RACHMANINOFF & SHOSTAKOVICH where he spent the summer, completing the piece in Dresden on August 25.
The premiere took place the following March 18, in Philadelphia, with Leopold Stokowski conducting The Philadelphia Orchestra. It was a critical disaster. In the New York Evening Telegram, Pitts Sanborn complained that the piece was“ long-winded, tiresome, unimportant, in places tawdry.” Rachmaninoff was distraught, and he quickly set about effecting cuts in what admittedly was a long piece— so long, in fact, that he had joked to his friend Nikolai Medtner( the work’ s dedicatee) that a performance of this concerto might be spread over successive nights, like Wagner’ s Ring cycle.( He also observed in a letter to Medtner:“ I also noticed that the theme of the second movement is the theme of the first movement of Schumann’ s concerto. How is it that you didn’ t tell me this?”) Even before the premiere, Rachmaninoff had begun to edit down his score; soon 114 bars were pared away, and in 1941 another 78, bringing the piece to its final form with a running time of about 25 minutes( 22 seconds less than that, in the composer’ s own recording of it, made in 1941).
Instrumentation: Two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, tambourine, snare drum, triangle, cymbals, and strings, in addition to the solo piano.
Dmitri Shostakovich
Born September 12( old style)/ 25( new style), 1906, in St. Petersburg, Russia Died August 9, 1975, in Moscow, Russia
SYMPHONY NO. 4, IN C MAJOR, OP. 43 [ 1935 – 36 ]
The biography of Dmitri Shostakovich reads like something out of a particularly nightmarish Russian novel: Dostoyevsky, perhaps, but with more ironic jokes. He spent practically his whole career falling in and out of favor with the Communist authorities, ending up battered and paranoid. His Fourth Symphony could encapsulate this bio-tragedy all on its own. The composer produced it from September 1935 to April or May 1936, and it was in the midst of that span, on January 28, that Pravda ran an unsigned editorial titled“ Muddle Instead of Music.” The article condemned Shostakovich for presenting“ the coarsest naturalism” in his recent opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, accused him of pandering to“ aestheteformalists,” and warned that“ this is a game … that may end very badly”— words one took seriously when they appeared in the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Shostakovich soldiered on, and the symphony was scheduled to premiere on December 11, with Fritz Stiedry conducting the Leningrad Philharmonic. The work had already gone through ten rehearsals when suddenly a questionable notice appeared in the press:“ Composer Shostakovich appealed to the Leningrad Philharmonic with the request to withdraw his Fourth Symphony from performance on the grounds that it in no way corresponds to his current creative convictions and represents for him a long outdated phase.”
Various explanations tried to rationalize the cancellation: the musicians had resisted the piece, the orchestra’ s administration created obstacles, conductor Stiedry was incompetent. Shostakovich’ s close friend Isaak Glikman reported of the final rehearsal:“ I detected a strong sense of wariness in the hall; rumors had been circulating in musical circles— and even more significantly, on their fringes that Shostakovich had not heeded the criticism to which he had lately been subjected, but had persisted in writing a symphony of diabolical complexity and crammed full of formalist tendencies.” After a brief meeting in the administrative office, Shostakovich walked home to his apartment accompanied by Glikman.“ My companion seemed thoroughly downcast, and his long silence only added to my sense of anxiety. At last he told me in flat, expressionless tones that there would be no performance of the symphony. It had been removed from the program at the insistent recommendation of Renzin [ the orchestra’ s director ] who, reluctant to be forced to take administrative measures himself, had urged the composer to take the step of withdrawing it.”
Shostakovich tucked the symphony away in his desk drawer, revisiting it now and again to effect alterations. It was finally published in 1946, though only in a reduction for two pianos and in an edition of just 300 copies. Not until 1961 was the USSR comfortable enough to present what had by then become famous as Shostakovich’ s“ missing symphony,” conspicuous by its absence. It scored a huge success at its premiere that year, with Soviet critics viewing it as a historical stepping-stone on the way to the composer’ s mature style and Western critics by and large finding it more bracing than many of his ensuing symphonies. It is indeed an extraordinary work, immense in the scale of its orchestral resources and its structural expanse, wide-ranging in its style( tapping parodistic vulgarity at one turn, Mahleresque grandeur at the next), and always fascinating— if cryptic— in its narrative: a many-layered metaphor of Shostakovich’ s life and oeuvre.
Instrumentation: Four flutes, two piccolos, four oboes( fourth doubling English horn), four clarinets, bass clarinet, E-flat clarinet, three bassoons, contrabassoon, eight horns, four trumpets, three trombones, two tubas, two sets of timpani, bass drum, wood block, xylophone, castanets, snare drum, tam tam, cymbals, suspended cymbal, triangle, glockenspiel, celesta, and strings.
JAMES M. KELLER has served as the longtime program annotator of the New York Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony, where he recently completed his 25th season. He is the author of Chamber Music: A Listener’ s Guide( Oxford University Press).
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