Symphony No. 4 (Shostakovich)
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The Symphony No. 4 in C Minor (Opus 43) by Dmitri Shostakovich was begun in 1934. However, Shostakovich was dissatisfied with the original ideas for his Fourth Symphony, scrapping his initial work. In September 1935 he began work on the symphony anew, completing the symphony in May 1936.
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[edit] History
Halfway through its composition the composer was denounced for formalism in the infamous Pravda editorial "Muddle Instead of Music". Nevertheless, Shostakovich continued work on the symphony, announcing to his critics that his Fourth Symphony would be his "composer's credo." Following that annoncement, his best friend, the musicologist, Ivan Sollertinsky, declared at a Composers' Union meeting that the Fourth Symphony would redeem the composer and that the symphony would prove to be Shostakovich's "Eroica."
Despite these very dangerous and difficult times, Shostakovich pressed forward with his plans to premiere the symphony as soon as he could. The symphony was eventually accepted for performance by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra and the date of the premiere was set for December 30 1936, under the baton of the orchestra's then musical director, Fritz Stiedry. Shostakovich was also able to secure Otto Klemperer to conduct the symphony's first performance outside the U.S.S.R.
What happened next remains unclear. At some point during the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra's rehearsals of the Fourth Symphony, Shostakovich decided to withdraw the symphony, claiming that he felt that the finale needed some reworking. He would later gave varying explanations as to why he withdrew the Fourth Symphony. In an interview in the late 1950s, Shostakovich explained to his interviewer that he withdrew the symphony because although there were parts in the work he did like, he felt the symphony as a whole suffered from "grandiosomania." Still later, he would claim that he withdrew the symphony, because Fritz Stiedry was making an appaling mess of the symphony during rehearsals. Recently, Shostakovich's friend, Isaak Glikman, stated in his book, Diary of a Friendship, that the real reason the symphony was withdrawn was because of pressure exerted from party bosses on the Leningrad Philharmonic's manager to drop the symphony from its rehearsals. He also defended Fritz Stiedry's musicianship against Shostakovich's allegations of incompetence. Soon after the fiasco surrounding the Fourth Symphony's withdrawal, Fritz Stiedry emigrated to the United States. Stiedry would later be a successful house conductor for New York City's Metropolitan Opera.
During the early to mid-1940s, Shostakovich sought to have his Fourth Symphony premiered and made a two piano reduction of the work at this time to show off the symphony to any interested parties. Shostakovich and his composing colleague, Moishei Vainberg, premiered the symphony in its two piano reduction at a meeting of the Composers' Union in 1946. However, Shostakovich's campaign to have the orchestral version performed was in vain and the orchestral score was shelved and eventually lost. When in the early 1960s, a librarian at the Leningrad Philharmonic found all the instrumental parts in the orchestra's archives, the orchestral score was quickly reconstructed, note-for-note, as it stood when Shostakovich withdrew it back in 1936. The Fourth Symphony was then entrusted to the conductor, Kyril Kondrashin, and was belatedly premiered on December 30 1961 by the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra. The same forces went on to give the Western premiere of the Fourth Symphony at the 1962 Edinburgh Festival.
[edit] Music
The work is approximately one hour in length, and has three movements:
- Allegretto, poco moderato - Presto - Tempo 1o
- Moderato, con moto
- Largo - Allegro
Shostakovich requires an immense orchestra in this work, numbering over a hundred musicians. This, combined with the extreme technical and emotional demands placed on the performers, makes this among his least-performed scores, yet it ranks as one of his most important and personal works.
The symphony is strongly influenced by those of Gustav Mahler, with the Austrian's Third Symphony serving as a model for Shostakovich in the first movement. "To my astonishment and joy I see now that in the (first) movement, as in the entire work, there is the same framework, the same underpinning - without my having wanted it or even planned it - as one finds in Mozart and, in a more expanded and refined form, in Beethoven; it's the same idea which actually began with old Haydn. There must be profound and eternal laws which Beethoven held to and which I see as a kind of confirmation in my work." These words written by Mahler about his own Third Symphony may just as well apply to the first movement of Shostakovich's Fourth. What at first seems like an uncontrolled deluge of musical ideas is, on closer inspection, a tightly organized but uniquely laid out movement in sonata form. Only three themes serve as the basis for the first movement.
One of the first movement's most notable features is a furious presto fugato for the strings that eventually consumes the entire orchestra and climaxes in a blistering quintuple forte tutti. The second movement is a landler-like scherzo cast in a deceptively simple A-B-A-B-A form. This eerie scherzo, at times reminiscent of the scherzi from Mahler's Second and Seventh symphonies, ends with a percussion figure that Shostakovich would use again in the Second Cello Concerto and the Fifteenth Symphony. The third and final movement is, arguably, one of Shostakovich's most complex and bizarre symphonic creations. A Mahlerian funeral march starts off the movement. Soon, a violent toccata takes over which, in turn, leads into a grotesque Rossinian divertimento that features a prominent solo for the trombone of almost cartoonish hilarity. The divertimento gives way to a brutal chorale reminiscent of the coda to Gavriil Popov's First Symphony. Reaching an ear shattering climax when the funeral march from the movement's beginning reemerges, the music finally gives way to the death haunted coda. With echoes of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique and Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, the symphony finally throbs away morendo into darkness on a bleak C-minor pedal point.
[edit] Recordings
Recordings of the work include:
- Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra/Kyrill Kondrashin (Melodiya)
- Staatskapelle Dresden/Kyrill Kondrashin (Profil)
- Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra/Gennady Rozhdestvensky (Russian Disc)
- U.S.S.R. Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra/Gennady Rozhdestvensky (Melodiya)
- Philadelphia Orchestra/Eugene Ormandy (Sony)
- WDR Symphony Orchestra, Cologne/Semyon Bychkov (Avie)
- City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra/Sir Simon Rattle (EMI)
- Kirov Orchestra/Valery Gergiev (Philips)
- Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra/Mariss Jansons (EMI)
- Scottish National Orchestra/Neeme Jarvi (Chandos)
- Gurzenich Orchestra/Dmitri Kitaenko (Capriccio)
- Philadelphia Orchestra/Myung-Whun Chung (Deutsche Grammophon)
- Chicago Symphony Orchestra/Andre Previn (EMI)
- London Philharmonic Orchestra/Bernard Haitink (Decca)
- St. Louis Symphony Orchestra/Leonard Slatkin (RCA/BMG)
- Prague Symphony Orchestra/Maxim Shostakovich (Supraphon)
- Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Vladimir Ashkenazy (Decca)
- Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra/Herbert Kegel (Weitblick)
- Colin Stone and Rustem Hayroudinoff, pianists (arrangement for two pianos) (Chandos)
- National Symphony Orchestra, Washington D.C./Mstislav Rostropovich (Teldec)
- London Symphony Orchestra/Mstislav Rostropovich (Andante)
- Verdi Symphony Orchestra of Milan/Oleg Caetani (Arts)
The last two recordings also include performances of the surviving original drafts of the Fourth Symphony's first movement.
