Program Notes: March 3, 2002
How does a composer become the voice of an entire people? As if that weren’t a difficult enough question to ponder, we might ask with regard to Dmitri Shostakovich, How can a composer officially in the good graces of the oppressive Soviet government (well, at least most of the time) seem nevertheless to speak for those most oppressed by that government? A satisfactory answer to either question would have to call up both the tremendous power and the mystifying vagueness that music, and especially symphonic music, seems capable of projecting. And such an answer would also have to trace the deeply rooted traditions that enable the symphony, as a genre, to embody both individuality and collectivity, and that support a composer’s capacity to disguise private meanings within a more public musical discourse. Within this context, we might indeed hear the expression of a composer’s suffering and aspirations as the expression of a broader community, and we might imagine that what matters most in the equation is the immense power of the voice itself on the one hand and, on the other, how immensely needed that voice is by those who want to claim it as their own. Only then, perhaps, might we have a useful perspective on the frequently heard claim that Shostakovich was a "secret dissident" whose music needs decoding along such lines in order for it to be fully appreciated.
Rarely is Shostakovich’s voice more powerful–or more sorrowful–than in the second and fourth movements of his Fifteenth Symphony, and on the basis of these two movements alone we might indeed find this work expressive of a national sorrow. Enigmatically, however, the remaining movements are hard to reconcile to that view. Typically for Shostakovich, the Scherzo (the third movement) exhibits a sharply satirical tone that may be traced readily to Mahler, Shostakovich’s most important symphonic model. And Mahler may have been his model as well for the even more enigmatic first movement: like the opening movement of Mahler’s Fourth (which the Santa Monica Symphony played a few seasons ago), it opens with bells, adopts a childlike tone throughout, and climaxes in a nightmarish descent to a funereal trumpet call about three-quarters of the way through–the latter a nearly direct quotation from the parallel place in Mahler’s score. If Shostakovich’s opening movement is a "toy shop" come to life–as Shostakovich described it, and as the abrupt periodic appearances of the "Lone Ranger" tune from Rossini’s William Tell Overture would seem to corroborate–then it is one suddenly darkened by a premonition of death.
And, sure enough, Shostakovich’s second movement is a full-scale funeral march, with an opening quotation from his Eleventh Symphony (commemorating "Bloody Sunday," January 9, 1905) to confirm the national scope of its sorrow. (Intriguingly, Mahler’s second movement also brings death, but with a darkly comic edge: Freund Hein–that is, Death–playing the fiddle). The finale again brings quotations to the foreground: funeral music borrowed from Wagner’s Ring Cycle, the yearning motive that opens Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, leading to a sadly nostalgic song melody borrowed from Glinka, and a central foreboding recollection from his own Leningrad Symphony (No. 7). Shostakovich wrote his Fifteenth Symphony, destined to be his last, on his recovery from a serious illness in 1971, completing it shortly before a devastating heart attack; the eerie open chord sustained by the strings at the conclusion of the finale reportedly derives from the sound of the hospital equipment that sustained him through that difficult time.
The remaining two pieces on tonight’s program are the most prominent of the nineteenth-century works that Shostakovich quotes in his Fifteenth Symphony. The Overture to Gioachino Rossini’s William Tell (Paris, 1829), with its sections of pastoral, storm, and "riding" music, is surely too familiar to require much introduction here–although the circumstances of that opera are somewhat unsettling, as it was meant to launch Rossini’s career as a composer of French Grand Opera, but turned out to be his last opera altogether, despite his living another twenty-nine years. Siegfried’s Funeral Music, from Richard Wagner’s Götterdämerung, the fourth and final opera of his massive Ring Cycle (premiered Bayreuth, 1876), seems to carry the weight of mythological cataclysm. Thus, the music mourns more than the hero Siegfried, who falls victim to the curse of the ring, the emblem of Wotan’s sins three operas back; shortly after Siegfried’s funeral pyre is lit, Valhalla itself is put to the flame.
--- Raymond Knapp
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