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BBC Proms - 17 July - 12 September 2009 - The World's Greatest Classical Music Festival
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What's On / Programme Notes
Dmitry Shostakovich (1906–75)
Symphony No. 9 in E flat major, Op. 70 (1945)
1 Allegro
2 Moderato
3 Presto
4 Largo
5 Allegretto
Shostakovich composed his Ninth Symphony
during the final weeks of the Second World War. Reports that he
was working on it soon appeared in the papers, along with a
fair amount of eager speculation. A bulletin from the Soviet
news agency TASS announced that the new symphony would be
‘devoted to the Celebration of our Great Victory’.
A remark Shostakovich had made the previous year was widely
quoted:
I am thinking of my next symphony, the
Ninth. I would like to employ not only a full orchestra but a
choir and soloists, if I can find a suitable text; in any case
I don’t want to be accused of drawing presumptuous
analogies.
Maybe not, but that last comment
effectively invited comparison with another Ninth Symphony with
choir and soloists: Beethoven’s ‘Choral’. The
effect was predictable: Soviet Russia prepared itself for a
masterpiece of national self-celebration: a musical ‘Ode
to Joy’ to put beside Beethoven’s, with –
naturally – an acknowledgement of the inspired role
played in the Great Victory by the ‘Leader and
Teacher’ himself, Joseph Stalin.
In the event, the looked-for ‘Soviet
Ninth’ turned out to be a bombshell – but of a
completely unexpected kind. Not only was it surprisingly short
(well under half an hour) and scored for a modest orchestra;
its whole character seemed staggeringly misjudged. This was the
reaction of the composer Marian Koval: ‘The listeners
parted, feeling very uncomfortable, as if embarrassed by the
musical mischief Shostakovich had committed and displayed
– committed, alas, not by a youth but by a 40-year-old
man, and at a time like that!’ The audience, Koval wrote,
was presented with ‘old man Haydn and a regular American
sergeant unsuccessfully made up to look like Charlie Chaplin,
while every possible grimace and whimsical gesture galloped
through the symphony’s first movement’.
Koval’s remarks were republished in 1948, the year
Shostakovich was denounced at the First Congress of the Union
of Composers and forced to make a humiliating public statement
of repentance. Stalin, it seems, had not forgotten that act of
‘musical mischief’.
Poisonous though Koval’s review was
– and no doubt partly politically motivated – in
one point he was right. Something of the spirit of the great
18th-century symphonist Haydn can be felt in
Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony, and especially in the
first movement. The opening Allegro is lean, athletic,
quick-witted music with some wonderful deflating humour. Take
the second theme, a cheekily whistling piccolo tune introduced
by martial percussion and a ludicrously pompous two-note
‘fanfare’ on trombone: Shostakovich thumbing his
nose at Soviet pomp? In the recapitulation, the pompous
trombone keeps trying to assert itself, but each time it is
thwarted by the rest of the orchestra. Near the end of the
movement the ‘mischief’ threatens to turn ugly, but
Shostakovich suddenly drops the curtain with two brusque
full-orchestral chords – a kind of neo-Classical
‘that’s all, folks!’
The second-movement Moderato is dark-hued,
but prevailingly lyrical and mostly restrained –
Shostakovich’s response, perhaps, to some of
Haydn’s gently melancholic minor-key slow movements.
Mocking humour then breaks out again in the
scherzo-like Presto, with shades of the Russian circus. But
this runs out of steam and subsides into the Largo. At this
point the comic mask drops; in fact, if this movement turned up
in one of the epic wartime symphonies that preceded the Ninth,
it wouldn’t sound out of place. Grim, rhythmically jagged
bass brass figures twice introduce long, plaintive,
recitative-like solos for high bassoon.
But then comes a typical Shostakovich
reversal: just when the subversive humour of the first and
third movements seems forgotten, the tempo changes to
Allegretto, and the bassoon drops to its lowest register for a
sly, chuckling, folk-like theme. The rest of the orchestra
catches the mood, but now the comedy has an unmistakably
nervous edge. At the end the tempo quickens and the symphony
dances wildly to its conclusion: still comic, but an ‘Ode
to Joy’ it clearly isn’t.
Programme note © Stephen Johnson
Stephen Johnson has written regularly for
‘The Independent’, ‘The Guardian’ and
‘BBC Music Magazine’, and is the author of books on
Bruckner, Mahler and Wagner. He is a regular presenter of BBC
Radio 3’s ‘Discovering Music’.
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2009 Calendar
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| July | ||||||
| 17 | 18 | |||||
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |
| August | ||||||
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |
| 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
| 30 | 31 | |||||
| September | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
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