1905 and Now

            Having received numerous complaints and queries from members of our community regarding the Driftless Philharmonic’s upcoming performances of Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 11: The Year 1905, I have decided to write and address these concerns as fully as I can in hopes of emphasizing the relevance and importance of the music in question. Public discourse is a welcome and necessary aspect of the musical process and it is my pleasure to see the community so excited and involved, even if much of the discussion antagonizes the Driftless Phil and our programmatic choices. I would like to make clear that we will not be altering our concert program in any way and that we will still be performing Symphony no. 11 as planned next month, but I am happy to acknowledge criticisms of its appropriateness and do my best to explain its value.

            We have received complaints regarding three broad aspects of the work and its historical context. First of these is the subject matter of the musical plot – this symphony’s subtitle, The Year 1905 refers to the Bloody Sunday massacre in St. Petersburg, Russia in January of 1905, an event that helped fuel the Bolshevik uprising that dismantled the old Tsarist system and created what we remember as Soviet Russia. There is no text or visual accompaniment to Symphony no. 11, but the musical scenes of the second and third movements clearly depict the violent killing and wounding of upwards of four thousand working-class Russians. Some members of our community object to the frankness of this depiction, especially with regard to its perceived inappropriateness for younger concert-goers. I have no desire to dictate parenting methods, but pain and suffering are integral facts of artistry that are as deeply rooted in music as are joy and love. Symphony no. 11 is unambiguous, but it is far from alone in its genre. This aspect of the work is also historically significant in that the symphony premiered in 1957, a year after a violent and costly uprising in Budapest that solidified the Soviet government’s powerful grip on its constituent regions. This uprising and the violence surrounding it were so fresh in the minds of the symphony’s first listeners that connections were inevitably drawn and the music served as a new way to understand and even cope with that suffering. Today, music about pain still has an important place in culture to facilitate the comprehension of atrocity and horror, and to shield the public from that opportunity may even be considered irresponsible.

            Other objections from our community relate to Shostakovich’s public identity as a Soviet puppet. Certainly most of his large works are examples of Soviet nationalism and socialist realism, but it is unclear how Shostakovich personally felt about the regime. One of Shostakovich’s earlier works, the opera Lady MacBeth of the Mtsensk Distsrict, premiered in 1932, was publicly denounced after Stalin attended a performance in 1936 (the review in question may even have been written by Stalin himself). The following year, Shostakovich premiered his fifth symphony, with the written inscription “A Soviet artist’s creative response to justify criticism.” After Stalin’s death in 1953, Schostakovich began insert variations on the musical idea D-Eb-C-B, or, in the German musical system, D-es-C-H – in other words, “D. SCH” (for D. Schostakovich). Musicologist David Fanning asserts that “through the dictator’s death [Shostakovich] could begin to assert his own identity in his work.” This specific motive happens to appear in various forms all over Symphony no. 11, and while it is far from proof of Schostakovich’s political alignment, it is at least evidence that he thought and worked as his own person, not only as a puppet for the Soviet regime.

            The most complaints we have received come from community members who find the Soviet socialist realist aspects of Symphony no. 11 distasteful, un-American, and even propagandistic. After Stalin gained power, it was mandated that Russian art satisfy the idea of “socialist realism,” i.e. Russian art should use the glorified Common Man as subject matter, should be large and grand, should make an effort to include traditional folk material, and above all depict a socialist utopia that glorifies the Russian Motherland. It is difficult to deny that, at least on the surface, Symphony no. 11 satisfies every requirement. It tells the story of the beaten, massacred working class as they became inspired to rise up against tsarist tyranny. It clocks in at about an hour long and uses the full dynamic, musical, and emotional range of the orchestra, and each movement contains substantial melodic material adapted from Russian revolutionary songs. However, the fact that the work could have been used as propaganda does not make it inherently worthless, especially since we will never know Shostakovich’s true motivations. If in fact Shostakovich was conveying some secret anti-state message with his music, then performing it creates fascinating opportunities to explore the rebellious nature of art and composer motivation, and serves as a reminder of the subversive power of music. On the other hand, if the work is purely propagandistic, it still opens up important opportunities for discussion of art and music’s place in politics and power structures.

            Regardless of Shostakovich’s intentions or of the subject matter itself, Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 11 is regarded as one of the most important (and often most beautiful) works of the twentieth century. It is enjoyable even without its controversial historical context, but even concert-goers who are aware of its place in world history have the opportunity to use this performance as a chance to open up dialogue, not stop it before it begins.

Shosty and the Onion

            Shostakovich’s eleventh symphony is a deeply layered work whose content is inarguably patriotic on some level, regardless of the composer’s inscrutable private political leanings. Subtitled “The Year 1905,” Symphony no. 11 is a cinematic retelling of the events of “Bloody Sunday” – the massacre of disgruntled workers in St. Petersburg on January 9, 1905 which became a key component of the Russian Revolution and the dawn of the Soviet Union. The work holds up confidently to the scrutiny of socialist realism in its cinematic enormity, its prominent use of folk tunes, and its telling of the Bloody Sunday story from the workers’ (i.e. the common man’s) tragic point of view.

            The most easily identifiable of these aspects is the symphony’s size. The chronological size at least is difficult to ignore – there are no breaks between movements and the work is about an hour long. The orchestra itself is not remarkably big, but Shostakovich does tend to use full “choirs,” such as all the brass or all the strings at once, rather than single instruments. The sense of size is exaggerated by the enormous range of dynamics, of tempo, and of melodic pitch. He also includes the idee fixe of open fifths in octaves throughout the piece, lending to the work a sense of expansive continuity that enhances its size.

            Shostakovich also complies with socialist realism by taking the comman man’s point of view and using revolutionary folk tunes as the basis for most of the melodic material. In the expository first movement, The Palace Square, the stage is quietly set for rebellion and massacre. Most of the movement is soft and drawn-out with long string pedals and slow, low melodies. Occasionally, the melody “Listen” appears in a higher register as a reminder of the atrocities of the czarist regime. The carnage itself happens in the second movement, The 9^th of January, which is introduced by a fast ostinato in the low strings to the tune of Shostakovich’s own composition “Oh, Czar, our little father,” a melody that reappears throughout the rest of the symphony at varying speeds, pitches, and dynamics. At the end of the second movement, “Listen” reappears as the massacre ends and the scope of the tragedy comes into focus. The third movement, In Memoriam, depicts the horror of defeat and begins with the violas playing the folk tune “Worker’s Funeral March.” The final movement is The Tocsin, the alarm bell signaling revolution for the working man, set to loud, crashing, and often unison excerpts from folk tunes like “Rage, Tyrants” and “Vrashavianka.”

            Symphony 11 and many of Shostakovich’s other large works are comparable to the output of other regional composers in the 20^th century, such as Ralph Vaughan Williams in the United Kingdom and Aaron Copland in the United States. These composers all tried to depict a (generally idealized) musical image of their homelands at a time when regional identity was often a highly political matter. Copland’s experience with McCarthyism in particular parallels some of what Shostakovich dealt with, as does the cancellation of John Adams’s opera The Death of Klinghoffer shortly after 9/11. Art is often so layered and subversive that it can be frightening to governments attempting to maintain security and safety. Politics can create opportunities for artists, but they can also create dangerous limitations.

Lincoln Hoedown

During the bulk of his career, Aaron Copland had an orchestral composition style that bore many similarities to those of his contemporaries and immediate successors. Copland orchestras are reasonably-sized – not chamber orchestras, but nothing close to the scale of Rite of Spring either. Lincoln Portrait employs and orchestra similar in size and structure to those used by Stravinsky in his later career after he began renouncing his earlier cultural radicalism, as well as to late-19^th-century composers such as Tchaikovsky. Like Stravinsky and Debussy, Copland most frequently features brass and winds rather than strings, which more often play mood- and atmosphere-setting pedals that give the piece character instead of the hefty melodic material you would find in a Mozart or Beethoven symphony. However, Copland’s use of orchestra is also much more harmonically simplistic and identifiably tonal than many of his contemporaries. Whereas a work like Wozzeck struggles to find itself in a recognizable diatonic triad, there is hardly ever doubt where Copland’s music sits.

            Like Stravinsky and the Realist composers of the early 20^th century, Copland is known for his use of folk music in his orchestral works. Unlike Stravinsky, however, who notably uses Russian folk music throughout Rite of Spring but works to establish a “folk aura” rather than calling attention to specific direct quotes, Copland displays his quotation prominently and even uses his folk music as a reference to specific place or time and to create deeper meaning. The ballet Rodeo features the folk tunes If He’d be a Buckaroo and (famously) Bonaparte’s Retreat as near-complete direct quotations. In Lincoln Portrait, the tune of Springfield Mountain is similarly prominently featured and may be a reference to Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois. Even when Copland does not quote folk tunes directly, Lincoln Portrait and Rodeo are structured to create an American version of the same type of “folk aura” that Stravinsky creates for Russian music in Rite of Spring.

            An uncommon feature of Lincoln Portrait is its inclusion of spoken text where another composer may have written for solo voice or choir. This choice reflects Copland’s desire to write accessible music – spoken text is more manageable for a wider American audience than solo operatic voice since there is so much more opportunity for the performer to experiment with inflections and enunciations that are more linguistically accessible to human ears and therefore easier to understand. Using spoken text also lifts the restriction of voice part for the performer and fits thematically with the subject of Abraham Lincoln, who is remembered as one of the greatest orators in Western history. In the absence of the structured meter of sung text, the timing for the speech is specifically marked within each relevant measure. There is also a long, drawn-out introduction before the speech begins. Both these qualities help sustain a stately, moderated atmosphere for the piece that further strengthens the presidential theme.

            Lincoln Portrait is a patriotic work, but not one that directly celebrates the war-weary America of the 1940s. Rather, it is nostalgic for a peaceful America with higher value for the freedom of the individual. Ironically, that America was still deeply divided by the Civil War and was therefore less united than the modern America of the time. In this sense, its patriotism is inauthentic. The prevailing message of the piece is that America was perhaps better off then, even if it was more divided.