He answered and he answered well
One of the most interesting phenomenons in music is it lives in any circumstance. From the slave ships to the royal courts, music rallies our spirits or expresses the anguish of the soul, it rejoices or cries. The production of such pieces is evidence that the human spirit longs to be expressed and fortunately music is one of those unique outlets that can express what words cannot. Shostakovitch was not the first to use music to escape oppression or explain his environment but how he did it is a story worth recounting.
It was 1937, the height of Stalin’s Great Terror. Dmitri Shostakovitch at 31 had already found some success as a composer and concert pianist. His musical association with politics started at the very beginning of his career. At age 12 he had written a requiem for two leaders of the Kadet party. At age 20 he had written his first symphony. The trouble started with his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Stalin didn’t like it. It was denounced for formalism which is more or less not conforming to what the Soviet government deemed uplifting music, in theory, because it was too concerned with features of structure. In reality Stalin just didn’t like it. Shostakovich’s dilemma was that if he wrote the music that reflected his feelings he would be condemned by the government but if he wrote “safe” music he was denounced for formalism.
The solution? Shostakovitch wrote his Fifth symphony and subtitled it “A Soviet Artist’s Reply to Just Criticism.” With his brilliant intellect he found an answer in his creation of musical double talk. He wrote a symphony that impassioned the people while at the same time appearing to sing the praise of the government. Perhaps the government officials had caught on, but how could they publicly punish something that so blatantly went against what they were proclaiming to practice especially when the people so connected with the piece? The result was (ironically) rehabilitation, which basically meant that the charges against him were cleared because there was no evidence found against him.
The sentiment that sings through the music and so enraptured the audience is a depiction of what life was really like under a communist regime. It didn’t paint any pretty pictures but clearly stated things how they were. Somewhere in the midst of the piece is the triumph of the human spirit, a spirit that has been blown and bent but not broken, in the end stronger if it does not succumb to the oppressive gloom that surrounds it. Shostakovitch said of this symphony. “The idea behind my symphony is the making of a man. I saw him, with all his experience, at the centre of the work”
It was a heroic feat. Once again music had triumphed and persevered over circumstance.
Israel Nestyev a critic from Moscow and contemporary of Shostakovitch said of him. “Not a single other artist – no painter, dramatist, or film-maker – could think of using their art as a means of expressing protest against Stalin’s Terror. Only instrumental music was able to express the terrible truth of that time.”
So in the midst of this great terror came one of the 20th century’s greatest composers. In the end the Fifth symphony was a great response, a response to the people and a response to the government. It was a message that music lives. The Russian musicologist Inna Barsova quotes from Liubov’ Vasilievna Shaporiny’s diary for 21st November 1937 concerning the premiere of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony: “The audience was beside itself and gave a frenzied ovation – a deliberate protest against the persecution to which poor Mitya has been subjected. Everyone repeated one and the same phrase: ‘He answered and he answered well.’”
Shostakovich’s Response
November 21 & 22, 2008 at 8 PM
Abravanel Hall
Keith Lockhart, conductor
Posted in Utah Symphony