EVERYTHING’S READY: THE POEM
AS IS ITS WAY, IS SILENT.
BUT SUDDENLY THE THEME BREAKS
OUT
HAMMERS AT THE WINDOW LIKE A FIST,
AND FROM FAR OFF
A TERRIBLE SOUND
WILL ANSWER THIS CHALLENGE —
GURGLINGS, MOANS, SHRIEKS —
AND THE APPARITION OF CROSSED
HANDS…
from Poem without a Hero
by Anna Akhmatova
translated by Lenore Mathew and William McNaughton
The opening measure of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5
For the thirty years of Joseph Stalin’s rule over the Soviet Union, artists and intellectuals crouched under the critical eye of his Communist Party. Artistic or intellectual work seen as “perverse,” “anti-popular,” or in any way contrary to Soviet values could lead to the exile, imprisonment, or death of its creator. Having watched her friends and fellow artists board the train in St. Petersburg as they headed into exile, or die in the Gulag as did her husband and nearly her son, Anna Akhmatova was reported to write her poems down only long enough to read them aloud to someone, then burn them on the stove. Dmitri Shostakovich, whom Akhmatova admired deeply, saw his own friends and relatives sent to prison or killed, and in 1936 he found himself in the Party’s proverbial crosshairs.
A decade earlier, 19 year-old Shostakovich had premiered his first symphony as a capstone work upon graduating from the Petrograd Conservatory. The work was an early milestone, receiving its first professional performance that same year with the Leningrad Philharmonic, its first hearing outside of Russia in the hands of legendary conductor Bruno Walter, and its U.S. premiere with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. As his language matured and modernized, Shostakovich’s subsequent work often diverged from popular tastes, yet his status as a preeminent Russian composer remained.
Things changed in 1936 when Stalin attended a performance of the composer’s opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. For two years the opera had enjoyed both popular and official praise, with one critic calling it “the result of the general success of Socialist construction, of the current policy of the party [and a piece that] could have been written only by a Soviet composer brought up in the best tradition of Soviet culture.” Stalin apparently disagreed, leaving with his entourage at intermission, and leaving Shostakovich white-faced at the curtain call.
It took only a day for Pravda, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, to publish a review entitled “Muddle Instead of Music.” The editorial called Lady Macbeth a “deliberately dissonant, muddled stream of sounds…quacks, hoots, pants, and gasps.” Just a week later, Pravda also decried his comic ballet, The Limpid Stream, saying that “it jangles and expresses nothing.” Shostakovich appealed to Platon Kerzhentsev, Chairman of the USSR State Committee on Culture, and was told to “reject formalist errors” and “attain something that could be understood by the broad masses.”
The denouncement came as Shostakovich was working on his Fourth Symphony. Under Pravda’s cruel spotlight, he nonetheless completed the work in preparation for a Leningrad premiere. Rehearsals were already underway when the orchestra’s management cancelled the performance. Shostakovich shelved the symphony, and it would not see the stage for 25 years.
From the silence of this would-be Fourth emerged the Fifth and, along with it, the composers “rehabilitation” in the eyes of the state. Following its 1937 premiere, the Fifth was hailed as a “triumphal success,” with critics calling it a “Soviet composer’s response to just criticism.” The musical language of the Fifth is indeed a more conservative departure from that of Lady Macbeth, and even if one rejects claims that Shostakovich was sincerely “rehabilitated,” it follows that the composer would temper his language to meet the expectations of the Party, or at least avoid its ire. It worked. Pravda praised the composer for “not having given in to the seductive temptations of his previous ‘erroneous’ ways.”
For the next 38 years, Shostakovich’s relationship with the State was, as they say, complicated. His ten subsequent symphonies, many of them bearing patriotic dedications or themes, were sometimes praised and sometimes censured for not being patriotic enough. He was made a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, while at the same time writing the song cycle From Jewish Poetry, despite widespread, state-endorsed anti-semitism. He was denounced for a second time in 1948, having the entirety of his works banned. Yet the very next year he was sent, no doubt as part of his “rehabilitation,” as an official Soviet representative to the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace in New York City. Shostakovich joined the Communist Party in 1960, was appointed Chairman of the RSFSR Union of Composers, and served as a party delegate until his death in 1975. Yet, while a Party member, his Eighth String Quartet was dedicated “To the victims of fascism and war;” his Thirteenth Symphony set the poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who spoke out against the persecution of Jews by both the Nazi’s and the Soviets; and he helped to secure a reprieve for Joseph Brodsky, whose “anti-Soviet” poetry had earned him a sentence of exile and forced labor.
As the world began to make sense of the endlessly-embattled life and work of Dmitri Shostakovich, Solomon Volkov’s 1979 tell-all biography, Testimony, hit the shelves. Purporting to be the authentic memoirs of Shostakovich, as transcribed from a series of meetings between 1971 and 1974, Testimony portrays a composer who, under the relentless gaze of the Soviets, encoded wordless messages of dissent into his music. Recalling the open weeping and half-hour’s worth of applause following the Fifth Symphony’s premiere, Shostakovich is reported to have said, “Of course they understood, they understood what was happening around them and they understood what the Fifth was about.” The book offers a compelling account, but it’s one now widely considered to be a fabrication, at least in part. Nonetheless, by the time scholars had brought their skepticism to bear, the image of Shostakovich as a clandestine voice of musical resistance had taken its hold on the public imagination.
Shostakovich is still presented as a willful dissident in today’s conservatories and concert halls, such that it is almost impossible to hear the Fifth Symphony without feeling drawn to its apparent spirit of defiance. Do the trumpet fanfares of its finale represent a genuine victory of Soviet ideals or a forced triumph and veiled protest? Can the Seventh Symphony, which was premiered over loudspeakers in Leningrad as Soviet forces pushed back against the Nazi siege, symbolize resistance to fascism despite the oppressive regime for whom it was written? Can we choose our heroes, despite the masters they served? Even if the intent of their creations is ultimately unknowable?
The Music
Much like the subject of Akhmatova’s poem, the symphony begins with a written out silence (two beats of rest), after which the opening theme “BREAKS OUT…HAMMER[ING] AT THE WINDOW LIKE A FIST.” Here the hammering is a repeated iteration of two notes, jumping forcefully upward and downward again, traded off between string sections in a minor key. This is one of three core elements of the first movement. As the hammering quiets to a murmur, the second element emerges — a slow, sorrowful, wandering violin melody. This melody will undergo numerous transformations over the course of the moment, the most prominent of them bearing starkly militaristic characteristics. The third element is a string of repeated notes, softly drumming out a sort of funeral march, while the violins play a soft, stretched-out version of the hammering motive. A simple accompaniment though they may seem, these repeated notes will drive the musical drama all the way to the symphony’s conclusion. Meanwhile, the music slowly but relentlessly accelerates. Tempo, volume, and energy build for some thirteen minutes before finally offering relief in a tranquil duet of flute and French horn. Yet the reprieve is brief. The sunny key of D Major shifts back to the twilight uncertainty of D minor, and a lonesome celeste softly chimes out three mysterious, rising scales — an enigmatic elegy to the tumultuous journey.
While the second movement shares some of the tonal darkness of the first, its overall character is something else entirely. A younger Shostakovich had written music for the circus, theater, and cinema, and the more playful sounds of those mediums define the trapezeian vertigo of the this movement. Cellos and basses again take the lead, garishly clodhopping toward a brief horn fanfare, trilling woodwinds, and a mischievous clarinet solo. The bulk of the music thereafter is an off-kilter waltz, characterized by sudden instrumental outbursts, crashing cymbals, and brief high-wire acts taken in turn by solo violin, flute, and oboe. The music is positively unbalanced, perhaps as both a dance and a state of mind. There are echoes of military music here as well, particularly in the horn and trumpet fanfares, which are also built on repeated notes.
In the wake of the circus comes yet more sorrow. The third movement is an obsessive lament, sung first by a veiled chorus of ruminative strings, then handed off to harp and solo flute. The flute plays a version of the first movement’s wandering violin melody before the return of the ruminative strings, whose theme builds in volume and gathers other instrumental forces, finally exploding in a brief, but powerful, outpouring of sound. The emotional drama of this movement is held in the tension between its own three elements: veiled choruses, sorrowful woodwind melodies, and the unrestrained lamentations of the full orchestra. Like the first movement, this one ends with the celeste, whose bell-toned echoes set up a strangely luminous major chord in the strings — strange because it feels out of place, coming from nowhere. If the warm light of that last chord comes as a welcome dawn after a night of torment, we may yet wonder what lies in its remaining shadows.
The fourth movement begins as a war cry. A tremendous D minor chord blasts forth in the winds and brass. Trumpets, trombones, and tuba join the timpani in a terrifying march, and four whipping strikes from the full orchestra announce that the battle is on. The timpani’s drum strokes are here transformed into the most important element of the finale – repeated notes. There is scarcely a measure for the next fifteen minutes where we don’t hear the relentless repetition of pitch like banging on a door. Layered over this ostinato are numerous transformations of the march, and, like in the first movement, the music gets gradually faster and faster. Finally, it explodes in a brief, orchestra-wide thundering of repeated notes. Seemingly exhausted, the music quiets and slows, nearly coming to rest.
The ensuing section is all mystery — quietly oscillating violins, a wandering flute solo, and curious punctuation of a harp. From this strange stillness, the timpani returns with soft repeating notes, undergirding a dark woodwind choral — another version of the march theme. The music builds one last time, with more and more instruments taking up those repeated notes, until nearly all are hammering it out in unison. From this unrelenting pulsation arises a seemingly triumphant choral fanfare in the brass. If indeed triumphant, it’s a victory hard won, as this chorale is a technical tour de force for the trumpets. And it is their highest, most difficult note that muddies the water of this supposed victory. That note belongs to D minor, the solemn key in which the symphony began, instead of D major, the exultant key to which the music has just arrived. Even in redemption, there is doubt.
I wonder what Anna Akhmatova heard in the Fifth Symphony. Was it music “that could be understood by the broad masses”? Strained acquiescence? A cipher of resistance? The will to create amidst impossible circumstances? What do we hear in it today, in this historical moment? Certainly there is pain, and also resilience. Perhaps defiance, but undoubtedly perseverance. Perhaps protest, but above all, courage.
