Symphony No. 15 (Shostakovich)

Template:Infobox musical composition The Symphony No. 15 in A major, Op. 141, composed between late 1970 and July 29, 1971, is the final symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich. He began to plan and sketch the symphony, originally intended as a cheerful commemoration of his 65th birthday, in late 1970. After completing the sketch score in April 1971, he began the orchestration in June, during his medical therapy in Kurgan. The symphony was completed on July 29 at his summer dacha in Repino. This was followed by a prolonged period of creative inactivity that did not end until the composition of the Fourteenth Quartet in 1973.

The Fifteenth Symphony was first performed privately in a reduction for two pianos for members of the Union of Soviet Composers and invited guests in August 1971. Its scheduled world premiere in September was postponed after Shostakovich had his second heart attack earlier that month. After a two-month hospitalization, he recovered enough to attend rehearsals in late December 1971 for the rescheduled premiere, which took place in Moscow on January 8, 1972, performed by the All-Union Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra conducted by Maxim Shostakovich. The first performance outside the Soviet Union took place in Philadelphia on September 28, 1972, by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy. Immediate critical reaction to the symphony was positive in the Soviet Union, but mixed in the West.

Shostakovich's extensive use of musical quotation in the Fifteenth has attracted speculation. He initially likened the first movement to a "toyshop", but later cautioned listeners against taking his description too precisely. A quotation from Gioacchino Rossini's William Tell Overture recurs throughout the first movement, while the last movement quotes a song by Mikhail Glinka and Richard Wagner's Götterdämmerung and Tristan und Isolde. Critics have also detected more quotations and allusions, from other composers as well as Shostakovich's own music.

Background

Origins

Shostakovich began to prepare the Fifteenth Symphony in late 1970; he originally envisioned it as a present to himself for his 65th birthday. He wrote to Boris Tishchenko that he wanted to write a "merry symphony".Template:Sfn By no later than April 2, 1971,Template:Sfn Shostakovich completed a sketch outline of the symphony that was sparsely notated and made extensive use of shorthand.<ref name="Notes">Template:Cite journal</ref> The sketch manuscript totals 18 pages.Template:Sfn It also includes sketches for "Yelabuga Nail", an unfinished setting of a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko about the suicide of Marina Tsvetayeva.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

Composition

In June 1971, Shostakovich continued treatment for his poliomyelitis at the clinic of Gavriil Ilizarov in Kurgan,Template:Sfn where the composer had been a patient since 1968.Template:Sfn While there he began the final draft of the symphony. He wrote to his friend, the writer Marietta Shaginyan, that he was he was on the "verge of tears" from work:Template:Sfn

Tears flowed from my eyes not because the symphony was sad, but because my eyes were so exhausted. I even went to an ophthalmologist who suggested that I take a short break. The break was very hard for me. It is annoying to step away when one is at work.Template:Sfn

Similarly, Shostakovich told Sofia Khentova, his official biographer, that his pace of work on the symphony did not permit him rest. "It was a work which simply grabbed me, one of the few which appeared in my mind with total clarity from first note to last", he continued. "There was nothing left for me to do but write it down".Template:Sfn Veniamin Basner, in contrast, recalled that Shostakovich complained to him that completion of the finale progressed too slowly.<ref name="Wilson">Template:Cite book</ref>

Upon completion of medical treatment in Kurgan, Shostakovich continued to write the symphony at his summer dacha in Repino.Template:Sfn He was visited there on July 13 by his friend, the critic and arts administrator Isaak Glikman. Shostakovich told him that he had completed the first two movements and was working on the third,Template:Sfn but had not yet been able to compose a finale. The problem, Shostakovich told Glikman, brought to mind parallels he discerned between the Fifteenth and Ninth symphonies, particularly what he believed was their shared lack of a central idea.<ref name="rowell">Template:Cite journal</ref> Shostakovich completed the Fifteenth on July 29,Template:Sfn in Basner's presence.Template:Sfn The symphony was his last,Template:Sfn as well as his first purely instrumental and non-programmatic symphony since the Tenth.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

"The new symphony is still warm and I like it", Shostakovich later told Glikman. "But, perhaps after some time has gone by, I will think about it differently".Template:Sfn

Music

Instrumentation and timing

The Fifteenth Symphony is scored for the following instruments:

Woodwinds

Piccolo

2 Flutes

2 Oboes

2 Clarinets in A

2 Bassoons

Brass

4 French horns

2 Trumpets

3 Trombones

Tuba

Percussion

4 Timpani

Triangle

Castanets

Woodblock

Whip

Tom-Tom (soprano)

Snare Drum

Cymbals

Bass Drum

Tam-Tam

Glockenspiel

Xylophone

Vibraphone

Keyboards

Celesta

Strings

1st Violins

2nd Violins

Violas

Cellos

Double Basses

Notwithstanding the large percussion section, the piece is scored for a smaller ensemble than the one needed to play Shostakovich's First.Template:Sfn The composer indicated in the score that the number of instruments listed were the minimum required, but "if there are more, then it would be better".<ref name="dsch8">Template:Cite book</ref>

A typical performance lasts approximately 45 minutes.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Structure

The symphony consists of four movements, the middle two played attacca.Template:Sfn

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Description

The first movement begins with two chimes on the glockenspiel, followed by a five-note motif on solo flute, accompanied by pizzicato strings. This leads into a galloping motif for trumpet constructed out of all twelve notes of the Western chromatic scale. Hugh Ottaway observed that Shostakovich's use of such motifs in this symphony create an "enlarged tonal field in which 'chromatic' and 'diatonic' cease to be meaningful distinctions".Template:Sfn Recurring five times in the movement are quotations from the William Tell Overture by Gioacchino Rossini.Template:Sfn

The second movement begins with a brass chorale, followed by a cello solo. These themes alternate with a funeral march introduced by a pair of solo flutes, then taken up by a solo trombone.Template:Sfn Sounding several times are what musicologist Iosif Raiskin calls the "chords of death".Template:Sfn This builds to a climax, after which the opening chorale is reprised on muted strings, then fades away on a timpani roll, after which bassoons announce the start of the scherzando third movement.Template:Sfn

The finale contains several musical quotations, starting with the "fate motif" from Götterdämmerung,Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn followed by the opening motif fromTristan und Isolde.Template:Sfn This segues into a reminiscence of Mikhail Glinka's song "Do Not Tempt Me Needlessly".Template:Sfn A passacaglia theme, whose resemblance to the march from Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony has been noted, is introduced and builds to another climax.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn The "chords of death" from the "Adagio" announce the symphony's coda.Template:Sfn This is followed by a restatement on celesta of the symphony's opening motif.Template:Sfn An open A-major chord, sustained over a percussion part that recalls the scherzo of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony,Template:Sfn is finally resolved by a three-octave C-sharp that concludes the work.Template:Sfn

Arrangements

After completing the orchestral score, Shostakovich arranged the symphony for two pianos in order for it to be auditioned at the Union of Soviet Composers.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn It was first performed there in early August 1971 by Boris Tchaikovsky and Mieczysław Weinberg.Template:SfnTemplate:Refn Although Derek C. Hulme said the arrangement was completed on January 4, 1972,Template:Sfn this is disputed by the editors of the new complete works edition of the arrangement, who say it contradicts the documented performance history. The manuscript of the arrangement is not dated.Template:Sfn

In August 1972, the pianist Viktor Derevyanko, with assistance from the percussionist and composer Template:Ill, produced a chamber arrangement of the Fifteenth Symphony. It is scored for violin, cello, piano (alternating with celesta), and percussion. Shostakovich approved this arrangement and designated it Op. 141a.Template:Sfn

Premieres

Shortly after Shostakovich completed the Fifteenth Symphony, he informed his son, the conductor Maxim.Template:Sfn Shostakovich's first choice to lead the symphony's premiere, Kirill Kondrashin, developed severe heart problems in mid-1971 and was unable to conduct.Template:Sfn Therefore, the composer entrusted the first performance to Maxim.Template:Sfn

The completed score of the Fifteenth Symphony was sent to copyists at the Union of Soviet Composers by September 9 in preparation for its world premiere, which had been announced for late 1971.Template:Sfn On September 17,Template:Sfn Shostakovich suffered his second heart attack, which postponed the premiere.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn He stayed in the hospital until November 28, whereupon he was released to continue recovery at a sanatorium in Barvikha.Template:Sfn Despite continued weakness in his arms and legs, Shostakovich's health improved sufficiently for him to attend rehearsals for the rescheduled premiere.Template:Sfn

The symphony's world premiere occurred on January 8, 1972, at the Large Hall of the Moscow Conservatory; it was performed by the All-Union Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra conducted by Maxim Shostakovich.Template:Sfn He also conducted the British premiere with the New Philharmonia Orchestra on November 20, 1972.<ref name="walsh">Template:Cite news</ref>

Leopold Stokowski and Eugene Ormandy vied to conduct the first performance of the Fifteenth Symphony in the United States. The rights were ultimately granted to the latter, who conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra in the symphony's American premiere on September 28, 1972.<ref name="webster">Template:Cite news</ref>

Chamber arrangement

The chamber arrangement by Derevyanko and Pekarsky of the symphony was premiered on October 30, 1972, at the All-Union House of Composers in Moscow. It was performed by Valeria Vilker (violin), Mark Drobinsky (cello), Derevyanko (piano), Alla Mamyko (percussion), Template:Ill (percussion), and B. Stepanov (percussion).Template:Sfn

Reception

Soviet Union

Maxim Shostakovich, conductor of the Fifteenth Symphony's premiere

Upon hearing its first performance, Shostakovich remarked that he had composed a "wicked symphony".Template:Sfn It was received with an ovation by the audience at its premiere. Marietta Shaginyan was among the symphony's admirers. After the premiere, she met with Shostakovich at the hall's green room and made the sign of the cross over him. "You must not say, Dmitri Dmitrievich, that you are not well", she told him. "You are well, because you have made us happy!"Template:Sfn

Nevertheless, despite the positive reception of the Fifteenth Symphony at its premiere, and the puzzlement it provoked, it generated a more muted response in the Soviet Union compared to the Thirteenth and Fourteenth symphonies.Template:Sfn The American musicologist Richard Taruskin, who was an exchange student at the Moscow Conservatory,Template:Sfn attended the symphony's premiere. He recalled in a 2001 essay for The New Republic:Template:Sfn

[The symphony] was not much liked, actually. But the outpouring of love that greeted the gray, stumbling, begoggled figure of the author, then sixty-five and beset by a multitude of infirmities, was not just an obeisance to the Soviet composer laureate. It was a grateful, emotional salute to a cherished life companion, a fellow citizen, and fellow sufferer, who had forged a mutually sustaining relationship with his public that was altogether outside the experience of any musician in [the West].Template:Sfn

Tikhon Khrennikov, general secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, called the symphony one of Shostakovich's "most profound"; he added that it was "full of optimism [and] belief in man's inexhaustible strength".Template:Sfn Yevgeny Mravinsky, who conducted the symphony's Leningrad premiere, believed the work to be autobiographical. While studying the score, he told his wife that he was emotionally overwhelmed by the music.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

The earliest Soviet reviews of the symphony pointed to its perceived sense of surprise and crypticness.Template:Sfn The first substantial analysis was published in the September 1972 issue of Sovyetskaya Muzyka.Template:Sfn Its author, the musicologist Template:Ill, sought to reconcile what he viewed as the symphony's incongruities with the context of Shostakovich's previous music, as well as the prevailing ideals of Soviet music. Another musicologist, Template:Ill, explored the symphony's metaphysical and semantic implications in an essay that is considered a pioneering text in Russian musicology.Template:Sfn

In the West

The first movement drew especial praise from Norman Kay, who called it a "tour-de-force of concentration, self-dissolution, and musical economy".<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Eric Roseberry wrote that the symphony's instrumental timbres and use of passacaglia suggested that Shostakovich had been influenced by the late operas of his friend and fellow composer Benjamin Britten.<ref name="Roseberry">Template:Cite book</ref> Bernard Jacobson wrote in 1972 that the symphony's lasting appeal was secured because it made use of "one of [Shostakovich's] greatest expressive assets—a teasing and often powerfully affective emotional ambivalence".<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Speculation about the symphony's meaning

The Fifteenth Symphony's use of musical quotations and allusions, as well as devices unusual in Shostakovich's output, has attracted speculation since its premiere.Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn Shostakovich explained the music and its process of composition by saying that he continued to feel music the way he did as a child,Template:Sfn and that he felt compelled to use quotations.Template:Sfn To GlikmanTemplate:Sfn and Krzysztof Meyer, Shostakovich said that he not only used exact quotations from Beethoven, Rossini, and Wagner, but had also been under the influence of Mahler while he composed the symphony.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> According to Maxim Shostakovich, he had been urged by his father not to reveal to the orchestra at the first rehearsal that there would be a quotation from Rossini in the first movement. "I want to see their faces when they come to it", the composer told him.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

During an interview in Chicago for WFMT on June 15, 1973, the radio host Norman Pellegrini asked Shostakovich if the symphony was conceived as program music. The composer replied:Template:Sfn

In the Fifteenth Symphony, there is no defined program. I myself said, the first part is as if played in a toy store. I myself said that. But to consider this precise or exact, I myself said it, but maybe it did not come quite that way. As far as the quotations that I used from The Ring cycle of Wagner, less known romances of Glinka... They ask me why, why did you do that? I don't know, I don't really know, it just seemed to be necessary, it seemed to be necessary... But much in a question of creativity is a phenomenon, inexplicable phenomena, and a very difficult thing to explain, including why [I have] taken those particular things, why these particular fragments. I can't explain very precisely or exactly why I did this.Template:Sfn

Maxim Shostakovich felt the symphony reflected "the great philosophical problems of a man's life cycle".Template:Sfn Later he likened the work to a chamber symphony that describes human life through the "prison of existence".Template:Sfn The conductor Kurt Sanderling felt the music was about loneliness and death, and that no other work by Shostakovich seemed to him so "radically horrible and cruel".<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Alfred Schnittke, whose own music was deeply influenced by Shostakovich,<ref name="Webb">Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> held that the Fifteenth was a "crossroads in time" where "the past enters into new relationships with the present, and, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, intrudes into the reality of the music and actually forms it".<ref name="Schnittke">Template:Cite book</ref> To Alexander Ivashkin, Shostakovich's then unusual use of quotation signaled an awareness of the impossibility of composing a "pure" symphony, with the quotations creating a web of correspondences atop the "traditional skeleton of the symphony".Template:Sfn

The musicologist Template:Ill suggested that the William Tell quotations in the symphony's first movement may relate to Shostakovich's identification with Rossini as a composer "who outlived his talent". During this period, Shostakovich repeatedly expressed concern that he had exhausted himself as a composer.Template:Sfn To Shaginyan, he wrote on August 26 that the completion of the symphony he had "worked on day and night" left him feeling as if in a void.Template:Sfn He wrote to Krzysztof Meyer in a letter dated September 16, 1971, that he had doubts about whether to continue as a composer but could not bear to live without work.Template:Sfn Shostakovich experienced a prolonged period of creative inactivity after completing the symphony. Aside from his arrangement of the "Serenade" by Gaetano Braga, which was intended for an unrealized opera based on Anton Chekhov's short story "The Black Monk", Shostakovich did not resume composition until the Fourteenth Quartet in March 1973.Template:Sfn

Influence on David Lynch

David Lynch in 1990

During the production of the 1984 film Dune, the film director David Lynch told its composer, David Paich, that he wanted a score that resembled Shostakovich. While working on the screenplay for his subsequent film, Blue Velvet, Lynch repeatedly listened to Shostakovich's Fifteenth Symphony:Template:Sfn

I liked this Russian feel. I don't know where I got this thing that the Eastern EuropeTemplate:Sic, Russian air is different ... even the wood of the instruments ... it just makes a sound, and there's a depth that the air brings and the musicians bring... And so this particular symphony I listened to all the time when I was working on the script and it just became very important that this film had that feel.Template:Sfn

Lynch told Angelo Badalementi, the composer for Blue Velvet, that he wanted his score to evoke the sound of Shostakovich's symphony. Badalamenti had a master's degree in composition but only two film scores to his credit; before Blue Velvet, most of his experience was in pop music. Nevertheless, Lynch was confident that Badalamenti could "play anything and tune into anything".Template:Sfn The finished score has a number of cues influenced by Shostakovich's Fifteenth Symphony, particularly its second movement.Template:Sfn

Lynch also played the symphony on set during the filming of Blue Velvet.Template:Sfn

References

Sources

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Further reading

• Saenger, Peter. "Shostakovich’s Vibrant Valediction: The composer’s 15th Symphony, his last, blends a hard-earned gravity with the buoyant spirit of youth" The Wall Street Journal. March 22, 2024.