REGISTER NEW USERLOST PASSWORD? WELCOME, Logout

Two Russian Masters of the Symphony

Classical Corner Featured — 20 August 2012

By

Two Russian Masters of the Symphony

Perhaps we are fortunate that two of the greatest symphonic composers of the 20th century were born and died in Mother Russia. There they suffered privations and harassments of such intensity that many lesser souls would have fled the country or abandoned their art entirely, or both.

Instead Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) and his younger colleague Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) turned out one masterpiece after another. Together their work makes up a disproportionately large share of the most significant, engaging orchestral music of the era.

Two recording projects now underway will encourage everyone to give them another listen. These projects are being directed by fine conductors—Marin Alsop for Prokofiev and Vasily Petrenko for Shostakovich—and the discs and downloads emanate from Naxos, which means that you can acquire whole sets without auctioning off Grandma’s jewelry.

Let’s begin with Prokofiev. Childhood spent as musical prodigy? Check. First works generated heaps of acclaim and criticism? Check. Went abroad to build his reputation? Check. But here’s where the story gets interesting: after stints in Chicago and Paris, where his spikiest modern music was applauded, he began a decade’s worth of return visits to Russia, where he gave concerts, scored films, and in 1936 finally took a Moscow apartment with his young family. In Russia he could never again be certain that his edgiest music would be well-received. He began to write more often in a warm post-Romantic manner, for larger ensembles and in traditional Russian genres like ballet. Did Prokofiev undertake this transformation because of the well-documented political pressure placed on him by the Stalin regime? Or had Romanticism—rich melodies, lushly scored—always been lurking in his heart, just waiting for a chance to speak?

prokofiev time Two Russian Masters of the Symphony

Cover of Time, Nov. 19, 1945, for the American premiere of Symphony No. 5

Dissonance never completely disappeared from Prokofiev’s palette: witness his Sixth Symphony, which, as the late Michael Steinberg wryly noted, is “not exactly soft.” Nor had the composer banished Romantic accessibility from his vocabulary even during his most radical early years. After all, he wrote the lovely opening melody of the Violin Concerto No. 1 in 1915, in the midst of a love affair. When the concerto was finally premiered in Paris in 1923, on the same bill with Stravinsky’s icy Octet for Winds, it flopped. Too gooey for the Parisians, apparently, but not for Prokofiev.

Where should you begin your survey of the Prokofiev symphonies? I recommend the Fifth, a well-loved work that incorporates all four “basic lines” that the composer recognized as vital to his lifework: “classical,” “modern,” “motoric,” and “lyrical.” It also exemplifies Prokofiev’s strengths and weaknesses as a symphonic composer. His creative process seems to have been essentially dramatic or pictorial, hence his success with opera, film scores, and ballet. But the symphony is a genre in which structure of a more abstract nature is needed. That structure has to sustain a narrative—must convincingly present a succession of expressive gestures—without the aid of a sung libretto or dancers acting out a scenario. It’s a matter of musical unities and relationships. Themes that work quite well in a film or ballet may play out as episodic or disjointed in a purely symphonic context. (This is one reason that listening to a film soundtrack is seldom as rewarding as viewing the film itself.)

For his symphonies, Prokofiev often found himself adapting material that had originated in a ballet, a discarded operatic sketch, or something similar. Although the Fifth also contains music that originated elsewhere, it is dominated by related, organically unfolding themes that seem like a direct expression of the composer’s stated intention: to write music “glorifying the human spirit . . . praising the free and happy man—his strength, his generosity, and the purity of his soul.” Undoubtedly this statement also fulfilled Soviet dicta for politically appropriate wartime music.

The first movement launches immediately into its primary theme, a lyrical yet tension-filled rising line given first as an unharmonized statement for woodwinds and then in a series of richer, more fully harmonized versions from the full orchestra:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

After further orchestral ruminations on that theme, Prokofiev introduces the secondary theme; it is clearly a member of the same family, even more lyrical than the first. This new theme expands more quickly and leads to a closing peroration:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

That closing motif, or something very like it, will return in other movements. Prokofiev offsets these unifying actions by continually refreshing the orchestration and harmonization of the main material. Here is that first theme again, at the beginning of the first movement’s development:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

And here it is again “after the storm,” transformed again and now signaling the recapitulation:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

If the first and third movements illustrate Prokofiev’s “lyrical” bent, the riveting second-movement scherzo neatly demonstrates his “motoric” side. Compared with my reference recordings of this symphony—Koussevitsky, Leinsdorf, Gergiev —Alsop’s rendition of the scherzo times out about a minute longer. It’s not that she pokes along in the relentless outer sections; they are as full of snap as anyone’s. Rather, she takes exceptional care in setting up a contrast between the lyrical middle part and the driving pace of the surrounding territory. In her interpretation, the intervening materials offer a true respite, not merely a thematic change-up. That brings the scherzo into a more meaningful relationship with the meditative character of movements one and three.

Prokofiev’s drive to unify the symphony also helps explain the reappearance of the first-movement primary theme as the finale gets underway. He brings it back in an especially poignant scoring for four-part cellos:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

And then we’re off, galloping to an affirmative conclusion that largely washes away the hazards and struggles of the earlier movements. Very Beethovenian, that. It probably also met the requirements of Commissar Zhdanov and the Politburo for “socialist realism,” i.e., Official Optimism, i.e., a happy ending.

I do not always find this part especially persuasive. To some extent the conductor is faced with a dilemma: either integrate the thrust of the finale with the mood of the preceding music and thus rein in some of its “animal spirits,” or else go hell-for-leather, which raises the risk of producing caricature, especially toward the very end. There Prokofiev really lets fly—just listen:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

As the music reaches a climax, the orchestration becomes increasingly shrill, loaded with percussive punctuations and shrieking woodwind figures, and then . . . a quieter passage, but not without anxiety as the trumpets enter, low-ranged and nasal, suggesting residual danger, doubt, or (worse yet!) some vulgar, naysaying Party official voicing his displeasure. A moment later the symphony’s seeming high spirits bubble quickly up again, dealing a triumphant final blow. Wham, game over. Yet one cannot help asking: Did he mean it?

That sort of freighted question comes up much more frequently in discussions of Shostakovich’s symphonic legacy. I don’t want to end our Prokofiev talk with it. Certainly audiences in 1945 thought they knew what he meant: the end of the war renewed people’s hope for the future. Prokofiev’s new symphony—the first he had written in nearly fifteen years—expressed that hope within a recognizable existential context. It also happened to be superlative music, which never hurts.

marinalsop 2274889b 300x187 Two Russian Masters of the Symphony

Marin Alsop. Photo from The Telegraph (UK).

Marin Alsop gets it. Her reading, with the São Paulo SO, comes closer to realizing this great work’s strengths than any performance I’ve heard for a long time. Here it is paired with The Year 1941, a brief three-movement “symphonic suite” written as an earlier response to Russia’s war effort, and widely criticized for being “insufficiently developed” (Shostakovich) or perhaps insufficiently profound (that from the official critics). Well, it would have made good film music. In fact some of it found its way into a film, reminding us just how gifted Prokofiev was as a “visual” composer. Update: Naxos has now released Alsop’s Prokofiev Fifth as a high-resolution Blu-Ray audio disc (NBD0031). This is the version you want. It’s smoother, deeper, punchier, and altogether more alive than the CD or downloads.

Alsop is just beginning her trek through the Prokofiev symphonies, but Vasily Petrenko and his Royal Liverpool forces have been chipping away at the Shostakovich cycle, a much larger and more significant corpus, for some time now.  His latest release couples No. 2 “To October” (1927), one of Shostakovich’s earliest works, with No. 15 (1971), his last symphony. The performances are very good, and the recorded sound is possibly even better than that furnished for Alsop. Another reviewer has praised the “punch, presence, and ambience” provided by Petrenko’s engineers, and I heartily second that endorsement. Dip into his previous Shostakovich issues almost anywhere (see list below) and you will discover a consistent combination of musical vitality and profound understanding. These are fine performances, well worth acquiring and savoring.

shostakovich.axd 238x300 Two Russian Masters of the Symphony

Shostakovich. Drawing by Maxine Frost.

But let’s start with Nos. 2 and 15, which serve as a decent introduction to Shostakovich’s symphonic output if you have never gone there. Even if you know some Shostakovich—probably the Fifth, perhaps the Ninth or Tenth—you may not have added these to your collection yet. They illustrate two important facets of this composer’s artistic anatomy: (1) the centrality of topical-political-social “message,” and (2) biting wit, satire, and sardonic humor. Shostakovich is often most effective when he juxtaposes these two aspects.

In this regard he somewhat resembles his hero Gustav Mahler. Like Mahler, he sought to create not just movements, but entire worlds. And like Mahler again, that sometimes meant a jarring juxtaposition of the crude and the sublime, the transcendent and the trivial. Shostakovich’s personal experiences magnified the significance of these elements in his music, although they also tended to confine his interests to the topical and parochial: Mahler would never have written a symphony depicting the siege of Leningrad or a cantata celebrating the reforestation of the Steppes.

Shostakovich received extraordinary acclaim as a teenaged symphonist, followed in 1934 by the popular success of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. But after that he underwent a horrific baptism-by-fire when the opera incurred the wrath of high-ranking Party members. Stalin himself reportedly attended a performance, came away offended by the story, characters, and music, and saw to it that the composer’s standing in Soviet artistic circles suffered nearly irreparable damage.

For the rest of his life Shostakovich rode a very public see-saw, falling in and out of favor at the whims of the functionaries who controlled artistic life in the Soviet Union. In the West, he came to be seen as (in Robert Layton’s words) “the soulful, sensitive, somewhat neurotic introvert quailing under the whiplash of Zhdanov’s philistine musical philosophy.” In the ‘60s and ‘70s, however, and especially with the publication in 1979 of Testimony, a book purporting to consist of clandestine conversations with the composer, another image began to emerge: that of a valiant protest singer, a man who could cleverly encode even the simplest musical materials with hidden, scathing denunciations of the politicians and bureaucrats who had made his life and that of his fellow Russians so miserable for so long. Even Shostakovich’s most innocuous music apparently carried double meanings, encrypted messages meant only for the ears of those who well and truly understood him.

Shostakovich 2 15 8572708 Two Russian Masters of the Symphony

This “new” Shostakovich dominated many discussions during the ‘80s and ‘90s, and the talk has not yet died down. Nor is it ever likely to be placed in realistic context, for like all good conspiracy theories, every refutation of its mythology can also be taken as proof of the enemy’s capacity for deceit—not to mention further confirmation of the composer’s cleverness at hiding his messages. (We don’t have space here to go into chapter and verse, so I invite those who are interested to pursue the story here.)

Back to No. 2: After the favorable reception of his first symphony, Shostakovich sought to sustain momentum by immediately drafting two more big works, of which No. 2 is by far the more interesting. In March 1926 he received a commission from the Propaganda Division of the State Music Publishers Section to write something commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. He quickly suggested a formal outline for a work to close with a rousing chorus, introduced if possible by a factory hooter. (Back in the day, that must have seemed like a daring Machine-Age touch.) The Division chose an “official” proletarian poet, Alexander Bezïmensky, to provide a text—one which Shostakovich later criticized in withering terms—and the symphony was premiered in Leningrad in November 1927.

Shortly after its first performances this work essentially dropped out of sight. Hearing Petrenko’s ardent new recording, one has to ask why that happened. Did its radical modernism—speaking musically, not politically—make it invisible, once Socialist Realism and the demand for an accessible “people’s music” became the aesthetic law of the land in the 1930s? We forget that Russia remained relatively hospitable and “open” during the 1920s, and that the music of Berg, Hindemith, Stravinsky, and others was played there. In Leningrad, Shostakovich took in a performance of Berg’s expressionist opera Wozzeck and was deeply impressed. Its tragic drowning scene undoubtedly inspired the murky ascending swirl of string counterpoint that opens Symphony No. 2. Listen:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

After this, the struggle intensifies, bringing more sharply defined polyphony.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Finally, with the entrance of the workers’ voices, triumph is at hand. “October! It is the herald of a new dawn. October! It is labor, joy, and song.”

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

In spite of its trite text and official designation as propaganda, this Shostakovich symphony retains considerable power. Writing forty years ago, Layton noted these works’ “brashness, bombast, and vulgarity,” but also their “lofty feelings and sense of spiritual desolation.” All are present in Symphony No. 2, bringing it within hailing distance of Layton’s claim that these symphonies, at their best, share the “epic panoramic sweep of the great Russian novels.”

To be entirely accurate, that would also have to include the dark comedy embedded in so much Russian literature. Two glockenspiel chimes begin Symphony No. 15, and then we hear nimble lines from solo flute and bassoon. It sounds almost Haydnesque. But the music wanders, abruptly changing direction and creating a sense of psychological instability. And then:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Why the Rossini sample? It comes back several times. If you subscribe to the hidden-message school of thought, you will find Andrew Porter’s theory attractive:

Would it be too fanciful to suggest that, whereas William Tell was an active fighter for freedom, a musician—Shostakovich now feels—has the power to make only small, ineffectual gestures?

In other words, is this seemingly trivial, playful insertion a lament, made doubly meaningful by its very triviality?

The work is haunted by other quotations. As it assumes an increasingly bleak outlook, they become more and more significant. In a lengthy Adagio, Shostakovich recalls the Adagio of his own Symphony No. 11, which took the massacre of “Bloody Sunday,” January 9, 1905, as its subject. A mocking scherzo follows in which the composer appears to take his own name (spelled out in music as DSCH, i.e., D-E-flat-C-B) in vain. The work ends in another Adagio, this one twenty minutes long, full of quotation and allusion. First, Wagner: the Fate motif as heard in the “annunciation of death” scene in Act 2 of Die Walküre. We should recall the words Brünnhilde sings then:

Only those destined for death / Can see me; / Whose gaze finds me / Must part from the light of life. / On the field of battle / I appear to noble heroes . . . / I choose, and they must follow me.

Then, the barest possible allusion to the Desire motif from Tristan, an ascending sixth followed by a falling second. Death and Desire have taken the stage. But Shostakovich leads the Desire motif without pause into his own willfully banal, uncertainly shaped melody. This was my life, he tells us. It’s not Wagnerian, not a bit. Listen:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The music eventually progresses to a powerfully voiced passacaglia that may be derived—yet another quotation?—from the “war” theme in the “Leningrad” Symphony. That builds to a relentless, crushing climax, after which the movement ends, slowly, with wistful references to earlier material including the Wagner themes and the composer’s self-referential extension of them, plus the no-longer sprightly flute tune and bell chimes of the first movement. Taken altogether it makes a deeply moving farewell to that most public of all instrumental genres, the symphony. The Romantics saw the symphony as an expression of the whole community. Shostakovich honored that vision with a lifetime’s work. But here he was surely speaking of one life only, his own.

There is much more that could be said. The best thing is to listen. Below, a “starter list” of other important Shostakovich symphonies:

Symphony No. 5. As “a Soviet artist’s creative response to justified criticism,” this powerful work rehabilitated Shostakovich’s image with the Party and the Russian public in 1937 and sustained the composer’s reputation through decades of misunderstanding and neglect. Bernstein’s 1959 recording was an international triumph and remains worth hearing; there are many others. Petrenko’s reading (coupled, like Bernstein’s NYP reissue, with No. 9) received unusually mixed reviews but has been staunchly supported by the hidden-message faction. Naxos 8.572167.

Symphony No. 10. Layton regards this as “undoubtedly [Shostakovich’s] masterpiece.” For one thing, the finale is wholly successful, musically well integrated with the rest of the work and avoiding the ambiguity or coarseness of the conclusions he fashioned for some earlier works, including the Fifth. Petrenko is masterful here; Naxos 8.572461.

Symphony No. 8. Petrenko, Naxos 8.572392; Andris Nelsons, C Major Blu-Ray 710004 (see the video clip below). The middle piece in Shostakovich’s trilogy of wartime symphonies. Essentially an anti-war statement, deeply pessimistic. Like Mahler, Shostakovich did not find the classic four-movement symphonic forms always useful, and this work, like several others, begins with a spacious slow movement. Written in 1943, preceded by the “Leningrad” Symphony (1941), now usually dismissed as bombastic and shallow, and followed in 1945 by

Symphony No. 9. Short, light, and humorous. An “anti-Ninth,” not at all what the public or the Party had in mind as a proper celebration of the Russian victory. Banned by the Soviet authorities in 1948, it eventually became one of Shostakovich’s most popular works. Bernstein recorded it twice; besides the CD reissue that couples this with his incandescent Fifth, look for a DVD that includes the underrated Sixth, featuring Lenny and the Vienna Philharmonic at the top of their game.

Featured Image (at the top of this column): Ilya Repin (1844-1930), “17 October 1905.”

In preparing this column I gratefully relied on the work of Robert Layton, in The Symphony 2: Elgar to the Present Day (Penguin, 1967), and that of Michael Steinberg, in The Symphony: A Listener’s Guide (Oxford, 1995). The most evenhanded, accurate English-language biography of the composer is Laurel Fay’s Shostakovich: A Life (Oxford, 2000).

email Two Russian Masters of the Symphony Forward to a friend and help us engage more readers

Get new and fresh stories like this each morning by joining the folks reading Paul's Posts. Click here

Related Articles

Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Pat Metheney Best of Winter 2013 Bobby Lyle

Share

About Author

Lawrence Schenbeck

Lawrence Schenbeck lives in Atlanta Georgia, is into high-end and has a doctorate in music performance and literature. "I have spent most of my grownup years either teaching, conducting, or writing about music. A lot of that writing was directed at other professionals, but some was meant for civilians. I always tried not to sound pompous (that was hard) and not to condescend to my readers. Back in the days when I gave pre-concert lectures for the Atlanta Symphony, I would invariably meet audience members whose knowledge of concert music far exceeded mine in certain respects. Whether you're casually exploring classical music or passionately committed to it, I hope this column will be useful."

(7) Readers Comments

  1. Soundminded

    August 21, 2012 at 5:18 pm

    As always Lawrence your postings are interesting. I say this even though it now seems to me I invariably disagree with them. You provoke me….to think! :-) That’s good. It helps me understand not just what I like and don’t like but why, which is much harder than just saying “because I just do or don’t.” I like to wait several days to consider what I say. After all, each time I demonstrate just how little I actually know about music. That should be done carefully.

    Last time I brought up the dichotomy between self and not self. I think you misunderstood me to a degree. I was talking about the coincidence between the way our minds function and the images whether aural or visual presented to us by what is purported to be art. This was not about philosophy but about physiology of the mind, biology. Today I’d like to talk about consonant versus dissonant. In consonance we have agreement. I think up until Beethoven most music was almost always consonant (did I get that wrong out of ignorance?) Remember the point I made about those dissonant minor chords at the opening of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony? Those chords struck hard six times in a row were intended to create shock and awe. They come as a complete surprise considering what Beethoven had prepared you to expect. The use of dissonance sparingly with the greatest of skill is a mark of a true genius as I see it. Surprise adds interest, it grabs your attention. What are some other examples? The ending section of Le Sacre du Printemps with its wild dynamics and driving rhythm. The last chords of La Boheme. And those sudden stabbings in the shower in Hitchcock’s movie Psycho punctuated by those screaming chords of music. You are set up for something entirely different and then they lower the boom on you. What’s more, it works again and again even when you know it’s coming. Dissonance isn’t for me just about sour chords like sevenths. It’s also about very angular progressions, especially those that don’t seem to go anywhere, never resolve, never evolve into a complete melody. It can be like someone starting to express a thought but never getting to the point. Not that composition must be dissonant to be awful, there are many other routes to that same end.

    What does this have to do with the matter at hand or anything about music for that matter? Just this, the exclusive use of dissonance or its near exclusive use presents no shock at all, just cacophony. This is just one of the many ways so called composers destroyed music in the 20th century. So called Soviet realism seems to be nothing more than perpetual dissonance. It isn’t clear to me that most of it even constitutes music, at least not as I learned it and define it. Where is the element of melody? Or for that matter of harmony. If it exists at all it’s usually trite. Here’s another example of what I mean. Few people who know me ever hear me use profanity. It’s not because I am particularly polite, I’m anything but and usually find other more effective ways to insult people and get my point across when that’s what I need to do. But on those rare occasions when I do use it, there is the element of shock and awe. It comes as a complete surprise because it’s unexpected. People who use it all the time dilute it to the point where it’s worthless. What do you think of people who use profanity profusely? Not much of them, probably. Me? I think how unfortunate that these people have such limited vocabulary that this is the only way they have of expressing themselves. Visually a diagonal line in a painting or photograph is powerfully dissonant. But a whole painting of nothing but diagonal lines is meaningless. To be powerful dissonance must present contrast. And so I see the bulk of this so called work as banal profanity, not worth listening to, tedious in the extreme, boring, and annoying.

    It is the role of the music and art critic of the 20th century to convince their audience that the exclusive use of dissonance in these profanities and of all the other inane nonsense that evades music is not merely acceptable but great art. That if we reject that notion we are condemned as unsophisticated simpletons who just don’t have the worldliness to recognize genius when we encounter it. To that I say bull-oney! Some people write mediocre composition because they don’t have the skill to write anything else. All they need to be notorious and acclaimed instead is a friendly critic who showers their tripe with accolades. The difference between the mediocrity of John Coltrane’s composition “A Love Supreme” and Soviet realism is that Coltrane’s lobotomy, his mental castration was chemically self induced, those of Soviet realists was externally imposed by threat of ostracism and even prison. Ostracism is as good as a death sentence in a closed society from which there is no escape. I knew Coltrane was a heroin addict before I ever read or knew a single word about him, I could tell from the flat bleak featureless aural landscape he painted and his ultimate boring funeral dirge he wrote for himself (don’t confuse it with Tchaikovsky’s 6th symphony, that was a roller coaster ride if ever there was one.) Compare Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet with Tchaikovsky’s. There is no comparison. One is a masterpiece, the other is a monstrosity.

    The triumph of Shostakovich and Prokofiev wasn’t the bulk of their work which I judge as unlistenable but that they were able to offer us a few gems of remarkable worth in spite of living in a world invented by mass murdering sociopaths, especially Stalin like the world Orwell painted for us in 1984. To that end two works stand out from all the rest. For Shostakovich it was his 5th symphony which I’m going to go out on a limb by pronouncing it as being by far the best symphony written in the 20th century. I’ve got several recordings including Bernstein’s which I consider excellent. Also I’ve got Stokowski’s recording on Everest on both vinyl and cd. I think there’s another in my collection as well. I think it must be much harder to successfully write powerful dissonance punctuated music than entirely consonant music. And now to go out on yet another limb and pronounce Prokofiev’s “Alexander Nevsky Suite” as by far the best movie music ever written. The one to get of course IMO is the old DG recording. Anyway, Prokofiev wrote a few other pieces worth noting even if they aren’t as great. His Classical Symphony taken on its own merits is enjoyable and I’m sure millions of children have enjoyed and many millions more will continue to enjoy Peter and the Wolf. BTW, next time you hear it, notice the chords played by the horns when the wolf enters the scene are dissonant in the way I described and very sinister, very effective. That guy could really compose…when he was allowed to.

  2. Lawrence Schenbeck

    August 22, 2012 at 7:27 pm

    Good to hear from you, Soundminded! I will want to think about some of what you said for a couple of days myself, because it bears careful consideration.

    But one place I would disagree is about the whole Socialist Realism business encouraging dissonance. It seems to have done the opposite in many cases, especially that of Prokofiev. I had two recent experiences with his “Scythian Suite” which as you probably know is an early work, full of primitivist non-harmonies, driving rhythms, and much dissonance. I can’t say it struck a good chord with me. Heard an avant-garde group in Buffalo this June using one or two movements from that suite as a jumping-off place for Coltrane-like improvisations. It was very effective in that context!

    On the other hand, that type of wild stuff, and Schoenberg and Stravinsky etc., epitomized the style that Stalin and his henchmen absolutely hated. They wanted simple, sturdy melodies that the audience could hum, they wanted clean, pure heroes of the community, and they wanted the bad guys (capitalists and petty bourgeoisie) to suffer and then lose. And they didn’t like dissonance much, which they lumped into a pile of modernist practices they called “formalism.”

    I do think the Shostakovich Fifth is a wonderful work, and I really, really like “Alexander Nevsky.” I agree with you that it is marvelous music. It’s also a nearly perfect example of Socialist Realism, because it was created to inspire the Russian people to resist the German invasion and make endless sacrifices to protect their homeland in World War II. It originated, as you undoubtedly know, as the soundtrack for an Eisenstein film, which is still also a delight to watch. Full of sturdy heroes, laughably bad, evil villains, pretty maidens, and a GREAT battle scene — for which Prokofiev wrote suitably dissonant music, as I recall. But the rest is sweet, stirring, sad, and patriotic as appropriate.

    And the irony is, this is just the sort of thing Stalin wanted. He and Zhdanov, whom he appointed as cultural czar, were incompetent, mediocre hacks in terms of having a finely tuned aesthetic sense. But their ham-handed censorship probably led Prokofiev (and perhaps Shostakovich too, although his case is more complicated) to create more works that had actual melodies, beautiful chords, etc. etc. than they might have done otherwise.

    Or not. Maybe Prokofiev moved back to Russia because he intuited that he would be more at home there, not just in terms of familiar culture but also in terms of writing music for his people.

    One of the things I had to struggle with as a young American musician was the realization that Peter and the Wolf, Lieutenant Kije, Alexander Nevsky, and of course the Prokofiev Fifth Symphony were created by a man working under the thumb of one of the cruelest dictators of the 20th century.

    I’m going to get Laurel Fay’s bio of Shostakovich off the shelf again and make more of an effort to understand his situation. I have to confess there’s not a lot of S. that I actually enjoy, which was partly why I was so struck by the moving conclusion of the Fifteenth Symphony (and as you heard, it’s not at all dissonant).

    More later. Thanks for responding in such stimulating ways.

  3. Soundminded

    August 23, 2012 at 3:31 am

    Nice to hear from you too Lawrence. Frankly I don’t know much about the music of these two composers. Most of what I heard was by way of recordings and my first instinct is usually to turn it off or leave. Where these composers wrote “melodic music” it is often trite to the point of being inane. For example, Shostakovich piano concerto no. 2 parodied (as was the case in most instances) in Fantasia 2000 was an example. Compare it to any of the major concertos in the repetoire and it just seems simpleminded to the point of being stupid. I’m not familiar with what most of these people wrote, I just gave up on them. But then I don’t have to teach it.

    I’ve heard over and over again about the political significance of music. German music, French music, Russian music, Czech music. I’m not sure I agree with the concept. Bernstein discussed the similarities between two pieces, one written by Copland and another by Shostakovich I think. They had a surprising number of structures in common, for example the extensive use of once verboten open fifths. I think there may be styles and traditions that are taught, handed down in one region, one school of music compositional thought or another but I don’t think they can necessarily be associated with a particular nation or ethnicity. Do all pieces that use melodic minor to a great extent reflect Judaism? I hardly think so. Much classical music is based on folk melodies. I see an association there. However, I usually don’t think about the nationality. However, I do associate musical structures, orchestrations, and other techniques with particular composers and I can often guess who wrote something without ever having heard it before just based on those similarities.

    I suppose Nevsky could be thought of as a warning to Hitler not to invade the USSR, I’ve read that. However, it seems more likely to me it was just one hell of a story that happened to come along. Sure Stalin wanted something “patriotic.” But while the both the Teutonic Knights and the Wermacht were both defeated on Russian soil, the actual stories were very different. I’ve watched this movie several times and despite having to read subtitles and see it in early black and white it may still be the greatest of all movies. I don’t ever recall a battle scene that compares with the Battle on the Ice. Prokofiev’s score seems to capture it perfectly. After 20 years of reliable service my Dynaco Stereo 120 amplifier gave up the ghost trying to reproduce it. Hard to sell optomisim in Stalins’s USSR. The motto of Kansas is “per aspera ad astra” which means through hardship to the stars. I know, it’s also the motto of my alma mater. So doesn’t that equally describe Shostakovich 5? Was Rachmaninoff a Russian or American composer? What about Stravinsky, Russian or French? Holst, English or German? Grieg’s Peer Gynt based on Ibsen’s story was about Africa as I recall, not Norway. And where do Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov get off writing about sunny Spain and Italy? Or in Mendelssohn’s and Bruch’s cases about Scotland? Was Grainger an Australian, English, or American composer?

    I think the concept of consonant and dissonant is just another way of looking at my prior thoughts about self and not self. I was listening to a talk recently on Charlie Rose’s program where he was interviewing people who study the human brain. Because of powerful new technology like FMRI there is now the possibility to see and understand what goes on inside one’s mind as the result of various stimulations including drugs, psychotherapy and even music. Perhaps one day not too long from now we’ll have actual facts, not mere speculation.

  4. Lawrence Schenbeck

    August 24, 2012 at 7:18 am

    Hi Soundminded. Good comments. Some quick responses:

    (1) Yes, a lot of this music – especially with Shostakovich – takes the “melodic” and turns it into “trite to the point of being inane.” S. is being deeply sarcastic. And like you, I have problems with that. Whereas Mahler seems to have held his sarcasm somewhat in check (IMHO), S. just lets it take completely over. For me, a little goes a long way. But in the Symphony No. 15 – which I confess I did not know until I heard Petrenko’s recording – the dialogue between Profound (Wagner) and Trite (Shostakovich) becomes, I think, rather touching. At least it touched me, but you do have to hear the entire movement, and probably the whole symphony, to get the point. (Incidentally, I usually avoid teaching S., partly because of my own antipathy toward much of his music and partly because undergraduates have a hard time “hearing” sarcasm when it isn’t their own.)

    (2) Yes, how should we non-Russians listen to something like the Shostakovich Fifth? We can’t hear it the way Russians do, but we can still enjoy it. Apparently late in his life S. “came clean” about the Fifth and said, basically, that he was forced to write a happy ending for it. Even the conductor Mravinsky, one of S.’s great champions and the guy who conducted the premiere, didn’t know or understand that. I am not sure it matters. We don’t have to subscribe to the “hidden message,” or be privy to the political history of Russia, etc., to respond to a piece of music. Petrenko’s apparent desire to recast the S. Fifth so that it reflects the “true story” has something to do with the negative reception his recording has gotten in some quarters – read the customer reviews on Amazon. I do think politics and small-c culture matter, and I do teach that, but it would be incredibly small-minded to follow that to a logical conclusion and dictate that only Estonians can listen to, and comment on, Estonian music or whatever. Good points about Rachmaninoff, Holst, et al. Worth repeating a billion times!

    (3) Yeah, I guess I’m looking forward to the day when more so-called research on the brain becomes based on actual, empirical, physical evidence. My point earlier, in bringing up Descartes (in our exchange over “Counterpoint”) was not philosophical. My understanding of the Baroque theory of Affect is that Descartes and others were operating as biologists. That is, they were actually grappling with the physiological roots of human response to music. Whereas today we might explain the Affects as a matter of endocrine secretions, i.e., hormonal activity in the bloodstream, Descartes was forced to resort to a quasi-biological, semi-theoretical way of talking about it. Will the new research, if and when it comes – and MRI technology is definitely getting there! – really have much impact on the way we choose and experience music? Personally, I doubt it.

    (4) Glad to hear you like the Nevsky film. A friend of mine recently brought over a VHS tape with restored film stock and the soundtrack newly recorded by Temirkanov and the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, and it knocked me out! I had to drag my VCR out of storage to play it, but what sound! Analog reigns, or at least it did here. It’s a wonderful movie. Don’t know just how important the propaganda motivation was for Eisenstein and Prokofiev back in the day, but obviously the continuing value of the movie has little to do with that.

  5. Soundminded

    August 27, 2012 at 4:58 am

    Lawrence, I’m puzzled by something you said. But first, I want to remind you of something I said awhile back which I constantly keep in mind. I know my preferences have been shaped by what I was exposed to at a very young age, in fact from infancy. I wonder if I’d been born into a different culture, say India or China of 100 years ago, or some aboriginal tribe if they wouldn’t be very different. Would they change if I were later exposed to “western music?” Is the preference for one type of music over another a matter of the inherent way our brains are structured, our innate internal rhythms and neural pathways or is it a matter of conditioning. Do those pathways change and our preferences change with them? Is western music becoming the norm around the world because it is inherently more in tune with our brain structures? Does the rhythm and sound of a particular language affect our predisposition to a certain type of music because it is consonant with it? French, Russian, or Italian? Is there a cultural connection to certain types of music after all? I’ve noticed on those occasions I’ve listened to Pandora lately that they have something called “The Music Genome Project.” They pick music for my defined radio stations and hit a home run for me almost every time even with music I’ve never heard of. They’ve successfully analyzed me, they’ve got my number.

    I was puzzled by your use of the word “sarcasm” in referring to certain music. Are Prokofiev and Shostakovich telling the world look at what awful music I’m forced to write because the dunces who impose their notions of political correctness make me do it, so if I have to write bad music I’ll make it so awful only someone with the musical intellect of a potted geranium, a Soviet Commissar of culture would be stupid enough to like it? Then what about awful music of a similar ilk not written in a totalitarian state? Perhaps the answer is simpler than that, perhaps they just wrote awful music because they usually couldn’t do any better. So then how did Shostakovich write the 5th symphony? Well even a broken clock is right twice a day. Maybe he wrote it on the best day of his life. Not everything the best composers write is to my liking or even good either (at least to my way of thinking.) I never did understand what that guy who said he got though a year of recovery from excruciating burns by listening to Beethoven’s late quartets saw in them.

    I don’t like thinking about the politics surrounding music. I try to take music on absolute terms. Does it matter what the politics of Mozart’s operas were a couple of hundred years ago? To academicians yes, but to most people who just want to listen to them I don’t think it matters too much. After all, I can find much better reasons to detest music I don’t like than these political reasons. I judge badness on an absolute scale that is timeless and without external context :-)

  6. Lawrence Schenbeck

    August 27, 2012 at 10:01 am

    You pose some mighty huge questions, Soundminded! It would take a crack team of scientists and musicians, working around the clock for several years, to come up with definitive answers in all cases. So I can only respond with what I think I personally know, which is bound to be incomplete and biased:

    (1) Is human response to music biologically determined and thus heritable and instinctive, or is it culturally determined, a matter more of nurture than nature? The answer is yes to both. I am convinced that certain basic human responses to music are universal. For example, FAST and LOUD, i.e., rapid basic pulse and high amplitude, cause excitement or agitation in most humans. But beyond that, culture almost certainly plays a part. Remember that if you were raised in, say, India, your upbringing would include not only a different bunch of musics but most likely also a different set of values about religion, social structure, food, dance, the purpose of life, etc. etc. forever. So the music you played or heard would reflect all those differences! It wouldn’t seem weird or foreign, it would just be part of your life.

    Just as many Westerners now enjoy ethnic food, they also make a stab at enjoying ethnic music — reggae, Indian ragas, Javanese gamelan. In my heart of hearts, I think their enjoyment of such genres is bound to remain somewhat superficial. But I could be wrong, or at least my position could easily become increasingly less tenable over the passage of time, as the Internet and other forces continually work to erase cultural boundaries. We are all becoming more and more alike.

    Is Western music now dominant because we have it “right,” in terms of instinctive and unversal responses to music? Again, yes and no. (In general, I think either/or formulations are almost always evil and stupid. The Western preoccupation with dueling dualisms is a blot on our civilization. There aren’t always two sides to every question. Sometimes there are five, and sometimes there’s only one reasonable view. But I digress.)

    We dominate world music today because of the vast economic and military power we have exerted over the last 400 years or so. There were string quartets played in the royal houses of African chieftains in the 18th and 19th centuries because those guys were trying to get with the program. Westerners dictated educational standards, culinary standards, clothing standards, and much more, for hundreds of years. Missionaries and military units alike took an active role in destroying native cultures and “upgrading” the people to Western ways of life, whether they wanted it or not.

    On the other hand, consider the Japanese. They appropriated and adapted the practices of other cultures right and left, and continue to do so today. If the Bach Collegium Japan is alive and well in 2012 (and it is!) that’s because something about Bach’s music, its order, its controlled passion, its roots in the sacred, appeals very much to a segment of Japanese society. They’re not being forced to sing the cantatas or play the Brandenburg Concertos. They LIKE it.

    Bear in mind also that the style of Western music that actually dominates the world music scene is not Mozart, it’s Madonna. Let me be less crude, and more specific here: the American music that has found greatest favor among audiences worldwide is the popular music most heavily influenced by African-derived performance styles (jazz, blues, r&b, rock) and mediated by advanced technologies. So if you’re looking to link up Western musical domination with something inherent about “our” music that makes it the best, you had better at least start with the actual music that’s doing the dominating.

    Whew! I think I will post this much, so I don’t lose it.

  7. Lawrence Schenbeck

    August 27, 2012 at 10:40 am

    I actually just published a book that traces, in part, the influence of a certain way of thinking about classical music, in which people — the people who ran things — were convinced that serious art music would make you a better person, and that if you played it or patronized it, other folks would recognize you as one of the better sorts also. You know what I’m talkin’ about here! So the cultivation of classical music was automatically considered a sign that you were intelligent, refined, and in short, superior. This is no longer the case — see the Letters section of the most recent Stereophile magazine for example, in which Joe Six Pack proudly (or rather defensively, I think) brags about how he don’t have to play none uh that artsy stuff ta enjoy his rig. Hey, fine with me.

    So, enough about that. About “sarcasm”? That’s a lot harder to discuss.

    Undoubtedly you’ve experienced a social interaction with someone in which either of two things happened: you delivered a dry bon mot of some kind that you considered absolutely the wittiest, most cutting remark you’d made all day, but it went right over the other guy’s head; or (2) you concluded your conversation, walked away, and realized at some later point that your acquaintance had roundly insulted you with some series of patronizing comments delivered with such deadpan skill that you had no idea you were being skewered.

    Or maybe not. My point is, these things are highly subjective and personal. Like I said, I avoid sarcasm like the plague when I teach. Creates problems, seldom enlightens anyone.

    Moving on: First, let’s leave poor Prokofiev out this. He seems to have adjusted to the situation with more equanimity than Shostakovich. Was S. “telling the world”? Certainly not! He gave a handful of close friends the indication that he was writing music that was “awful” in a certain way in order to reveal his true feelings to them only, while disguising them to the masses and the authorities.

    Did it work? You tell me. Frankly, I think his strategy — vindicate your actions by allowing a small in-group to feel very special about themselves and their superior insights — seems suspiciously similar to what powerless intellectuals have done throughout history, and also what the elite of every society (see my first paragraph above) always tend toward.

    Bear in mind that S. supported the general ideals behind the Soviet state. He just didn’t like the particular people who were in charge of it, and the way things kept turning out in his career.

    Also worth bearing in mind that Shostakovich’s most dissonant, depraved music was written BEFORE the authorities came down on him. “Lady Macbeth,” the opera that caused him so much trouble with Stalin, was wildly popular in Russia, getting something like 250 performances (!) in a couple of years. So apparently the intelligentsia and the slightly more common people both enjoyed it. So, again, Your Mileage May Vary. Which music was the “bad” music? The dissonant, licentious stuff S. wrote very early in his career, or the stuff he found himself writing once it was clear that a guy could get in big trouble with too many minor seconds?

    Bottom line (if there actually is one), creating music is a much more complex process than anyone realizes. Putting a symphony or a string quartet together takes time, effort, and the ability to walk a tightrope between “inspiration” and “craft.” You have to stay in touch with a childlike, inarticulate “muse” that sends lovely or exciting ideas your way, and then you have to wrestle those ideas into fully developed narratives. When you have a bad day, I don’t think you write bad music. You write no music, and you probably go down to the corner bar and have a glass or two of something, and hope tomorrow is better.

    ps I’d give those late Beethoven quartets another try sometime. You may have changed your outlook since you last heard them. I didn’t understand Faust until I was in my 40s. And now that I’m considerably past that, I no longer think “Carmina Burana” is the greatest music I’ll ever hear. Yeah, I know how pompous this sounds.

Leave a Reply