Schostakovich – a century life | nd-aktuell.de

In May a globally unique Leipzig Schostakowitsch festival took place in Leipzig. On the occasion of the next 50th anniversary of the death of the composer on August 9, an almost encyclopedic overall show of all symphonies, string quartet and solo concerts was shone. In addition, there were many chamber music works by the composer, especially those who play a key role in his work. The listeners were able to dive deep into the Schostakovich cosmos, especially since all performances of outstanding quality were.

This applies not only to the two symphony orchestras and their Schostakovich experts Andris Nelsons, but also to the fabulous soloists. Above all, Daniil Trifonov, who, with his immense attack, even made a rather banal piece like the 2nd piano concerto, which Schostakovich devoted to his son Maxim on his 19th birthday, became a fascinating experience. Breathtaking also the two piano sonatas, such as the first of the only 20-year-old, in which he recapitulates the events of the October revolution he witnessed in St. Petersburg, and the interpretation of the late, death-related violin sonata together with Nikolaj Sceps-Znaider, with her ghost dance in the 2nd set and the indispensable Passacaglia with all its Bach and Alban mountain references.

Or Gautier Capuçon from France, who elegantly performed the 1st cello concert. Also moving the Latvian Baiba Skrid with the violin concerto, which the composer wrote in the dark years of 1947 and 1948 when he once again got into the fire of Stalinist criticism because he supposedly did not fill the criteria of the closeness to the people. We remember with horror at Stalin’s dictum “The people expect beautiful songs” from the notorious essay “Chaos and Music”, which appeared in the “Prawda” from January 1936 and billed with modernity, using the example of Schostakowitsch’s opera “Lady Macbeth von Mzensk”. Instead, a platter of socialist realism has also been enforced in the music of Rigoros.

But the composer also created “beautiful”, popular music-the waltz from his 2nd suite for Varieté orchestra is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful pieces of music in the 20th century (and is known as a leitmotif from Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” at the latest). Schostakovich wrote a number of stage and ballet music, eight operas and music at over forty films- one of them, “five days- five nights” by Leo Armstam (USSR/DDR 1961), the festival showed. These stage and entertainment music are often neglected, and in Leipzig they were performed by the Cappuccino salon orchestra.

Dmitri Schostakovich was a composer of enormous creativity. And he was a composer who was not involved in the Soviet society against his will during long phases of his life. He had professorships (which had been revoked in the meantime) and high offices in the Soviet Composer Association. He represented the Soviet Union at international congresses. And this contradiction of being largely integrated into the system, but also repeatedly threatened by the system – can be found consistently in Schostakovich’s works.

It may be that in some compositions you can see direct resistance to Stalin (such compositions usually disappeared in the composer’s drawer). And rightly you can interpret a kind of internal resistance into other compositions. While his great symphonic works were not opportune for a few years, he wrote film music to make money, as he confessed. On the other hand, however, his numerous works, in which the revolution or the Soviet Union are positively presented, are hardly celebrated as a mere propaganda plant that serves the survival. This fragmented, the contradictory in his persona makes Schostakovich a typical representative of his time, the 20th century.

Throughout his life, the composer accompanied his intensive childhood memory to the overture from Rossini’s opera “Wilhelm Tell”. Perhaps Stalin was a tyrant for Schostakovich like Hermann Gessler, the opponent of Wilhelm Tell from the Swiss national epic, who asked for his subjects to symbolically greet his hat, which Tell refuses. Also Schostakovich had to come to this Gesslerhut with his works in some way, which had been in the way in some cases since the 1930s.

In Leipzig, Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra combined the 6th (1939) and the 15th Symphony (1971). At first glance, a somewhat strange combination, but together the two works have quotes from Rossini’s “Wilhelm Tell” overture. In the sixth, Schostakovich lets the “Presto” galloping horses from the Tell-Ouverture, one of Stalin’s favorite melodies, in the final sentence from a leash, not without them to “let the women from Lehár’s” the funny widow “, the favorite operetta of Hitler, to be dashed past. Here the Tell-Galopp answers in its final oversight to a brooding, introverted first sentence, which a Scherzo overrunned to the grotesque follows: The last sentence compared Schostakowitsch’s close friend Isaak Glikman with the “description of a football game” and the “up and down” up and down of success and failure “. Schostakovich was a die -hard football fan, and he was regularly found in the Leningrad stadium in the 1930s.

Finally, there was Schostakovich’s last symphony No. 15 in A major, op. 141 with the strangely satirical first sentence, which he described as “childhood, a toy shop with a cloudless sky”. Kurt Sanderling, the important Shostakowich conductor and friend, pointed out that “in this shop there are only soulless, dead toys”, “which hang on their threads and only wake up to life when there is pulling on these threads”. Perhaps at first glance you can explain the confuse in this symphony, the mess, what is going on as follows: there seems to be nothing “composed” in shape, but also all associations from a rich life: in addition to the toy shops, a cool string fugato and the strangely showering violinsolo in the first set and a quote from the trumpet fanfare from the beginning of the 5. Mahler’s symphony; Grief march calls of the flutes and heartbreaking cello solos, including even fantastically beautiful twelfth tone rows; The peculiar music box sounds of triangle, castanette, drum, xylophone and piccolo flute, as well as a number of self-quotes, last but not least the famous tonal sequence “D-ES-CH” formed from its name. And in the 4th set, an adagio, finally the “fate motif” from Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelungs”, the “announcement of death” from the “Valkyrie” (a favorite work of Lenin …), followed by the longing motif from the foreplay of “Tristan and Isolde”, which flows into the quote of a Glinka song, in which, as with Shakespeare’s Hamlet becomes.

But what are all these quotes? Schostakovich revealed Glikman: “I don’t really know why all of these quotes are there, but I couldn’t do without them.” Even today, reviewers are rubbing on the assembly technology that has long since become a method, which the composer used particularly extensively here.

The documentary »Two. The story Told by Shostakovitch’s Wife «of the Israeli director Elena Yakovich from 2022. In addition to impressive original film sections, which show the composer at work, in his free time, but also when listening to his music, interviews with Irina Antonova Schostakovich, his third wife, can be seen. She says that Schostakovich wanted to watch a football game on TV on the death bed. She set off in the hospital to find a small television and when she had returned to his hospital room, he had already slept.

Dmitri Schostakovich-one of his first musical memories: Rossini’s “Wilhelm Tell”-OUVERTUE. His last wish: watch a football game. In between: a century life.

Recommended total recordings of the 15 symphonies: Kirill Kondrashin, with various Russian orchestras (melodya, antiquarian); Andris Nelsons, Boston Symphony Orchestra (German Gramophone), inexpensive box set with all symphonies, all piano, violin and cello concerts as well as the opera “Lady Macbeth von Mzensk”
Part 1 and Part 2 of Berthold Seliger to Schostakovich are also available online.