Oh, Lenin!
Our choral society has been rehearsing intensely for two concerts to take place within the next month. We will be singing the brief vocal sections of two early and not very popular symphonies by Dmitri Shostakovich, or DSCH, in musicialogical shorthand. The symphonies were written in celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 and the earlier incomplete revolution of May 1905. The poems he used for text are awful. The music's not hard but the Russian is. It has taken a considerable effort to get our collective tongues around some of the interesting diction. Our introduction to Russian was the vowel ï. "Imagine," our director suggested, "that you are trying to say 'ee' with a fist in your mouth." Go on, try it. It's got less color than a schwa. You want to say ee but it comes out as a grunt. Some other examples, phonetically, are "fslu," "vgla," "vzvi" and everyone's favorite, "zhm'om." The apostrophe is a brief "y" as in nyet.
DSCH has been a controversial personality most of his professional life and now in posterity. He was the first composer to come of age in the Soviet era, and he was the first to be celebrated. His future was bright. The two pieces on our program were written in the 1920's, when the system was still new and the people optimistic. There is a lot of interesting history about that era - communism was stylish even. Comrades named the children after tractors and power plants. Lenin, then Stalin, implemented a series of economic reforms, five year plans, that never really worked. At the time, there was hope that the millions of people could escape 900 years of crushing poverty under Tsarism. DSCH wrote heartfelt symphonies extolling the virtues of the revolution and glorifying the struggle shared by the People.
By 1934 the honeymoon was over. The offical view was that DSCH's opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, was bourgeois, and he fell out of favor. After that event, he and his work were subjected to scrutiny. DSCH was never officially disgraced, but it is said to have worked under perilous circumstances. It is thought that he composed on two levels. The surface of the music did not challenge political orthodoxy. But the music is deeply ironic, withering at times. It seems remarkable that he took such chances and survived.
Learning his music is like learning about the man. It is strange at times, seemingly simple. But as layers are peeled away, there is much more to find. There are musical surprises and the signature of a master. Even in these early, often-ridiculed works, there are moments of remarkable beauty and inspiration. The composer and the cause may have been discredited but the spirit of optimism is alive. The music moves one to aspire to something better, to struggle for an escape from the hell of oppression and suffering.
We're doing the pieces because we were asked by a wonderful, world-famous conductor to participate. It is a very great honor and an opportunity to make our group better known and respected. At first bored by the pieces and resentful of the amount of time devoted to what is essentially a total of thirty minutes of singing, no one seemed terribly enthusiastic about the music. But that began to change. Along the way our director, who works very hard and very smart, whipped up our enthusiasm for the work and transmitted it to us. In the last few rehearsals, we have grown close to the music and the language. It has motivated us to embrace it, to engage in the struggle to master something decidedly foreign. The credit for this inspiration has to be shared among Lenin, Shostakovich and our director.
The payoff, more than the concerts themselves, is the learning. Words such as barba (struggle), molchanye (silence), and stradanye (suffering) are added to our very short Russian vocabulary list. We find too that Shostakovich had some brilliant moments, even when working with banal material. Most of all, we've learned again how much more one can appreciate the quality and mystery of music listening from the inside.
DSCH has been a controversial personality most of his professional life and now in posterity. He was the first composer to come of age in the Soviet era, and he was the first to be celebrated. His future was bright. The two pieces on our program were written in the 1920's, when the system was still new and the people optimistic. There is a lot of interesting history about that era - communism was stylish even. Comrades named the children after tractors and power plants. Lenin, then Stalin, implemented a series of economic reforms, five year plans, that never really worked. At the time, there was hope that the millions of people could escape 900 years of crushing poverty under Tsarism. DSCH wrote heartfelt symphonies extolling the virtues of the revolution and glorifying the struggle shared by the People.
By 1934 the honeymoon was over. The offical view was that DSCH's opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, was bourgeois, and he fell out of favor. After that event, he and his work were subjected to scrutiny. DSCH was never officially disgraced, but it is said to have worked under perilous circumstances. It is thought that he composed on two levels. The surface of the music did not challenge political orthodoxy. But the music is deeply ironic, withering at times. It seems remarkable that he took such chances and survived.
Learning his music is like learning about the man. It is strange at times, seemingly simple. But as layers are peeled away, there is much more to find. There are musical surprises and the signature of a master. Even in these early, often-ridiculed works, there are moments of remarkable beauty and inspiration. The composer and the cause may have been discredited but the spirit of optimism is alive. The music moves one to aspire to something better, to struggle for an escape from the hell of oppression and suffering.
We're doing the pieces because we were asked by a wonderful, world-famous conductor to participate. It is a very great honor and an opportunity to make our group better known and respected. At first bored by the pieces and resentful of the amount of time devoted to what is essentially a total of thirty minutes of singing, no one seemed terribly enthusiastic about the music. But that began to change. Along the way our director, who works very hard and very smart, whipped up our enthusiasm for the work and transmitted it to us. In the last few rehearsals, we have grown close to the music and the language. It has motivated us to embrace it, to engage in the struggle to master something decidedly foreign. The credit for this inspiration has to be shared among Lenin, Shostakovich and our director.
The payoff, more than the concerts themselves, is the learning. Words such as barba (struggle), molchanye (silence), and stradanye (suffering) are added to our very short Russian vocabulary list. We find too that Shostakovich had some brilliant moments, even when working with banal material. Most of all, we've learned again how much more one can appreciate the quality and mystery of music listening from the inside.
posted by Evan Sarzin at 11:03 PM
1 Comments:
H.L. Mencken's famous remark, that non one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the average American, speaks right to this point. If nothing else, one can see our advanced civilization plagued by superstitution and tenancious ignorance. We are a big, dumb wealthy country, filled with people who are oblivious to our history, as well as everyone else's. Now, let's see: Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa...does Apu count?
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