Schubert & Shostakovich

Concertos are often described as musical depictions of a relationship between an individual (the soloist) and society at large (the orchestra). This relationship can take many forms, from friendly agreement to bitter rivalry. Such an approach is particularly fruitful when it comes to the concertos of Dmitri Shostakovich. After all, the communist regime, under which he spent all but the first decade of his life, made a great deal of the relationship between the individual and society. But in this case, the needs of the individual were almost always subordinated to those of society, a state of affairs that only music — the most abstract of the arts — could afford to question openly.

At the beginning of Shostakovich’s Second Cello Concerto, the soloist plays a slow, sad melody without accompani­ment. The “community” enters only gradually: lower strings and harps first, the rest of the orchestra much later in the movement. Instead of a traditional exposition, where the orchestra gets a chance to flex its collective muscles, we are treated to a solitary meditation. The tragic soliloquy of the cello is eventually (but only temporarily) relieved by the entrance of the woodwinds and xylophone. For the first time, the orchestra gives the soloist a real response and, for a while, it seems that a meaningful interaction can develop between the two. But this proves to be an illusion, and the dark mood of the piece returns.

The second movement is one of those Shostakovich scherzos where the boundary between lighthearted humor and biting sarcasm is completely blurred. Its principal melody, as Shostakovich himself acknowledged in a letter to his friend Isaak Glikman, is very similar to a street song from Odesa: “Kupite bubliki” (Buy donuts). “I cannot explain the reason why,” he added. Whatever the reason, this innocent little ditty is soon subjected to a series of extraordinary transformations, its playfulness gradually giving way to a sense of utter despair.

Without pause, the scherzo is soon followed by the third movement, which begins with a menacing horn fanfare. Responding to the challenge of the “outside world,” the soloist takes over the fanfare theme for the ensuing cadenza, presenting some highly virtuosic elaborations that eventually calm down with an idyllic figure that seems to emerge from some distant world. The entire movement is in some way based on the fanfare material, yet whatever harmony has been reached is mercilessly destroyed by a wild irruption of the “bubliki” theme — now sounding positive­ly tragic — in the entire orchestra. What is left is the cello’s wistful recapitulation of earlier themes (including the begin­ning of the first movement) and a coda featuring the mysterious ticking of the woodblock, tom-tom, and tambourine.

Shostakovich’s Second Cello Concer­to is a very different kind of piece than the First, both written for Mstislav Rostropovich. During the seven years separating the two works, Shostakovich’s health had deteriorated seriously and a sense of deep pessimism had begun to take hold of him. The late 1950s were known as a period of “thaw” following Stalin’s death; by the 1960s, the Brezhnev era was bringing a new “freeze.” At age 60, Shostakovich was a man broken by decades of changing political fortunes, during which he received high praise from the Communist Party one day and feared for his life the next.

Even now, his political troubles were far from being over. Yevgeny Mravinsky, the conductor who had led many of Shostakovich’s works since the 1930s, refused to conduct the premiere of the composer’s Symphony No. 13 in 1962, which was based on Yevgeny Yevtushen­ko’s poem about the Nazi massacre of Jews in the Ukrainian village of Babi Yar during World War II. In 1966, Mravinsky likewise cancelled plans to conduct the premiere of the Second Cello Concerto on Shostakovich’s 60th birthday. (It was ultimately led by conductor Yevgeny Svetlanov.) According to the official record, he hadn’t had time to learn the score. It is more likely, however, that he had grasped it only too well, and this music was always potentially “danger­ous,” even without a controversial poem making those dangers explicit.

It is clear to anyone who listens to this music that the “individual” and the “society” in the Second Cello Concerto do not form one big happy family, as communist teachings about the new classless society would have it. Instead, their relationship is deeply troubled and remains unresolved at the end of the piece.

— adapted from a note by Peter Laki

Peter Laki is a musicologist and frequent lecturer on classical music. He is a visiting associate professor of music, emeritus, at Bard College and was The Cleveland Orchestra’s program annotator from 1990 to 2007.

During his life, Franz Schubert composed, or at least started, a dozen symphonies, several of which he left unfinished. What we now know as his “Unfinished” Symphony, ironically, was almost certainly completed, even though the partial autograph score reveals only two movements.

The origins of Schubert’s “Great” C-major Symphony, often given the designation as his Ninth, were for many years equally problematic, despite the fact that the score for this big work was in the hands of Vienna’s Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (more commonly known today as the Musikverein) during the composer’s lifetime.

At the top of the manuscript is a date that looks like “March 1828,” which led English lexicographer George Grove (famous in music circles as editor of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians) to argue that the date was when Schubert started composing the work. However, more recent examinations of the score have revealed that the pages were trimmed so that the last “8” of the inscribed date could instead be a “5” or “6.” This would suggest that this is the symphony that Schubert’s friends said he composed while on holiday in summer 1825 and was long considered lost.

That summer, Schubert traveled with his friend, the singer Johann Michael Vogl, in the mountains of Upper Austria for five months. In the city of Linz, they stayed with Anton Ottenwalt, who wrote to another of their friends: “By the way, he worked on a symphony in Gmunden, which is to be performed in Vienna this winter.” Such a work was not performed that winter, but in 1826 the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, having learned that Schubert was writing a symphony for them, voted a gift of 100 crowns to him in acknowledgement. A set of parts was made and the autograph score delivered. The work was tried out in rehearsal but found to be too difficult, so it was returned to the shelf.

More than a decade later, long after Schubert’s death, Robert Schumann called on Schubert’s brother Ferdinand in Vienna in 1839 and was amazed to find an enormous collection of unknown music, including the Symphony in C major, which no one had ever heard. He immediately arranged a performance in Leipzig, where Felix Mendelssohn oversaw the city’s Gewandhaus Orchestra. Other orchestras, however, still refused to rehearse it because the relentless stream of notes in the string parts, especially in the last movement, were considered too difficult and exhausting.

No doubt about it, this is a big symphony. The nickname “The Great” is a translation of the German word “Grosse,” which means large or expansive. This nickname was first given to the work to help distinguish it from Schubert’s earlier, shorter symphony in C major (No. 6), now known as the “Little” C-major Symphony.

As Haydn did in almost all his symphonies, and Beethoven did occasionally, Schubert begins his first movement with a slow introductory section, marked Andante, which crescendos into the start of the movement proper, marked Allegro. It was Haydn’s “Drumroll” Symphony (No. 103) that gave Schubert the idea of bringing back the broad theme of the introduction (originally stated by two unaccompanied horns) at the conclusion of the movement, first in the winds, then in the strings.

Schubert’s slow movement is a unique creation, with a nod toward the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and its jog-trot tempo. Schubert was sometimes inclined to allow the development of his music, especially in slow movements, to generate tension, defused at the last minute by a return to his main theme. But in this movement, the process loses control. Angry dotted figures in the strings are goaded by repetitive brass figures in a terrifying escalation, to the point where the music completely collapses. A bar and a half of silence is needed before the music can resume, wounded but alive.

One would be hard pressed to name examples of happier music than the third-movement Scherzo, which seems to have descended from a cloudless sky. Its Trio section, too, is a glimpse of paradise, with a long melody given to the winds as a group.

The finale is another matter altogether. The unflagging pace, the sense of machinery switched to “full power,” and the dotted rhythms in the strings all suggest that this music cannot and will not be stopped. The famous second subject, with its four repeated notes, compounds the pulse and provides the drive that reaches the end of a “Great” symphony that few have matched.

— Hugh Macdonald

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.