What does this symphony mean? Music and Vision 10 November

What does this symphony mean?
Shostakovich's 'Leningrad',
heard by GIUSEPPE PENNISI

'What does this symphony mean?' A few years ago, Andrew Huth, music critic of The Guardian, raised this quite pertinent question in his commentary on Dmitry Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony in C major Op 60, generally called the 'Leningrad Symphony'. Reportedly, the symphony's composition was begun in Leningrad during the siege of the city (between September 1941 and February 1943) when nearly 630,000 people died of hunger and cold or in the shelling of constant air raids. Shostakovich volunteered to serve, as a fireman, in the defense of the city until, like many other artists, he was evacuated first to Moscow then to Kuibyshev; there the Symphony was completed and had its first performance on 5 March 1942 by the evacuated Bolshoi orchestra under Samuel Samosud's baton; the Moscow premiere followed on 29 March and in the besieged Leningrad the symphony was played on 9 August. Thereafter, it was played all over the Soviet Union. In parallel, a microfilm was flown from Russia to Tehran and then to Cairo and on to London and New York; in London, on 22 June 1942, the BBC broadcasted a radio performance conducted by Sir Henry Wood and in New York, the NBC aired it under the baton of Arturo Toscanini in a very special performance simultaneously broadcast by radio stations throughout the USA. In the USA alone, during the 1942-43 season, the symphony had sixty-two performances under the batons of Stokowski, Mitropoulos, Koussevitski, Ormandy, Monteux Rodzinski -- only to mention the best known conductors. Briefly, this grand symphony (nearly 75 minutes in length, and with over a hundred musicians in the pit) became a symbol of resistance to Nazism and to its siege of one of the most beautiful and historically important towns of European Russia.
Was this the real meaning that Shostakovich intended to give to the symphony? The author himself provided different versions. In his first reading (when war was still being ravaged), each of the four movements had a title: The War, The Recollection, The Countryland, The Victory. Nonetheless, these titles hardly match the musical content (eg the themes, the tonalities, the tempos, the rhythm, the harmony) as clearly shown by Kirill Petrenko in his début on 6 November 2010 in Rome with the symphonic orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. (The concert was repeated on 9 and 10 November).

Kirill Petrenko conducting the choir and orchestra of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia. Photo © 2010 Riccardo Musacchio
In the first movement, Allegretto, Petrenko emphasized not the fighting bursting into Leningrad's peaceful summer time, but the variation on a musical theme from an operetta (a recollection of Franz Lehar's The Merry Widow), with a crescendo like in Ravel's Bolero . In the second and third movements, respectively a Moderato (poco allegretto) and an Adagio, he stressed the Mahler-like melancholy; they are both designed like a rondo; there are dark clouds and painful echoes, but, in spite of the program notes provided in the 1940s and in the 1960s, there is no sense of heroism.
The mystery surrounding the symphony is clearly shown by Petrenko, in the last movement, Allegro ma non troppo. There Petrenko highlights Shostakovich's technical skills in developing a theme as a unifying element for the entire symphony. It is not an emphatic and rhetorical theme, as Soviet intelligentsia would have expected in the 1940s, but a series of harmonic and rhythmic variations around the first movement's leitmotif until its final solemn explosion in the finale. In short, Petrenko's interpretation is closer to a later reading of the symphony provided by Shostakovich himself in the book interview co-authored with Solomonn Volkov (Testimony). There, several years after Stalin's death, Shostakovich, who had suffered discrimination and isolation during Stalinism, revealed that the symphony had been planned before the war, and hence, before Leningrad's siege, by reading David's Psalms, in particular Psalm 94 on a God who 'shall recompense and destroy'. In other sections of the book, Shostakovich had recalled that in Leningrad, before World War II, each family had lost at least a dear one -- those who had disappeared during the Stalinist terror -- and that his music was also in their memory. Shostakovich was not a religious man; he was a 'good red-blooded Marxist' with a materialistic view of the universe, no feeling for the after-life, but had a strong sense of piety -- Petrenko delves into this sense of piety in his interpretation of the symphony, especially of the final movement. This makes his conducting of the Leniningrad Symphony quite different from that of Valery Gergiev (heard in Rome with the Marijinskij and Santa Cecilia's Orchestras in 1998 and again in 2006) and also from that recorded by Bernard Haitink with the London Symphony Orchestra a few years ago. In short, a classical piety without any supernatural after-life (ie without any God Almighty) -- a Roman Pietas.

Kirill Petrenko conducting the choir and orchestra of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia. Photo © 2010 Riccardo Musacchio
A further element of this reading is that in the concert, the Leningrad was paired with Igor Stravinsky's Symphonie des Psaumes ('Symphony of Psalms') for chorus and orchestra, a short (twenty minute) but highly religious piece dating from 1930, where tears (the second Psalm of the Symphony) are married with hope (in the third and final movement). A perfect twinning.

Kirill Petrenko conducting the choir and orchestra of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia. Photo © 2010 Riccardo Musacchio
A final comment: Petrenko is young (just thirty-eight years old), has had a very successful career (mainly in Germany) and will very soon take on the musical leadership of the Munich State Opera -- one of the most prestigious European opera houses. Thus, almost naturaliter, his reading is not through eye glasses colored by the 1941-1945 Great Patriotic War (as the Russians call World War II). He goes more deeply, in search of what Shostakovich really meant, answering Andrew Huth's question.
Copyright © 10 November 2010 Giuseppe Pennisi,
Rome, Italy

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH
IGOR STRAVINSKY
ROME
ACCADEMIA NAZIONALE DI SANTA CECILIA
ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
ITALY
RUSSIA
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