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ALLOWANCE FOR PARTICIPATION No.29/13.11
- victorshramko
- Nov 13
- 4 min read
Life Is Not a Waltz
Almost everyone knows this waltz because this is music 'for everyone'. Just a hit! To be remembered immediately and forever. Clinging, it's longing, love, dizziness. Music easy? To some extent, but not simple pimple, not easy peasy (lemon squeezy, as the British saying goes). This note of tragic fate is the spice that ennobles. But he seems to be completely different?
Past August marked the 50th anniversary of his death. He lived for 69 years. Neither long nor short. He managed to cross the superstitious 'limit of the 9th Symphony'. Others were said to have died intending to write the 10th Symphony, but he wrote fifteen of them! Variously assessed.
Be First Or Not To Be
He wrote the 1st Symphony at the age of 19, as a diploma composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. And he was recognized almost overnight as a front-rank composer.
'The revelation of the highest talent', as it was called, was undertaken by the greatest conductors in America and Europe, such as Toscanini, Bruno Walter, or Stokowski. Even 'The Cruelest Maestro - Time' treated it kindly: it is played everywhere to this day! To this day, he is considered one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. Although his life was one great sinusoid of ups and downs.
A Silent Screen
Despite his brilliant debut as a composer, he wanted to become a pianist. He entered the 1st Chopin Competition in 1927. He won an award. But not the 1st one! So he gave up piano concerting: 'because I didn't win against some Oborin or Szpinalski'. They were the winners of 1st and 2nd Prizes. Apparently, he played brilliantly, but without any Romantic flair.
He returned to the country, earning money by playing the piano in what was then a 'silent cinema'. He had to somehow support his sisters, sick mother, and – himself. When cinema stopped being 'silent', he started writing music for a lot of now forgotten movies. (Because it wasn't Hollywood, it was Mosfilm!)
Life Started With a Volcanic Eruption
Wait. Who, what, where? I forgot to write. Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-1975), born in St. Petersburg, from parents – accomplished musicians, then 'petty bourgeois' of Polish descent! Really not good for those times. All around, an eruption of Soviet revolution was beginning, one that wanted to change heaven and earth, and above all – to change all people. Revolutionaries proclaimed that people are equal, but they forgot to add that they are different. It cost a lot of problems and many more victims.
The old leaders seduced the young with a vision (illusion!) of a bright future. Including Dmitry. 'My first compositions were dedicated to the Revolution and that inspired me'. But his compositions did not fit into the Soviet ideology and aesthetics. Paradoxically, revolutionaries are often conservative in taste and suspicious of new things. Dmitry's music contains overwhelming emotional intensity and power, shows mastery of form, technical invention, and an astonishing command of the orchestra. It is also full of humor, parody, and savage wit. Sometimes he combines tragedy with poisonous irony. He has more in common with Mahler, Berg, Hindemith.
Such Were the Times
Such universality made it inevitable that Dmitry at some stage came under fire from the repressive totalitarian regime. It really started early at the Opera. He began rehearsals for his opera 'Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk' (later known as 'Katerina Ismailova'). Dictators sometimes like art. Stalin came to the theatre and after the first act stormed out. The composer became 'white as a sheet'. The next day 'Pravda' ('The Truth', official newspaper) edited an article 'Chaos instead of Music'. (A Russian joke said that 'don't look for truth in 'The Truth')
And this was a death sentence for his work, luckily not yet for the composer. The 'Great Terror' this year (1936) claimed the lives of approximately one million people. Shostakovich was in friendly relations with Marshal Tukhachevsky, who was executed on false charges. The composer was interrogated because of this acquaintance and was forced to testify, which he refused. In mortal fear, with his bundle packed, he slept under the elevator in the apartment building, where a friend found him. 'I was afraid that when they came for me, they would wake my children', he explained. He avoided arrest because the officer who was supposed to interrogate him was arrested just before the interrogation.
He withdrew to safer ground by patriotic cantatas and returning to cinema music (over 30 movies 'providing music accompaniment to the human emotions on the screen'). However, in 1937 already the subtitle of his 5th Symphony is; 'A Soviet Artist's Reply to Just Criticism'.
The Torment of Leningrad
During WWII, the Nazis encircled Leningrad (f. St. Petersburg) for 900 days (1941-1944). Hundreds of thousands of people died from hunger, disease, and bombing. The city defended itself heroically. The composer became a volunteer for the firefighter brigade and - started to compose his 7th, so-called Leningrad Symphony dedicated to the city and its citizens. It was performed there in 1942 by 15 surviving on the verge of starvation members of the Radio Orchestra.
He finally tried to sort out his relationship with the Soviet regime. Apparently, when authorities agreed to grant him a passport for a New York appearance, the composer asked in a letter to Stalin to get... a concert tailcoat. Apparently, he received it, as allowance for participation.
He lived until 1975 and still wrote a lot of music that lives on 50 years after his death and probably much longer. He said of his 14th Symphony that it was his 'protest against death'. Seems effective.
Enough words.
Let us play:
D. Shostakovich - Waltz No. 2 by HAUSER
and
D. Shostakovich - Violin Concerto No. 1 (performed by Hilary Hahn)
Written by
Cezary Owerkowicz
Co-founder of Kuwait Music Academy and
Director of Treasure of Talents Festival in Kuwait
