On Saturday I had the great good fortune to conduct the wonderful Wrexham Symphony Orchestra in Shostakovich's 5th Symphony. I had never conducted Shos 5 before, and although I'd heard it many times I couldn't really claim to have known it in the way I know, say, the symphonies of Sibelius. Learning the piece has been an illuminating experience.
Almost too much is known about the circumstances in which the 5th Symphony was written. The Great Terror of the 1930s, in which Stalin attempted to purge of Soviet society of his opponents, is estimated to have resulted in up to fifteen million shot or sent to the Gulags. Neighbour denounced neighbour and children denounced their parents. Failure to denounce could imply personal guilt.
In this atmosphere of fearful paranoia, Shostakovich's opera The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was the subject of a scathing review in Pravda, written if not by Stalin personally then certainly under Stalin's direction after he had walked out of a performance. The composer withdrew the Fourth Symphony, then in rehearsal, fearful that it too would meet with the authorities' disapproval, and kept a suitcase packed for when the secret police called. There are stories of him sleeping in the apartment stairwell so that his family would not be disturbed upon his arrest. To cap Shostakovich's problems, the woman he was in love with then married another man.
In these circumstances the composition of the 5th Symphony was an act of almost reckless courage. It's in a less dissonant idiom than the immediately preceding works, and the structure is quite simple (we also played Sibelius's Pohjola's Daughter on Saturday, music of far greater structural complexity and subtlety). Nevertheless the tone is one of almost unremitting bleakness; when that lets up it is because the orchestra becomes possessed of a manic dysfunctional energy verging on the parodistic. To mark his lover's marriage - to a Spaniard, a Snr Carmen - twisted versions of the Habanera from Bizet's opera are inserted in the outer movements.
For a regime demanding art which exalted the heroic struggles of the proletariat, the 5th reads as a calculated two-finger salute.
And yet the piece ends happily. Out of nowhere a blaze of D major lights up the sky, and the orchestra pounds away in D for a good minute to a thumping conclusion. It's an ending which was criticised by some as a cop out, and it wasn't until Shostakovich's pupil Solomon Volkov published what purported to be the composer's memoirs in the 1970s that the idea began to dawn that Shostakovich had written a deliberately bombastic ending as if to say, "So you wanted rejoicing? Well here's some rejoicing for you".
For conductors this presents a problem, because audiences like to go home feeling good, and we are always tempted to wave our arms around to signal the sense of completeness, of triumph over adversity, that the Romantic symphony communicates so well (if so misleadingly: life is not so binary). Some press on through the D major coda to give a sense of mounting excitement. I didn't want to short-change the William Aston Hall audience, but respect for Shostakovich's achievement (and his suffering) demanded that the conclusion be as rigid and mechanical as, according to Volkov, the composer would have wanted.
In truth, getting the speeds right in the piece is one of its hardest aspects. Pacing is always an issue in symphonic music outside the Classical era. To be clear, pacing is not the same as speed. Pacing is the cumulative effect of a series of different speeds, and in the outer movements of the piece Shostakovich writes great slabs of music which get faster to a central climax and then withdraw once more. It's very hard to get the pacing of these accelerating sections right, not the least because orchestras are long used to having learnt the piece from conductors who don't actually seem to have read Shostakovich's metronome marks.
The opening is a case in point. The upward leaps in the strings must clearly be done in 8 (one beat for each quaver), but the passage which follows feels very slow and lumpy if you carry on in the same way. Most conductors try and get into 4 (one beat for each crotchet) after the first few bars, but speeding the orchestra up from this slow tempo is difficult, and anyway Shostakovich didn't write an accelerando.
I recently saw a young conductor begin - too slowly I thought - in 8, and go straight into a much quicker 4 with an audible and ragged jerk as the strings sought to adjust to the new speed. There's a film on Youtube of Rostropovich (who knew Shostakovich, for Christ's sake) doing it in 4 right from the opening but at a fast speed which bears no relation to the metronome mark. As a general principle I always try and do what the composer asks for unless it palpably doesn't work: and this is one of the instances where you have to bow apologetically to the composer and honour the spirit of the music. Bernstein for me seems to get it about right (the performance is on Youtube again), beginning in quite a direct 8 and going on in 4 with just the tiniest quickening.
However the same Bernstein performance shows the weakness of imposing your judgment on the composer's. In the finale he, like many others, starts too fast and gets faster too quickly. This is exciting to begin with, but leaves the music with nowhere to go. True excitement comes from the gradual accelerando, the feeling that events have got out of control.
I was struck too by Shostakovich's masterful pacing of the orchestration. The piece opens with a grand gesture, but uses only one section of the orchestra to make it - the strings. Now strings playing in unison can be imposing, but not as much as a fortissimo tutti. Yet Shostakovich calculates that since it is a gesture which interrupts silence, it will be big enough. And he is right (Incidentally, Dvorak makes the same calculation at the beginning of the last movement of the New World Symphony). This careful allocation of resources enables him to make even bigger gestures later. True tuttis are actually quite rare in the symphony, and indeed there are many passages where the scoring is confined to a few instruments. I have always liked this in music - it's a bit like a watercolourist using the white of the paper to let light shine through.
For me there is only one miscalculation in the score, and that is the climax in the first movement where the strings and wind play a frenzied version of the opening over enormous brass chords. You really are being beaten over the head here, and, after the first half a dozen bars, the wind/string accompanying figures are too continuous to be interesting and dramatic. Given the same material, Tchaikovsky would have done this much better.
But what do I know?
Unlike novelists, who have regularly faced persecution for their work, there are very few composers who have risked death for writing a piece of music their enemies didn't like. The audience at the first performance is said to have applauded for three quarters an hour. Shostakovich deserved his redemption.
