Shostakovich symphony no 14 analysis group

The opening, almost introductory song is an elegy for a hundred dead lovers. The first melody of the De Profundis, ironically high in the violin register, makes immediate reference to the notes of the Gregorian Mass for the Dead whose Dies Irae theme has been used by so many composers over the centuries. Its timelessness as a melodic idea creates an eternal atmosphere.

This is a piece for the past, the present, and for ever. He often saw his music as some kind of cross that could perpetuate the memory of others. It is a brilliant aspect of this work that Shostakovich is able to use such limited orchestral colours to create such huge contrasts. It is very easy to listen to this piece without ever realising that there are only twenty-five people involved in the performance and that the vast majority are playing string instruments.

You can almost smell the alcohol. Death is a feminine word in Russian, and the legendary character of the sorceress Loreley has long been considered one of its strongest representations. This also gives the sense that the first two songs were introductions and that it is in Loreley that the symphony really begins. Yet somehow these disparate ideas seem perfectly unified.

She in turn can be seen as a combination of the death figure of the Malaguena with one of the hundred lovers from the opening movement and these textural links, as well as many musical connections, enable Shostakovich to turn four highly individual songs into what can be heard as a long opening symphonic movement. The end of this song is the first time in the work that anyone gets a chance to draw their breath.

Shostakovich was forced to denounce twelve-tone serialism as typical of Western, bourgeois decadence but as a composer he was fascinated in later life by its harmonic implications. The opening xylophone melody of On the Watch has to be one of the most pleasant twelve-note melodies ever written but it still creates a sense of harmonic instability that is cleverly able to evoke the uncertainty and nervousness of a woman waiting at home whilst knowing that her lover is being killed in the trenches.

The Loreley, who had grieved for her lover far away, has become the woman who knows her lover is being killed on the battlefield, and is obviously the same woman who in the next song laughs in despair in the knowledge that he is already dead. The vast majority of the music so far has been sung by the soprano, and the change to the male voice is telling.

Shostakovich symphony no 14 analysis group

In , Guillaume Apollinaire was wrongly arrested and imprisoned for stealing a few statues from the Louvre in Paris and his poem In the Sante Prison was the result of his rather less than serious five-day stay in jail. When Alexander Solzhenitsyn discovered that Shostakovich had chosen to set it, he was furious, and wrote to the composer explaining that it was outrageous that he should honour the millions who suffered in the Gulags with a poem by a man who could never have understood the true level of suffering that occurred.

Apollinaire wrote of rays of sunlight and sounds of the city drifting in, but these lines are ruthlessly cut by Shostakovich. The occasional woodblock note seems to represent the slow dripping of water in some distant, deserted, dank corridor. At the end Apollinaire implies that the lamp left burning is some kind of friend, but Shostakovich allows no such sentimentality and, by saying that the only two friends there are the prisoner and his mind, it is clear that madness has finally set in.

I know about that. Discover the world's largest classical music catalogue with Presto Music. If you are a library, university or other organisation that would be interested in an institutional subscription to Gramophone please click here for further information. The rhythmic precision of what sounds like a relatively small body of Liverpool strings is quite something and the high-voltage sense of forward movement is maintained throughout.

The downside is that the snap and crackle of youthful enthusiasm occasionally seems to edge out deeper sentiments in the less physically demonstrative songs. When the tragic demise of the hero and heroine occurs, it is softened with radiant music. In Mussorgsky's song cycle Shostakovich found a model that spoke out against death; in his symphony, he attempted to expand this protest still further.

I want listeners to reflect upon my new symphony That is what I was thinking about as I wrote my new work. I want my listeners, as they leave the hall after hearing my symphony, to think that life is truly beautiful. While Shostakovich's intent may have been to emphasise that life is truly beautiful, he did so by starkly underlining the opposite — that the end of life is ugly and irredeemably negative.

His writing for the voice is in small intervals , with much tonal repetition and attention paid to natural declamation. This practice is taken directly from Mussorgsky. Four singers were involved in the first presentations of the work: the sopranos Galina Vishnevskaya and Margarita Miroshnikova , and the basses Mark Reshetin [ ru ] and Yevgeny Vladimirov.

An initial performance, preceding the official Moscow and Leningrad premieres, was given by Miroshnikova and Vladimirov, but sources differ as to the vocalists in the official premieres. The official premiere recording on Melodiya was with Miroshnikova and Vladimirov. The pre-premiere performance on 21 June was attended by Pavel Apostolov , one of the composer's fiercest critics.

He suffered a heart attack during the fifth movement. The composer himself was initially unsure what to call the work, eventually designating it a symphony rather than a song cycle to emphasise the unity of the work musically and philosophically: most of the poems deal with the subject of mortality he rejected the title oratorio because the work lacks a chorus; it is not a choral symphony for the same reason.

Not all the movements are linked; there are a few breaks between movements that effectively divide the work into a "conventional" four-movement structure. Many at the time including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Lev Lebedinsky criticised the work as too pessimistic. Wilson argues that on the contrary "through careful ordering of the texts [he] conveys a specific message of protest at the arbitrary power exercised by dictators in sending the innocent to their deaths" p.

Shostakovich reportedly answered his critics in Testimony :. But it's not a beginning, it's the real end, there will be nothing afterwards, nothing. I feel you must look truth right in the eyes To deny death and its power is useless. Deny it or not, you'll die anyway It's stupid to protest against death as such, but you can and must protest against violent death.

It's bad when people die before their time from disease or poverty, but it's worse when a man is killed by another man. The absence from the symphony of redemption or transcendence drew protests not only in the Soviet Union but also in the West, where the work was considered both obsessive and limited spiritually. Shostakovich was determined to avoid false consolation.

This intent was a prime stimulus in writing the work. Some have found that the work's embracing of human mortality has been expressed with tremendous clarity. Regardless of opinion, the Fourteenth in performance is agreed to be a profound and powerful experience. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk.