Miguel Muelle:
>My question, apart from wanting to hear other listers' favorite versions,
>is the following: Is there a "program" to this piece? It sure sounds like
>there must be -- almost like movie music. I know it has to do with the
>regime, etc., but can anyone tell me or direct me to a more detailed
>description of what's going on?
I have and appreciate the Rozhdestvensky version recorded in Moscow in 1984
with the USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra.
The CD booklet is most informative. May I be allowed to quote it as I
have no other source for all the information it contains?- i.e. I can't
countercheck every detail.
J & M Berridge translate Sigrid Neef, who writes in part:
Composed in April/May 1937, the Symphony No5 in D minor op. 47
assumed the significance of "fateful symphony" for Shostakovich. He
wrote it at the time of the worst of Stalin's 'purges', of mass
execution and deportation. The composer had every reason to fear
being deported.Friends of his, such as the marshall of the Red Army,
Mikhail Tukhachevsky (1893-1937) were being shot under martial law.
Shostakovich himself had fallen out of Stalin's favour with his opera
"Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" at the beginning of 1936. His works were
deleted from concert programmes overnight, and he himself had been
declared an "enemy of the people".He was given the chance in 1937 to
"rehabilitate" himself with a new work. Today we know that this
redemption was the result of Maxim Gorky's personal written plea to
Stalin.
Uncompromising in the music of his fifth symphony, in the run-up to
its first performance Shostakovich had nevertheless verbally declared
his adherence to Socialist Realism and had given his symphony an
appropriate label: 'The growth of a personality". This token of
allegiance was accepted by the Soviet rulers, yet to sensitive
listeners at the premiere the discrepancy between word and work was
apparent. Their demonstrative applause was for the coded message.
In the opinion of the Shostakovich biographer, Solomon Volkov, "an
upright thinking person is represented here, who, under tremendous
moral pressure, has to make a crucial decision. Neurotic pulse beats
run through the whole symphony, the composer searching feverishly
for a way out of the labyrinth, only to find himself, in the finale
(...), in the `gas chamber of thoughts' once more".
This symphony is one of the most popular, and at the same time one of
the most misunderstood of Shostakovich's works. The difficulty lies in
making its tragic elements understandable to people living in circumstances
which are socially and biographically far from the tragic. Rozhdestvensky
exaggerates with denonciatory delight and ragjng fury the noisy idle
activism of the bureaucrats of then and now, and has the monologues of the
solo instruments sound like intimate confessions, thereby creating the
necessary musical urgency: "Everyone should be clear about what happens
in the Fifth. The jubilation is produced under duress, as if someone were
to beat us with a cudgel and at the same time say `you shouid rejoice, you
should rejoice'. And the maltreated person rises, though his legs can
barely hold him, and marches round murmuring `we should rejoice, we should
rejoice'." (Shostakovich)
I hope this is of some interest to you.
The recording was originally issued on Melodiya but can now be found
on a BMG Classics 'Twofer'.
Regards,
Christine Labroche
|