Shostakovich Symphony No. 9
Shostakovich Symphony No. 9 Program Notes
By August 1945, when Shostakovich composed this work, expectations were high that his would be a tribute to Allied victory over Axis powers. Stalin was reputed to anticipate such a thing, and the official news agency reported it as being devoted to the Celebration of our Great Victory. Instead of the paean expected by the Soviet, Shostakovich delivered a relatively short, scherzo-like work, reminiscent of Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony: the first movement follows classical allegro-form quite strictly. Leonard Bernstein would later call Shostakovich’s Ninth Dzone big series of jokes. Of course, they are not all funny jokes: the laughter seems forced at times. Even the second movement waltz (a typically cheerful form) is gloomy. The actual scherzo (third movement) is fiery and virtuosic, before trailing off into the mausoleum-like seriousness of the fourth movement – the lower brass pontificate in unison, before the bassoons soulful response gives way to a cartoon-like, sometimes frantic and comical last movement. Censured by critics and obviously not the hoped-for monument, the Ninth was unofficially withdrawn until after Stalinǯs death. Much has been written about the life of artists and intellectuals in the USSR, and Volkov’s famous Testimony (1979) would have neatly tied together Shostakovich’s music to the politics, were it not so fraudulently written. However, we can assume Shostakovich knew he was walking a fine line in disappointing authorities. Plenty of intellectuals were shot for openly speaking out, but an abstract Symphony could obscure political messages. And as colleague of Shostakovich recounted in his diary during the Ninths composition: [he] told me about the uranium bomb, of the inconceivable, terrible catastrophe of Hiroshima… I started to give voice to my despondency, but Dmitri Dmitriyevich, his eyes fixed on some point overhead, quickly cut short my lamentations: our job is to rejoice!Symphony No. 9 in E-flat major is the shortest and most sardonic of Shostakovich's symphonies, composed in 1945. After the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, Stalin expected a grand celebratory symphony befitting the occasion — Shostakovich delivered instead a brief, irreverent, and sometimes farcical work that baffled and angered the authorities.
Shostakovich composed the symphony in just one month in the summer of 1945, and it was premiered in Leningrad on November 3, 1945, conducted by Yevgeny Mravinsky. Official displeasure was swift and lasting.
A typical performance lasts approximately 25 to 28 minutes — remarkably compact for a wartime symphony expected to be a monument.
Listen for the deliberately lightweight, almost clownish character of much of the symphony — the chirpy woodwind writing, the bouncy rhythms, the touches of deliberate vulgarity. The slow fourth movement introduces a sudden note of ominous solemnity, like a warning, before the finale resumes its sardonic dance.
Symphony No. 9 was interpreted by Soviet authorities as a deliberate insult to the occasion it was supposed to commemorate, and Shostakovich was subjected to renewed official criticism. He later said that he had written exactly what he felt — that after so much wartime death and suffering, a pompous triumphalist symphony would have been obscene.
