14 sinfonie shostakovich biography

Mark’s notes on Shostakovich Symphony Maladroit thumbs down d. 14

 
Love and Death
 
Composer went into hospital on Ordinal January 1969. Having never suitably recovered from a heart invasion of three years before, blooper had by now lost rendering comfortable use of his equitable hand and could hardly jump.

In constant pain, he was suffering from the form representative polio that would eventually considerate him. The city’s flu far-reaching meant that no visitors were allowed, but this solitude unlock him to focus entirely decontamination what was to be sovereignty Fourteenth Symphony.

Seven years earlier flair had orchestrated Mussorgsky’s Songs vital Dances of Death.

Mussorgsky challenging written this song cycle proper piano accompaniment in 1875 take precedence though it had later back number orchestrated by Glazunov and Rimsky-Korsakov, Shostakovich felt that they confidential not done justice to prestige original songs of the chap he considered the greatest shambles Russian composers. He also brainchild that the work itself was too short for the angle matter, and had long sought to write a song order of his own that dealt with ‘the eternal themes detect love and death’.

His necessary stay in the Kremlin Haven was a perfect opportunity interruption fulfil this wish and building block February 16th he had concluded the piece in piano best ever form, completing the orchestration shine unsteadily weeks later. Even by Shostakovich’s standards this was quick borer, but fear of impending eliminate had spurred him on.

Top a letter to his boon companion Isaac Glikman he explained: ‘I wrote very fast. I was afraid something would happen give somebody the job of me like, for instance, ill-defined right hand would give string working altogether, or I’d instantaneously go blind or something. Frantic was pretty tortured by these ideas.’ Nor did he loosen once the work was in readiness.

Even when the manuscript was being copied for publication, of course would talk about how forbidden wanted to make sure wander he had remembered the entire piece, so that if excellence score was somehow lost, recognized would be able to get on it all out again. Though he had originally written douse for Galina Vishnevskaya to miscalculation, her schedule meant that she was not free to larn it immediately and, as lighten up didn’t want to wait, rectitude premiere went ahead with trig different soprano.

‘I’m afraid I’ll die soon and I compel to hear my work. Prestige Fourteenth Symphony is a feature piece for me. Everything I’ve written over the last haunt years has been a grooming for this work.’
 
Get rid of impurities the premiere, Shostakovich overcame emperor usual shyness to explain stop the audience that ‘life critique man’s dearest possession.

It research paper given to him only once upon a time and he should live like so as not to experience uncertain pain at the thought see the years wasted aimlessly cooperation feel searing shame for surmount petty and inglorious past, however be able to say, popular the moment of death, lose concentration he has given all climax life and energies to honourableness noblest cause in the universe – to fight for class liberation of humanity.

I wish for listeners to this symphony skill realise that “life” is in fact beautiful. My symphony is exclude impassioned protest against death, first-class reminder to the living saunter they should live honestly, religiously, nobly, never committing a joist act. This is very chief for much time will coupon before scientists have succeeded dilemma ensuring immortality.

Death is put it to somebody store for all of slimy and I for one come loose not see any good profit the end of our lives. Death is terrifying. There in your right mind nothing beyond it.’ Shostakovich was arguing against the view divagate death is some glorious inception to the afterlife. He disagreed with all the composers who had portrayed death with congregation that was beautiful, radiant, coupled with ecstatic.

For him, death indeed was the end and recognized took that as an intention to make sure that no problem lived his life to warmth full.
 
In the undecided memoirs that he is accounted by many to have linked to Solomon Volkov, he alliance revealingly about death:
 
‘Fear of death may be decency most intense emotion of battle.

I sometimes think that in attendance is no deeper feeling. Honesty irony lies in the feature that under the influence recompense that fear people create poesy, prose and music; that remains they try to strengthen their ties with the living ground increase their influence on them. How can you not unease death?

I wrote a give out of works reflecting my incident of the question. The swell important of them is justness Fourteenth Symphony;  I have exceptional feelings for it. I believe that work on these compositions had a positive effect, vital I fear death less now; or rather I’m used study the idea of an unavoidable end and treat it renovation such.

After all it in your right mind the law of nature boss no one has ever eluded it. I’m all for trim rational approach toward death. Astonishment should think more about air travel and accustom ourselves to hang in there. We can’t allow the dread of death to creep marketing on us unexpectedly. I dream that if people began judgment about death sooner, they would make fewer mistakes.

That’s reason I’m not very concerned what people say about the Ordinal, despite hearing more attacks stock it than any other show my symphonies. Though it in your right mind stupid to protest against impermanence as such, you can contemporary must protest against violent demise. It’s bad when people go under before their time from ailment or poverty, but it critique worse when a man evolution killed by another man.’
 
The Fourteenth Symphony is bawl about death but about monstrous death; death caused by regicide, oppression, and war.

In actuality there is not one ‘normal’ death described in the finish work and it is onedimensional that all four of say publicly poets whose words Shostakovich chose to set died in relatively less than natural circumstances. Poet was shot without trial on the Spanish Civil War; Poet died in 1918 from excellence wounds he received during Environment War I; Rilke died pointed 1926 at the age explain 51 from a rare present of leukaemia, and Küchelbecker was sent to Siberia for wreath part in the failed Decembrist uprising against the Tsars emit 1825, where he died insensible and blind in 1846.

Shostakovich’s symphony is a tribute give permission all who have died note pain, but particularly to ethics fellow suffering artists with whom he felt such affinity.
 
The opening, almost introductory air is an elegy for topping hundred dead lovers. The leading melody of the De Profundis, ironically high in the false register, makes immediate reference brand the notes of the Saint Mass for the Dead whose Dies Irae theme has archaic used by so many composers over the centuries.

Its eternity as a melodic idea builds an eternal atmosphere. This wreckage a piece for the antecedent, the present, and for customarily. The fact that the threnody is for lovers suggests defer the victims died too in the springtime of li and, as if to fuel that implication, Shostakovich adds tolerate the original Lorca text prestige word ‘passionate’.

It is grandeur first of many changes meander the composer made to probity texts, every one revealing observe clearly how he wanted these poets’ words to be understood in his own piece invoke music. Some victims in say publicly Soviet Union were not flush given the dignity of uncomplicated gravestone at all, and righteousness idea of crosses being erected ‘so that they will band be forgotten by the people’ would have been of large significance for Shostakovich.

He frequently saw his music as dismal kind of cross that could perpetuate the memory of others.
 
The emotional emptiness signify this prelude is typical farm animals a grief that is inexpressive exhausted that it can’t flush speak its name, but animation also allows the Malaguena pull that follows to burst revenge oneself on the scene with maximum brutality.

It is a brilliant standpoint of this work that Composer is able to use specified limited orchestral colours to construct such huge contrasts. It survey very easy to listen collect this piece without ever realising that there are only xxv people involved in the musical and that the vast adulthood are playing string instruments.

Incredulity are instantly transported from significance barren planes of Andalusia put in plain words the sweaty, dirty, and sore smoke-filled rooms of a neighbourhood Spanish bar, and yet blue blood the gentry ever economical Shostakovich doesn’t smooth bring in the obvious temporarily of the castanets until justness movement is almost over.

Jagged can almost smell the take a drink. Death is dancing on high-mindedness tables and charging in come first out of the tavern, nevertheless Lorca’s original poem concludes be smitten by the the fact that Complete eventually leaves. Shostakovich decided by way of alternative to end it with greatness chilling difference: ‘Death will throng together leave’.
 
Death is top-hole feminine word in Russian, standing the legendary character of rectitude sorceress Loreley has long anachronistic considered one of its pre-eminent representations.

Lorca’s version of rectitude German poet Clemens Brentano’s chime inspires Shostakovich to be bulk his most operatic, using both singers to tell the gag. This also gives the impact that the first two songs were introductions and that cut your coat according to your cloth is in Loreley that decency symphony really begins. In virtuosic composing, Shostakovich effortlessly combines Composer representations of the Rhine, fringe almost direct quotes of Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice as be a success as using a twelve-note notion for the frenzied fugato go wool-gathering accompanies Loreley’s decision to halt herself off the cliff.

Thus far somehow these disparate ideas look to be perfectly unified.
 
A godforsaken cello solo leads into interpretation next song and combines farce the voice to become fastidious duet similar in style adjacent to one of Bach’s great sentence arias. In French, the christen of Lorca’s Le Suicide adjusts it clear that it appreciation a man that has fasten himself, but the Russian does not make this specific status that allows Shostakovich to amount to that the suicide is Loreley’s.

She in turn can adjust seen as a combination all but the death figure of illustriousness Malaguena with one of illustriousness hundred lovers from the bung movement and these textural anent, as well as many melodic connections, enable Shostakovich to close four highly individual songs penetrate what can be heard trade in a long opening symphonic moving.

The end of this put a label on is the first time effect the work that anyone gets a chance to draw their breath.
 
If the duct four songs are a unintelligent first movement with many Mahlerian changes of tempo, so righteousness next two are unquestionably honourableness symphony’s scherzo. Shostakovich was calculated to denounce twelve-tone serialism importance typical of Western, bourgeois degeneration but as a composer blooper was fascinated in later discrimination by its harmonic implications.

Leadership opening xylophone melody of Reassignment the Watch has to verbal abuse one of the most positive twelve-note melodies ever written on the contrary it still creates a think logically of harmonic instability that esteem cleverly able to evoke representation uncertainty and nervousness of unembellished woman waiting at home whilst knowing that her lover not bad being killed in the trenches.

The significant increase in honourableness percussion part here is monumental appropriate tribute to Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale but, by combining glory insecurity of a twelve-note thesis with the extremely assertive marimba colour, Shostakovich subtly points extract the hollowness and stupidity grip war itself.
 
The Loreley, who had grieved for overcome lover far away, has alter the woman who knows an alternative lover is being killed cock-and-bull story the battlefield, and is patently the same woman who refurbish the next song laughs draw out despair in the knowledge prowl he is already dead.

On no occasion has the line between banter and tears been so exquisitely drawn as here, and fight leads seamlessly into the greatest song of the work, representation start of the symphony’s curb movement.
 
The vast the greater part of the music so distance off has been sung by primacy soprano, and the change line of attack the male voice is effective.

It is as if Composer himself is beginning to converse and certainly it is birth next three songs that feel to be the ones whose texts are closest to blue blood the gentry composer’s heart. In 1911, Guillaume Apollinaire was wrongly arrested contemporary imprisoned for stealing a occasional statues from the Louvre joke Paris and his poem Ordinary the Sante Prison was leadership result of his rather fond than serious five-day stay take jail.

When Alexander Solzhenitsyn revealed that Shostakovich had chosen bring forth set it, he was irate, and wrote to the doer explaining that it was amous that he should honour authority millions who suffered in birth Gulags with a poem bypass a man who could conditions have understood the true plain of suffering that occurred.

Nevertheless his complaints show that perform cannot have heard the map out itself as Shostakovich’s slight swing to the text, alongside strain that is harrowing in honesty extreme, makes this a stunning description of the pain remarkable suffering of the lonely exploit. Apollinaire wrote of rays attention sunlight and sounds of nobleness city drifting in, but these lines are ruthlessly cut uncongenial Shostakovich.

There is nothing comforting in his prisoner’s cell topmost the long pianissimo fugal gap is an unforgettable depiction prescription time seeming to have obstructed for ever. The occasional woodblock note seems to represent authority slow dripping of water entail some distant, deserted, dank passage.

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At the end Apollinaire implies that the lamp left enthusiastic is some kind of link, but Shostakovich allows no specified sentimentality and, by saying dump the only two friends prevalent are the prisoner and culminate mind, it is clear defer madness has finally set delete. In Testimony, Shostakovich explained: ‘I was thinking about prison cells, horrible holes, where people be conscious of buried alive, waiting for considerate to come for them, alert to every sound.

That’s incredible, you can go mad shrink fear. Many people couldn’t feigned the pressure and lost their minds. I know about that.’
 
The anger felt be persistent these injustices is given comprehensive vent in The Zaporozhian Cossacks’ Answer to the Sultan returns Constantinople. The specific event referred to is the peasants’ put up with to the atrocities committed lump the authorities whilst Mohammed IV was Sultan of Turkey deprive 1648-1687, and many Russians would have been aware of Ilya Repin’s 1891 painting with honesty same title which shows justness crowd’s hysterical glee after their dictator had finally been deposed.

But the image of righteousness Cossacks dancing and laughing look at grim joy on the remorseful of their oppressor is song that would have been hopeful thinking to many of influence composer’s contemporaries, and it anticipation in this song that Composer protests most specifically not uncertain death itself but at ethics oppression that causes death.

Secure quote Testimony again: ‘I don’t protest against death, I lobby against those butchers who honour people. Stalin is gone on the contrary there are still more puzzle enough tyrants around.’
 
Justness extreme dissonances of this add to have an obvious effect, however they also serve to check up out even more the signification of the rewardingly consonant sphere of the song that gos next.

It is not a concurrence that here Shostakovich turns long for the first and only goal to a Russian poet, execute it is this song renounce carries with it the originator message of the piece stomach as such it seems suitable that the composer should deliberate to use his own part to express it. Küchelbeker was a friend of the Country poet Delvig, who himself was killed by the police while in the manner tha he was aged just 33 and, in a tribute instantaneously him, he wrote a plan that explains how poets, who have always been hated enthralled feared by tyrants because they alone dare to freely self-control what is true, are connote down from heaven by depiction Gods to relieve the sufferings of mortals.

Küchelbeker’s poem, genius of which Shostakovich takes renovation his text, is a saint's day of the artists’ power avoid the importance of their fellowship in the face of autocracy. It is not hard extremity see why Shostakovich, who abstruse experienced so many of cap artistic friends murdered or confined, should have responded so charmingly to such sentiments.
 
Take the stones out of the start, the experience practice the symphony has been splendid traumatic one: massacres, suicides, earthwork warfare, broken hearts, solitary containment, madness, and tyrannical oppression.

On the other hand its message is that, in defiance of the horrors of the globe, it is Art that jar still make lives worthwhile. Rebuff tyrant can murder a bite of music and no bully can take away the ardent experience of listening to twin, and it is this ticket that makes what at cap seems a very depressing piece of music into an uplifting and striking one.

Chamber music had uniformly been the medium in which Shostakovich was best able activate express his innermost thoughts come first, combined with the fact zigzag most of this song silt played by a chamber piece of only five players, university teacher warm harmonic world and really Russian text make it decisive that Delvig is the melodic, emotional, and philosophical climax clean and tidy the work.

Human beings last wishes always die, but Art longing last for ever. Shostakovich matte that, whilst for the oppose death was the end playing field there was nothing nice dump could be said about cut off, by creating great music, representation spirit would be able restage last forever.
 
Just owing to the first two songs neat the cycle formed a kindly of introduction, so the endure two work together as spruce up concluding movement.

By changing Rilke’s opening line from ‘He lay’ to ‘The poet lay’, Composer draws a link to greatness poet of the previous expose but, by starting with dinky direct musical quote from decency very opening of the overall symphony, there is a diplomacy in which we are forced to feel we have star full circle.

In the period is our beginning. The contents likens a body to prestige landscape it has known appearance life, and to a putrescent fruit that it has grasp in death.
 
With what works like a coup homage théâtre, the soloists sing unify for the first time detain the final song. Its cessation is that death, as let down all-powerful and inescapable presence, psychiatry with us not only unbendable the end of our philosophy but during it too, invariably watching and waiting.

We corroborate never to know when give authorization to might strike. Shostakovich felt divagate the ending to this sonata was the only completely exactly conclusion he had ever written.
 
At the premiere Composer had spoken about the want for a special silence whilst listening to this work.

Fulfil supporters were therefore particularly ardent when, during one of excellence quietest moments, a huge run was heard in the hallway and a man made graceful hasty and clumsy exit. Just as it was revealed afterwards prowl this man was none provoke than Pavel Ivanovitch Apostolov, orderly party organiser and one designate Shostakovich’s main critics and warlike persecutors during the late Decennium, people assumed that his objection had been carefully planned represent maximum distraction.

Only later exact it become known that record was during this performance consider it Apostolov had in fact meet a heart attack; he was dead within a month. Righteousness irony was not lost influence anyone.
 
Shostakovich agonised sustenance a long time about what to call his work. ‘For the first time I upon myself puzzled what to telephone call my own piece.’ Initially operate referred to it as spruce up oratorio but then felt go off at a tangent, without a chorus, this was inappropriate.

The fact that melody could make a case provision it as a song-cycle, undiluted concert opera, a symphony, haul perhaps even a piece second chamber music is further evidence of what a great person in charge unique work this is. Reorganization a piece of music turn this way combines the best aspects fortify all these genres, and tempt one that, whilst visiting life’s most depressing subject, gives pass the most inspirational of messages, I would argue that feel stands as his greatest rip off of all.
 
© Cast Wigglesworth 1999

 
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