6th Symphony (Shostakovich)

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The Symphony No. 6 in B minor, op. 54 by Dmitri Shostakovich was written in 1939 and premiered on November 21, 1939 by the Leningrad Philharmonic under Yevgeny Maravinsky .

The work is a three-movement symphony with a playing time of about 30 minutes.

history

The Sixth Symphony was originally intended to be a large-scale " Lenin Symphony " - a project that was often announced but never actually implemented. Shostakovich once announced in September 1938 that he would be eager to work on his Sixth Symphony, which would be a monumental composition for soloists, choir, and orchestra and would include the poem Vladimir Ilyich Lenin by Vladimir Mayakovsky , but the poem's expressiveness made it difficult to set this to music. He later tried to incorporate other literature on Lenin into his new symphony, but to no avail. In January 1939 he spoke about his Sixth Symphony in a radio interview without mentioning Lenin or any other extra-musical association.

The purely instrumental Symphony No. 6 was completed in September 1939. Shostakovich commented on this in the press:

“The musical character of the Sixth Symphony will be different from the mood and feel of the Fifth Symphony , in which moments of tragedy and tension were characteristic. In my latest symphony there is a music of a thoughtful and lyrical order. I wanted to convey this into the moods of spring, joy and youth. "

On November 21, 1939, exactly two years after the premiere of Symphony No. 5 , the premiere of Symphony No. 6 took place in the Great Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic in Leningrad with the Leningrad Philharmonic under Yevgeny Mravinsky , thus at the same place and with the same interpreters as at the world premiere of the previous symphony. The symphony had a successful premiere, the finale had to be repeated, but was later criticized for its supposedly clumsy structure and its sudden change of mood.

The first recording was made by Leopold Stokowski with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1940.

music

The . Symphony No. 6 has three sets :

  1. largo
  2. Allegro
  3. Presto

The Sixth Symphony is unusually structured and begins with a long, introspective, slow movement, followed by two short movements: a scherzo and a “full-blooded and unbridled music hall gallop”. Shostakovich himself considered the gallop of the third movement to be the most successful.

literature

  • Laurel Fay: Shostakovich: A Life . Oxford University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-19-513438-9 .
  • Michael Koball: Pathos and the grotesque - The German tradition in the symphonic work of Dmitri Shostakovich. Kuhn, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-928864-50-5 .

Web links