Bartok and Shostakovich
Two of my favourite pieces of 20th century music are Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra and Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony. However Bartok makes a cruel joke at the expense of the Shostakovich. It is like watching two of your footballing heroes having a punch-up.
In the 4th movement of the Concerto Bartok suddenly breaks off from a gentle, lyrical passage to play a snatch of one of Shostakovich's themes from the symphony. This is followed by chattering on the woodwind to imitate laughter and a big guffaw on the trombones. The snatch is then repeated followed by even more "laughter". The music then returns to the previous calm tempo.
I once read an article that said that Bartok never wears his heart on his sleeve, but that it would be truer to say that he wore his brains on his sleeve. He wrote the concerto towards the end of his life when he was in exile in America. His life was not easy, but he was able to express himself in pure music, as if his composing took him to a place where he could forget what was happening around him. Shostakovich on the other hand was in a perpetual battle with the authorities, so he used his music to convey his inner thoughts. He would explain to the powers that be what he wanted them to think that the music was about, while those in the know would understand his real feelings. Now years after his death there is still great debate about what was behind many of these works.
In the sleeve notes for my 1974 recording by Paavo Berglund and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra of the Leningrad Symphony, Shostakovich is quoted as saying this about the work:
"The Seventh Symphony is a programme composition inspired by the grim events of 1941. It consists of four movements......
"The exposition of the first movement tells of the happy life led by the people, of their self-assurance and security in the future. It was a simple and peaceful life such as was led by thousands of the Leningrad volunteer fighters before the war, such as was led by the entire city and the entire country. The theme of war governs the middle passages.
"The second movement is a lyrical Scherzo recalling times and events that were happy. It is tinged with melancholy.
"The third movement, an Adagio of great pathos, expressing ecstatic love of life and the beauties of nature, passes without interruption into the fourth which, like the first, is a key movement of the symphony. The first was expressive of struggle, the fourth, of approaching victory."
Since the composer's death many theories have been produced about what the symphony is trying to say, and I am happy to add my own. To my mind the above is a very good description of the work from about two minutes into it to about half way through the final movement. The angular opening theme does not depict a "simple and peaceful life", but there follows a soft lyrical passage to which that description certainly applies. This is interrupted by the passage that Bartok takes exception to.
My theory is that he is depicting a peaceful people living under an oppressive regime, that is invaded by a violent enemy. Eventually the enemy is driven out but what the "rescuing" forces impose on the people is not a happy ending. As the final movement progresses the music gets more sinister until eventually the brass crash in with the theme from the very beginning of the symphony. The invaders have been driven out, but the internal enemy has returned!
After the composer's death, Solomon Volkov published a book entitled Testimony, which he claimed was a series of conversations he had had with Shostakovich. While he never produced any evidence that they were genuine, the whole format suggests that they are, though maybe that is because they say the sort of things I would have expected him to say. Anyway he says "it is not about Leningrad under siege, it is about the Leningrad that Stalin destroyed and that Hitler merely finished off".
What Bartok is making fun of is the way Shostakovich repeats the same theme 12 times getting louder and louder, but with no variation at all in the notes, the pitch or the rhythm, only in the accompaniment. If this were a pure symphony with no sub-text, it would be considered unimaginative in the extreme. But this is not the only time the composer describes uncivilised action by reducing the musical language to its basics. In the second movement of his 11th Symphony, he depicts the 1905 march on the winter palace being violently broken up; the rhythm and harmony become more and more basic until at the climax there is just the percussion driving everything away.
We need to look also at the circumstances of the performance that Bartok was listening to. The symphony was written in 1941 during the siege of Leningrad and seen as was a symbol of resistance to the Nazis, not just in the Soviet Union, but among all the Allies. A copy of the score was sent secretly to America where it was performed under the baton of Toscanini and broadcast to millions of Americans. It is quite likely that Bartok heard this performance.
In Testimony Shostakovich is very scathing about Toscanini. He writes:"Toscanini sent me his recording of my Seventh Symphony and hearing it made me very angry. Everything is wrong. The spirit and the character and the tempi. It's a sloppy, hack job."
And that was probably what Bartok had listened to when he composed his Concerto for Orchestra.
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