Socialist Realism in Music

Dmitrii Shostakovich (1906-1975) is usually embraced as a truly "Soviet" composer, trained after the Revolution in Leningrad, and never spending the time abroad that made Stravinsky or Prokofiev so suspicious in the eyes of their compatriots.

The beginning of the second movement of the Fourth Symphony is a masterful rendition of Mahlerian sensibilities gone mad—or perhaps just chaotically playful: 

  

Without establishing any baseline of comparison from Shostakovich's youthful experimentation, let us move directly to the work which became emblematic of the tensions between modernist experimentation and Socialist Realism in music, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1932). In keeping with our philistine strategy so far, we will simply listen to two of the orchestral interludes to get a sense for how Shostakovich got into trouble: 

   

The opera actually enjoyed considerable critical success after its premier, playing for ninety-seven performances in Moscow before Stalin attended a performance and quickly made his disfavor known via an infamous editorial in Pravda entitled "Chaos Instead of Music." Shostakovich then treated the Fifth Symphony (1937) as his "creative answer to justified criticism." The middle portions of the first movement from the Fifth Symphony establish a nice contrast with his more obviously modernist work: 

   

But after you note the appeal of the movement's second theme (which begins this excerpt), ask yourself whether the accumulated effect is either triumphant or complacent.

For a good example of the problem of attributing specific stylistic motives accurately to a work seemingly overwhelmed by historical "context," listen to the first movement of Symphony No. 7 'Leningrad' (1941), with its use of a steady orchestral crescendo building on a simple theme in the manner of Ravel's Bolero: 

   

Shostakovich himself was contradictory about the origins of this symphony, at one point declaring that it had been planned before World War II began, and thus should not be seen as a "reaction" to Hitler's invading armies, whose inexorable advance this excerpt powerfully evokes. Yet the symphony was completed while Leningrad was being encircled by the Nazi armies, and premiered shortly before Shostakovich and his family were evacuated from the city in October 1941. It has thus understandably been seen as one of the most powerful musical representations of war in the twentieth century, and a remarkable testimony to human endurance amid overwhelming deprivation. More than that, it has been seen as a symbol of opposition to tyranny more generally. Think carefully about how you would assess its intended effect on the listener in light of your reading of Taruskin's essay. (Bartók's parody of this same motif can be heard in the final movement of the Concerto for Orchestra:) 

  

Symphony No. 7 in fact enjoyed official approbation, but matters become more difficult with Symphony No. 8 (1943), even though Shostakovich was working with many of the same wartime motifs (the first movement returns to the march theme you just heard). The third movement has much of the same drive as the previous excerpt, but this time the evocation of machine warfare is even darker: 

   

The cellist Mstislav Rostopovich, who was once a student of Shostakovich, later said of the Eighth Symphony, "It reflects all the complexity of modern man in the modern world. We act, and in acting quickly and thinking quickly, we never have time to stop and analyze ourselves. This is all the more the case today [1998]. Everything is getting more and more complicated and it's speeding up. In order to understand life at its deepest, you need tremendous intellectual strength. That is what Shostakovich had." While the work was not initially condemned, it was later avoided in public performance after Zhdanov's notorious speech in 1948.

In the late Stalin era, Shostakovich had the opportunity to visit Leipzig for the 200th anniversary of Bach's death in 1950. This seems to have inspired him to compose a series of 24 preludes and fugues as a kind of homage that would not invite charges of "formalism" or the like. To get a brief taste of this work, listen to No. 2 in A Minor and No. 15 in D flat Major.: 

   

and 

  

Shostakovich wrote his Tenth Symphony during the summer following Stalin's death in 1953. It is perhaps his best symphony overall, which has tempted many listeners to interpolate a sense of liberation on the composer's part. Listen to the intense second movement and see what you think: 

   

("Decay, cynicism, the howl of a maniac," wrote one Socialist Realist critic to himself upon first hearing this movement.) To the irritation of those close to Shostakovich, this movement has sometimes been taken as a "portrait" of Stalin. What do you think is the historical significance of this kind of attribution, and of the charges of "vulgarity" in response?