Mine Ears Have Heard the Glory
By Thomas Larson
Photography by Lukas Beck
1/
It took listening into my seventh decade as a musician and a critic, my life’s crossover passions, to arrive at the purest listening experience of classical music I have ever had; highlights of Sergei Prokofiev’s Suite from Romeo and Juliet (1938) and, in full, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony (1937), performed by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and led by the Czech conductor, Jakub Hrůša, at the Konzerthaus in Vienna. Surely I am not the first to have been so moved by these twentieth-century Russians in Vienna’s music halls, I thought. That feeling had previously alluded me as an American whose seated anticipation in stateside venues had seldom measured up to what I hoped it would. Alas, there were only two occasions on which my expectations had been exceeded: Mahler’s Sixth from the Royal Concertgebouw in Carnegie Hall and John Adams’s The Dharma at Big Sur from the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Disney Hall (oh yes, one other: Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, Michigan State University, 1973, a year before he died). What was so unique about the Shostakovich performance? If I were to guess, I would put it down, at least partly, to the venue; the Konzerthaus bore the music as if the venue itself were the birthing chamber of its being.
Right off, I sense this essay wants a direction I may not be able to give it, an explanatory context that first requires a discourse on sound and space, which, recalling that sublime May night last year, I’d prefer to celebrate. Still alive in my memory, I’ll try to be mindful of both.
Home in California, I read about the Vienna Philharmonic’s one hundred and seventy-five -year history, starting in 1842. In the 1870s, Hans Richter conducted premieres of Brahms’s symphonies (at Brahms’s request), and under the Nazi reign, Wilhelm Furtwangler paraded Beethoven and Bruckner for Hitler. Other early twentieth-century conductors included Bruno Walter and Hans Knappertsbusch. The official home of the Vienna Philharmonic, I learnt, is the Musikverein. The younger, but no less fervid, Konzerthaus, where I absorbed the frenzied terrain of Shostakovich’s Fifth and the VPO under Hrůša’s baton, is just a few blocks away, and was built in 1907.
These European-style “shoebox halls” feature grand interiors, composed of curved ceilings, corinthian pillars, ornate backdrops, gold-trimmed edging, Baroque statuary and sconces, and plaster surfaces. The architectural design of these venues, with a spare width of 75 feet or less, small capacity of around 1800 seats, solid spruce platform, and a wraparound balcony, results in a compact reverberation time. These halls and their sound production have been heralded as the capstone of orchestral chambers.
As the acoustician Leo Beranek wrote in his authoritative, Concert and Opera Halls: How They Sound (1996), each shoebox “is small enough for loud orchestral effects to sound very loud,” while “its narrowness . . . lends significant definition to the music.” That is, we hear the sectional contrasts as the composer intended, whether thinly or densely orchestrated. According to Beranek, this sharp definition reflects an earlier period’s dominant style: ensemble and choral pieces with many moving parts. Such pieces, with their emphasis on harmony and dynamics, were written for these shoebox halls, which were, in effect, their sole acoustic home. Though today’s huge auditoriums and outdoor venues, all electronic, have changed much, classical music patrons treasure the highly intelligent sound and distinct musical textures of the post-Mozart symphonic hall. Even after a few centuries, European shoeboxes sound natural to our ears, luxuriant and brilliant, like an HDTV to our eyes. The key factor: the players can hear each other and, thus, blend or distinguish what’s written for the instrumental units and their soloists.
Just as critical as the acoustics, the Vienna Philharmonic comes equipped with a unique playing style that is sumptuous, flexible, and unstuffy, secure in both Austrian instrumentation (the woodsy quality of the horns) and the waltz tradition. In 1960, Bruno Walter, then 83 years old, recalled his first impression of the Philharmonic as a young man. For Walter, the experience was
life-altering . . . because it was this sound of the orchestra that I have experienced ever since. I have the feeling: this is the way an orchestra should sound; the way it should play. I had never heard the beauty, this calmness of the sound, that sort of glissando, the manner of vibrato, the string sound, the blend of woodwinds with the strings, with the brass, the balance of the brass in combination with the percussion contributing together to the overall sonority of the orchestra. For me, this impression was definitive, and now I would like to anticipate a point and tell you this: this sound, 1897, is the same today.
Indeed, Walter’s hearing is not far off from my own, nor from that of most listeners in the European capitals. The VPO consistently ranks as one of the world’s five great orchestras, and its honored status is rightfully merited by how instrumentally sharp the Philharmonic plays and sounds - a sharpness and acuity that exists only because the orchestra has been tempered for 180 years in its home venues. The ensemble’s auditory finesse is difficult to record; it’s best perceived live, that is, in its ephemeral creation. One must witness the raucous torrents of these two Stalin-hating Russian modernists rushing at the audience like a dozen charging chariots.
In my mid-hall seat at the Konzerthaus, I heard no distance or closeness to the orchestra’s sound. It neither lingered near the ceiling nor dawdled on the stage. Rather, I felt it arrive from all directions all at once, a complex architectural feat. The acoustical term is listener envelopment. This involves a hall’s activating spaciousness—the sound travels from its source and arrives, tone by tone, to the assembled, in three staggered time delays: the moment it’s played, the moment it reaches the ear, and the moment it reverberates in the room (as you imagine, moments two and three overlap). In the best halls, the sound has an initial time delay of less than 30 milliseconds (to travel from source to ear) and a reverberation time of two seconds. This speed and its ratio creates intimacy, aliveness, and, with a strong low-frequency stasis, warmth.. Within the 30- to 2000-millisecond delay, the discrete sonorities go by fast, but we discern them easily, especially the timbre of the standout instruments: an oboe solo here, the fanfare of a French horn there.
In Shostakovich’s symphonies, there’s a churning, aggressive sensuality coupled with an exhausting working out and playful knotting up of motives. Themes, some lyrical, some brutal, race forward and peter out and, in a sense, mimic the delay cycle I discussed above. The conductor, Hrůša, wheeled these turns, emphasizing the hurried pace and the roguish attacks of the strings and brass. Too often, orchestras chase the pulse; here, like the rhythmic drive of the Count Basic Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic presses the moment’s note whilst simultaneously pushing slightly ahead of it. In addition, there’s the hall’s amplification of the score’s blazing heat, its fractious moods, its bawdy humor. For instance, in parts of the third movement, or Largo, I could feel my solar plexus swell at the bottoming tones of the double basses, the sound marbled and clear yet also dangerous in its territorial insistence.
In great symphonic scores, the writing features a timbred and thematic interplay in which musicians play off each other while playing with each other. This interplay was evident in the orchestra’s lateral toss of Shostakovich’s themes and phrases, iterated and varied like valvular exits and entrances in which sections would appear and finish, then get out of each other’s way. A Bernstein-like flourisher, Hrůša buoyed the orchestra with his big gestures (his hands move just above his forehead) lifting the lid on the symphony’s explosive energy.
In Hrůša and company, I heard an affinity for the Russian idiom, expressed through the voluptuous charm of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. In it, arrives grand features of the romantic/modernist period - musical narratives shifting their moods, suddenly and noisily. Alternatively, Neoclassical Stravinsky and Ravel, rebels of refinement during the 1920s, loved contrast and controlled flair. They staged their dramas a la the French New Wave while the symphonic Russians filmed Westerns. The former used color, piercing winds, and exotic solos, while Prokofiev and Shostakovich emphasized largesse, harnessing the brass and strings to sweep and dominate. We still swoon to the German romantic Klang, a belltower of rapture and complexity, especially in the large orchestral poems of Strauss and Schoenberg.
The VPO’s legacy, exemplified by its palatial sound, captivated me (it was duplicated at the opera a week later in a pulsating Tosca with the hand-wringing passion of the tenor, Piotr Beczala, who sang the third act’s “E lucevan le stelle” twice, by audience demand). Although I knew the structural oddities of Shostakovitch’s Fifth, it was the venue that brought it to life. The score’s pummeling drive, at once, congealed and loosened the space of the Konzerthaus with its convulsive energy.
Here, the Fifth felt as if it was made for the hall’s storied resonance. Its interiority and the music’s exteriority stitched sinew and tissue to flesh in the obliging air. By the end, I was slumped in my seat, entirely overcome, with my face in my hands. I’d made it to the pinnacle, and I would have wept, were it not for the fact that I was ecstatically happy.
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Symphonic artistry in a first-class listening envelope might be as close to ephemeral perfection as one can get, but music is much more than its primal habitat or its nonrepresentational being. Music has other meanings, given through its autobiographical or historical context, rhetorical elements, and its reception by critics and audiences - its extramusical dimensions.
To know a work’s extramusical dimensions, you must “read” it; that is, study, analyze, and interpret the piece, as a writer evaluates a book or poem. However, attaching a composer’s private passions or a political context to a musical piece is a brambled path that must be walked carefully. As James Wood writes in an article about Mozart in The New Yorker, we have separate ways of “reading” music “as narrative” and “as cultural allegory.” A work’s bearing (a better word than meaning) can be heard as the narrative of the music itself and unheard but perceived as its allegory, its representation, a realm much larger than the notes and the rhythms.
The allegorical is like a pentimento, here but not here, undwelled on and unheard during a performance. After a work premieres, allegorical bearings arise, commune and combine; they expand beyond the “mere” music. Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony becomes his ode to nature (see Disney’s Fantasia). Eventually, the work merges its original context with its ongoing reception. These days we think of this amalgam as an artwork’s celebrity. No doubt you recall hearing a piece for the first time and the emotional frisson it sparked in you, which continues in your memory, signifying a time, a place, a passion, which, though buried perhaps, is not forgotten.
In my case, more than just the acoustic joy I experienced in Vienna, Shostakovich’s Fifth offers musical, narrative, and allegorical readings in abundance too. These readings include the story of how the symphony was constructed, the claim of what the work was designed to achieve, and the interpretations of those who heard it first and those who came to love and value it later. Perhaps the most intriguing period of analysis occurs before the Fifth was even written, from 1934 to 1937, when Shostakovich was threatened with censorship and, potentially, death under Stalin’s rule.
From his teenage years on, Shostakovich was a precocious and prolific composer. His first symphony was written when he was 18 years old, his first opera at 21. By his mid-20s, he had produced music for film, two more symphonies, piano works, and ballet scores. In 1932, the weird and wildly popular opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, premiered. In one sense, the musical drama portrays a woman’s victimhood in sound. Katerina is bored with her merchant husband and takes one of his workers as her lover. The father-in-law finds out and she murders him with rat poison. When the husband catches them red-handed, they kill him and bury him in the cellar. After a peasant discovers the body, the pair are convicted and exiled to Siberia. There, Katerina’s lover eyes another woman, who also happens to be a convict. Betrayed, Katerina drowns herself and the other woman in a lake. It was a rakish melodrama, with untimely explorations of free love and female passion which upset the Russian sense of modesty.
Before Stalin attended a performance in 1936, the composer’s self-described “comedy-satire” had scored a hit—more so with the public than the critics. The music was rollicking, sarcastic, intensely tongue-in-cheek, and yet also tender. Audiences loved it for its gutsy, if lurid, discomfort and pique, and for the composer’s inventiveness. The music, with its tawdry references to old Mother Russia and its Soviet replacement, dug deep into the country’s psyche. Some saw the opera as a metaphor for the Bolshevik overthrow: “an unvarnished view of the bestial face of Tsarist Russia,” wrote a reviewer. “A revelation of the brutishness, stinginess, lust, and cruelty of pre-revolutionary society,” wrote another. Prokofiev declared privately that the music was “swinish, the waves of lust just keep coming and coming.” So notorious was Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk that an American critic called it “pornographic” - the most prurient tale ever told on the opera stage. And, of course, part of the tale’s appeal was that Shostakovich, under the nose of Soviet authority, was getting away with such a work of visual and aural depravity.
Aware of its reputation, Stalin demanded to hear Shostakovich’s mad opera. Here, the story descends into the apocryphal. The Butcher (among his many affectionate nicknames) hated Lady Macbeth and its feminist heroine. Its score grated on his nerves. He found it unmelodious, lacking in the spirit and simplicity of socialist realism. He left at the intermission. A day later, in the Pravda, a philippic appeared: “Muddle Instead of Music.” The “review” branded the composer’s viewpoint as anti-Soviet, implying further that the opera’s showiness had duped the audience. The public was “unaware” of its deviousness, but Stalin could not be fooled by the music. It’s unlikely that the Father of Nations wrote the critique, yet it was probably influenced by his micromanagement of the arts.
Following the denunciation of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in the “press,” Shostakovich became convinced that he would be purged. The threat was real. During the later-named Great Terror of 1937, which included the Moscow Show Trials, two million “dissidents” are believed to have been arrested, tortured, and executed. To spare his family and child a midnight abduction, Shostakovich slept on the landing of his apartment building, his packed suitcase a pillow of sorts. He waited for months, suicidal and morbidly occupied by his powerlessness, but the henchmen never came. Instead, he resolved to make amends. Had he apologized and bowed publicly to Stalin, he might have received a reprieve, but it was more in his character to beg for mercy via music. During the spring of 1937, Shostakovich wrote his “mea culpa,” the Fifth Symphony, which was rehearsed by his best friend, the conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky, and premiered in the fall. Nearly a century later, this rattling, disquieting symphony, with its grief-glorifying slow movement and mass of internal conflicts, would unravel me in the enveloping hall of Vienna’s Konzerthaus.
The Fifth is often compared with another monumental #5: Beethoven’s. The latter is a motivic masterpiece about “fate,” the former, a work of insecurity, hypercritical in its existential self-inquiry. It seems to overthink its possibilities: should it mimic Beethoven’s mold of repetitive patterns? Should it goose step toward a goal? Should it avoid pillorying itself with so many digressions? Shostakovich made unexpected choices, many highly personal and improvisatory, and the result was a score uncertain of its “fate,” whether as music, as personal narrative, or as a Stalin-appeasing reaction to his erasure. Because of its emotive turns, its bold and subtle changes, its overdone atmospherics, its dipsomaniacal sense of adventure, the Fifth is amongst the most honest spectacles we have of a composer who has rendered his woundedness—both of his dread of execution and the faked hope that he’ll survive—into music.
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Unlike Brahms or Sibelius’s Fourth symphonies, which are irreducibly abstract, Shostakovich’s symphony is like a tone-poem-as-newsreel. The news I’ve discussed. Its expressive quality is harder to read because it oscillates between diametrically opposed conditions, particularly in the first and fourth movements: anxiety and calm, catastrophe and enthusiasm, life-negating and life-affirming. To my ear now, these oscillations subordinate the struggle between Shostakovich and his nemesis to the greater struggle, the one within Dmitri himself. Apropos of its internal battles, the Russian musicologist, Solomon Volkov, calls the Fifth, “perhaps the most disturbing and ambivalent music of the twentieth century.”
Volkov—whose chillingly meticulous Shostakovich and Stalin (2004) has steered my understanding of the Fifth’s historical and political context, antagonist, and its menagerie of emotions—reveals the warring interpretations that accompanied the Fifth’s November 1937 premiere. Alexander Fadeyev, head of the Union of Soviet Writers and lover of the “humanist” Stalin, described the Fifth as an “irreparable tragedy” He goes on to add, “[t]he ending does not sound like a resolution (still less like a triumph or victory), but rather like a punishment or vengeance on someone. A terrible emotional force, but a tragic force. It arouses painful feelings.” The critic R.A. Sharpe found the work ironic, labeling it an “optimistic tragedy.” For him, the tragic element, despite its careening inertia, was little more than “a bitter pretense of rejoicing.” The composer Isaak Dunayevsky warned that the Fifth bred “an unhealthy phenomenon of agitation, even psychosis to some degree.”
We need to remember that during the Great Terror, musical programs were skewed toward rallying industrial laborers, igniting the hopes of the peasants and the proletariat, or mobilizing militaristic passions. When composers complied, it was easy to ascribe a memoirist tag—the theme of this work is “my love for the motherland.” After all, all every Soviet artist feared Siberian exile. This is underscored by the sharp-eared commentator, Israel Nestyev, Prokofiev’s Russian biographer. Nestyev noted years later what the frightened composer felt and how he could best respond.
Let me remind you that this symphony appeared in 1937 at the height of the ‘Yezhov terror,’ when, at Stalin’s behest, masses of blameless people were executed, including some of Shostakovich’s closest friends. He suffered deeply. In those years, no other artist, whatever the field—no painter, playwright, or film director—could even think of protesting against the Stalinist terror through his art. Only instrumental music, with its own distinctive methods of expressive generalization, had the power to communicate the terrible truth of that time.
Post-Lady MacBeth, his reputation maligned in most quarters, Shostakovich atoned with his new symphony, written in just three months. Not long after the premiere, he joined the anvil chorus. His exuberant Fifth was, he said, “a constructive creative answer of a Soviet artist to just criticism.” Any artists’ work is ringed with just and unjust criticism. What was most revealing in this case was his kowtowing to the new national identity. Shostakovich declared himself a Soviet artist: Stalin had won that battle as well!
Because of the composer’s confession, artists and gossipers breathed a little easier. The death sentence had been removed—or, at least, waylaid. The fear of exile never left. To the authorities - or himself - Shostakovich couldn’t settle the Fifth’s meaning or score, so to speak. His most Soviet explanation was the least reliable, as vague as it was disingenuous: “the theme of my Fifth Symphony is the making of a man. I saw him, with all his experience, at the center of the work, which is lyrical from beginning to end. In the finale the tragically tense impulses of the earlier movements are resolved in optimism and joy of living.”
After Stalin died in 1952 and Khruschev launched the Thaw, Shostakovich put to rest the work’s ambiguities, including his own, with a summary interpretation. He declared that a direct correspondence existed between national events and the Fifth, and that all along, its theme was “totalitarianism,” not the “optimism and joy of living.”
And yet, questions persist. Did the Fifth’s third movement, which limps along like a wooden wheel missing its cotter pin, express Shostakovich’s fear of being silenced? Was the second movement a calliope of derision at his tormentor, who so far hadn’t made good on his threat? And is the rambunctiousness of the finale the sonification of a man being frog-marched to his execution, with sidewalk patriots cursing his modernist sympathies? Were the final few dozen measures a sarcastic ridicule of power?
The parodic progressoin of the last bars run circus-like, as so: a held trumpet note of B-flat, followed by a held trombone note of A-flat, followed by a held trumpet note of C natural, and these three unresolved tones asserting themselves against and above an A, bowed incessantly in the strings like a flying banner. This melee, at last, resolves as the “fifth” of the “triumphant” final chord of D major (Rostropovich, who was there that night, said anyone who thought the work triumphant was “an idiot.”). In the insistent throb of the two hundred and fifty-one repeated A notes, the symphony seems to raise a middle-finger to the system of Soviet surveillance. Or, as Volkov wonders, perhaps the symphony’s dark purpose was to incarnate its composer as Christ on the cross—the spikes nailed, settling in, and his sacrifice to the communist ideal achieved.
Regardless of how puzzling and paranoid these interpretations may be, the Fifth has endured as much for the ambivalence of its meaning (including the efforts lent by Shostakovich himself), as it has for its musical quality. Even in our own attempts and haste to make meaning, the interpretative act underscores music’s duplicity.
Early on in Mahler’s career, the Austro-Bohemian composer affixed layers of explanatory narrative to his work. He linked his First Symphony to a German novel, portraying its wandering lovelorn Titan-like hero through a barrage of woodland sounds. Later he would cancel all correspondences, choosing instead to take up the philosophical position of “art for art’s sake.” He wrote, contrary to his youth’s principles, that “starting with Beethoven, there is no new music that does not have an internal program. But any music in which the listener must first be informed what emotions it contains, and correspondingly what he is expected to feel, is worthless.”
How easy it is to get stuck between the representational story of what a particular work is about and what we feel it is about as we listen. To paraphrase Ralph Ellison: the shadow is the extramusical associations while the act is the symphony played live. But after so much intermingling between shadow and act in the Fifth, it’s unlikely that we can sever the score’s politics from the music.
But perhaps, that is not an issue. After all, music does have a lot to say because it bears aesthetic-cum-autobiographical-cum-historical weight. It cargoes that load from performance to performance, era to era, listener to listener, and in so doing, manifests a variety of contextual forms. A particular tune could be a protest song, a Sousa march, or a square-dance reel. It may be purely functional, like a wedding march, or it may linger in fantasy with its Liebestod melody. It could sonify epic literary narratives, like Copland or Stravinsky’s ballets or Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, or it could, like the work of Allan Pettersson, command complex, magnificent aural structures that unfold in and with the passage of time, its relationship entirely self-enclosed. Ultimately, music means what we need it to mean.
4/
At dinner after Hrůša’s Fifth in Vienna, I found myself trying to tell my hosts about my experience at the Konzerthaus, yet all I could muster were little jets of encomia. I have a long history of musical sunlight: in my youth I was a musician, a choral singer, a self-taught clarinetist and guitarist. Then, an undergrad composition major with years of sight-reading and ear-training, some failure with writing counterpoint, graduate study in theory, and thereafter, years as a critic. The cherry on top of this long personal history with music must be hearing the VPO in one of their two shoebox homes; I was transported to Valhalla and the journey reasserted my allegiance to the European canon.
That November evening 86 years ago in the Leningrad Symphony Hall, the Fifth’s first audience, through weeping introspection and shouts of approval, clapped for thirty minutes (twice as long as Maria Callas ever got), while the conductor, Mravinsky, held the score aloft like a Super Bowl trophy. Here was the piece the assembled had just heard, and make no mistake, its performance was key. Had the performance contained any of the semantic ambiguity that would later be attributed to Shostakovich’s work, it’s likely that the applause would have been warier and shorter. But that wasn’t the response given by the audience that night. The music did not sound unstable; it sounded primal and Russian, like a quaking tectonic plate. It offered catharsis, a symphonic way to let the citizenry express their deep dread of the state’s control over the arts through the arts
That evening the Fifth had only begun its journey into the extramusical realm. By the time I heard it, it had already taken on a plethora of meanings - personal, political, and aesthetic. And yet, despite knowing the Fifth’s backstory, as well as the music itself, the hall’s vivifying enhancement made it so that I felt I was hearing the work for the first time.
Later, I began to wonder if there’s a shorthand that might bridge the aesthetic and extramusical meanings of the Fifth. Listening to music can be an exercise in thinking about a work’s cultural or psychological relevancy, ,but my sense is that the closer we listen to the finely shaped tones and rhythms, joyous allegros and lingering adagios of such pieces, the less we dwell on its so-called binding ties. Music in performance should not necessarily remove us from contextualizing a given piece, from searching for its meaning in our lives or our history. But for those like me who write about what we hear, our efforts can be antagonistic to the pristine thing we love—the hills and valleys of beautifully contoured sound. Why replace music with explanatory prose?
The shorthand I’m looking for is presence. It’s a kind of tyranny of the aural because the aural is alive only in performance and at its most alive only in the best of halls (how marvelous then that such places still exist). The aural exists independent of the historicity of recordings and the essentialism of program notes and the uselessness of music analysis and the lionising of composer biographies. Music’s presence, I learn over and over, is all that really matters.
I rather like this Mahler quotation from a letter he sent to Bruno Walter in 1909. Near death, Mahler, the mystic, tapped his conductor’s baton on music’s transformative nature. When anxieties overwhelm, when thoughts mushroom into fears, tones and rhythms palliate our despair, and the mind’s preoccupation with what was and what if vanishes. “Strange,” Mahler wrote, “when I hear music—even when I am myself conducting it—I hear quite definite answers to all my questions, and [I] am wholly clear and sure. Or, in reality, I seem to feel clearly that they are not questions at all.”