4th Symphony (Shostakovich)

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The Symphony no. 4 in C minor (Opus 43) of Shostakovich was started 1934th It can be assumed that Shostakovich conceived this symphony as an archetype of the symphony in socialist realism (which he later succeeded in doing with his fifth symphony ), since this genre did not yet exist in the context of the time. However, he was dissatisfied with the original ideas for his fourth symphony and discarded his initial work. In September 1935 he began working on the symphony again and completed it in May 1936.

history

The work came into being at a time when a new cultural policy in the Soviet Union was supposed to consolidate the paradigm of socialist realism . Since there were no works at that time that fulfilled this paradigm, it was a social task to develop a new archetype of the symphony. In order to do justice to this goal, all kinds of examples were looked for, which should be used as a guide. In February 1935, for example, Aleksandr Ostretsov propagated that the symphony as a genre must contain “a maximum of strength, ideological depth and clarity in conveying certain vital content”. Ivan Sollertinsky , who had a lasting influence on Shostakovich, regarded Gustav Mahler's symphonies as archetypes of what he called “democratic symphonies”.

In fact, it can be assumed that Shostakovich took this into account when composing his fourth symphony. That Shostakovich had big plans for his upcoming work is not only suggested by the many rumors in legends that arose in the run-up to the composition. On December 28, 1934, Shostakovich expressed himself in the Leningrad Pravda about his future symphony:

This will be a monumental cause of great thoughts and great passions. And consequently great responsibility. For many years I carry myself with it (...) The shameful death of Sergei Mironowitsch Kirov obliges me and all composers to create works that would be worthy of his memory. (...) But to respond with full-fledged works to the “social mandate” of our remarkable epoch to be its trumpeter - this is a matter of honor for every Soviet composer.

Halfway through with his composition, the composer was then denounced formalism in the notorious leading article of Pravda "Chaos instead of music" of January 28, 1936 . Although he then had to fear for his life, Shostakovich continued to work on the symphony and announced to his critics that this, his fourth symphony, would be the “Credo of its composer”. Following this announcement, his best friend, the musicologist Iwan Sollertinski , declared at a meeting of the Composers' Union that the fourth symphony would save the composer and that it would turn out to be Shostakovich's " Eroica ".

Despite these very dangerous and difficult times, Shostakovich continued to press with his plans to premier the symphony as soon as it was possible for him.

Eventually the symphony was accepted as a performance by the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic and the date of the premiere was set for December 30, 1936. The orchestra's music director at the time, Fritz Stiedry, was supposed to conduct . Shostakovich was also able to assure Otto Klemperer that he would perform the symphony outside the USSR for the first time .

What happened next remains unclear. At one point during the rehearsal of the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic's Fourth Symphony, Shostakovich decided to withdraw the symphony, claiming that he felt the finale needed a revision. He was later to give different explanations for why he withdrew the fourth symphony. In an interview in the late 1950s, Shostakovich stated that he was withdrawing the symphony because he felt the symphony as a whole would suffer from “grandiosomania”, even though there were parts of the work that he liked. Even later, he would claim that he was withdrawing the symphony because Fritz Stiedry made a terrible mess with the symphony during rehearsal. In Shostakovich's memoirs, the author Solomon Volkov even claims that Stiedry deliberately tried to distance himself from the symphony.

In contrast, Shostakovich's friend Isaak Glikman, in his 1993 book Diary of a Friendship, named the real reason the symphony was withdrawn as the pressure exerted by party leaders on the manager of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic to take the symphony off the rehearsal schedule. There he describes how two party officials visited the conductor Stiedry the evening before the dress rehearsal and are said to have forced him to stop the rehearsals. Stiedry is said to have pleaded with Shostakovich in private to withdraw the symphony himself in order to avoid public embarrassment. Glikman also defended Fritz Stiedry's musicianship against Shostakovich's claim of incompetence.

Soon after the fiasco surrounding the withdrawal of the Fourth Symphony, Fritz Stiedry emigrated to the United States . Stiedry would later be a successful house conductor for the Metropolitan Opera in New York City .

During the early and mid-1940s, Shostakovich longed for the world premiere of his fourth symphony and wrote a reduction of the work for two pianos in order to show the symphony to interested musicians. Shostakovich and his composer colleague Mieczysław Weinberg premiered this version for two pianos at a meeting of the Composers' Union in 1946. Nevertheless, Shostakovich's undertaking to perform the orchestral version was in vain. The orchestral score was eventually lost during World War II.

When a librarian from the St. Petersburg Philharmonic found the orchestral parts in the orchestra's archives in the early 1960s, the score was reconstructed note by note. The fourth symphony was then entrusted to the conductor Kirill Kondrashin and premiered late on December 30, 1961 by the Moscow Philharmonic. Gennady Roschdestvensky conducted the western premiere of the fourth symphony at the Edinburgh Festival in 1962 .

The German premiere took place in Dresden in 1963 with the Dresden State Orchestra under Kirill Kondraschin.

content

The thesis that this work is critical of Russian history, especially Stalin's seizure of power and the Stalinist purges, is controversial . This impression is also created by the implied symbolism of the instrumentation - the bassoon (to which the composer is said to have a particular affinity) as a symbol for Shostakovich, while the trumpet can be interpreted as a sign of Stalin, and the militaristic rhythm of the first movement as a synonym for the horror or the waltz rhythm in the middle of the third movement, which may not really fit the mood of the work and, driven by the trumpets, tries to force a happy situation downright. In particular, the climax at the end of the third movement, representing a kind of party hymn, is very reminiscent of the horror theme from the first movement and therefore cannot serve as a glorification or glorification of the system or the party apparatus.

Shostakovich himself commented on his fourth symphony in his memoirs (which are not entirely undisputed) as follows:

“During the period I was talking about, I was close to suicide. The danger terrified me and I saw no way out. I was completely dominated by fear, no longer master of my own life. My past was crossed out. My work, my skills - they were no longer needed. And the future offered no glimmer of hope. I just wanted to leave. That was the only possible way out. I thought of it with relief. At this critical time, Zoshchenko's thoughts helped me . He did not regard suicide as a mental confusion, but as an extremely infantile act, the mutiny of the lower forces over the higher, complete and final negative victory ... I even emerged from this crisis stronger, with more confidence in mine own strength ... Even the shameful betrayal of friends and acquaintances no longer filled me with as much bitterness as before. He no longer met me personally. I had learned to separate myself from other people. That became my salvation. Some of the newfound knowledge is contained in my fourth symphony. Especially at the end. Everything is clearly expressed there. "

music

The three-movement work has a duration of approximately one hour:

  1. Allegretto, poco moderato - Presto - Tempo uno
  2. Moderato, con moto
  3. Largo - Allegro

Shostakovich demands an immense orchestra for the work with over a hundred musicians. The technical and emotional demands on the musicians are enormous.

In reception, the symphony is described as being strongly influenced by Gustav Mahler . Shostakovich's third symphony serves as a model for the first movement: "To my astonishment and joy I see in the (first) movement, as in the entire work, the same framework, the same knotting - without my wanting it, let alone planning it - as found in Mozart and, in a more expansive and refined form, in Beethoven; it's the same idea that actually started with old Haydn. There must be profound and eternal laws to which Beethoven adhered and which I see as a kind of confirmation in my work. ” These words, written by Mahler about his third symphony, could just as well go with the first movement of Shostakovich's fourth. What at first appears as an uncontrolled flood of musical ideas, on closer inspection, is a strictly organized, but uniquely executed movement in sonata form. Only three subjects serve as a framework for the first sentence.

One of the most remarkable parts of the first movement is a furious presto fugato for the strings, which eventually encompasses the entire orchestra and climaxes in a burst of five forte tutti. The second movement is a landler-like scherzo that is kept in a deceptively simple ABABA form. This gruesome scherzo, which at times serves as a reminiscence of the scherzi from Mahler's second and seventh symphonies, ends with a percussion motif that Shostakovich will use again in the Second Cello Concerto and the Fifteenth Symphony . The third and last movement is arguably one of Shostakovich's most complex and bizarre symphonic creations. A funeral march begins the sentence. This leads to a violent toccata, which turns into a kind of grotesque divertimento, which contains a well-known solo for trombone with almost cartoon-like happiness. The divertimento makes way for a brutal chorale reminiscence of the coda of Gawriil Popov's First Symphony. It reaches a deafening climax when the funeral march reappears from the beginning of the movement, the music finally giving way to the death-breathed coda. With echoes from Tchaikovsky's Pathethique and Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde , the symphony finally pulsates morendo into the darkness on a bare C minor organ point.

Recordings

Recordings of the work include:

The last two recordings also include performances of the preserved, original sketches of the first movement of the fourth symphony.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Pauline Fairclough: The 'Perestroyka' of soviet symphonism: Shostakovich in 1935 . In: Music & Letters . Vol. 83, No. 2 . Oxford University Press, May 2002, pp. 259 .
  2. ^ Pauline Fairclough: The 'Perestroyka' of soviet symphonism: Shostakovich in 1935 . Vol. 83, Music & Letters, No. 2 . Oxford University Press, May 2002, pp. 261 .
  3. ↑ Pauline Fairclough: A sovjet credo: Shostakovich's fourth symphony, . Ashgate Publishing Company, USA 2006, p. 3 .
  4. ^ Pauline Fairclough :: A sovjet credo: Shostakovich's fourth symphony . Ashgate Publishing Company, USA 2006, p. XIX .
  5. ↑ Hans Joachim Hinrichsen & Laurenz Lütteken (eds.): Between Confession and Refusal: Shostakovich and the Symphony in the 20th Century . Swiss contributions to music research 3, BVK 1830.Bärenreiter-Verlag, 2005, ISBN 3-7618-1830-0 , p. 64/65 .
  6. ↑ Chaos instead of music - German Shostakovich Society: Forwarding reference. (PDF) Retrieved May 2, 2019 .
  7. ↑ Hans Joachim Hinrichsen & Laurenz Lütteken (eds.): Between Confession and Refusal - Shostakovich and the Symphony in the 20th Century . Bärenreiter, S. 20 .
  8. ↑ D. Shostakovich: 'Moy tvorcheskiy put' [My creative path] . In: Red Strains . Izyestiya, April 3, 1935.
  9. ↑ Dmitri Shostakovich: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich [Testimony of Shostakovich]. In: Solomon Wolkow (Ed.): Music and Letters . 1st edition. List, Munich 2003.
  10. ↑ Glikman, I. (Isaak): Story of a friendship: the letters of Dmitry Shostakovich to Isaak Glikman, 1941-1975 . Faber, London 2001, ISBN 0-571-20982-3 .
  11. ^ Alan Mercer: Writing about Shostakovich - Edinburgh International Festival 1962. (PDF) In: dschjournal.com. DSCH Journal No. 37, July 2012, accessed June 30, 2018 .
  12. ↑ Dmitri Shostakovich: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich . Ed .: Solomon Wolkow. 1st edition. List, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-548-60335-1 .