeers the hymns and marches that were the soundtrack to life in Soviet Russia to depict not so much the joy of spring as the vulgarity of state-imposed optimism.

Most unsettling of all is the symphony’s bipolar structure. The opening movement, titled simply ‘Slowly’, takes up more than half the symphony’s space despite proving notably unnerving in its lack of action. It is founded almost entirely on the interval of a minor third (think the first two notes of ‘Hey Jude’, but that’s where the comparison ends). We hear two waves of expression, visited by a solo cor anglais telling of tragedy, and a funeral march punctuated by strikes on kettledrums. A cryptic flute solo does little to calm the nerves (some hear this as an image of Stalin’s hypnotic influence over his people).

The mood changes in the ‘Brisk’ second movement, a fairy-tale apparently powered by aggression. Shostakovich’s orchestration is typically imaginative, as the pandemonium of massed shrieking woodwinds meets brass artillery and capering xylophone. No single image maintains its presence for long enough to prove tangible. Truly, this is the stuff of nightmares.

The ‘Fast’ final movement is dressed in triumphant garb but betrays something altogether more plastic. A deranged circus march eventually runs the symphony it into the buffers. Some say Shostakovich was reacting to the structural distinctiveness of the first three movements of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 6 of nearly 50 years earlier. But it’s hard not to hear, in this score, a reflection on how, after a long winter, spring really felt in Soviet Russia.
Andrew Mellor

Symphony No 9 in E flat major Op 70
In 1941, Nazi forces surrounded Shostakovich’s beloved city of Leningrad and began a siege lasting over 870 days. The composer’s response? To write a symphony. This was his Seventh: a depiction of the suffering of his fellow Russians and, in the end, their triumph over evil. The piece was a sensation and the struggling musicians of Leningrad gave performance in August 1942, relaying the music through loud speakers to the German troops stationed around the city. Two years later, Shostakovich’s Eighth was premiered in Moscow. This was a far bleaker work with no optimistic conclusion; but its scale and scope makes clear how seriously Shostakovich took the Symphony as a major public statement. So it’s hardly surprising that the composer’s Ninth was hotly anticipated, particularly when Shostakovich had promised that it would be ‘about the greatness of the Russian people, about our Red Army liberating our native land from the enemy.’

The intention to create a victory work propelled Shostakovich through the early months of 1945, as he busied himself with a grand first movement and plans to involve solo singers and a chorus. But by April his confidence had faltered. Feeling the pressure of creating his own Ninth—the long shadow of Beethoven looming behind him—and seemingly doubtful that a shout of triumph would be the correct response to all that had passed, he shelved the score. By the time he returned to it that summer, it was a different piece altogether: no singers, no programme, no shouts of victory. Instead, Shostakovich explained, ‘in the Ninth a transparent, pellucid, and bright mood predominates.’

And that’s clear from the very first bars of the opening Allegro: this is a bright and breezy beginning (complete with whistling piccolo), even if there is something unsettling in some of the brasher entries from brass and percussion. The second movement is more wistful, the writing chamber-like and full of solos for the wind players. And then we are thrown through the final three movements without a break. The frantic pedalling of the brief Presto rapidly runs out of steam and strident brass takes over; this Largo, in turn, fades away until only a lone bassoon remains—and leads us into the raucous finale.

Critics were divided. Some found it a crashing disappointment, a mockery of the national mood of celebration; others praised its lightness. Audiences loved it, and at the premiere the last three movements were all encored. And despite subsequent attacks by colleagues, Shostakovich never apologised for choosing to write this Symphony to mark the end of the war.
Katy Hamilton

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