Can Shostakovich Ever Escape Stalin’s Shadow?
Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, one of the mainstays of the twentieth-century orchestral repertory, ends with an unapologetic display of musical bombast. The coda consists of thirty-five triple-forte bars in the key of D major, anchored on grandiloquent, fanfare-like gestures in the brass. The strings saw away at the note A, playing it no fewer than two hundred and fifty-two times, the winds piping along with them. The timpani pound relentlessly on D and A, the final notes accentuated by elephantine bass-drum thwacks. It is the pum-pum-pum-pum of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” run amok. The audience invariably springs to its feet.
If Shostakovich had written the Fifth under ordinary circumstances, the coda would present few problems. A bravura, over-the-top finish; end of story. The work arose, however, in 1937, at the time of Stalin’s Terror, and its meanings are profoundly fraught. The previous year, Stalin had conspicuously walked out of a performance of Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” and the composer had been castigated in Pravda for practicing decadent formalism. While Shostakovich was at work on the Fifth, one of his highest-ranking supporters, the Soviet general Mikhail Tukhachevsky, had been executed. Not only the composer’s career but also, possibly, his life depended on what he did next. When, on November 21, 1937, the Fifth had its première, under the direction of Yevgeny Mravinsky, it seemed to renounce modernist complexity in favor of socialist-realist affirmation. Officialdom was satisfied; the pall was lifted. Yet doubts about Shostakovich’s sincerity lingered. Some observers found the ending of the Fifth cold and forbidding. Those who had suffered under the Terror detected signs of clandestine resistance. The triumph might be hollow, or it might be a triumph against the system.
Marina Frolova-Walker and Jonathan Walker, in a new book titled “Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5,” begin with those thirty-five bars, charting a sharp divergence in how conductors have handled them. The authors cite a sequence in Semyon Aranovich and Alexander Sokurov’s 1981 film, “Sonata for Viola,” a documentary about the composer. First, we see footage of Mravinsky leading the Leningrad Philharmonic. Frolova-Walker and Walker write, “His austere features and spare gestures suggest utter seriousness, and he slows the tempo down greatly in the final section, grimacing as if in pain when the bass drum joins the timpani.” The film then cuts to a performance by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, on tour in Moscow in 1959. This one is “fast and jubilant”; the conductor flashes a grin as he drives the music home. Mravinsky’s coda takes eighty-seven seconds; Bernstein’s, forty.
When the full range of approaches to the symphony is considered, an ever more drastic divide yawns. The musicologist Peter Kupfer, in a 2022 article titled “Of Majesty, Mockery, and Misprints: The Coda of Shostakovich’s Fifth on Record,” analyzes more than a hundred and fifty recordings and tabulates the almost comical discrepancies among them. At one extreme is Serge Koussevitzky, who, in a 1948 rendition with the Boston Symphony, sprints through the coda in thirty-seven seconds. At the other is Kurt Masur, who, leading the London Philharmonic in 2004, requires slightly more than two minutes to traverse the same span of music. It’s difficult to think of another repertory work that has elicited such a spectacular deviation in performance practice. The notes are the same, but the messages attached to them are irreconcilable.
The story of how the coda of the Fifth became an interpretive war zone is a tangled one, involving not only Soviet cultural politics but also, as Kupfer’s title indicates, a misprint in the score. The most fascinating twist, though, is that Shostakovich himself declined to resolve the issue. Mravinsky, having conducted the première, carries primary authority. Yet in “Sonata for Viola” we see a visibly delighted Shostakovich embracing Bernstein after the Moscow concert. Later, the composer wrote in a letter to a colleague, “I was very taken with the performance of my Fifth Symphony by the talented Leonard Bernstein. I liked it that he played the end of the finale significantly faster than is customary.” We want to find the “right” interpretation; Shostakovich, a supremely wily artist, knows there is none.
The trouble started with a metronome—that pesky apparatus which, since Beethoven’s time, has created as much confusion as it has cleared up. At the time of the première, Mravinsky and Shostakovich worked out a set of metronome markings that were then inserted into the score. These proved impractical in some instances and had to be revised. Because it was so difficult to get a straight answer out of Shostakovich, Mravinsky would sometimes choose a patently ridiculous tempo to elicit a reaction.
For the coda, Shostakovich and Mravinsky apparently settled on a metronome marking of eighth note = 184 or 188. (The original manuscript has disappeared, so we don’t know precisely.) In the first published score, the figure was mistakenly given as quarter note = 188, which is twice as fast. Soviet performances were not affected, since they tended to follow Mravinsky’s lead. Yet conductors in the West—Koussevitzky, Bernstein, Leopold Stokowski, Dimitri Mitropoulos, and Artur Rodzinski, among others—took the marking at face value. During the Second World War, the bat-out-of-hell tempi that prevailed were of a piece with Allied fellow-feeling: here were heroic Russians throwing themselves into battle and production. Nor would a committed leftist like Bernstein have been inclined to look for tragic undertones in the Fifth. His trip to the Soviet Union in 1959 was, after all, undertaken as a “mission of friendship,” in his own words, although it also fit a Cold War agenda of asserting American cultural strength.
Perceptions of Shostakovich changed in the sixties and seventies. The composer’s later works, rife with ironies, ambiguities, and enigmas, disturbed the image of a Soviet true believer. The belated emergence of the sprawling, self-demolishing Fourth Symphony—which Shostakovich had been writing at the time of the Pravda denunciation and had subsequently withheld from performance—shed new light on the far tidier Fifth. Furthermore, the “correct” metronome marking was now present in most scores. The decisive event, though, was the publication, in 1979, of Solomon Volkov’s “Testimony,” which purported to be Shostakovich’s secret memoirs, channelling his rage against the Soviet system. (The composer had died four years earlier.) In a passage that has been quoted in countless program notes, the narrator declares that the Fifth’s ending is “forced, created under threat . . . It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing.’ ” Those phrases helped to usher in revisionist readings in which conductors strove to make the coda sound as dire as possible. Kurt Sanderling and Mstislav Rostropovich led the way with recordings made in 1982.
To say that “Testimony” proved controversial is to put it very mildly. Many of Shostakovich’s relatives and friends, including his widow, Irina, accused Volkov of fabrication. The musicologist Laurel Fay later subjected “Testimony” to devastating scrutiny. Volkov had offered as proof of authenticity the fact that the composer had signed one page of each chapter. Fay found that those pages duplicated politically innocuous material that had already been published elsewhere. Shostakovich may have given his approval to an entirely different document. Although more reliable witnesses corroborate some of the stories told in “Testimony,” the book is ultimately useless as a historical source. Those words about the Fifth are especially suspect, because they are so untypical of Shostakovich’s customarily noncommittal tone toward questions of interpretation.
Shostakovich’s son, Maxim, passed along a more plausible framing of the coda. Once, Maxim said, his father had reacted to a comment that the writer Alexander Fadeyev had made in a notebook shortly after the première. Fadeyev heard the ending as a “punishment, or an act of revenge.” Shostakovich, according to Maxim, replied that “it was not just scolding. The hero is saying: ‘I am right. I will follow the way I choose.’ ” In this sense, that slower, heavier tempo represents a grim assertion of personal will. You can, perhaps, discern such an attitude on Mravinsky’s face in that remarkable sequence from “Sonata for Viola.”
Yet a musical challenge remains. How do you go about getting an orchestra to play all that blaring D major in a way that communicates conflict and doubt? To my ears, most of the slow versions sound no more troubled or menacing than the sped-up ones. Masur’s take is so surreally glacial that it begins to sound like a minimalist recomposition, along the lines of Leif Inge’s twenty-four-hour-long transformation of Beethoven’s Ninth. Often, the slower the tempo, the more self-aggrandizingly pompous the music becomes. Those final twin blows of the timpani and the bass drum have a fist-pumping vibe. If, as “Testimony” tells us, the rejoicing is compulsory, whom are we applauding when we jump to our feet? Are we, too, saluting Stalin?
