PROGRAM
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FOURTH SEASON
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director
Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus
Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant
Global Sponsor of the CSO
Thursday, December 4, 2014, at 8:00
Friday, December 5, 2014, at 1:30
Saturday, December 6, 2014, at 8:00
Tuesday, December 9, 2014, at 7:30
Ingo Metzmacher Conductor
Tchaikovsky
Selections from The Nutcracker, Op. 71
Miniature Overture
March
Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy
Russian Dance
Stravinsky
Petrushka
The Shrovetide Fair
In Petrushka’s Room
The Moor’s Room
The Grand Carnival
INTERMISSION
Shostakovich
Symphony No. 11, Op. 103 (The Year 1905)
The Palace Square: Adagio
The Ninth of January: Allegro
Eternal Memory: Adagio
The Alarm: Allegro non troppo—Allegro
Saturday’s concert is sponsored by S&C Electric Company.
CSO Tuesday series concerts are sponsored by United Airlines.
This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher and Gerard McBurney
Pyotr Tchaikovsky
Born May 7, 1840, Votkinsk, Russia.
Died November 18, 1893, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Selections from The Nutcracker
Although The Nutcracker
is the work that introduces Tchaikovsky to
many music lovers, the
composer didn’t have high
hopes for its future. He
complained in particular
that the story, based on
E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The
Nutcracker and the
Mouse King” (simplified by Alexander Dumas
and further watered down by the choreographer
Marius Petipa), lacked the compelling drama of
his two previous big ballets, Swan Lake and The
Sleeping Beauty. After Petipa handed him a
synopsis, annotated with measure-by-measure
musical suggestions, Tchaikovsky was stunned.
“I am experiencing a crisis,” he said at the time.
He was so reluctant to undertake the project that,
when he was invited to the United States in the
spring of 1891 to conduct his music at the gala
opening of Carnegie Hall, he accepted with
enthusiasm—procrastination on a global scale.
As he was passing through Paris on the way to
the U.S., Tchaikovsky picked up a newspaper,
turned to the back page, and learned of the death
of his sister Sasha. He arrived in America broken
and despairing—his mood was further darkened
COMPOSED
1891–92
FIRST PERFORMANCE
Suite: March 19, 1892; Saint Petersburg,
Russia. The composer conducting
Ballet: December 18, 1892; Saint
Petersburg, Russia
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
October 22, 1892, Auditorium Theatre.
Theodore Thomas conducting
(U.S. premiere)
July 23, 1936, Ravinia Festival. Isaac
Van Grove conducting
2
when a fellow passenger on the ship threw
himself overboard and he was asked to translate
the suicide note—but he put on his best public
face, ready to conquer a new world.
Tchaikovsky was amazed to discover how
famous he was in the U.S. “It seems that in
America I am better known than in Europe,” he
quipped. By 1891, he had already composed most
of the works on which his fame rests. He had
recently completed his fifth symphony, which
had been introduced to this country in New York
City two years earlier by Theodore Thomas, who
would launch the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
the next October. In the U.S. that spring,
Tchaikovsky conducted concerts of his music in
New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore; made
quick tours to the nation’s capital and Niagara
Falls (like Mahler a few years later); and was
genuinely impressed by the “frankness, sincerity,
and generosity of this country.” But when he
returned home he was depressed, irritable, and
unable to make satisfactory headway on The
Nutcracker. “The ballet is infinitely worse than
Sleeping Beauty, that much is certain,” he wrote to
his nephew.
Although he continued to complain that
his brain was “empty,” Tchaikovsky eventually
warmed to the project. In the end, he wrote
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
July 12, 2009, Ravinia Festival. James
Conlon conducting
November 23, 24 & 25, 2012, Orchestra
Hall. Ludwig Wicki conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
three flutes and piccolo, two oboes
and english horn, two clarinets and
bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns,
two trumpets, two cornets and piccolo
trumpet, three trombones, tuba,
timpani, percussion, celesta, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
10 minutes
CSO RECORDINGS
1939. Frederick Stock conducting.
Columbia
1959. Fritz Reiner conducting. RCA
1966. Morton Gould conducting. RCA
1986. Sir Georg Solti conducting.
London
1991. Claudio Abbado conducting.
Sony
some of his finest and most inspired music,
finishing the score so far ahead of deadline that
he prepared a concert suite of excerpts, which
he conducted nine months before the ballet was
staged. In this truncated form, The Nutcracker
became one of his most enduring works. (“For
a lot of people, Tchaikovsky is The Nutcracker,
but not the ballet in full, only the suite from it,”
wrote George Balanchine, one of the greatest
men to be associated with the ballet, first as a
dancer and later as choreographer.) Theodore
Thomas gave the U.S. premiere of the suite with
the Chicago Orchestra on October 22, 1892, in
the Auditorium Theatre, early in the Orchestra’s
second season—among the first in a long line of
premieres the CSO has given over the years.
“These pieces are miniature pictures painted
with infinite grace and care,” begins the program
note for the 1892 Chicago performances. This
week’s concerts include four of the best-known
selections from the suite Thomas introduced
here: the miniature overture (so named because
it lacks a genuine
development
section); a march,
which unfolds as
a courtly dialogue
between winds
and strings; the
dance of the
Sugar Plum Fairy
(with its signature
solo role for the
recently invented
celesta, which
Tchaikovsky
had discovered
in Paris, where
he was seduced
by its “divinely
beautiful tone”);
and the dazzling
Russian Dance
(the Ukranian
folk dance known
as the trepak),
which Chicago’s
1892 program
writer dismissed
as “inspiration for
the toes, not food
for the brain.” A first edition score, printed by P. Jurgenson in Moscow, of a suite from Tchaikovsky’s
Nutcracker (or Casse-noisette in French) from the Theodore Thomas Collection in the CSO’s
Rosenthal Archives. The title page bears an inscription to Thomas from the summer of
1892, a few months before the first performance in October of that year, inaugurating the
Orchestra’s second season. This score bears markings—by CSO music directors Thomas,
Frederick Stock, and Fritz Reiner—and likely would have been used for the recordings led by
Stock in 1939 for Columbia and Reiner in 1959 for RCA.
3
Igor Stravinsky
Born June 17, 1882, Oranienbaum, Russia.
Died April 6, 1971, New York City.
Petrushka (1911 version)
The Firebird was
Stravinsky’s first big hit,
and it made him famous,
almost literally overnight,
at the age of twenty-eight.
Petrushka is that most
difficult of artistic
creations—the follow-up.
The Firebird had not only
made Stravinsky the talk
of Paris, then the capital of the international art
world—capturing the attention of the city’s
biggest names, including Debussy and Proust—
but it had scored a huge success for Sergei
Diaghilev, who had taken a risk hiring the young,
relatively unknown composer to write music for
the Russian Ballet’s 1910 season. Naturally, both
men wanted another sensation for the next year.
Stravinsky already had an idea. While he was
finishing the orchestration of The Firebird, he had
dreamed about “a solemn pagan rite: wise elders,
seated in a circle, watching a young girl dance
herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring.” These powerful images
suggested music to Stravinsky and he began to
sketch almost at once. (Early in his career, most
of Stravinsky’s initial musical ideas were inspired
COMPOSED
August 1910–May 26, 1911
FIRST PERFORMANCE
June 13, 1911; Paris, France
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
November 21 & 22, 1930, Orchestra
Hall. Frederick Stock conducting (suite)
July 24, 1954, Ravinia Festival. Pierre
Monteux conducting (complete ballet)
January 5 & 6, 1961, Orchestra
Hall. Pierre Monteux conducting
(complete ballet)
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
July 9, 1977, Ravinia Festival. James
Levine conducting (complete ballet)
4
by visual imagery.) At first he thought of it as
a symphony, but when he played parts of it at
the piano for Diaghilev early that summer, the
impresario immediately knew that this was music
for dance. With Diaghilev’s urging, Stravinsky
continued working on the score that would
eventually become their biggest sensation, Le
sacre du printemps—The Rite of Spring. But in the
meantime, Stravinsky got sidetracked.
When Diaghilev went to visit Stravinsky in
Switzerland at the end of the summer, he was
stunned to discover that the composer had
begun a completely different work instead.
As Stravinsky recalled, Diaghilev “was much
astonished when, instead of the sketches of the
Sacre, I played him the piece which I had just
composed and which later became the second
scene of Petrushka.”
For the second time that year, one of
Stravinsky’s landmark ballet scores started out
not as music to be danced, but as an unnamed
abstract symphonic score. But unlike The Rite
of Spring, Petrushka moved from sketch to stage
without serious interruption. What had begun as
just a detour from The Rite now became the main
project of the year, and, at the same time, the
score with which Stravinsky found his modernist
March 24, 25 & 26, 2011, Orchestra
Hall. Charles Dutoit conducting
(complete ballet)
tambourine, side drum, tam-tam,
xylophone, piano, celesta, two
harps, strings
CSO PERFORMANCES,
THE COMPOSER CONDUCTING
Between 1935 and 1964, Stravinsky
conducted the CSO in selections from
Petrushka on thirteen occasions at
Orchestra Hall, the Pabst Theatre in
Milwaukee, and at the Ravinia Festival.
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
35 minutes
INSTRUMENTATION
Original 1911 version:
four flutes and two piccolos, four
oboes and english horn, four clarinets
and bass clarinet, four bassoons
and contrabassoon, four horns, four
trumpets, three trombones, tuba,
timpani, triangle, cymbal, bass drum,
CSO RECORDINGS
1969. Carlo Maria Giulini conducting.
Angel (suite)
1977. James Levine conducting. RCA
(complete ballet)
1993. Sir Georg Solti conducting.
London (complete ballet)
voice—the voice that made The Rite possible.
Musically, it had started innocently enough,
almost as a kind of warm-up for The Rite. “I
wanted to refresh myself,” Stravinsky later
explained, “by
composing
an orchestral
piece in which
the piano
would play
the most
important
part.” The
narrative and
the title came
later, although
Stravinsky
admitted that
“in composing
the music, I
had in mind
a distinct
picture of
Sergei Diaghilev
a puppet,
suddenly
endowed with
life.” (Petrushka is a Russian version of the male
half of the Punch and Judy puppets.) As with
The Rite, it was Diaghilev who immediately saw
the potential in Stravinsky’s dazzling music for
another dance classic:
[Diaghilev] was so much pleased with it
that he would not leave it alone and began
persuading me to develop the theme of the
puppet’s sufferings and make it into a whole
ballet. When he remained in Switzerland we
worked out together the general lines of the
subject and the plot in accordance with ideas
which I suggested . . . I began at once to
compose the first scene of the ballet.
There were still a few details to be worked out,
including Stravinsky’s fee (1,000 rubles) and
the selection of the painter Alexandre Benois
to polish the scenario and to provide costumes
and scenery. (Michel Fokine soon signed on as
choreographer and Pierre Monteux agreed to
conduct the premiere.) With this extraordinary
team lined up, Stravinsky and Diaghilev now
had their sights set on surpassing the success
of The Firebird. Aside from Stravinsky’s brush
with nicotine poisoning in February 1911, work
on Petrushka progressed smoothly. Rehearsals
were a different story. The dancers and orchestral
musicians, innocent of the terrors of The Rite
of Spring, still no more than a pile of sketches,
found the complexities of Stravinsky’s score
almost unmanageable.
Opening night, however, was a great triumph,
crowned by Vaslav Nijinsky’s brilliant dancing of the title role. Brash, bold, exciting, and
in-your-face “modern,” Petrushka was another
overnight hit with the public. For the next
two years, until the legendary premiere of The
Rite of Spring set Paris afire with fresh controversy, Petrushka was the latest word in musical modernism.
The scenario is in four scenes; the first and last
are public, taking place on the Admiralty Square
in Saint Petersburg, in the 1830s; the middle
ones are set in private rooms and focus on individual characters. Petrushka opens with a busy
crowd scene, a kaleidoscopic panorama of street
dancers, drummers, a magician playing a flute, a
street musician with his hurdy-gurdy, and three
puppets—Petrushka, a ballerina, and the Moor.
Stravinsky shifts focus and shuffles events like a
modern filmmaker: musical passages are cut and
spliced, rhythmic patterns jostle one another.
Finally the solo flute charms the three puppets to
life and they join in a brilliant Russian dance.
The two middle scenes are more intimate, relying less on the full orchestra and built of more
modestly scaled materials. In the first of these
scenes, the spotlight falls on Petrushka, alone in
his room, pondering his grotesque appearance
and despairing over his inability to win the love
of the ballerina. This is the music Stravinsky
had first played for Diaghilev, with a piano solo
“exasperating the patience of the orchestra with
diabolical cascades of arpeggios. The orchestra
in turn retaliates with menacing trumpet blasts.
The outcome is a terrific noise which reaches its
climax and ends in the sorrowful and querulous
collapse of the poor puppet.”
When he first began sketching Petrushka,
Stravinsky was haunted by the image of a
musician rolling two objects over the black and
white keys of the piano, which led him to the
idea of a bitonal effect made by combining the
white-note C major arpeggio with the black-note
5
F-sharp major arpeggio. This
double-sided sonority dominates Petrushka’s scene (the
first music Stravinsky wrote)
and as the work progressed, it
came to represent the conflicting sides of his character—the
human versus the puppet.
The Moor’s scene builds to
a romantic encounter with
the ballerina (she enters to a
dazzling high trumpet solo).
The lovers dance to waltzes
borrowed, without apparent
apology, from Joseph Lanner,
an Austrian composer who was
a friend of Johann Strauss, Sr.
They are interrupted by the
Drawing by Alexandre Benois for the set of Petrushka, 1911
jealous Petrushka.
The finale is another surging
crowd scene, characterized
as the magician drags the puppet off, he sees
by various kinds of music pushing and shoving
Petrushka’s ghost on the roof of the set, thumbagainst each other. Petrushka enters pursued
ing his nose. This, according to Stravinsky, “is
by the Moor, who strikes him with his saber.
the real Petrushka, and his appearance at the
Petrushka falls and the crowd grows silent.
end makes the Petrushka of the preceding play a
But when the magician is summoned, he
mere doll.” demonstrates that Petrushka is merely a puppet
stuffed with sawdust. The square empties. Then,
Phillip Huscher
6
Dmitri Shostakovich
Born September 25, 1906, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Died August 9, 1975, Moscow, Russia.
Symphony No. 11, Op. 103 (The Year 1905)
One might have naively
thought that when Stalin
died in March 1953,
Shostakovich would have
found himself released
from the crushing
creative, personal, and
political pressures of the
dictator’s last years. To
some extent, this was the
case, although nobody in the Soviet Union at the
time imagined Stalinism would come to an end
just because Stalin himself wasn’t there.
Certainly, Shostakovich’s immediate creative
response to Stalin’s death was striking enough:
the Tenth Symphony, a work of tremendous
musical dynamism and vivid human scope. At
the same time during these early post-Stalinist
years, the composer was also adding substantially
to his reputation by releasing a number of
powerful and already written works, like the
First Violin Concerto and the Fourth String
Quartet, which he had previously held back for
fear of the consequences. Taken together, these
old and new pieces gave every reason to suppose
that Shostakovich would now experience a
liberation of his genius.
And yet, after the initial explosion of the
Tenth, there actually followed one of his bleakest periods. Although a few important pieces
date from this time, Shostakovich spent a great
part of his energies composing tub-thumping
film music, music for unpretentious practical
use, and “official” music of one kind or another,
including popular songs to sentimental words of
COMPOSED
1956–August 4, 1957
FIRST PERFORMANCE
October 30, 1957, Moscow
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
January 19 & 20, 1961, Orchestra Hall.
André Cluytens conducting
the “Communist Youth” variety. His admirers
were confused and disappointed, and he himself
complained of frustration and depression.
One major cause of his inertia at this period
was the death of his wife Nina Varzar in
December 1954. A distinguished scientist and an
immensely strong character, Nina had been the
rock on which his life had been built for many
years. Their marriage had not been easy and was
“open.” But without her, Shostakovich seemed,
as several friends later remembered, rudderless,
lonely, and confused.
It was during this time that the composer
began to acquire an unenviable reputation as an
unadventurous conservative, a hack, an official
Soviet bard. In the West, his music was written
off by commentators as more or less irrelevant as
the avant-garde discovered brave new worlds of
sound and post-war popular music began to overwhelm the classical traditions. In his own country, the young and rebellious musical generation
that came to maturity in those Khrushchev years
looked harshly and askance at this dinosaur from
another age (he was only fifty). Half-forgotten
were the wonders and experiments of his early
years, and even the vast and tragic ironies of his
middle-period symphonies seemed less important than they once had.
Then, in the summer of 1957, while staying in
his favorite dacha (country cottage) in Komarovo
on the north Baltic coast just west of Leningrad,
Shostakovich produced his Eleventh Symphony.
The auguries were not good. At first hearing, this symphony confirmed the worst fears
of the composer’s detractors, and, at the same
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
March 4, 5 & 6, 2010, Orchestra Hall.
Charles Dutoit conducting
trumpets, three trombones, tuba,
timpani, triangle, cymbals, snare drum,
bass drum, tam-tam, xylophone, bells,
celesta, two harps, strings
INSTRUMENTATION
three flutes and piccolo, three oboes
and english horn, three clarinets and
bass clarinet, three bassoons and
contrabassoon, four horns, three
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
62 minutes
7
time, found worryingly warm favor with Soviet
officials, who declared it one of the composer’s
most satisfactory and splendidly Soviet pieces. To
most listeners—those who liked it and those who
hated it—the Eleventh seemed the very embodiment of the doctrine of Socialist Realism.
What made it such a perfect example of that
state-sponsored aesthetic? First, the fact that it
was explicitly written for the fortieth-anniversary
celebrations of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution
and that it purported to memorialize another
sacred date in Soviet history: the 1905
Revolution. Then, there was the all too neat
way it fulfilled so many of the musical ideals of
Socialist Realism: it was heavily pictorial and
programmatic; it often sounded like film music
(a very good thing for Socialist Realists); most
of the thematic material was not the composer’s
own but drawn from nineteenth-century revolutionary songs that most people in the audience
would already know and love (this was another
very important qualification for Socialist Realist
music); and, finally, its harmonic and orchestral
language was deeply and obviously indebted to
nineteenth-century Russian nationalist music
(Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov,
and the rest).
One particular listener at the time of the first
performance understood all of this in a completely different way. She was no special friend
of Shostakovich’s and no musician, but she
was one of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century
poets—Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966). Zoya
Tomashevskaya, the daughter of a famous literary
critic, remembered the occasion well:
At the premiere of the Eleventh Symphony,
there was a lot of discontented muttering.
The music-loving connoisseurs alleged that
the symphony was devoid of interest. All
around one heard such remarks as: “He has
sold himself down the river. Nothing but
quotations and revolutionary songs.”
Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova kept her
silence. For some reason, my father couldn’t
attend the concert. When we came home
afterwards, he asked us, “Well, how was it?”
And Anna Andreyevna answered, “Those
songs were like white birds flying against a
terrible black sky.”
8
Akhmatova had evidently been deeply moved.
To another friend she commented:
His revolutionary songs sometimes spring up
close by, sometimes float by far away in the
sky . . . they flare up like lightning . . . That’s
the way it was in 1905. I remember.
Akhmatova had put her finger on one of the
three keys to this symphony—the extraordinary
and vivid choice of nineteenth-century songs
that provide most of the melodies. The other
two keys are the way the symphony develops
ideas from one of Shostakovich’s own compositions, the sixth of his Ten Poems on Texts by
Revolutionary Poets, op. 88, a work for unaccompanied chorus written in 1951. And, finally, there
is the way almost the entire symphony seems
clearly modeled on a crucial work of music from
Russia’s past, one of Shostakovich’s personal
favorites—Mussorgsky’s mighty historical opera
about a revolution, Boris Godunov. Echoes of
the crowd scenes from Boris—from coronation
to revolution—abound in all four movements
and there are also specific references to details
of Mussorgsky’s piece, including the famous two
chords of the Coronation Bells. All three of these
keys to the mystery bring us to the intriguing
realization that this is one of the most purely
“Russian” of all Shostakovich’s symphonies.
There is hardly a hint of Mahler, who was so
important as a model from the First Symphony
to the Tenth.
The nineteenth-century revolutionary songs
that so excited Akhmatova are little known
to American listeners. But to Russians of the
early twentieth century, these lyrics and tunes
were part of their cultural inheritance, rather
like “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in the
United States.
The first movement opens with Mussorgskian
scene-setting music, establishing the
place—Palace Square in the middle of Saint
Petersburg—and the time—the hour before
dawn on the fateful day of January 9, 1905, at the
moment when the Russian Revolution of that
year began. We hear the frozen stillness of the
river Neva in the darkness, the distant sounds of
military bugles calling “Reveille” in the barracks,
and the equally distant chanting of the Russian
Orthodox prayer for the dead, the Kontakion.
Then, like an echo from one of the prison cells
in the Peter-Paul Fortress immediately opposite
the Winter Palace, we catch the first of those
songs Akhmatova recognized—“Listen!” This
was a popular ballad with nineteenth-century
political prisoners and it often was sung in
Stalin’s Gulags, too. It tells a convict’s story
of hearing a fellow prisoner being led out to
early-morning execution. Shostakovich introduces it on the gentle sound of two flutes (like
two trumpets playing in the distance), just after
an eerie passage of softly beating drums:
that took place in front of the Winter Palace on
January 9, 1905:
Like the deed of a traitor, like the conscience
of a tyrant,
The autumn night is black.
But blacker than night looms out of the mist
A gloomy vision of the prison.
All around, the lazy stepping of the guards
In the quiet of the night. But—there it is!—
Like the tolling of a bell, lingeringly,
longingly, the echoing call:
“Listen!”
Hey you, father Tsar! Look around you.
We have nothing to live on, your servants
give us no help.
A little further on in the first movement, after
a reprise of “Listen!” in the bassoon, violins, and
violas, Shostakovich introduces a second melody,
gloomy and hymnlike, first in the cellos and
basses, then in the flute and clarinet. This is “The
Arrested Man,” a song from 1850:
The night is dark. Seize the moment!
But the walls of the prison are strong,
And the gates are locked
With two iron padlocks.
Along the corridor there faintly flickers
The watchman’s candle,
And the jingling of the spurs
Of the sentry, who longs to live.
There follows a grief-filled exchange of words
between two equally oppressed individuals, a
despairing prisoner and the sentry who cannot
help him.
The second movement mostly plays not with
tunes from early songs, but instead with melodies taken from the second key ingredient of
the Eleventh Symphony, Shostakovich’s own
unaccompanied choral setting of Arkady Kotz’s
poem written in the aftermath of the catastrophe it describes, the Bloody Sunday massacre
Bare your heads! Bare your heads!
On this bitter day the shadow of a long night
trembled over the earth.
In musical language vividly reminiscent of the
choral scenes from Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov,
the unarmed protestors, carrying portraits of
Tsar Nicholas II, process to his palace to ask for
his help:
After a climax in which the orchestra repeats
over and over again the phrase “Bare your heads,”
Shostakovich returns for a moment to the opening of the symphony, to the prayer for the dead
and, again, the sound of the old song “Listen!”
The third movement—Eternal Memory (the
Russian name for the ancient chant we call
the Kontakion, which we already heard at the
beginning of the symphony)—is a funeral march
or processional. It starts with the revolutionary
funeral song “You fell as a victim”:
You fell as a victim in the fateful struggle
Of selfless love for the people.
You gave everything that you could for them,
For their lives, their honor and
their freedom.
Sometimes you were tormented in dank
prisons . . .
Your merciless sentence
Had already been decided for you by the
executioner-judges
And your chains rattled as you walked.
This lovely old tune is soon answered by
a stern, revolutionary marching song. Here,
Shostakovich combines several different sources
into a single musical utterance. The most prominent melodies here come from two songs. The
first begins:
Bravely, comrades, step forward!
Your spirit has been strengthened in
the struggle.
9
Let us lean our bodies forwards
On the road to the kingdom of freedom.
We all come from the people,
We are the children of working families.
Brotherly union and freedom—
This is the slogan that takes us into battle.
The second song at this point is called “Hail,
free word of liberty!”
The finale of the Eleventh begins with a fiery
revolutionary march:
Rage, you tyrants, and mock at us,
Threaten us with prison and with chains.
We are stronger than you in spirit,
Though you trampled on our bodies.
Shame! Shame! Shame on you, you tyrants!
This is followed, in an extended marching
sequence for the strings of the orchestra alone, by
one of the most famous and catchy of all revolutionary anthems, the so-called Warsaw Song:
Malevolent whirlwinds blow around us,
Dark forces press down on us with hate.
We have engaged in the fateful struggle with
our enemies,
The fate that awaits us is still unknown.
But with pride and courage we will raise
The battle standard of the workers’ cause,
The standard of the great struggle of
all peoples
For a better world, for holy freedom!
To the bloody battle,
Holy and true,
March, march onwards,
You working people!
The violence unleashed in this final movement
is astonishing, overpowering with its sense of
uncontrollable rage. The symphony ends with a
last return to Shostakovich’s own 1951 chorus
and its opening words, repeated over and over
again and at deafening volume by the whole
orchestra: “Bare your heads! Bare your heads!”
And that brings us back to the meaning of
this symphony and to Akhmatova’s brilliant
description of the songs in it as like “white birds
flying against a terrible black sky.” This piece
may indeed be “about” the 1905 Revolution,
that bloody upheaval whose eventual failure
10
led directly to the 1917 Revolution and the
establishment of the Soviet Union. Then again,
when Shostakovich wrote it, his country was
only just emerging from the nightmare of the
Stalinist Terror and the mass executions and
imprisonments by means of which the Bolsheviks
continued the old tyranny of the Romanov
emperors in new and vastly destructive forms.
And in the year in which it was composed, the
USSR invaded Hungary and bloodily repressed
the uprising there, an event which caused many
Western communists to tear up their party cards
and made many more in the Soviet intelligentsia,
to which Shostakovich belonged, despair at the
workings of their own country.
Shostakovich himself never “explained” this
music, beyond leaving its pictorial titles to tell
a clear story of 1905 almost in the manner of a
children’s cartoon book. But when we hear and
listen—“Listen!”—to its not so hidden words
(and almost every bar suggests words), then we
quickly see that what the composer is talking
about has many more layers of meaning than we
first suspected. This is a symphony not about one
event, but many events, and about how any one
of us approaches those events in the darkness of
our conscience. Gerard McBurney
Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra.
Gerard McBurney has been artistic programming
advisor for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and
creative director of the CSO’s Beyond the Score series
since 2006. He has a long-standing interest in the
music of Shostakovich, and, since the early 1990s, has
reconstructed, reinvented, and reorchestrated a number
of lost works by this composer including the 1931 musichall show Hypothetically Murdered and the “real” Jazz
Suite no. 2 of 1938. In the mid-1990s, he made a danceband version of Shostakovich’s 1958 musical comedy
Moscow Cheryomushki, which received its U.S. premiere
at the Chicago Opera Theater in 2011. His orchestration
of the Prologue to Shostakovich’s lost opera about a
monkey-human hybrid, Orango, was premiered in 2011
by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the direction of
Esa-Pekka Salonen, and subsequently recorded by the
same artists for Deutsche Grammophon.
© 2014 Chicago Symphony Orchestra