Evanston RoundTable, Jan. 15, 2025

Riveting and profound music that meant life or death

I’ve written about the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony before. It’s one of the masterworks of the classical repertoire, alongside the great symphonies of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Mahler. But it’s also a great deal more. A man’s life depended on this symphony. That man was the composer himself.

There are hundreds of books on Dmitri Shostakovich’s life, which remains something of a mystery: Did he despise the Soviet regime that repeatedly persecuted him? Or was he a loyal son of the Communist Party, as newspapers reported at his death in August 1975? The London Times eulogized him as “One of the greatest twentieth-century composers and a committed believer in Communism and Soviet power.”

Critics would accuse him of being a willing part of the Soviet propaganda machine, because he would sign documents and recite speeches (written by others and forced on him) supporting the regime. Case in point: a June 1973 news conference in Chicago, where the Sun-Times music critic harangued the composer mercilessly. Former Northwestern University Slavic Languages and Literature Professor Irwin Weil recalls translating for Shostakovich during his three-day visit to receive an honorary degree from NU and describes the hostile press gathering in his memoir From the Cincinnati Reds to the Moscow Reds.

‘Mountains of corpses’

In his memoir, Testimony, published after his death, Shostakovich wrote of Stalin’s relentless terror, the show trials and frequent denunciations: “What I remember are mountains of corpses, whole cities of corpses, a continent of corpses,” which included many of his friends and artistic colleagues. “They figured out how to make me a corpse without killing me,” he went on, “so I could serve Mother Russia and the Soviet Man and the Great Gardener [Stalin] even better. And I did.”

But the book has been challenged as fraudulent, and there’s a lively debate among Shostakovich scholars as to its credibility. When I asked his close friend and colleague, the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, what he thought of the purported memoir during a 1999 guest conductorship in Chicago, he replied in his broken English: “The writing, false. The feelings, true.”

But that’s not really the point, is it? The point is that Shostakovich had to write the Fifth Symphony to stay alive. It was, in the hackneyed phrase, a matter of life or death. In January 1936, Stalin had walked out of Shostakovich’s immensely popular opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Two days later Pravda published an article titled “Muddle Instead of Music,” which claimed “The power of good music to infect the masses has been sacrificed to a petty-bourgeois, ‘formalist’ attempt to create originality through cheap clowning.” The article ended ominously, “It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly.”

Some scholars believe Stalin himself might have written the threatening piece.

“The opera disappeared overnight and every publication and political organization in the country heaped personal attacks on its composer,” writes PBS’ Keeping Score.

Disgrace and despair

A week later, yet another Pravda article appeared attacking the composer, plunging him still further into disgrace and despair. He was now “an enemy of the people.” Married and the father of two young children, he started keeping a bag of toiletries near the front door. It contained his pills, toothbrush, toothpaste and a few other necessities he would need if the KGB came knocking in the middle of the night to take him away. Sometimes those arrested were taken to prison, sometimes sent to the gulags in Siberia and sometimes dumped in an unmarked grave.

Why did Stalin target the inoffensive Shostakovich? Stalin had previously purged most of the officer corps, including Shostakovich’s friend and patron Marshall Mikhail Tukhachevsky. No wonder the Nazis rolled practically untouched right up to the suburbs of Moscow in late 1941.

Stalin next turned to the intelligentsia, academics and the creative community. He thought of teachers and artists — with their writing, poetry, music and paintings — as “engineers of the human soul” who exerted enormous influence in Soviet life and were therefore a threat to his iron-fisted control.

The hugely popular Shostakovich, a favorite son in his native Leningrad, became Stalin’s whipping boy, with terrifying consequences. As the composer wrote in Testimony, “I was completely in the thrall of fear. I was no longer the master of my life, my past was crossed out, my work, my abilities, turned out to be worthless to everyone. The future didn’t look any less bleak. At that moment I desperately needed to disappear, it was the only possible way out.”

But Shostakovich couldn’t just disappear; he was too well-known. Nor could he quit composing; he needed to work to support his family. And in any case writing music was as necessary as breathing, he told friends. “If they cut off both hands, I will compose music anyway holding the pen in my teeth.”

A symphonic response

His answer to Stalin was the Fifth Symphony. A music committee, the Union of Russian Composers, reviewed the new works of all Soviet composers for approval. How they let this one slip by is mystifying. The symphony is dark and provocative, pulsing with furious energy, quirky humor and searing pain. The ending is famously ambiguous: was it a glorious paean to Soviet triumph or something darker and more ironic?

“There is plenty of emotional variety in this symphony,” writes musicologist David Hurwitz, “even before the finale bursts in, including triumph, despair, violence, tranquility, innocence, mystery, vulgarity, and humor.”

As the Evanston Symphony’s Music Director Lawrence Eckerling told the orchestra during its first rehearsal, the heart of the symphony is the incredible third movement Largo, a beautiful and poignant 28-minute lament that reflected in its haunting melodies the suffering of the Soviet people in the years of the Great Terror. Many in the audience at the November 1937 Leningrad premiere wept.

Perhaps what saved Shostakovich was the finale, which is lively, bright, almost militantly bombastic. The Leningrad audience at the premiere responded with a 40-minute ovation.

“Although some audiences heard condemnation of the government through inflections of despair, Stalin found the politics of the music acceptable and Shostakovich won a reprieve — at least for another decade,” PBS’s Keeping Scoresays.

I first heard the Fifth Symphony on a $2.99 cassette tape recording of Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. The ending was played very fast and sounded glorious. Shostakovich heard the Bernstein orchestra perform the piece in Moscow in 1959, and supposedly approved, telling Lenny, “It’s not the way I wrote it, but it’s the best I ever heard it!”

Nowadays, we no longer assume the powerful ending was meant to extol Soviet triumphalism. In his private correspondence, guarded as it was, Shostakovich could be more ironic and darkly satirical about life in the USSR.

This article by Cesare Civetta in Medium spells it out:

“Stalin was responsible for the death of 30 million Russians. Shostakovich’s friends kept disappearing. His colleagues, patrons and members of his family were arrested and shot, including his brother-in-law, his mother-in-law and his uncle. In 1937 and 1938 1.5 million people were arrested and 668,000 were killed, averaging 880 executions a day.”

An inconclusive finale

Today, the ending is usually played more slowly. In the latest edition of the ESO newsletter Keynotes, Eckerling cites some of the military references in the symphony, “which appeased Stalin, but probing deeper, for those receptive to it, could be viewed as actually mocking the military or creating a caricature of the same.”

Conductor Mark Wigglesworth writes on his website: “The repeated notes that end the work are shocking. That they are repeated 252 times is a sign that Shostakovich knew the battle would be a long time in winning. He knew there would be millions more deaths before the truth was discovered. Listening today to the music it is hard to imagine how anyone could have been taken in by Shostakovich’s double speak. Perhaps they weren’t. Perhaps even Stalin realised that on this occasion he had been outwitted and had no choice but to let the people’s champion get away with it. With this work Shostakovich was able to usher in a cease fire.”

Because the symphony — with all its incredible power and sadness, its mirror of the suffering and resilience of the Russian people and the redemptive triumph it represented for the composer — is almost sacred to music lovers, I auditioned to rejoin the Evanston Symphony’s viola section to play the Shostakovich Fifth with the ESO in February. The audition went well and I was accepted, which was thrilling, though not without challenges: it’s long, difficult and exhausting to play and requires many hours of practice and study.

No matter. To perform the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony, to hear the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony, to understand the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony, is a privilege and joy for every music lover.

You can hear it performed by the Evanston Symphony Orchestra on Feb. 2, along with Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme with cellist Christine Lamprea as soloist and Motor City Dance Mix by Northwestern University Bienen School of Music Dean Jonathan Bailey Holland at Northwestern’s Pick-Staiger Concert Hall.