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Shostakovich Symphony No4 – A Personal View

Personal opinions about music are often problematic precisely because they are personal. People who are asked to choose music to accompany their loneliness often select pieces by association, pieces they heard at a particular time or place that was important in their lives. The music becomes a reinforcement of purely internal associations and thus comes to mean things that are not really in the music itself, or even in its experience, either to an audience or probably to its composer. In offering this personal view of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 4, I want to address the music first and foremost and my reactions to it. The opinions remain, however, nothing more than personal, but I hope they have at least something to do with the music.

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony presents particular challenges. The composer withdrew it during rehearsals and did not hear a performance himself until its world premiere some twenty-five years later. Meanwhile, he had partially disowned it, dismissing it as excess. His views, however, may well have been driven by a need to conform, if only to avoid imprisonment and perhaps death. Self-preservation is also a necessary search for composers. He had recently been criticized for his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in a review that called his work more noise than music. The 1930s was not a decade to fall out of favor with a man of steel. The context of the fourth symphony is itself a challenge for the listener. You cannot be neutral in this conflict.

The fourth is also a challenge because it is the fourth. The first had been groundbreaking, the work of a teenage genius who had yet to find his full voice. Numbers two and three are the ones that are played less now, because now they smack of a socialist realist program, where peasants and the urban proletariat join hands to stare with wide eyes at the receding horizon of a future perfect, although they themselves are still. The fourth was going to be something different both in content and style, a work in which the composer’s own voice would speak, a mature work in which the future might be a little closer.

But hearing it for the first time, the room is not only different from what came before: it’s also different from what followed, at least on the surface, both structurally and emotionally. It’s still different for many audiences, but finally one hears it again in the eighth, in the tenth and finally much more in the fifteenth. It is also usually lyrical, it has musical jokes, a circus and a lot of waltz. There are leaks and variations. But at all times, there is a threat.

This is challenging music, although there is nothing particularly difficult about what you actually hear. It is the almost relentless drive in the stone-faced sound that presents the listener with a challenge. The piece has clear rhythms, even a pop rhythm. It is not atonal but uses a lot of dissonance. The orchestration is massive, but conservative, save for occasional extremes in the percussion. But the music does seem like a machine without control, running with its own momentum. But then again, this was nothing special for the 1930s, as evidenced by the first movement of Prokofiev’s Second Symphony, Mossolov’s The Iron Foundry, or Honegger’s Pacific 231, all from the previous decade. The Fourth Symphony, like these other pieces, is musically harsh, harsh, and often bitter. Perhaps the most difficult thing for a new listener to accommodate, however, is the end of the work, because it is a question mark, not a fading into infinite tranquility, but an expiration into an unknown destination.

This Symphony Number Four has three sections that together last just over an hour. The first is half the length of the play and contains most of the challenges, right up to that unsettling ending. It opens with three dissonant chords, followed by a big bang, like the universe. But this is a living entity, and her heart immediately starts beating and continues to beat along approximately the same rhythm. Although it may occasionally slow to rest and eventually stop, the pulse is always there and is your living reality.

But this is not a human heart. It is an industrial, mechanical, incessant, penetrating and controlling movement. We begin to feel that human beings are servants of this process, pawns of the mother who are used in some activity greater than the life of the mother.

Along the way, people tell jokes, go to the circus, dance the occasional waltz. But they also scream, they scream as in Eisenstein or Munch, they fight and destroy, but it is the machine that always re-imposes its demands on those who serve it. Even the giant fugue in the middle of the movement cannot shake the mechanical regularity, except for losing control. Orderly and disciplined at first, the music fragments as an instrument and enters faster and faster, as if wanting to break the order, create anarchy. The conflict erupts into chaos, but the machine does re-impose its order, its discipline, and the rhythm restarts.

But at the end of the movement, a violin solo makes an extended, even human statement. It offers tenderness, repentance and reflection and lulls us to sleep, calms us down in a human existence. And then the pulse of the machine returns, not hard, dull, but as insistent as ever. And then the movement ends, silently, but reiterating in a modified and discreet way the chords of creation from the beginning.

This opening section has perhaps described part of the human condition, that part which includes our social, economic, and political life. In this view we are not individuals. We are part of a universe that operates on its own terms, at its own pace, and rejects anything that doesn’t fit its demands. We are also part of a human society that confines us with its expectations, norms and cultures. We will be able to have our individual voices, but neither the cries nor the whispers will be heard or recognized above the imposed norms. And the result is often violent, not because we are individually violent, but because what we are a part of is inherently mechanical, relentless, and completely selfish.

If the first section was an individual who became a mere cog in industrial or social structures, or perhaps restrictions, then the second is surely the intellect of human beings. The music here is full of reflection, self-analysis and suppressed emotion. It is never sentimental. Ideas come and go, but they often don’t come together. This is a reaction to reality, not an analysis of it. And when they try to hold together, our human thoughts throw us back into the mechanical rhythm of the opening movement, as if unable to escape their dictates. Paradoxically, it is when this regular and mechanical rhythm is imposed again that we feel more calm and confident. Eventually, however, the process – intellectual and personal – becomes a clockwork mechanism that seems to operate independently of any individual. It’s the same incessant controlling beat, but now it just controls and doesn’t threaten, and itself was probably the product of our collective intellectual effort.

The third section of the symphony is both personal and emotional. Quiet reflection seems to give rise to a sense of satisfaction. Optimism rises and maybe there is time and space in this universe for something cute and personal scale to exist and thrive. Maybe there could even be meaning in this mechanical stack that we’re a part of. For once, the heartbeat of the machine does not dominate. But this new confidence in our own abilities prompts the mechanical return, and it does so, syncopated and even more menacing, albeit a waltz in disguise.

Eventually, our optimism seems to outweigh the pressure to conform. We will survive. We will prosper. We will control our own destiny. In moments of levity, we can consider such ideas and dance, even though it sounds and may seem like a trivial joke. And then we rise above all conflict. We control. We decided.

A fugue reaffirms its rationality. This time he maintains control, but then it dissolves into a joke or something as profound as an evening at the circus. In a grand affirmation of our collective and individual confidence, we rise with a great fanfare of crescendo in triumph.

But it is an empty claim and we know it. And so the final passages of the symphony point to the most difficult understanding for each and every one of us: that in the end there is still a heartbeat, which was perhaps the mechanical rhythm that dictated our existence all along. But now it’s failing, fading. The orchestra literally and irregularly breathes as the residual energy moves its members. The celestial – celestial? – repeatedly tries to break free from this trapped suffering, perhaps as a soul might seek eternity in Christian dogma. The heartbeat in the double basses is the same one that Tchaikovsky used to finish his sixth symphony, and here too it has the same mortality implications. Finally, the final notes of the celestial are released, but the last note of all is not freedom, or paradise, but a question mark.

I said at the beginning that this would be a personal opinion and it is. Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony Number Four is, simply put, the greatest artistic work of the human race, surpassing any other in any medium. This is where we truly meet ourselves, where the personal becomes personal, nothing more.

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