The comments for and against Shostakovich's 7th interest me, in
that they seem also to divide on what a symphony should be.  The modern
Western bias, I believe, inclines toward a view of the symphony as artifact
and thus concerns itself mainly with craft.  Soviet music, on the other
hand, always seemed to me to regard the symphony as a kind of higher
journalism, or philosophy - a view we also see in such composers as Ives
and Mahler.  There's a lot of Mahler in Shostakovich.  I consider the
latter Mahler's greatest symphonic heir.  In fact, one of the standard
drop-the-needle-guess-who trick examples is the Shostakovich 5th, and the
answer given (more than Shosty) is Mahler.  The Shostakovich 7th - and I
mean mainly the first movement, since that's the movement that gets all the
bad press - is easy to pick apart on aesthetic grounds if the work does not
connect on philosophic ones, just as it's easy to pick apart Ives in the
same circumstances.  For that matter, read contemporary criticisms of the
Verdi Requiem or Vaughan Williams's brutal reckoning of the Beethoven 9th.

Do the Leningrad's lack of modulation and abundance of repetition - easily
noticed as faults - really matter? They matter to those for whom craft is
most of any piece.  They matter to those whom the work does not grab
emotionally and who consequently can hold on only to craft.  Yet there's
a third position: one that can both acknowledge technical deficiencies
and hold that they don't matter, because the works convey something else
overwhelming.  This is actually Vaughan Williams's view of Beethoven's
Ninth *and* the Verdi Requiem.  After years of dismissing Shostakovich's
symphonies as "grossly undercomposed," "rhetorically cheap," and "facile,"
I must say that as I've continued to listen, the clumsiness that seemed
to blot out the sun, as far as those works were concerned, has shrunk
considerably in its importance (except for numbers 2 and 3).  I don't even
care all that much - although it's nice to know - whether Shostakovich
directed his music against Hitler or Stalin.  Most artists talk of "inner"
rather than "outer weather," to quote Robert Frost, and to me, few talked
as eloquently as Shostakovich.

Steve Schwartz