CHSA 5310 – SHOSTAKOVICH

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 14 / Six Verses of Marina Tsvetayeva

Symphony No. 14, Op. 135

I want listeners reflecting upon my new symphony... to realise that they must lead pure and fruitful lives for the glory of their homeland, their people, and the most progressive ideas motivating our socialist society. That is what I was thinking about as I wrote my new work. I want my listeners, as they leave the hall after hearing my symphony, to think that life is truly beautiful.

That description by Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 – 1975) of his intentions in his Fourteenth Symphony first appeared in Pravda on 25 April 1969, in between his completion of the work and its first performance, the following September. Given that the symphony consists largely of settings of poems about death, and given that it goes to great lengths to avoid any tone of consolation, Shostakovich’s summing-up is, to say the least, oblique. We might well think that it needed to be so, given that it appeared in the official organ of the Communist Party, in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, where existential gloom was less than welcome. But it was not necessarily a complete smokescreen. To paraphrase: people should indeed ‘lead pure and fruitful lives’, because the history of mankind shows so much shameful cruelty; and life is indeed ‘truly beautiful’, because death, particularly violent death, is truly hateful.

In a speech given in a more specialised context, before a public rehearsal of the work, Shostakovich was able to express himself rather more directly:

I should like to recall the words of that remarkable Soviet writer [Nikolay] Ostrovsky [1904 – 1936], who said that life is given to us only once, so we should live it honestly and handsomely in all respects and never commit base acts. In part, I am trying to polemicise with the great classics who touched upon the theme of death in their work. Remember the death of Boris Godunov. When Godunov has died, a kind of brightening sets in. Remember Verdi’s Otello. When the whole tragedy ends, and Desdemona and Otello die, we also experience a beauteous serenity. Remember Aida. When the tragic demise of the hero and heroine occurs, it is assuaged by radiant music... Take, for instance, the outstanding English composer, Benjamin Britten... I would fault him, too, in his War Requiem. All this, it seems to me, stems from various kinds of religious teachings that have suggested that as bad as life might be, when you die everything will be fine; what awaits you is absolute peace. So it seems to me that perhaps, in part, I am following in the footsteps of the great Russian composer Mussorgsky. His cycle Songs and Dances of Death – maybe not all of it, but at least ‘The Field Marshal’ – is a great protest against death and a reminder to live one’s life honestly, nobly, decently, never committing base acts... Death awaits all of us. I don’t see anything good about such an end to our lives, and this is what I am trying to convey in this work.

It seems scarcely coincidental that many of his most death-haunted works postdate his own first heart attack, on 30 May 1966. Shostakovich had, in fact, been suffering for eight years before that date from a muscular condition that was only much later diagnosed as motor neurone disease. Over the nearly ten years until his death, in 1975, he spent regular periods in hospital, and it was during one such stay, in January and February 1969, that he selected and worked on the poems for the Fourteenth Symphony. It may plausibly be connected with his protest against untimely death that each of his chosen poets had died prematurely and / or in unnatural circumstances – Wilhelm Küchelbecker in Siberian exile for his part in the 1825 Decembrist uprising, Federico García Lorca assassinated during the Spanish Civil War, in 1936, Rainer Maria Rilke of blood poisoning following an accident in 1926, Guillaume Apollinaire in 1918 during the Spanish influenza pandemic.

In the ordering chosen by the composer, the texts associate death first of all with love, then with separation, and finally with creativity. These are the selfsame topics that underlie most of his song cycles, at least from the Four Romances on Poems of Pushkin, of 1936 – 37, to the Suite on Verses of Michelangelo, of 1974. As a model of a song cycle to texts by different poets, but unified by an overall poetic theme, Shostakovich might well have had in mind Britten’s Nocturne, of 1958. Notwithstanding his reservations about the consolatory conclusion to the War Requiem, Shostakovich and Britten enjoyed a close rapport from the time of their first meeting, in 1962, and the symphony bears a dedication to Britten, who conducted its British première in Aldeburgh, on 14 June 1970. Shostakovich had initially considered calling the work an ‘oratorio’, but settled eventually on the designation ‘symphony’, perhaps mindful that throughout the 1960s Soviet composers had been experimenting with the layout and content of the symphony as a genre, particularly by introducing vocal elements. For instance, in 1964, MieczysÅ‚aw Weinberg (a Polish-born disciple and close friend of Shostakovich’s) had cast his Eighth Symphony, Flowers of Poland, for tenor, mixed choir, and orchestra, in ten movements.

In the Fourteenth Symphony, Shostakovich builds on two other prominent lines of development in the Soviet symphony. For one thing, its ensemble of nineteen strings and percussion is a variant of the layout of numerous chamber symphonies composed during the 1960s for Rudolf Barshai’s crack ensemble, the Moscow Chamber Orchestra. It allows for a combination of virtuosity and semi-avant-garde, Polish-influenced textures that could not realistically have been expected of the Soviet Union’s full-sized and still very tradition-orientated symphony orchestras. Secondly, Shostakovich enriches his compositional palette with twelve-note themes, in which all notes of the chromatic scale appear without (or with only minimal) repetition or recursion. Such writing had been gaining acceptance in the Soviet Union through the 1960s but had by no means lost its aura of non-conformity. The use of such themes in the Fourteenth Symphony’s representations of death recalls the era before Schoenberg’s notorious twelve-note ‘technique’, when twelve-note rows were occasionally deployed to symbolise some kind of absolute or metaphysical quality (as in Faust the thinker, in Liszt’s Eine Faust-Symphonie; science, in Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra; the universe, in Berg’s Altenberg-Lieder). As Shostakovich must have known, Britten himself had followed that tradition in his depictions of the supernatural in the operas The Turn of the Screw and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The floating line with which Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony opens returns in the penultimate setting, ‘The Poet’s Death’. But even the fraction of comfort offered by this musical framing device is snatched away by the final movement. Here the bass and soprano solos sing together for the first time (in the third movement, depicting Loreley and a bishop under her spell, they sing in strict alternation). The text on which they finally unite, in the last movement, rams home the message of the ‘all-powerful’ nature of Death. In the only non-tonal conclusion to any of his symphonies, Shostakovich seemingly shakes his fist in impotent rage, as if to defy our applause and compel our silence.

Six Verses of Marina Tsvetayeva, Op. 143a

In the last decade of his life, Shostakovich turned increasingly to the song cycle for his deepest, most concentrated musical utterances. His choices often fell on authors to whom friends and colleagues had alerted him, as was the case with his suite of Six Verses of Marina Tsvetayeva, a favourite of Boris Tishchenko, his most prominent composition pupil in the 1960s. The younger composer had created a massive symphony (No. 2) to Tsvetayeva’s poetry in 1964, and in 1970 his settings of three of Tsvetayeva’s verses for voice and piano drew Shostakovich’s unstinted admiration.

Like a number of Russia’s most prominent poets, Tsvetayeva (1892 – 1941) had much to endure in her life. Amid the privations of the 1917 Revolution and its aftermath, she sent her two daughters to a state orphanage, only for the younger one to die of hunger. She herself left Russia and lived in poverty in Paris, Berlin, and Prague, battling tuberculosis, and returning to Moscow, in 1939. Her husband, who had been a spy for the Soviet secret police while abroad, was arrested on trumped-up charges (anyone who had returned from living abroad was automatically under suspicion). He was executed in 1941, and Tsvetayeva, unaware of his fate, hanged herself the same year.

In August 1973, two months after the American visit during which he received the definitive diagnosis of motor neurone disease, Shostakovich took a vacation with his wife in Pärnu, Estonia. During the first week he composed the version of his Tsvetayeva songs for voice and piano, and in the following January he arranged the accompaniment for chamber orchestra.

Shostakovich made his selection of poems from the first major Soviet collection of Tsvetayeva’s poetry, published in 1965. He arranged the texts in such a way that each leads on thematically to the next, but without suggesting an overall narrative arc. All are consonant with subject matter that characterises his late vocal settings, including the Fourteenth Symphony. The first, ‘My verses’, is a self-reflection on early poems, which could well have sparked thoughts in Shostakovich of his own little-known works from the early 1920s. The opening twelve-note row, on solo cello, links back in style to the symphony, just as the poem suggests a kinship in content with the Küchelbecker setting, ‘O Delvig, Delvig!’. ‘Whence all this tenderness?’ continues the theme of anguished love that runs through Shostakovich’s song settings as far back as the Japanese Romances, Op. 21, composed when Shostakovich was in his twenties. Now it is a solo violin that initiates the setting. The ‘Dialogue between Hamlet and His Conscience’, the last of Shostakovich’s half a dozen engagements with Shakespeare’s play over four decades, features a solo viola; its hesitant repeated notes evoke the Conscience as explicitly as the painful wider intervals in the vocal line represent Hamlet. The setting ends with a subtle reversal of Tsvetayeva’s meaning by removing the final question mark, her ‘Did I love her?’ becoming, in effect, ‘I did love her’.

Both ‘The Poet and the Tsar’ and, less overtly, ‘No, the drum did beat’, refer to the relationship between Tsar Nicholas I and Pushkin, heavily mythologised in the Soviet Union but tapping into Shostakovich’s long-standing interest in the relation of artists to power. In its vehement tone, given point by xylophone interjections, ‘The Poet and the Tsar’ strongly recalls ‘The Zaporozhian Cossacks’ Answer to the Sultan of Constantinople’, from the Fourteenth Symphony. ‘No, the drum did beat’ depicts Pushkin as he is carried away after his fatal duel, the military aspect here reinforced by a sparse accompaniment of horns and side drum. Finally, ‘To Anna Akhmatova’ pays homage to the famous poet, who herself had dedicated her 1958 poem ‘Music’ to Shostakovich, inscribing a presentation copy ‘To Dmitriy Dmitriyevich Shostakovich, in whose epoch I live on earth’. The music picks up on the reference, in the penultimate line of Tsvetayeva’s symbolic gift of Moscow to Akhmatova, to ‘The City of Bells’, making the tubular bells a constant, fateful accompaniment to the entire poem. Here Shostakovich makes an unmistakable allusion to the opening bars of Aram Khachaturian’s Second Symphony, ‘The Bells’.