DSCH’s Fifth Symphony: Meaning and Being

“A poem should not mean / But be,” writes Archibald MacLeish in his “Ars Poetica,” though these lines notoriously contradict themselves. The modernist response to music is certainly in this vein, and I am inclined to agree, with certain qualifications. If we read “meaning” as simplistic interpretation, as a kind of musical allegory, then our “interpretation” of music is destined to fall into ludicrous tautology.

Criticism of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony has been marked by such simplistic interpretations—from listeners who have heard Soviet orthodoxy and from romantic revisionists who have heard ironic dissidence. These polar readings began to appear almost immediately after the premiere in 1937 and have haunted the symphony ever since. The appearance of the apparently fraudulent Shostakovichian “memoir” Testimony in 1979 (a book supposedly dictated to, but likely mostly written by Solomon Volkov) provided fuel for problematic revision of the problematic orthodoxy. The supposed “Shostakovich” writes:

I think that it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in Boris Godunov. It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, “Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,” and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, “Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.” (183)

It is, of course, just as unclear what “happens” in the Fifth as it is unclear who wrote this passage. In the next Shostakovichian post, I will outline some of this history, and I will try to explain why we can’t escape or ignore it, but also why we should do our best to move beyond it.

Politics and Musical Ambiguity

Several readers have commented via e-mail and in conversation on the degree of culpability for those who use the “inner emigration” justification mentioned by Vollmann’s narrator in the previous post. (Yes, this blog does have a few readers, though no one has ventured to post any comments as of yet: come on, people!) This is interesting to consider, no doubt, though surely each case will be different.

What interests me more at the moment, however, is how this kind of political context affects our assessment of art forms we usually consider abstract, like “pure” music. Film and poetry, for example, are different. The political is unavoidable when we assess the work of Leni Riefenstahl (an example a friend pointed out to me today in conversation), because of the naked propaganda of a film like Triumph of the Will; its undoubted brilliance cannot be divorced from what we must consider problematic politics.

But what do we do with, say, Furtwängler, who made some of the most famous recordings of the twentieth century with the Berlin Philharmonic during the war? What do we do with the music of Carl Orff, whose connection to the Nazis is a longstanding subject of controversy? What do we do with Karajan, who actually joined the Nazi party and then had a legendary career, which extended forty years after the war ended?

Do political contexts affect the way we hear these artists?  Should they?  What kind of political work is this music doing?

Of course, the notion that music is free from political and cultural context because musical notes do not signify is mistaken. “Pure” music can signify in any number of ways, and it is as closely connected to cultural context as any art form. Musical quotation, for example, folk and folk-like melodies, certain modalities, and even certain intervals (think of the tritone) all can signify in very specific ways in context.

But it is true that musical signification is usually difficult to pin down, and this ambiguity brings us back to Shostakovich. How does his political ambiguity affect our reading of his musical ambiguity? His is a particularly difficult case because of the widely varying assessments of his politics. Does the Fifth Symphony embrace party orthodoxy, or does it secretly, ironically reject it? Or does it do both and neither? Alex Ross rightly insists in The Rest Is Noise that musical irony is difficult to identify and analyze because it is so difficult to determine specific meaning in a piece of music.

We can, however, learn to be wary of any interpretation that displays too much certitude about what the music is “really saying,” and stay alert to multiple levels of meaning. Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony becomes a rich experience when heard in this way. (Ross 245)

In the case of the Fifth Symphony, politically impossible circumstances actually provide the composer a platform for producing great art. But how do we hear it? In future posts I will chart one listener’s idiosyncratic reading of this fraught masterpiece.

And, of course, Shostakovich wrote music for films as well. . . . We have much ground to cover!

A first encounter with the Fifth Symphony

I first encountered Shostakovich in high school, believe it or not. My music theory teacher passed out scores of the Fifth Symphony and insisted that we follow along as best we could as she played a recording. I wish I could remember which recording it was.

My response to the D-minor opening—the unmistakable four intervals followed by the descending figure—without knowing anything of the circumstances of its composition, was a feeling of paranoid menace, which began to intensify as the music accelerated, especially with the strange entrance of one-handed piano line. The piano entered here for a few seconds and never reappeared for the remainder of the first movement; it was as if the pianist had been taken out back and shot.

But then after the menace reached a climax of nightmare, something remarkable happened: over a rhythmic background of strings and harp, a flute, a horn, and then a clarinet transformed the paranoid theme into something of heartbreaking beauty. It seemed a miracle to my eighteen-year-old sensibility.

The Fifth Symphony has been an important part of my life ever since, and it served as a gateway to much of the composer’s great music: the string quartets, the violin concertos, the twenty-four preludes and fugues. And, of course, Shostakovich became to me, as to many others, a troubling, irresistable figure: tragic, farcical, ambivalent, enigmatic. His description of the Fifth Symphony is infamously emblematic of his troubled career and his controversial position in the pantheon of great composers. After a politically ominous review of his music in Pravda, he withdrew his monumental Fourth Symphony, for which rehearsals had begun in May of 1936, and wrote this rich masterpiece, he claimed, as “a Soviet Artist’s creative reply to just criticism.”

This web-log will begin as a series of reflections on the life and music of Shostakovich. What does his music tell us about art and society, art and psychology, art and politics? Where I will go from there is anyone’s guess. Suggestions are welcome . . .