then we saw the stars again

Dimitri Shostakovich, Symphony n.11 in G minor

(apologies for the lack of podcast this week. The podcast will resume on the 1st of December)

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” Meaning in music – that must sound very strange for most people…What was the composer trying to say? What was he trying to make clear? The questions are naive of course, but despite their naivety and crudity, they definitely merit being asked. And I would add to them, for instance, Can music attack evil? Can it make man stop and think? Can it cry out, and thereby draw man’s attention to various vile acts to which he has grown accustomed?”
Shostakovich, preface to the 11th Symphony.

I ask my students whether they think that there is still a place for ‘classical’ music in today’s world, and whether there are still people making ‘classical’ music in a time where culture has been channeled through the radio/TV/internet rather than the concert hall. To put things in context: as Shostakovich was finishing his eleventh Symphony, Elvis was singing “Blue suede shoes”. One is a monolithic work featuring long drones and dirge-like passages, the other is the first big hit of rock ‘n’ roll.

Yet, Shostakovich is very much a man of his time, a man about his time. As a Soviet composer, he faced the pressures of being an artist under the Stalin regime, and though he did not suffer the hardship of the Gulag like many of his contemporaries, he did fall out of line with the Party’s doctrines and was forced to ‘realign’ in order to regain his status as a major Russian artist.

So the 11th Symphony comes as an anniversary of sorts. Initially meant to be published in 1956 (his fiftieth birthday), Shostakovich pushed the date a few months to make it coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the successful 1917 Revolution. And as a program piece, he chose to depict the tragic events of the failed attempt to overthrow the Tsar in 1905 (the same events that had been the basis of the Battleship Potemkin), in an attempt to get in the Party’s good books, but also to raise important questions, reflect and comment on the atrocities committed in the name of an ideology, regardless of which side of the fence you are sitting on.

Not that music should be political, or that it should have a message. But the place of the artist in the Twentieth Century is not the same one as that of the court composer, or the self-imbued Romantic virtuoso in his cozy Parisian salon. You wouldn’t have Guernica without the Spanish Civil War, you wouldn’t have the War Requiem without the Canterbury and London bombings, and these works not only serve as reminders, alarm bells and cautionary tales, they also strive to see what still makes us human after all.

The fact that Shostakovich uses sounds to convey his message makes his music ambiguous by nature, and he intended it to be. Words are more easily interpreted, whereas music can still carry different meanings, and his Western supporters saw his later works as subtle critiques of a Regime he was forced to embrace. The eleventh symphony embodies this dichotomy. For the Soviets, it was a celebration. For others, it was a eulogy.

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The first movement is almost glacial in its static pace and tone. As a master in the use of tone colour, Shostakovich evokes the bleak landscape of an early cold January morning, on a desolate Palace square.

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The bloodbath.
Elements from the first movement are reintroduced, only here the setting is more anguished and ultimately desperate. The tension and violence progress towards the ineluctable outcome. And again, as a closure to the second movement, the themes borrowed by Shostakovich from the popular folk tunes of the time reappear, in much more subdued and somber tones.

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The Tocsin.
After the requiem-like composure of the third movement, Shostakovich sums up the thematic content of the whole symphony into one last swooping soundscape.
The ambiguity of the symphony’s brutality at the end is striking: are we mourning the crushing of the rebellion of 1905, warning the Tsar that his time will come during the next one, or hinting that the success of Lenin’s 1917 attempt would still mean the death of many?
On a programmatic level, the dignitaries of the Communist Party would of course side with the former, but as a convinced humanist, Shostakovich lets us hear otherwise as well.

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As usual, pieces here are for illustrative purposes only. If you like what you hear, buy the composer’s records, or go to their gigs and get a t-shirt!