Shostakovich: Symphony No. 6 in B minor, op. 54
I – Largo
II – Allegro
III – Presto
1937 saw Shostakovich’s `practical creative reply to just criticism’ in the form of his Symphony No. 5. In the wake of the Pravda article `Muddle Instead of Music’, the première of the Fifth Symphony was a sensation (with a thunderous ovation lasting half an hour) – not only was this a work that could secure the composer’s rehabilitation, but also a legitimate channel for grieving at the zenith of the Great Terror of the 1930s.
In September of the same year Shostakovich began teaching composition at the Leningrad Conservatoire. This, together with the immense relief after being rehabilitated, halted any major creative work for almost two years – the period between 1937 and 1939 saw the composition of a number of film scores, a second Jazz Suite, and the First String Quartet.
It was the Sixth Symphony that signalled the end of this creative drought. The successor to the hugely successful Fifth was originally publicised as a `Lenin Symphony’ – a monumental work employing soloists, chorus, and orchestra, setting, among other things, Mayakovsky’s poem `Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’. Yet by January 1939, when Shostakovich was preparing to write the long-awaited symphony, no mention was made of Lenin or a text, or soloists and chorus. Instead the composer produced a purely instrumental work in an unconventional three movement form, with an opening Largo of greater duration than the following Allegro and Presto put together.
On the subject of the Sixth Symphony, Shostakovich stated:
The musical character of the Sixth Symphony will differ from the mood and emotional tone of the Fifth Symphony, in which movements of tragedy and tension were characteristic. In my latest symphony, music of a contemplative and lyrical order predominates. I wanted to convey in it the moods of spring, joy, youth.
And at a private playing of the symphony in front of the composer’s closest friends, Ivan Sollertinsky and Issak Glickman, Shostakovich exclaimed:
It’s the first time I have written such a successful Finale. It seems to me not even the sternest critics will be able to find fault with it.
As Glickman recalls, the première was a huge success with the Finale being encored. Yet the critical reception was not so enthusiastic. Critics were uneasy with the lop-sided three- movement structure and, as Boris Schwarz reports, `the inner contrast between the philosophical subjective beginning and the extrovert, flippant ending seemed too sharp.’ With the patriotic works by Prokofiev and Shaporin overshadowing the Sixth Symphony, perhaps the failure of Shostakovich to produce a Lenin Symphony contributed to the cool critical reception.
On 21 November 1939, exactly two years after the première of the Fifth Symphony, in the same hall (the Large Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic), with the same performers (the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under Yevgeni Mravinsky), the Sixth Symphony was unveiled to the public. Part of the `All-Soviet Music Festival’, Shostakovich’s symphony shared the stage with such patriotic works as Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky and Yuri Shaporin’s On the Fields of Kulikova, together with Myaskovsky’s symphonies nos. 19, 20, and 21 and Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto.
As Glickman recalls, the première was a huge success with the Finale being encored. Yet the critical reception was not so enthusiastic. Critics were uneasy with the lop-sided three- movement structure and, as Boris Schwarz reports, `the inner contrast between the philosophical subjective beginning and the extrovert, flippant ending seemed too sharp.’ With the patriotic works by Prokofiev and Shaporin overshadowing the Sixth Symphony, perhaps the failure of Shostakovich to produce a Lenin Symphony contributed to the cool critical reception.
Shostakovich was unable to attend the Moscow première on 3 December 1939, but the Moscow musicians’ malicious gossip soon found its way back to the composer. In a letter to Vissarion Shebalin, Shostakovich wrote:
…the composers are indignant with my symphony. What can be done: I didn’t oblige, evidently. As much as I try not to be distressed by this circumstance, all the same my heart is heavy. Age, nerves, all this tells.
The opening Largo, inherently lyrical and pensive, is neo- Bachian in its contrapuntal treatment of the opening two themes. This is clearly nothing like the playful 1930s neo- classicism of Stravinsky and his followers. Rather, it is indicative of a retreat into the composer’s own private world – an expressive device that finds perhaps its purest manifestation in the first movement of the elegiac Fifteenth String Quartet. The middle section of the Largo presents, by way of contrast, a series of recitative-like passages for cor- anglais over sustained trills, before the material of the opening returns, in a truncated form, to close the movement.
The second movement is an unpredictable scherzo in which the spectral and the coarse and earthy cohabit. This fleeting movement gives way to a finale that builds from a tentative beginning to a full-blooded and debauched music-hall gallop. As Boris Schwarz observed:
In Shostakovich’s make-up, Bach and Offenbach had always been friendly neighbours, and so they are again in the Sixth Symphony.
Program Note: Kristian Hibberd c. 2001.