I've often pondered the role of "popularity" in the growth of classical music. This blog is devoted to the numerous delightful, and indeed wonderful, works of music which languish in the shadows because they (or their composers) are not popular, and hence not well known. Popularity can be fickle too. An extreme example is the opening "sunrise" passage from Richard Strauss' tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra. This work definitely lay in obscurity until those opening bars were given spectacular vision by Stanley Kubrick in his epic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Since then, Strauss' sunrise has become part of the popular cultural landscape (although the rest of the work still remains rarely heard).
The issue gets further confused when the "great experts" anoint this work or composer as masterly while consigning that work or composer to the discard bin. Sadly, many music-lovers base their choices on those of the "great experts", while forgetting that these experts too are human beings and have their likes and dislikes. I strongly suspect that personal likes and dislikes, not to mention McCarthy-era politics, lie at the root of the matter in the case I am going to examine today.
Imagine, if you will, a piece which begins with a simple, obsessive rhythm beaten quietly on a snare drum. Over a span of some minutes, the drum is joined by one instrument after another. Each instrument that joins repeats the same melody given out by the first one. At each repetition the music gets bigger, louder, brasher, until the entire orchestra is engaged -- yet the rhythm, melody and key never change. UNTIL -- with a sudden modulation the orchestra swerves mightily into a different key, bringing the piece at last to its thunderous climax.
Ravel's Bolero, of course. Probably a few of my gentle readers guessed that already. Bolero is certainly not to everyone's taste. All the same, it is -- rightly, I think -- regarded as a great masterpiece for the orchestra.
But no. I was not actually describing Bolero. It came as a shock to me when listening to another favourite work to realize that there is a lengthy passage in it which repeats the recipe of Bolero almost exactly. And yet, this passage has been described as a "monumental miscalculation" and "banal beyond belief."
The piece I am referring to here is Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 in C Major, the "Leningrad" Symphony. This work was mainly composed in Leningrad and completed in Kuibyshev during the famous Siege of Leningrad by Nazi German armies in World War Two. When performed, it was presented as a tribute to the people of the city and their endurance in the face of adversity. Shostakovich himself said that the first movement was dedicated to the struggle and the last to the victory. The piece achieved instant fame, and when the score was flown out by way of Tehran and Casablanca to New York, it quickly received over a hundred performances in the United States alone. The propaganda value of the symphony was immense.
After the war, though, it was dismissed as being "only" a piece of propaganda, written off as a noisy socialist potboiler, and in any case almost all Russian music of the 20th century became suspect during the McCarthy era. That judgement has continued to be repeated by many critics and commentators right to the present day. I would submit, though, that after 70 years the time is ripe to reappraise the Leningrad Symphony.
Much of the negative critical reaction has centred on the long central passage of the first movement, the passage which so effectively uses the same formula as Bolero. The tune in this case is a perky little melody, almost folk-like in shape, which takes on much more militaristic tone as the orchestration grows step by step. In wartime terms, this was taken as a depiction of the German armies coming closer and closer, surrounding the city, and moving in to crush it. Perfectly believable.
But with Shostakovich, as we now know better, nothing is ever quite that simple. You need to take his public utterances with a grain of salt, because it was in his public words that he bowed to the Stalinist empire. Recent research, though, has shown a very different possible interpretation, and one that makes much more sense of the repeated, obsessive nature of that long central passage. Take it instead as the invasion, suppression, and brutal destruction of the Trotskyite Leningrad cultural community by the relatively uncultured and uncouth Stalin, and suddenly that simple, obsessive melody which rises finally to a roar makes much more sense. After all, thousands of prominent citizens of Leningrad disappeared in the Stalinist purges, yet the German armies never actually entered the city. That possibility also adds much more depth and poignancy to Shostakovich's comments about the struggle and the victory -- and of the hard-won triumph when the central passage is finally subsumed in an altered version of the symphony's dogged opening theme.
All four movements of this symphony have moments of peace and austere beauty which were so characteristic of the composer. All four also have moments of emphatic bombast, equally characteristic. Take it as a whole, though, and I think it is by no means the least of Shostakovich's achievements in the symphonic form.
I've heard several recordings, but have yet to hear a live performance. Unfortunately, when the Toronto Symphony did it some years back, I was still teaching in Elliot Lake and unable to get down to Toronto for a mid-week concert.
My favourite recording is quite old now, but stands the test of time well. It's one of a group of recordings done in the early 1970s by EMI with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Paavo Berglund. The entire 70-minute work is held together with force and conviction and the playing is of high calibre.
Where Berglund scores over all rivals is in the closing 5 minutes of the finale. There are several different musical lines at work in this long, loud climax. Berglund wisely chose a speed just a couple of notches less than others have done, and with care managed to balance the orchestra so that all the notes in all the levels come through clearly. Quite a trick in such a massive work, but he definitely managed it. It's a truly great performance, effectively raising the Leningrad Symphony to its proper stature as a major twentieth-century work for the orchestra, and (in my humble opinion) redeeming the symphony from its long exile in the outer reaches of the musical world.
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