Program 9 - Festival Finale 

Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor, Op. 99

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) 

Composed in 1947-1948.

Premiered on October 29, 1955 in Leningrad, with David Oistrakh as soloist.

In 1948, Shostakovich, Prokofiev and many other important Soviet composers were condemned for threatening the political and emotional stability of the nation with their “formalistic” music. Through Andrei Zhdanov, head of the Soviet Composers’ Union and the official mouthpiece for the government, it was made known that any experimental or modern or abstract or difficult music was no longer acceptable for consumption by the Russian peoples. Only simplistic music glorifying the state, the land and the people would be performed. In other words, symphonies, operas, chamber music — anything involving too concentrated an intellectual effort or critical thought — were out; movie music, folk song settings and patriotic cantatas were in.

Shostakovich saw the iron figure of Joseph Stalin behind the purge of 1948, as he was convinced it had been for an earlier one in 1936. After the 1936 debacle, Shostakovich responded with the Fifth Symphony, and kept composing through the war years, even becoming a world figure representing the courage of the Russian people with the lightning success of his Seventh Symphony (“Leningrad”) in 1941. The 1948 censure was, however, almost more than Shostakovich could bear. He determined that he would go along with the Party prerogative for pap, and withhold all of his substantial works until the time when they would be given a fair hearing — when Stalin was dead. About the only music that Shostakovich made public between 1948 and 1953 was that for films, most of which had to do with episodes in Soviet history (The Fall of Berlin, The Memorable Year 1919), and some jingoistic vocal works (The Sun Shines Over Our Motherland). The only significant works he released during this half-decade were the 24 Preludes and Fugues for Piano, Op. 34. The other works of this time — the First Violin Concerto, the Songs on Jewish Folk Poetry, the Fourth and Fifth String Quartets — were all withheld until later years. The Violin Concerto, composed for David Oistrakh in 1947-1948 as Op. 77, was not heard in public until 1955, when it was re-numbered as Op. 99.

In his purported memoirs, Testimony, Shostakovich revealed the inspiration behind the First Violin Concerto: “Jewish folk music has made a most powerful impression on me. I never tire of delighting in it; it’s multifaceted, it can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It’s almost always laughter through tears.... [But] this is not purely a musical issue, this is also a moral issue. The Jews became the most persecuted and defenseless people of Europe [during World War II]. It was a return to the Middle Ages. Jews became a symbol for me. All of man’s defenselessness was concentrated in them. After the war, I tried to convey that feeling in my music. Despite all the Jews who perished in the camps, all I heard people saying was, ‘They went to Tashkent to fight.’ And if they saw a Jew with military decorations, they called after him, ‘Hey, where did you buy the medals?’ That’s when I wrote the Violin Concerto, the Jewish cycle, and the Fourth Quartet.” After he premiered the work, David Oistrakh, who helped in the preparation of the score and was probably privy to the composer’s thoughts, wrote, “In the Violin Concerto, as in many other of Shostakovich’s works, I am attracted by the amazing seriousness and profundity of the idea, the truly symphonic thinking. There is nothing accidental in the score of the Concerto, nothing that is used for its outward effect and is not supported by the inner logic, by the development of the material. Behind Shostakovich’s symphonic thinking you can always sense the profoundest meditation on life, on the fate of mankind.”

Shostakovich likened the First Violin Concerto to “a symphony for solo violin and orchestra,” and, with its four-movement structure, gravity of expression and fully developed musical argument, it bears little resemblance to the traditional virtuoso concerto. A personal touch is woven into the fabric of the music by the recurring notes of Shostakovich’s musical signature: D–E-flat–C–B, a motive that also occurs in the Tenth Symphony and the Eighth Quartet. (The note D represents Shostakovich’s initial. In German transliteration, the composer’s name begins “Sch”: S [ess] in German notation equals E-flat, C is C, and H equals B-natural.)

The brooding opening movement, titled Nocturne, is an extended, accompanied soliloquy for the violin that grows continuously from the plaintive melody presented at the beginning by the low strings. The movement, without clear structural divisions, takes the shape of a huge arch, quiet at beginning and end, intense in its central portion. The second movement, a raucous Scherzo whose theme resembles that of the comparable movement in the Tenth Symphony, provides the utmost contrast to the introspective music of the preceding Nocturne. The expressive heart of the Concerto lies in its third movement, the darkly hued and deeply emotional Passacaglia. The passacaglia is an ancient musical form, serious in expression, built on a short invariable melody to which are added elaborating lines on each repetition. Brahms revived the principle for the finale of his Fourth Symphony, and Shostakovich used it here one of the first times in any concerto. The Soviet musicologist and critic Vasily Kukharsky wrote of this music, “In the Passacaglia, there is philosophic meditation, there is sorrow and sad lyricism, and there is courage.... It may be said that Shostakovich has never achieved such magnificent simplicity, such an inspiration of melodic thinking.” A massive cadenza for the soloist, almost a separate movement in itself, links the pensive end of the third movement to the surging energy of the finale, a brilliant, whirling Burlesca that recalls in its closing pages themes from earlier movements. 

Symphony No. 1 in D major

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)

Composed 1883-1888, revised 1892-1893.

Premiered in Budapest on November 20, 1889, conducted by the composer.

“To write a symphony means, to me, to construct a world with all the tools of the available technique,” wrote Gustav Mahler. The World in a Symphony — the experiences, qualities and meaning of life enfolded in tone. Mahler, the most ardent of the Romantics in his belief in the bond between human existence and music, spent his career pursuing this lofty aim. He once said, “My whole life is contained in them [i.e., the first two symphonies]: I have set down in them my experience and my suffering.... To anyone who knows how to listen, my whole life will become clear, for my creative works and my existence are so closely interwoven that, if my life flowed as peacefully as a stream through a meadow, I believe I would no longer be able to compose anything.” Mahler certainly had a full share of rocks and rapids in the stream of his life: deaths of loved ones, including a child, only weeks apart; a critical heart condition that precipitated his premature death at the age of fifty; severe bouts of depression that led him to seek the counsel of Sigmund Freud; and great difficulties in finding acceptance for his works. Though these experiences were still in the future when he wrote this First Symphony, Mahler nevertheless embodied profound thoughts and emotions in this early work. Written during his tenure as conducting assistant to the great Arthur Nikisch in Leipzig, the D major Symphony reflects Mahler’s concerns with romantic love, with establishing himself as a creative artist, and with finding a musical language proper to express his inner turmoil.

Though he did not marry until 1902, Mahler had a healthy interest in the opposite sex, and at least three love affairs touch upon the First Symphony. In 1880, he conceived a short-lived but ferocious passion for Josephine Poisl, the daughter of the postmaster in his boyhood home of Iglau, and she inspired from him three songs and a cantata after Grimm (Das klagende Lied) that contributed thematic fragments to the Symphony. The second affair, which came early in 1884, was the spark that actually ignited the composition of the work. Johanne Richter possessed a numbing musical mediocrity alleviated by a pretty face, and it was because of an infatuation with this singer at the Cassel Opera, where Mahler was then conducting, that not only the First Symphony but also the Songs of the Wayfarer sprang to life. The third liaison, in 1887, came as the Symphony was nearing completion. Mahler revived and reworked an opera by Carl Maria von Weber called Die drei Pintos, and was aided in the venture by the grandson of that composer, also named Carl. During the almost daily contact with the Weber family necessitated by the preparation of the work, Mahler fell in love with Carl’s wife, Marion. Mahler was serious enough to propose that he and Marion run away together, but at the last minute she had a sudden change of heart and left Mahler standing, quite literally, at the train station. The emotional turbulence of all these encounters found its way into the First Symphony, especially the finale, but, looking back in 1896, Mahler put those experiences into a better perspective. “The Symphony,” he wrote, “begins where the love affair [with Johanne Richter] ends; it is based on the affair that preceded the Symphony in the emotional life of the composer. But the extrinsic experience became the occasion, not the message of the work.”

The “message” of this work, and of all Mahler’s symphonies, is that life comprises a countless number of feelings and sensations, a ceaseless ebb and flow of sentiments gliding together, combining, then disappearing in the marvelous complex of the emotional life of the individual. In each of his symphonies, this world of experience is mirrored in a wide spectrum of musical styles, from child-like simplicity to transcendent profundity — folksong beside fugue, parody beside pathos, tempest beside tranquillity.

The Symphony begins with an evocation of a verdant springtime filled with the natural call of the cuckoo (solo clarinet) and the man-made calls of the hunt (clarinets, then trumpets). The main theme, which enters softly in the cellos after the wonderfully descriptive introduction, is based on the second of the Songs of a Wayfarer, Ging heut’ Morgen übers Feld (“I Crossed the Meadow this Morn”). The first movement is given over to this theme combined with the spring sounds of the introduction in a cheerful display of ebullient spirits into which creeps an occasional shudder of doubt.

The second movement is a dressed-up version of the Austrian peasant dance known as the Ländler, a type and style that finds its way into most of Mahler’s symphonies. The simple tonic-dominant accompaniment of the basses recalls the falling fourth of the opening movement, while the tune in the woodwinds resembles the Wayfarer song. The gentle trio, ushered in by solo horn, makes use of the string glissandos that were so integral a part of Mahler’s orchestral technique.

The third movement begins and ends with a lugubrious, minor-mode transformation of the European folk song known most widely by its French title, Frére Jacques. It is heard initially in an eerie solo for muted string bass in its highest register, played above the tread of the timpani intoning the falling-fourth motive from the preceding movements. The middle of the movement contains a melody marked “Mit Parodie” (played “col legno” by the strings, i.e., tapping with the wood of the bow), and a simple, tender theme based on another melody from the Wayfarer songs, Die zwei blauen Augen (“The Two Blue Eyes”). The mock funeral march of this movement was inspired by a woodcut of Moritz von Schwind titled How the Animals Bury the Hunter from his Munich Picture Book for Children.

The finale, according to Bruno Walter, protégé and friend of the composer and himself a master conductor, is filled with “raging vehemence.” The stormy character of the beginning is maintained for much of the movement. Throughout, themes from earlier movements are heard again, with the hunting calls of the opening introduction given special prominence. The tempest is finally blown away by a great blast from the horns (“Bells in the air!” entreats Mahler) to usher in the triumphant ending of the work, a grand affirmation of joyous celebration.

©2007 Dr. Richard E. Rodda