Music Director
Dmitry (Dmitriyevich) Shostaskovich (1906-1975)
Festival Overture
Russian composer Dmitry Shostakovich grew up during and after the October Revolution of 1917. In 1979, four years after Shostakovich’s death, a collection of the composer’s memoirs entitled, Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich (as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov) was published. The memoirs suggested that, while Shostakovich outwardly conformed to the demands of being a Soviet artist in a totalitarian state, he inwardly despised the regime he was desperately trying to appease. In subsequent years, Volkov’s claims that the memoirs were legitimately those of Shostakovich have been discredited. For more than 20 years, the controversy has spawned new biographies and at least one symposium.
Shostakovich spent his life both in and out of favor with the Communist government. Establishing what his true attitudes were at any given time is complex business because of the political dangers of free expression prior to the fall of the Soviet Union. Whatever the case, Shostakovich was one of Russia’s greatest composers and perhaps the best symphonist of the twentieth century. His musical style shows the influence of the greatest musical minds of his century, incorporating techniques of Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Mahler, and Hindemith.
In the early 1920s, the Soviet Union was relatively free culturally. Shostakovich was exposed to performances of music by Stravinsky, Alban Berg, Bela Bartok, and Paul Hindemith. Shostakovich tried some avant-garde techniques in his satiric opera, The Nose, based on the story by Nikolay Gogol. The second opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1932), showed even more assimilation of radical technique.
In 1928, Stalin began his First Five-Year Plan. Soviet composers were expected to write music in an accessible, popular style. Any use of avant-garde or jazz idioms was banned. On January 28, 1936, after Stalin had apparently attended a performance of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District , an article entitled “Chaos Instead of Music” appeared in the Soviet newspaper Pravda. It criticized the opera for its ‘fidgety, screaming, neurotic…primitive and vulgar’ score.
The article also apparently stated, ‘This is playing with nonsensical things, which could end very badly.’ This comment came in the midst of Stalin’s “Great Terror” of 1936-37, during which millions of people were arrested, tortured, executed, or exiled to Siberia and Central Asia. Shostakovich’s sister Mariya was exiled to Central Asia in 1937.
Shostakovich withdrew his newly completed Fourth Symphony in May 1936. The work was not performed until 1961. His song cycle Four Pushkin Romances, op. 46, completed in January 1937, was not performed until 1940. While Shostakovich worked on his Fifth symphony, his friend and patron Marshal Tukhachevsky was arrested and executed.
Shostakovich completed the Fifth Symphony in about three months in 1937. The work was premiered by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Yevgeniy Mavrinsky. The occasion was the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the 1917 Revolution. It was generally accepted that Shostakovich’s future was at stake.
The non-programmatic symphony, composed in a traditional four movement form with an accessible sound, was a tremendous success with the public. First hand accounts indicate that people wept openly during the third movement Largo and that the audience gave a spirited standing–ovation when the performance was over. Shostakovich was “rehabilitated.”
Shostakovich’s life was never easy. He survived two World Wars, and two denunciations (1936, 1948) by the Soviet regime, but still managed to compose fifteen symphonies. Stalin died in 1953, and Shostakovich was accepted by the government when he composed the optimistic Festival Overture for the 37th anniversary of the socialist revolution. In 1954. The work became popular and eventually became the theme for the Summer Olympics of 1980 in Moscow.
Program notes by Beth Bergman Fisher