3 sinfonie shostakovich biography

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(It is no accident 1936, when the government finally imposed complete control over the arts, it signaled the takeover with a withering attack on Shostakovich, letting everyone know that even the favored son of Soviet music had to conform.)

Shostakovich wrote his “First of May” on his own initiative, without a commission or particular performance in mind.

For example, in the Fifth Symphony, written when he was the target of official attacks, he inserted a quotation from one of his own songs, then unpublished, that makes it clear that he thought history would consign his critics to oblivion. While working on the Symphony, he told another composer “it would be interesting to write a symphony in which no theme is ever repeated.” Listeners so inclined can hear marches, and perhaps crowds singing in unison, or even an oration, particularly in the extended passage for unison trombones.

If the first 20 minutes are loosely constructed and episodic, the choral conclusion is direct, forceful, and declamatory, an apt and powerful setting of Kirsanov’s words about inexorable progress into the future.

Even Mstislav Rostropovich, who regards Shostakovich’s life work as an anti-Soviet statement, concedes that the young Shostakovich was “taken in” by the promise of the Russian Revolution. In February 2001 he was awarded the Golden Medal of Merit from the city of Vienna. By 1927, it seemed that a bright future was finally arriving.

This was particularly true for the composer, who was 21 years old and riding very high.

In 1929, Shostakovich wrote in his post-graduate report to the Leningrad Conservatory, “While in the [Second Symphony] the main content is struggle, the “May First” expresses the festive spirit of peaceful construction, if I may put it that way. But ascribing similar intent to Shostakovich a decade earlier, in a happier time for both Shostakovich and the Soviet Union, is a dicey proposition.

Shostakovich was occasionally criticized for being bourgeois, decadent, modernist or insufficiently in tune with proletarian sensibility, but he was still a national treasure, the first bona fide musical genius who was a child of the Revolution. May 1st was always a major day of celebration in the Soviet Union, not because it was an anniversary of any event (Kirsanov’s fourth and fifth stanzas should not be read to imply that the Tsar was deposed in May 1917—it happened in March), but because it had been designated a labor holiday by the Second Socialist International in 1889.

Shostakovich may have felt that the public and festive nature of the Symphonies made old-fashioned bright, major-key endings necessary, but it is difficult to make such an ending convincing when the musical language of the work has been something altogether different. His composition professor at the Conservatory had complained: "What is this enthusiasm for the grotesque?

With Shostakovich, of course, nothing is beyond debate, and there is a school of thought that Shostakovich approached the Second and Third Symphonies with heavy doses of sarcasm and irony. Shostakovich had already lived through a world war that killed millions of Russians, a revolution that caused complete social upheaval, and a long civil war.

He was also greatly influenced by Franco Ferrara in Hilversum (Netherlands) and Sergiu Celibidache in Siena (Italy). The orchestra’s final bars may seem tacked on and unnecessary—something that has also been said of the Second Symphony. In 1990, the French government named Eliahu Inbal an officer of the Order of Arts and Letters.

Soviet art in 1927 was a far cry from what it would be a decade later. His performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 10 (full version by D. Cooke), part of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra’s Mahler cycle, was also released on DVD.

Born in Israel, Eliahu Inbal studied violin and composition at the Jerusalem Music Academy before completing his studies at the Conservatoire National Supérieur in Paris on the recommendation of Leonard Bernstein.

You can find support for such a view in grotesque and humorous passages in both symphonies, but they hardly amount to proof: Shostakovich’s music was always full of grotesque and humorous elements.

The Second and Third Symphonies are very much works of their time, which was a period of great hope between enormous catastrophes.

There is not much question that his music sometimes contains a message in a bottle.