Personal opinions about music are often problematic, precisely because they are personal. People who are asked to choose music to accompany their loneliness often select pieces by association, pieces that they heard at a particular time or place that was significant in their lives. Music becomes a reinforcement of purely internal associations and thus comes to mean things that are not really in the music, in itself, or even in its experience, either to an audience or probably to its composer. By offering this personal insight into Symphony No. Shostakovich’s 4, I want to deal primarily with the music and my reactions. The opinions remain, however, nothing more than personal, but I hope they at least have something to do with the music.
Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony presents particular challenges. It was removed by the composer during rehearsals and he himself did not hear a performance until its world premiere some twenty-five years later. Meanwhile, he had partially disowned it, dismissing it as an excess. However, their views may well have been driven by a need to conform, if only to avoid imprisonment and perhaps death. Self-preservation is also a necessary search for composers. He had recently been criticized for his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in a review that labeled his work more noise than music. The 1930s was not a decade to fall in love with a man of steel. The context of the fourth symphony is in itself a challenge for the listener. You cannot be neutral in the face of this conflict.
The room is also a challenge because it is the room. The first had been groundbreaking, the work of a teenage genius who had yet to find his full voice. The numbers two and three are the ones that are played less now, because now they smell of a socialist realistic program, where peasants and urban proletariat shake hands to look with open and fixed eyes towards the receding horizon of a perfected future, although they themselves are unemployed. The fourth was something different both in content and style, a work where the composer’s own voice would speak, a work of maturity where the future could get a little closer.
But in the first hearing, the fourth is not only different from what happened before: it is different from what followed, at least on its surface, both structurally and emotionally. It is still different for many audiences, but it is finally heard again in the eighth, in the tenth and finally a lot in the fifteenth. He is also usually lyrical, has musical jokes, circus and a lot of waltz. There are leaks and variations. But at all times there is a threat.
This is challenging music, although there is nothing particularly difficult about what you actually hear. It is the almost relentless drive in the stoneface sound that presents the listener with a challenge. The piece has clear rhythms, even pop. It is not atonal but uses a lot of dissonance. The orchestration is massive, but conservative, save for occasional extremes in percussion. But music seems like a machine without a government, fleeing with its own impulse. But this was nothing special for the 1930s, as evidenced by the first movement of Prokofiev’s second symphony, Mossolov’s iron foundry, or Honegger’s Pacific 231, all from the previous decade. The fourth symphony, like these other pieces, is musically harsh, hard-edged, and often bitter. Perhaps the most difficult thing to accommodate for a new listener, however, is the end of the work, because it is a question mark, not a fading into infinite tranquility, but an expiration towards an unknown destination.
This Symphony Number Four has three sections that together last just over an hour. The first is half the length of the play and contains most of the challenges, until that haunting ending. It opens with three dissonant chords, followed by a big bang, like the universe. But this is a living entity and its heart immediately begins to beat and thus continues at roughly the same rate. Although it may occasionally slow to a halt and eventually stop, the pulse is always there and it is your living reality.
But this is not a human heart. It is an industrial, mechanical, incessant, penetrating and controlling movement. We begin to feel that human beings are servants of this process, mere pawns that are used in some activity greater than mere life.
On the way, people tell jokes, go to the circus, dance the odd waltz. But they also scream, they scream like in Eisenstein or Munch, they fight and destroy, but it is the machine that always comes back to impose its demands on those who serve it. Even the giant leak in the middle of the movement cannot shake the mechanical regularity, except if it gets out of control. At first ordered and disciplined, the fragments of music as instruments enter more and more quickly, as if they wanted to break order, create anarchy. The conflict erupts into chaos, but the machine re-establishes its order, its discipline, and the rhythm restarts.
But at the end of the movement, a violin only makes an extended statement, even a human one. It offers tenderness, repentance and reflection and we doze off, we calm down in a human existence. And then the pulse of the machine returns, not hard, not hard, but as insistent as ever. And then the movement ends, silently, but subtly reiterating the chords of creation from the beginning.
This initial section has perhaps described part of the human condition, that part that includes our social, economic and political life. In this vision we are not individuals. We are part of a universe that operates on its own terms, at its own pace and rejects anything that does not meet its demands. We are also part of a human society that confines us with its expectations, norms and cultures. We can have our individual voices, but neither the screams nor the whispers will be heard or recognized above the imposed norms. And the result is often violent, not because we are individually violent, but because what we are a part of is inherently mechanical, ruthless, and utterly selfish.
If the first section was an individual who became a mere cog in the industrial or social structures, or perhaps the restrictions, then the second surely is the human being as intellect. The music here is full of reflection, self-analysis, and suppressed emotion. It is never sentimental. Ideas come and go, but often they don’t go together. This is a reaction to reality, not an analysis of it. And when they try to hold together, our human thoughts return us to the mechanical rhythm of the opening movement, as if we were unable to escape its dictates. Paradoxically, it is when this regular mechanical rhythm is imposed again that we feel the greatest tranquility and confidence. However, over time, the process, intellectual and personal, becomes a clockwork mechanism that seems to work independently of any individual. It is the same rhythm of relentless control, but now it simply controls and does not threaten and, in itself, it was probably the product of our collective intellectual effort.
The third section of the symphony is both personal and emotional. From the quiet reflection a sense of satisfaction seems to grow. Optimism arises and maybe there is only time and space in this universe for something tender and personal on scale to exist and thrive. Perhaps it may even have meaning in this mechanical stack of which we are a part. For once, the rhythm of the machine does not dominate. But this new confidence in our own abilities provides the impetus for the mechanical return, and the return does so, syncopated and even more threatening, even though it may be a waltz in disguise.
Finally, our optimism seems to overcome the pressure to conform. We will survive. We will prosper. We will control our own destiny. In moments of frivolity, we can entertain such ideas and dance, even though it sounds and perhaps seems like a trivial joke. And then we rise above all conflict. We control. We decided.
A fugue reaffirms its rationality. This time he’s in control, but then it dissolves into a joke, or something as profound as an evening at the circus. In a broad affirmation of our collective and individual confidence, we rise to a great fanfare from crescendo to triumph.
But it is an empty statement and we know it. And so the final passages of the symphony point to the most difficult realization for each and every one of us: that at the end there is still a beat, which was perhaps the mechanical rhythm that dictated our existence from the beginning. But now it’s wavering, fading. The orchestra literally and irregularly breathes as residual energy moves its limbs. The celestial – celestial? – repeatedly tries to free himself from this trapped suffering, perhaps as a soul seeks eternity in Christian dogma. The heartbeat on the double basses is the same as that used by Tchaikovsky to finish his sixth symphony, and here too it has the same mortality implications. At last, the final notes of the celestial are released, but the last note of all is not freedom, nor paradise, but a question mark.
I said at the beginning that this would be a personal opinion and it is. Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony Number Four is, simply put, the greatest artistic work of the human race, surpassing any other in any medium. This is where we really find ourselves, where the personal becomes personal, nothing more.
