Shostakovich | A Century of Life

In May, a unique Leipzig Shostakovich Festival took place in Leipzig. To mark the upcoming 50th anniversary of the composer's death on August 9th, the festival offered an almost encyclopedic overview of all his symphonies, string quartets, and solo concertos. In addition, many of the composer's chamber music works were performed, especially those that play a key role in his oeuvre. This allowed listeners to immerse themselves deeply in the cosmos of Shostakovich, especially since all the performances were of outstanding quality.

This applies not only to the two symphony orchestras and their Shostakovich expert Andris Nelsons, but also to the fabulous soloists. First and foremost, Daniil Trifonov, whose immense touch transformed even a rather banal piece like the Second Piano Concerto, which Shostakovich dedicated to his son Maxim for his 19th birthday, into a fascinating experience. Also breathtaking were the two piano sonatas, such as the first by the 20-year-old, in which he recapitulates the events of the October Revolution he witnessed in St. Petersburg, and the interpretation of the late, near-death violin sonata, which Trifonov performed together with Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider, with its ghostly dance in the second movement and the relentless passacaglia with all its references to Bach and Alban Berg.

Or Gautier Capuçon from France, who elegantly performed the Cello Concerto No. Baiba Skride from Latvia was also moving with her Violin Concerto, which the composer wrote in the dark years of 1947 and 1948, when he once again came under fire from Stalinist criticism for allegedly failing to meet the criteria of popular appeal. We recall with horror Stalin's dictum, "The masses expect beautiful songs," from the infamous essay "Chaos and Music," which appeared in Pravda in January 1936 and took issue with modernism, using Shostakovich's opera "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk Region" as an example. Instead, a flat socialist realism was now rigorously imposed in music, too.

Yet the composer also created "beautiful," folk-oriented music – the waltz from his 2nd Suite for Variety Orchestra is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful pieces of music of the 20th century (and is well known as the leitmotif from Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut"). Shostakovich wrote numerous stage and ballet scores, eight operas, and the music for over forty films – one of which, "Five Days – Five Nights" by Leo Armstam (USSR/GDR 1961), was presented at the festival. These stage and light music pieces are often neglected; in Leipzig, they were performed by the Cappuccino salon orchestra.

Dmitri Shostakovich was a composer of enormous creative power. And he was a composer who, for long periods of his life, was integrated into Soviet society, not at all against his will. He held professorships (which were subsequently revoked) and high positions in the Soviet Composers' Union. He represented the Soviet Union at international congresses. And this contradiction, this dichotomy—being largely integrated into the system, but also repeatedly threatened by it—is found throughout Shostakovich's works.

It may be that one can recognize direct resistance to Stalin in some of his compositions (such compositions usually disappeared into the composer's drawer). And one can rightly interpret a kind of inner resistance in other compositions. When his great symphonic works were not opportune for a few years, he simply wrote film scores to earn money, as he himself admitted. On the other hand, however, his numerous works, in which the revolution or the Soviet Union are portrayed positively, sometimes even celebrated, can hardly be denounced as mere propaganda works serving survival. The fragmented, contradictory nature of his persona makes Shostakovich a typical representative of his time, the 20th century.

Throughout his life, the composer was haunted by his intense childhood memories of the overture from Rossini's opera "William Tell." Perhaps Stalin was a tyrant to Shostakovich, like Hermann Gessler, the opponent of William Tell in the Swiss national epic, who demanded that his subjects symbolically salute his hat, which Tell refused. Shostakovich, too, repeatedly had to somehow circumvent this Gessler hat in his works, which had stood in his way, sometimes cruelly, since the 1930s.

In Leipzig, Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra combined the Sixth (1939) and the Fifteenth (1971). At first glance, a somewhat odd combination, but the two works share quotations from Rossini's "William Tell" Overture. In the Sixth, Shostakovich lets the "presto" galloping horses from the Tell Overture, one of Stalin's favorite melodies, off the reins in the final movement, but not before letting them race past "Ja, das Studium der Weiber" from Lehár's "The Merry Widow," Hitler's favorite operetta. Here, the Tell gallop, in its final exuberance, responds to a brooding, introverted first movement, followed by a grotesquely exaggerated scherzo: Shostakovich's close friend Isaac Glikman compared the final movement to the "description of a football match" and the "ups and downs of success and failure" it contains. Shostakovich was a die-hard football fan and could be found regularly at the Leningrad Stadium in the 1930s.

Finally, there was Shostakovich's last Symphony No. 15 in A major, Op. 141, with its strangely satirical first movement, which he described as "childhood, a toy shop with a cloudless sky above." Kurt Sanderling , the important conductor and friend of Shostakovich, pointed out that "in this shop there are only soulless, dead toys, hanging by their strings and only coming to life when these strings are pulled." Perhaps the initially confusing nature of this symphony, the jumble, the juxtaposition, can be explained like this: there seems to be nothing "through-composed" or put into form, but rather nothing but associations from a rich life: alongside the toy shop motifs, a cool string fugato and the strangely flitting violin solo in the first movement, as well as a quotation from the trumpet fanfare from the beginning of Mahler's Fifth Symphony. Funeral march invocations from the flutes and heart-rending cello solos, including even dreamily beautiful twelve-tone rows; peculiar music-box sounds from triangle, castanets, drum, xylophone, and piccolo, as well as numerous self-quotations, not least the famous sequence "D-E-flat-C-H" formed from his name. And finally, in the fourth movement, an adagio, the "destiny motif" from Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelung," the "death proclamation" from "Walküre" (a favorite of Lenin's...), followed by the yearning motif from the prelude to "Tristan und Isolde," which culminates in a quotation from a Glinka song in which, as in Shakespeare's Hamlet, the great oblivion through sleep is invoked.

But what's the point of all these quotations? Shostakovich revealed to Glikman: "I don't really know why all these quotations are there, but I couldn't, couldn't, couldn't do without them." Even today, reviewers are chafing at the montage technique, which has long since become a method and which the composer used particularly extensively here.

Also screened in Leipzig was the 2022 documentary film "Two: The Story Told By Shostakovitch's Wife" by Israeli director Elena Yakovich. In addition to impressive original film excerpts showing the composer at work, in his free time, and listening to his music, the program features interviews with Irina Antonova Shostakovich, his third wife. She recounts that Shostakovich, on his deathbed, wished to watch a football match on television. She set out to find a small television set in the hospital, and when she returned to his hospital room, he had already passed away.

Dmitri Shostakovich – one of his first musical memories: Rossini's "William Tell" Overture. His last wish: watching a soccer match. In between: a century of life.

Recommended complete recordings of the 15 symphonies: Kirill Kondrashin, with various Russian orchestras (Melodya, antiquarian); Andris Nelsons, Boston Symphony Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon), an inexpensive box set with all symphonies, all piano, violin, and cello concertos, as well as the opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk." Parts 1 and 2 of Berthold Seliger's recordings of Shostakovich are also available online.