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COLLECTION BBVA FOUNDATION ‐ NEOS

Gran Duo Shubert ‐ Shostakovich

CD CONTENT:

CONUNDRUMS IN NOTES

Semblance and Reality in the Music of Schubert and Shostakovich

At first glance, no two works could conceivably be more different than a Franz Schubert piano duet and a symphony for huge forces by Dmitri Shostakovich – a key piece of early Romantic chamber music vs. an orchestral confession from one of the darkest periods of Soviet history. Yet both works have a strange Janus‐faced quality, a game with semblance and reality that makes it seem entirely plausible to juxtapose them on a single CD.

FRANZ SCHUBERT: SONATA IN C MAJOR D 812 “GRAND DUO”

For all the intimacy of this species of parlor music, Schubert’s piano duets frequently sound orchestral. Even his contemporaries were aware of this: “Compared to his other sonatas,” Robert Schumann noted of the Grand Duo in a detailed review, “I can only interpret this piece as an orchestral work. One hears string and wind instruments, tutti passages, isolated solos, timpani rolls; the broadly conceived symphonic form, even the allusions to Beethoven’s symphonies (the slow movement recalls the Andante of Beethoven’s Second), [...] further reinforce my opinion.” Since then the question has been raised time and again whether the Grand Duo is the piano version of an orchestral work – a symphony that the composer, for whatever reasons, initially presented in a version for piano four hands. There can be no doubt about its orchestral character, especially in its final two movements. But similar effects can be found elsewhere in Schubert’s piano music. Moreover, the Grand Duo has passages conceived in expressly pianistic terms, as witness the development of the main theme at the opening of the first movement. Thus, speculations as to whether it is the piano version of an orchestral piece are doomed to lead nowhere. Schubert’s score has, after all, come down to us in a fair copy, not in an orchestral draft. Still, it is revealing that the work was orchestrated several times after his death, the most notable of these arrangements being by Joseph Joachim. As far as the music’s underlying mood is concerned, the relentless propulsion of the opening movement seems at first to contradict the leisurely circularity that distinguishes so many of Schubert’s works. For the Grand Duo projects an aesthetic of discontinuities, as in the Andante, where the switch from tuneful turns of phrase to acrid sonorities undercuts the impression of idyllic bliss. Nowhere is this more evident than in the breathless finale, where the lyricism is increasing undermined by moments of panic and disaster that anticipate Gustav Mahler. Semblance and reality are cleft asunder in this work, and the lines of fracture bear witness to borderline experiences that would later bear fruit in Expressionism.

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH: SYMPHONY NO. 5 IN D MINOR OP. 47

The background of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, which was premièred in Leningrad in 1937 (and which the composer himself played in piano duet), is perhaps more harrowing. In 1936 Shostakovich had stumbled into the crossfire of the critical establishment; the frequently cited article “Muddle Instead of Music,” published in Pravda at Stalin’s personal instigation, was a violent attack on Shostakovich and his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The composer was accused of negating the principles of Socialist Realism and pandering to formalism. In the era of the Great Purge this article, as Shostakovich immediately realized, implied more than a professional setback; it threatened his very existence. He responded to this attack with his Fifth Symphony, originally subtitled “A Soviet artist’s creative reply to just criticism.” True, Shostakovich apparently sought a more accessible idiom in this symphony, especially compared to the works that immediately preceded it, but stylistically he clearly followed step with his great orchestral works such as the Fourth Symphony, which was at first withdrawn and only received its première in 1961. Behind a seemingly affirmative façade he was able, despite all odds, to realize his central ideas and musical credo. Parody became a paramount stylistic device. The dance and march rhythms of the second movement, for instance, are so exaggerated that they ultimately undercut the genre’s positive ideology. The finale, though at first seemingly optimistic (and fully in tune with Socialist Realism), winds up in a paean of stagnation in the coda, driving the notion of a “heroic finale” to the point of absurdity.

With this symphony Shostakovich, it is true, succeeded in rehabilitating himself with the powerful Soviet officialdom. But his contemporaries fully understood the hints he had strewn throughout his score and were fully capable of distinguishing between semblance and reality. To quote the cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich: “The shrill repetitions at the end of the symphony are to me like a spear‐point jabbing in the wounds of a man on the rack. Anyone who thinks the finale is a glorification is an idiot – indeed, it is a triumph for idiots.”

Martin Demmler Translation from the German: J. Bradford Robinson