Program Notes: March 28, 1999
Part of the legacy of the repressive Soviet regime is that we may never satisfactorily resolve the controversy that now swirls around its most respected composer, Dmitri Shostakovich. Twice reprimanded by his government for writing subversive music, Shostakovich nevertheless seemed to have been a model Soviet citizen overall, quietly accepting these rebukes and turning his attention ever more diligently to writing music that officially celebrated the state. But there have long been rumors that his music has a secret subtext: thus, heard "properly," it represents a passionate indictment of his government rather than an endorsement. Central to the controversy has been the supposedly autobiographical Testimony (1979), in which he appears as a secret dissident, but the book has proven more distracting than clarifying. While responsible music historians have denounced Testimony as a fraud, and while those who support the book's authenticity have seemed more like conspiracy theorists than scholars, the picture of Shostakovich presented by Testimony is not as easy to dismiss as the book itself. Even if it would be hard to imagine a composer outwardly serving his state more loyally than Shostakovich, his status as a "secret dissident" has been attested to by many intimates, and there is no doubt that he embedded secret (if cryptic) messages in his music. Thus, for example, his Tenth Symphony (1953) is built around his own initials ("D. Sch." after the German spelling of his name, which according to convention produces the notes D / E-flat / C / B), forming a motive that emerges ever more powerfully as the symphony progresses. But what does this musical obsession with his own initials actually mean? Does it represent the individual voice against the state? Are these notes the proud signature of the first major symphonist after Beethoven to complete a tenth symphony (which Schoenberg believed to be metaphysically impossible)? Is the symphony a coded record of his own persecution under Stalin, who had died earlier in 1953? Certainly it is easy to hear personal pain, and perhaps even political protest, in the repetitions of these four notes, but to interpret beyond these general qualities is to incite passionate confrontation with those who would understand things quite differently. Nor, ultimately, are Shostakovich's own intentions, whatever they might have been, the final arbiter. To quote Richard Taruskin (a prominent Russianist who has denounced Testimony while arguing persuasively for covert anti-Soviet protests in much of Shostakovich's music), "no one owns the meaning of this music, ... and no one can ever own it." And, as Taruskin goes on to say, this applies above all to Shostakovich himself, whose control in this area ended as soon as he surrendered the symphony to the world: "Imagine Edgar Bergen making himself very small and trying to sit on Charlie McCarthy's lap."
If Shostakovich presents a puzzle to historians because of his political situation, Richard Strauss appears more in the nature of a cautionary tale, an example of what can happen when a creative artist entirely turns his back on political issues. Strauss, who remained in Nazi Germany and was used as its musical figurehead--it is usually said against his will--wrote his Second Horn Concerto in Vienna, 1942, at the height of the Second World War. Given this political background, the "business-as-usual" attitude projected by the concerto can seem peculiarly unsettling. Few have argued (successfully, at any rate) that Strauss was "secretly dissident"; in fact, he seems to have cared little for anything other than his freedom to live a genteel life and to compose. This is an attitude that many have found unforgivable, even (especially?) considering that his daughter-in-law and many of his operatic collaborators were Jewish. Although tonight's work is, indeed, his second concerto for horn, it is actually his first for the French horn, since his youthful First Concerto was written for an earlier, less elaborate version of the instrument, without the tubing and valves that clutter the middle part of the modern horn.
Beethoven's ballet The Creatures of Prometheus (1800-01) was one of his first great public successes. The main theme of the finale is today its most familiar legacy, as Beethoven reused it as the theme of both his E-flat Piano Variations (Op. 35; 1802) and the finale of his Eroica Symphony (1803). But the Overture, too, has maintained a secure place in the repertory. A model of its kind, it proceeds from a suitably stately introduction to a movement of buoyant energy--an ideal curtain-raiser.
--- Raymond Knapp
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