Crisis Era: Great Patriotic War/WWII. Shostakovich turned the Austrian-German symphonic tradition that included Beethoven, Bruckner, Brahms, and Mahler against the Nazi fascists in his Seventh "Leningrad" Symphony.
Much derided after the Second World War for bombastic excess, it fit the time.
Shostakovich is the closest thing to Beethoven in the 20th century. So his works are uneven; Beethoven did have his Wellington's Victory and Opus 49 piano sonatas, too.
If it does not have a formal program it has one barely beneath the surface, being written under the most politically-charged time ever, the early successes of the Wehrmacht onslaught upon the Soviet Union. The opening theme suggests a peace-loving Soviet Union minding its own business and creating Socialist progress (ahem!) before a banal theme ("Ich gehe ins Maxim") from Lehar's operetta Merry Widow begins innocuously enough, becoming louder and darker, suggesting a growing menace that does worse and worse farther away from the Soviet peoples until it suggests the sheer brutality of Nazi tanks and dive bombers. Shostakovich adds the musical equivalent of agonized moans in case people don't get the message. The moans are not so blatant as they express horrors of the Nazis elsewhere, but as the music depicting aggression suggests increasing proximity, they also get louder. Ultimately this all stalls at Leningrad, the second-largest city of the Soviet Union in a horrific siege.
Aside from the very Russian, balletic introductory and closing theme the first movement is a parody of the Austrian-German symphonic tradition; Soviet people maintain their humanity while the Nazis show none. Russia of course became a big player in classical music in the latter part of the 19th century, too. You didn't expect Shostakovich to neglect Tchaikovsky as part of the symphonic heritage, did you?
But with the stalling of the war at the gates of Leningrad along comes the famine and the shelling. The second movement develops into an unforgettable, ominous Dance of Death suggesting the medieval horrors of war, famine and plague (shelling!), with a powerful, and undeniably Russian (musical) resistance to the inexorable wave of the future that the Nazis saw themselves. Except for famine, the British had just experienced this in the Blitz, so they could relate to this.
The third movement begins with a Bach-like chorale (the Nazis couldn't twist Bach as they could Wagner and even Beethoven) that intersperses with with string figurations. Victory will happen, and when it does the world will revert to a civilized one in which even the Germans relish peace. The Soviet peoples will return to the inevitable progress of Socialism in victory and peace. Even the very German -sounding music In the end the very German theme from Viennese operetta is transformed into something benign and even noble.
(You need not like Communism and especially Stalinism, let alone the brutality of the Red Army to hear this symphony as I do).
But the struggle has but begun, and Nazi evil meets the inevitable resistance of the peoples of the Soviet Union (and others!) Shostakovich says with music what Sir Winston Churchill said would be done: that the corrosive evil that is Hitlerism would be purged completely from the Earth once and for all. Was Shostakovich doing with music what Churchill did with words? Such is my interpretation.
This work is paradoxically a symphony derived from the German symphonic tradition turned against the perverts in the Reichskanzlei. the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the SS and Gestapo, and of course the administration of the KZ-lager. The Nazis had nothing musical as a response.
Much derided after the Second World War for bombastic excess, it fit the time.
Shostakovich is the closest thing to Beethoven in the 20th century. So his works are uneven; Beethoven did have his Wellington's Victory and Opus 49 piano sonatas, too.
If it does not have a formal program it has one barely beneath the surface, being written under the most politically-charged time ever, the early successes of the Wehrmacht onslaught upon the Soviet Union. The opening theme suggests a peace-loving Soviet Union minding its own business and creating Socialist progress (ahem!) before a banal theme ("Ich gehe ins Maxim") from Lehar's operetta Merry Widow begins innocuously enough, becoming louder and darker, suggesting a growing menace that does worse and worse farther away from the Soviet peoples until it suggests the sheer brutality of Nazi tanks and dive bombers. Shostakovich adds the musical equivalent of agonized moans in case people don't get the message. The moans are not so blatant as they express horrors of the Nazis elsewhere, but as the music depicting aggression suggests increasing proximity, they also get louder. Ultimately this all stalls at Leningrad, the second-largest city of the Soviet Union in a horrific siege.
Aside from the very Russian, balletic introductory and closing theme the first movement is a parody of the Austrian-German symphonic tradition; Soviet people maintain their humanity while the Nazis show none. Russia of course became a big player in classical music in the latter part of the 19th century, too. You didn't expect Shostakovich to neglect Tchaikovsky as part of the symphonic heritage, did you?
But with the stalling of the war at the gates of Leningrad along comes the famine and the shelling. The second movement develops into an unforgettable, ominous Dance of Death suggesting the medieval horrors of war, famine and plague (shelling!), with a powerful, and undeniably Russian (musical) resistance to the inexorable wave of the future that the Nazis saw themselves. Except for famine, the British had just experienced this in the Blitz, so they could relate to this.
The third movement begins with a Bach-like chorale (the Nazis couldn't twist Bach as they could Wagner and even Beethoven) that intersperses with with string figurations. Victory will happen, and when it does the world will revert to a civilized one in which even the Germans relish peace. The Soviet peoples will return to the inevitable progress of Socialism in victory and peace. Even the very German -sounding music In the end the very German theme from Viennese operetta is transformed into something benign and even noble.
(You need not like Communism and especially Stalinism, let alone the brutality of the Red Army to hear this symphony as I do).
But the struggle has but begun, and Nazi evil meets the inevitable resistance of the peoples of the Soviet Union (and others!) Shostakovich says with music what Sir Winston Churchill said would be done: that the corrosive evil that is Hitlerism would be purged completely from the Earth once and for all. Was Shostakovich doing with music what Churchill did with words? Such is my interpretation.
This work is paradoxically a symphony derived from the German symphonic tradition turned against the perverts in the Reichskanzlei. the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the SS and Gestapo, and of course the administration of the KZ-lager. The Nazis had nothing musical as a response.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.