Marin Alsop Conducts the Shostakovich Fifth

A decade later, Shostakovich was still the enfant gâté of Soviet art when an unsigned review of his long-running opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, appeared in Pravda on January 26, 1936, the day after Joseph Stalin had attended it for the first time. The critic denounced the score, which had been performed successfully in the major European capitals, as an inhuman “bedlam,” and, worse yet in the Stalinist lexicon, an example of "petty-bourgeois formalism.” The concluding words of the review, “This game may end badly,” were not simply a prediction that the opera might close for good, but, in the incipient atmosphere of the Great Terror, that the composer might be shut down in the same way. Shostakovich was at the moment at work on his epic Fourth Symphony, a work more aggressively modernist than Lady Macbeth. He completed but dared not expose it, withdrawing it from rehearsal; it would not be heard for 25 years.

Shostakovich could not simply remain silent, however; he was the Soviet Union’s songbird, and failure to sing was as potentially fatal as singing “badly.” What sort of music, though, can be produced under an implied death sentence? More than implied, in fact, because Shostakovich’s chief political patron, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, was executed even as Shostakovich was at work on his rehabilitation project, the Fifth Symphony. Shostakovich was sufficiently convinced that his number was up to keep a packed bag by his apartment door in anticipation of a midnight arrest.

A reply to just criticism?

No one could have blamed Shostakovich for producing the worst of his 15 symphonies under these circumstances, a patriotic potboiler or perhaps the “Ode to Lenin” that he subsequently promised as the theme of his Sixth Symphony. Instead, the Fifth Symphony would be one of the masterpieces of 20th-century music, the greatest of his works in the opinion of many, and certainly his most popular. Its only overt concession to the circumstances of its birth was the subtitle Shostakovich gave it, “A Soviet Artist’s Reply to Just Criticism.” That appellation has long since gone by the boards, of course, and even in making it Shostakovich was semi-defiantly arguing for his proper place as a true child of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Some critics have seen a more substantial concession in the more supposedly accessible style of the music itself. That it might have been, structurally if not harmonically, something Tchaikovsky could have immediately deciphered is true enough, but that it was formally retrogressive for Shostakovich himself is quite another claim. Many composers — Stravinsky, Bartók, and Schoenberg among them — were returning to more classical forms in the 1930s, and Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata, composed three years earlier, is tonally and harmonically less daring than the Fifth Symphony.

Anguish relieved by sardonic humor

If the music could not be faulted on a “formalistic” level, it pulls no punches in its tragic content: From first bar to last, it is of an almost unrelieved seriousness, not to say anguish, broken only by the sardonic humor and fury that from this point on would be a special feature of Shostakovich’s style. Marin Alsop, the latest of many conductors to perform the score with the Philadelphia Orchestra, called it a “protest” work in her pre-performance comments, but this seems to me a far too superficial categorization. In terror of his life, Shostakovich was able to touch the core both of his own and his people’s suffering, in a manner unlike that of anyone but Mussorgsky — and Mussorgsky had never faced a Stalin, only an Alexander II. The tears and ovations that greeted the first performances of the Fifth in the Soviet Union testified to Shostakovich’s accomplishment. His listeners knew exactly what he was saying, and for whom.

Fortunately, Alsop’s performance was a good deal more perceptive than her remarks, a somewhat understated first movement notwithstanding. The flute and clarinet solos in the Largo were exemplary, and the savage grotesquerie of the finale put paid to the nonsensical notion of a triumphalist program in deference to the authorities: This is music that praises no one and justifies nothing.

Familiar works decked out as curiosities

The opening half of the program featured two familiar works decked out as curiosities: Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun in a reduction for 11 instruments by Benno Sachs, and George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in Ferde Grofé’s arrangement for jazz band. Sachs made the reduction at the behest of Arnold Schoenberg, who had abandoned his own lush, post-Wagnerian style in favor of a more pointillist idiom. The Prelude is still a charming work in this chamber version, but the whole point of the composition was to suggest an alternative style for the late Romantic orchestra without abandoning its sensuous richness.

Grofé stepped in to ready Gershwin’s Rhapsody for its premiere by Paul Whiteman’s band, and he deserves a measure of credit for its historic success. Hearing it with Jon Kimura Parker’s bravura solo performance, it strikes me that it was with this piece that American classical music truly entered on the international scene, in the brash, exhilarating accents that belonged to the still-young republic alone. Parker, Chadwick, MacDowell, and even the innovative Ives had not made that impression; the young George Gershwin did.

The orchestra stepped through its paces as a chamber group, a jazz band, and a full symphonic ensemble with equal panache. A contract has been signed. But the Orchestra is still shorthanded and uncompetitively paid. These problems, as the musicians’ negotiating committee has pointedly noted, need all the more urgently to be addressed. You can’t have greatness on the cheap.