Shostakovich Symphony No. 6

Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast

This episode of Sticky Notes provides a deep musical and historical analysis of Dmitri Shostakovich's Sixth Symphony. Host Joshua Weilerstei

Key takeaways

• The Sixth Symphony breaks tradition with a three-movement structure instead of the standard four.
• Shostakovich used ambiguous descriptions of the work to avoid the political scrutiny faced during the Stalin era.

Main topics

• Shostakovich Symphony No. 6 analysis
• Soviet musical politics and censorship

Notable quotes

I have set myself a task fraught with tremendous responsibility, to express in sound the immortal image of Lenin.

Conclusion

The episode reveals that the Sixth Symphony is an essential key to und

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:05) Hello and welcome to Sticky Notes, the classical music podcast. My name is Joshua Weilerstein, I'm a conductor, and I'm the music director of the Orchestre National de Lille and the chief conductor of the Aalborg Symphony. This podcast is for anyone who loves classical music, works in the field, or is just getting ready to dive in to this amazing world of incredible music. Before we get started, I want to thank my new Patreon sponsors, Marilyn, Ross, Amber, Nijinga, Kathleen, Christian, Sarah Kristen. Thomas, and Sean, and all of my other Patreon sponsors for making Season 10 possible. If you'd like to support the show, please head over to patreon.com slash stickynotespodcast. And if you are a fan of the show, please take a moment to give us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It is greatly appreciated. Speaker 1 (0:53) I am in Norskeping, Sweden this week doing a really exciting program that I've wanted to do for a long time. The first half is Prokofiev's Sinfonia Concertante with Andreas Brantelid, the fantastic cellist. And then the second half is a program that I've come up with that is a bit tied to my obsession with history. And it is a program that... basically goes from before World War I to after. We start with Strauss's Emperor Waltzes, and then we play a piece by the English composer Frederick Septimus Kelly, who was killed during World War I. It's a piece for strings called In Memoriam Rupert Brooke, In Memoriam of the Poet Rupert Brooke, who also was killed during the war, and it's a really incredibly touching, beautiful piece. And then we finish the program with La Valse. So it's a very kind of dark program, but one that I've been wanting to do for a really long time. I love to kind of tell these stories a little bit like we do on the show during my concerts. So I really am looking forward to that concert, which is on Saturday. For this week's episode, I want to thank Sheldon for sponsoring it on Patreon on Shostakovich's Sixth Symphony, a piece probably you're not that familiar with. Here we go. Speaker 1 (2:09) Dmitri Shostakovich, quote, I have set myself a task fraught with tremendous responsibility to express in sound the immortal image of Lenin as a great son of the Russian people and as a leader of the masses. I have received numerous letters from all over the Soviet Union with regard to my future symphony. The most important advice contained therein was to make considerable use of musical folklore. Speaker 1 (2:37) In the massively consequential year of 1939, Shostakovich used these words to launch his sixth symphony. The piece was meant to have soloists and a chorus along with the orchestra, perhaps a nod to his second and third symphonies, which were essentially propaganda pieces. Shostakovich even promised to use the poem Vladimir Ilyich Lenin by Vladimir Mayakovsky as a basis for his choral text. The Soviet public eagerly awaited this new symphony, which was inevitably going to be compared with his fifth symphony, the piece that had brought Shostakovich back into good graces with the Soviet government, and which remains one of Shostakovich's most popular works, but is also one of his most complex and nuanced pieces underneath its relatively conservative surface. But whether Shostakovich ever actually planned to write this gigantic Lenin symphony during this period is highly doubtful, as no sketches have ever turned up of that symphony. Instead, Shostakovich pivoted publicly to describing his new symphony this way, quote, The musical character of the Sixth Symphony will differ from the mood and emotional tone of the Fifth Symphony, in which moments of tragedy and tension were characteristic. In my latest symphony, music of a contemplative and lyrical order predominates. I wanted to convey in it the moods of spring, joy, youth. As you can see there, Shostakovich wasn't actually saying much there about the content of the symphony, if anything at all. He was leaving things deliberately ambiguous, and actually, ambiguous is a pretty good description of this highly enigmatic symphony. Everything about this symphony is slightly off. It is in three movements, not the typical four, and it starts with a massive slow movement. The two remaining movements are fast and significantly shorter, lasting combined not even as long as the first movement. It was written in 1939, supposedly a year of military triumph for the Soviet Union, considering the Stalin Pact with Hitler, which allowed Hitler to invade Poland and to launch World War II. And yet there is not a hint of military triumphalism in it. In short, this symphony confused a lot of people and has always received mixed reviews, whether from musicologists trying to fit the symphony into the traditional everything-in-Shostakovich-is-about-Stalin narrative, or from Soviet critics of the time trying to fit the symphony into socialist realist aesthetics. In short, descriptions about Shostakovich always attempt to put him into a box. Silent Dissident or Soviet Stooge, Hero or Coward, etc. The truth is, of course, complicated, and this symphony is a great example of the eternal enigma that is Shostakovich. Today on this Patreon-sponsored episode, I'll take you through this wonderful symphony from a musical perspective, trying to parse its unusual form, its lyrical first movement, and the wild, madcap dash of the final two movements. All this and more is coming right up. on Sticky Notes. Speaker 1 (6:21) I want to quickly recap where Shostakovich was in his musical life before we get into the Sixth Symphony, but I also highly recommend listening to my episodes about Shostakovich's Fourth and Fifth Symphonies as well if you want the full picture, since the historical context and political context of Shostakovich's music is always so important to understand. But the short version of it is this. Shostakovich had regained his favor with the Soviet authorities in 1937 with his Fifth Symphony. a piece that was drastically different in style than the music he had been writing just prior, a style that had gotten him into very hot water with the Soviet government. In 1936, his opera Lady Macbeth of Mytensk had been condemned as bourgeois formalism, and his life was very much in danger for the period in between this denunciation and the premiere of the Fifth Symphony. He withdrew his already completed fourth symphony from publication, due to its dense, innovative, and sometimes radical style, and quickly wrote a fifth symphony that was much more harmonically conservative, and which also featured the mandated happy ending that would end the symphony in a blaze of triumphant glory. Now, whether that ending is actually triumphant or not has been the subject of questions and fierce debate since the premiere. And the answer, like everything with Shostakovich, is ambiguous and highly complex. Again, check out my show on the Fifth Symphony for a lot more about that ending. But whatever the ending was in reality, it passed muster with the Stalin government, and Shostakovich was enjoying renewed success and adulation from the public, though he would never recover fully, personally, from this period of cultural exile and physical danger. As he began the Sixth Symphony, Shostakovich was enjoying some calm in his personal life, and as I said, had some breathing room from the government, which perhaps accounts for the unusual form of the Sixth Symphony. Shostakovich clearly had gone back at least somewhat to the experimental ideas he was throwing around with such glee in his Fourth Symphony, which would not actually be performed for decades. Let's go into this Sixth Symphony now, which begins with this huge first movement. lasting around 20 minutes in most performances. Speaker 1 (9:09) Leonard Bernstein calls this movement a hypnotizing meditation, and also talks about how it is not a movement that follows any sort of typical form. Instead, we are launched into something that feels more like a fantasy than anything else. The symphony begins, as you just heard, with a long theme played by the violas, cellos, English horn, clarinets, and bassoons. This low and middle register color is a Shostakovich favorite, and is highly expressive. featuring huge leaps of register, like octaves, that are actually fairly unusual for Shostakovich, who usually prefers smaller intervals in his themes. But those leaps are serving a