A Soviet Credo: Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony

Pauline Fairclough

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351577953
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Composed in 1935-36 and intended to be his artistic 'credo', Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony was not performed publicly until 1961. Here, Dr Pauline Fairclough tackles head-on one of the most significant and least understood of Shostakovich's major works. She argues that the Fourth Symphony was radically different from its Soviet contemporaries in terms of its structure, dramaturgy, tone and even language, and therefore challenged the norms of Soviet symphonism at a crucial stage of its development. With the backing of prominent musicologists such as Ivan Sollertinsky, the composer could realistically have expected the premiere to have taken place, and may even have intended the symphony to be a model for a new kind of 'democratic' Soviet symphonism. Fairclough meticulously examines the score to inform a discussion of tonal and thematic processes, allusion, paraphrase and reference to musical types, or intonations. Such analysis is set deeply in the context of Soviet musical culture during the period 1932-36, involving Shostakovich's contemporaries Shebalin, Myaskovsky, Kabalevsky and Popov. A new method of analysis is also advanced here, where a range of Soviet and Western analytical methods are informed by the theoretical work of Shostakovich's contemporaries Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Tomashevsky, Mikhail Bakhtin and Ivan Sollertinsky, together with Theodor Adorno's late study of Mahler. In this way, the book will significantly increase an understanding of the symphony and its context.

Chapter One
The Soviet Symphony in the 1930s: Political and Aesthetic Background

Cultural Revolution: The First Five-Year Plan

The period of the First Five-Year Plan (1928–32) was one of the darkest in Soviet history. It was intended to lay the foundations for massive rationalisation of agriculture and industry, and was executed with merciless cruelty. Yet during the time when mass collectivization was forced onto the rural populace with devastating results (deaths from the ensuing starvation as a result of famine and exile have been estimated at 5,000,000 for the year 1933 alone¹), Pravda published a statement promising to 'raise the cultural level of the worker-peasant masses'.² Though it would be reasonable to suppose that the Soviet state had more pressing matters to attend to, as Sheila Fitzpatrick has shown, the drive against so-called 'rightists' (liberals) was a crucial part of a general whipping-up of class war. As a result, the human cost of collectivisation was kept as quiet as possible in the cities, while – as an antidote to its possible discovery – militant proletarian factions were allowed hitherto unprecedented control over the arts.³

The period of the First Five-Year Plan ended with Soviet musical culture in a state of crisis. Although the RAPM and Proletkult were not affiliated to the Party and never served as direct spokesmen for official cultural policy, Party support was tacitly expressed through the absence of measures taken to curb their increasingly aggressive domination of the cultural scene.⁴ RAPM had assumed control of all musical publications, with the last of the independent music journals, Sovremennaya muzïka, folding in 1929. Its influence had seeped into every corner of musical life, and the conservatoires were increasingly crippled by its militant control. In January 1930 the Moscow Conservatoire was renamed the Feliks Kon Higher Music School, and some of its oldest and most respected teachers, including Nikolay Myaskovsky, Reinhold Glière and Mikhail Gnesin, were harried from office, returning only once the 1932 Resolution had been passed. In addition to the stranglehold on the conservatoires, RAPM targeted the airwaves: their supporters began to take over jobs as presenters, editors and lecturers. As a result, there was a complete ban on the broadcasting of light music from 1930 and a marked increase in performances of the music of RAPM composers, complete with introductory lectures. Perceived as decadent, ideologically damaging and –worst of all – more popular with the proletariat than the edifying mass songs that RAPM composers produced specifically for their consumption, jazz and light music were especially vulnerable targets. Between 1929 and 1932, Western jazz bands were banned from visiting the Soviet Union, the popular Soviet jazz musician Leopold Teplitsky was sent into exile, and all performances of music in any way connected with jazz (including Křenek's Jonny spielt auf) were cancelled; even playing jazz records could lead to a fine. Publishing outlets for light music were closed down, and the light music division of the State Press's Music Section stopped publishing light music in 1930.⁵ The Association for Contemporary Music (ASM), formed in 1923 as a forum for the dissemination and discussion of new trends in Western European music, was, unsurprisingly, engaged in constant polemics with RAPM, who finally succeeded in hounding it out of existence: the ASM was formally disbanded in 1931.⁶

Proletarian Symphonism

Although the favoured genres of RAPM tended to be vocal, with explicitly ideological texts – mass songs, cantatas, song-symphonies, operas and so on –some of its most prominent composers also wrote chamber music, Symphonies and concertos. But despite RAPM approval of past 'revolutionary' figures such as Beethoven, their suspicion of the abstract symphonic genre was deeply enough rooted to provoke calls for a new kind of 'proletarian' symphonism based on mass song. Shostakovich's own response was mixed; during the 1920s he juggled affiliations with both the Leningrad branch of the ASM (LASM) and proletarian organizations such as TRAM (Teatr Rabochikh Molodëzh [Theatre of Working-Class Youth]).⁷ His Second and Third Symphonies (1927 and 1930), respectively subtitled 'To October' and 'The First of May', attempted to fuse the ideals of technical progress (in the form of dense linear counterpoint, free-flowing musical material with no thematic repetition, and the rejection of any conventional formal structure) with the demand for 'concrete' ideological content (in the form of rousing choruses with texts by the proletarian poets Aleksandr Bezïmensky and Semën Kirsanov). Shostakovich's friend and colleague Vissarion Shebalin also wrote a choral ('Lenin') Symphony in 1931, a work which, though light years away from Shostakovich's Second and Third in quality, similarly tries to maintain technical standards in the face of ideological expectations, here in the form of an excessive, rather dry use of contrapuntal techniques such as passacaglia and fugue. Shebalin was criticized – not without reason – for being over-academic; his 'Lenin' Symphony was withdrawn from the repertoire a year after its première in 1933 and was not performed again in the Soviet Union until 1960.⁸ But Shostakovich's symphonies were well received: the influential ASM critic Boris Asafiev hailed the Third Symphony as marking the Soviet symphony's rebirth 'out of the dynamism of revolutionary oratory'.⁹

Composers and critics affiliated to RAPM were not alone in recognising the potential for a new kind of Soviet symphonism to emerge from the (perceived) ashes of the Western symphonic tradition. This was to become the favourite theme of both Asafiev and Sollertinsky, Shostakovich's close friend and musical ally since 1927. But neither Asafiev nor Sollertinsky saw the choral symphony or song-symphony as the way forward. Both critics were products of the liberal, intellectual branch of Marxist aesthetics, which favoured an evolutionary rather than revolutionary approach to artistic development. Neither openly subscribed to the view that art was inherently non-political or ideological, whatever they may privately have thought; and both went to considerable lengths to develop an aesthetic framework for Soviet symphonism which would take pressure off composers to demonstrate political engagement, chiefly by arguing that the quality of 'symphonism' itself was inherently democratic by its foundations in the spirit of 'dialectic' and hence (so the reasoning went) of revolution. Those arguments were moderately successful, as will be seen, though it was arguably the success of a single 'abstract' symphony (Shostakovich's Fifth of 1937) that most effectively secured the genre's survival.

Asafiev's concept of symphonism shared some common ground with RAPM. Like them, he regarded Beethoven's symphonies as models of dialectical argument, infused with the intonations of revolutionary song and therefore a true reflection of the heroic spirit of their age. His earliest writings on symphonism (dating from 1917) were relatively apolitical, inspired above all by Henri Bergson's theory of élan vital and durée. To have 'symphonic' quality was to be in a state of perpetual growth, development and tension; as David Haas notes, although Asafiev never directly used Bergson's terminology, his references to a 'basic impulse of musical motion' and 'living musical fabric' are clearly related to Bergson's intuitive concept of time.¹⁰ Throughout the 1920s Asafiev's language became increasingly politicized. In 1918 he had described symphonism in rather esoteric philosophical language as 'an unbroken stream of musical consciousness, when no element is either conceived or perceived as independent among the remaining multitude, but an integral creative entity in motion emerges by means of intutitive contemplation'. But by 1928 that language had become absurdly convoluted in his attempt to justify symphonism on ideological grounds:

The issue of musical motion and the logic of musical thought reveal themselves more clearly and consequentially in symphonic forms than in other musical manifestations. The dialectic nature of the process of musical formation in symphonic forms allows the very concept of symphonism to emerge from the dialectic of musical consciousness, since any truly symphonic work is a dynamic process organised by consciousness embracing one or another type of life phenomena through the dialectically lawful progress of the musical idea in its successive phases of development.¹¹

The implicit parallels with Marxist-Leninist jargon are clear: merely by emphasizing certain terms such as 'dialectic' and 'consciousness', 'life phenomena' (implying that the musical material itself was socially 'relevant') and the imposing 'dialectically lawful progress', in Asafiev's definition symphonism begins to look like the quintessential musical embodiment of dialectical materialism.

Whatever Asafiev's personal commitment to that line of reasoning, his strategy of defending 'symphonic' music on pseudo-ideological grounds was taken up by Sollertinsky, whose 1929 article 'The Problem of Symphonism' was an analogous attempt to provide ideological justification for the symphony. Here, following Asafiev, Sollertinsky draws a distinction between symphonism as a genre and symphonism as a 'creative principle'. He describes symphonism as an inherently collective phenomenon based on contemporary themes, which arises in response to sociological factors: 'True symphonism always reappears, like heroism, at the time of the youth of a class embarking on the creation of an entire culture; such was the case with Beethoven.'¹² This may sound crude, but the implications of Sollertinsky's claims are considerable. If a work could be described as symphonic, then – assuming Sollertinsky's claims were accepted – no other apologia would be necessary. Music which was 'symphonic' would be inherently relevant to Soviet society, in spite of its supposedly abstract language.

Sollertinsky claims that the social relevance of the symphony is embodied in the musical fabric itself, as a 'musical collectivisation of feelings'. Also of significance is his assertion that Soviet symphonism would be 'built on the working out of new musical thematic and songful material'. Symphonic language, though abstract, was to be recognizably 'contemporary' in its assimilation of popular idioms:

Symphonism as a method (not as the canonization of a genre) in its basis is collectivism i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Permissions
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Note on Transliteration
• Note on Sources
• Note on References to the Score
• Note on Notation
• 1 The Soviet Symphony in the 1930s: Political and Aesthetic Background
• 2 Analytical Approaches to the Fourth Symphony
• 3 First Movement: Allegretto poco moderato
• 4 Second Movement: Moderato con moto
• 5 Third Movement: Largo-Allegro
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index