Symphony No. 4 (Shostakovich)
 | This article possibly contains original research. (December 2021) |
Instrumentation
Shostakovich uses a large orchestra requiring over one hundred musicians. It is scored for the following instruments:[2]
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Structure
The symphony has three movements:
- Largo – Allegro
Most performances of the symphony last a little over an hour.
Historical overview
Composition
Shostakovich began the Fourth Symphony in September 1935. His second and third symphonies, completed in 1927 and 1929, had been patriotic works with choral finales, but the new score was different.[how?] Toward the end of 1935 he told an interviewer, "I am not afraid of difficulties. It is perhaps easier, and certainly safer, to follow a beaten path, but it is also dull, uninteresting and futile."[3]
Shostakovich abandoned sketches for the symphony some months earlier[
Pravda published two more articles in the same vein in the next two and a half weeks. On 3 February, "Ballet Falsehood" assailed his ballet The Limpid Stream, and "Clear and Simple Language in Art" appeared on 13 February. Although this last article was technically an editorial attacking Shostakovich for "formalism", it appeared in the "Press Review" section. Stalin, under cover of the Central Committee, may have singled out Shostakovich because the plot and music of Lady Macbeth infuriated him, the opera contradicted Stalin's intended social and cultural direction for the nation at that period, or he resented the recognition Shostakovich was receiving both in the Soviet Union and in the West.[5]
Despite these criticisms, Shostakovich continued work on the symphony—though he simultaneously refused to allow a concert performance of the last act of Lady Macbeth.[6] He explained to a friend, "The audience, of course, will applaud—it's considered bon ton to be in the opposition, and then there'll be another article with a headline like 'Incorrigible Formalist.'"[7]
Once he completed the score, Shostakovich was apparently uncertain how to proceed. His new symphony did not emulate the style of Nikolai Myaskovsky's socialist realist Sixteenth Symphony, The Aviators, or Vissarion Shebalin's song-symphony The Heroes of Perekop.[further explanation needed] Showing the new symphony to friends did not help. One asked what Shostakovich thought the reaction from Pravda would be. Shostakovich replied, "I don't write for Pravda, but for myself."[8]
Despite the increasingly repressive political atmosphere, Shostakovich continued to plan for the symphony's premiere, scheduled by the
Withdrawal
After a number of rehearsals that left both the conductor and musicians unenthusiastic,[citation needed] Shostakovich met with several officials of the Composers Union and the Communist Party, along with I.M. Renzin, the Philharmonic's director, in the latter's office. He was informed that the 11 December performance was being cancelled and that he was expected to make the announcement and provide an explanation. The composer's direct participation is unknown, but the newspaper Soviet Art (Sovetskoe iskusstvo) published a notice that Shostakovich had asked for the symphony's premiere to be cancelled "on the grounds that it in no way corresponds to his current creative convictions and represents for him a long-outdated creative phase", that it suffered from "grandiosomania" and he planned to revise it.[9]
Decades later,
Premiere
 | The factual accuracy of part of this article is disputed. The dispute is about the origin of the two-piano arrangement of the Fourth Symphony. According to biographical sources, it had been made from the original score, which was lost after the fact. Moreover, Shostakovich was contemplating premiering the symphony in the late 1940s, before Stalin's death. (December 2021) |
The manuscript score for the Fourth Symphony was lost during World War II. Using the orchestral parts that survived from the 1936 rehearsals, Shostakovich had a two-piano version published in an edition of 300 copies in Moscow in 1946. Shostakovich began considering a performance only after Stalin's death in 1953 changed the cultural climate in the Soviet Union. He undertook no revisions. Conductor
Soviet critics[
Influence of Mahler
The symphony is strongly influenced by
Aside from the entire second movement, one of the most Mahlerian moments[according to whom?] appears at the outset of the third movement—a funeral march reminiscent of many similar passages in the Austrian's output. Another such point occurs near the beginning of the deeply brooding coda that follows the last full-orchestra outburst, with the descending half-step idea in the woodwinds clearly pointing to the A major-to-A minor chord progression that characterizes much of Mahler's Sixth Symphony.[citation needed]
References
- ^ a b Steinberg, 541.
- ^ Shostakovich, Dmitri. Symphony No. 4 in C Minor, Op. 43. New York: Kalmus.
- ^ Freed, 3.
- ^ Schwarz, 123
- ^ Volkov, 110.
- ^ Volkov, 121.
- Muzykal'naia akademiia, 4 (1997), 72.[author missing]
- Muzykal'naia akademiia, 4 (1997), 74.[author missing]
- ^ Robinson, Harlow. "Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No. 4 in C minor, Opus 43" (PDF). Boston Symphony Orchestra. Retrieved 9 October 2012.
- ^ Glikman, xxii–xxiv: "a mythology has grown up around the withdrawal of the Fourth Symphony, a mythology to which writings about Shostakovich have unfortunately lent quasi-scriptural status."
- incomplete short citation]
- ^ Edinburgh International Festival, 1926, in DSCH Journal No 37
- ^ Fay, 226.
- ^ Volkov, 136.
Sources
- Fay, Laurel E. Shostakovich: A Life (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). ISBN 978-0-19-518251-4.
- Freed, Richard, Notes for RCA/BMG 60887: Shostakovich: Symphony No. 4; St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leonard Slatkin.
- ISBN 978-0-571-20982-8.
- Schwarz, Boris, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia: 1917–1981 (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1972). ISBN 978-0-253-33956-0.
- ISBN 978-0-19-506177-2.
- ISBN 978-0-375-41082-6.
Further reading
- Fairclough, Pauline, A Soviet Credo: Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2006) ISBN 978-0-7546-5016-4.
- Layton, Robert, ed. Robert Simpson, The Symphony: Volume 2, Mahler to the Present Day (New York: Drake Publishing, Inc., 1972).
- Leonard, James, All Music Guide to Classical Music (San Francisco: Backbeat books, 2005). ISBN 978-0-87930-865-0.
- Maes, Francis, tr. ISBN 978-0-520-21815-4.
- Spencer, William (1985). The Fourth Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich: an analysis (M.M. thesis). Boston: Boston University.
- Wilson, Elizabeth, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, Second Edition (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994, 2006). ISBN 978-0-691-12886-3.
