So I've never seen Good Omens (don't watch a lot of TV) but I will never pass up the chance to talk about Shostakovich, so I wanted to share some on the remarkable history of Symphony no. 5 today. Maybe this piece was specifically chosen on purpose for the show and some of you Good Omens fans may be able to draw connections between the show and its history; if that's the case, let me know; I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts!
The date is November 21, 1937. To the audience at the Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic, the soon-to-be world famous symphony justified a standing ovation.
To the relatively-unknown conductor, Evgeny Mravinsky, it would be the start of a long, successful, and historic career.
To Soviet critics, the work was “a Soviet artist’s creative response to justified criticism.”
But to the thirty-one-year-old composer, Dmitri Shostakovich, the work’s success could have been a matter of life and death.
A few years prior, in 1934, Shostakovich premiered an opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. It was an enormous success, both in the Soviet Union and abroad, until January 26th, 1936, when Stalin, along with Zhdanov and Molotov, went to see the opera. Two days later, an article titled "Muddle Instead of Music" was published in Pravda, one of the main Soviet newspapers (along with Izvestiya), denouncing the opera for "formalism." Stalin's industrialization campaign of the mid-30s also called for a rapid cultural shift from the more progressive era of the late 20s, and with that came a shift in the arts. "Socialist Realism," an artistic style promoting easily-accessible patriotic works that glorified the common worker, was promoted, while "formalism," or art that was thought to embody "western" or "bourgeois" values, often including the avant-garde, was heavily discouraged. Lady Macbeth, while largely a product of the previous era, was now branded "formalist," meaning Shostakovich- then just twenty-nine- was officially under ideological attack.
To make matters worse, from 1936 to 1938, the Great Purges (sometimes called the Great Terror) was in effect, as suspected German spies, Stalin's political opponents, and dissidents were sent to camps, exiled, or executed, along with ethnic minorities, so-called "kulaks" (landowning peasants, as well as those who resisted the collectivization of land), "formalist" artists (see the case of Vsevolod Meyerhold), and civilians considered suspicious. Following the 1936 denunciation, many of Shostakovich's friends and colleagues were exiled or purged as well, leading many critics who once supported him and his work to denounce him. He canceled the premiere of his fourth symphony- among his most avant-garde (it would not be premiered until 1961, after Stalin's death in 1953), and wrote a ballet, "The Limpid Stream," intended to comply with Socialist Realism standards. However, this work, too, was denounced.
There are accounts that say that around 1937, Shostakovich slept with a packed suitcase on the staircase outside his apartment, so that if he were to be arrested by the NKVD (the Soviet secret police under Stalin), his wife and daughter would not be disturbed. The conductor who premiered it, Evgeny Mravinsky, was an obscure name at the time, although he would go on to premiere Shostakovich's symphonies up until the 13th (which warrants a completely separate post for later). The 5th, at least on the surface, turned out to be a far more "toned down" work than the 4th, leading many critics and officials to believe that Shostakovich had learned his lesson and would be a good composer and never do a formalism again because that is Wrong And Bad. Newspapers had dubbed it "a Soviet artist's creative response to justified criticism."
The 5th Symphony is perhaps Shostakovich's most analyzed work, because of the sheer number of "hidden messages" that have been interpreted in it. Many people don't interpret the 5th as an admission of defeat, but rather an act of malicious compliance; perhaps it's a creative response to criticism, but not in the sense that suggests that criticism was justified.
The Largo of the symphony, it is said, caused people to openly weep at the premiere, and shares some commonalities with Eastern Orthodox religious music. It is sometimes interpreted as a secular prayer for the victims of the Purges, although this, of course, hasn't been confirmed. And yet, the Finale ends in a major key- one of the factors that cemented the work as promoting patriotic optimism. But the way conductors play the Finale varies; while Bernstein (whose recording is shown in the Good Omens screenshot) plays it quite fast, for instance, Mravinsky- the premiere conductor- plays it much slower, perhaps suggesting a shade of sarcasm or even laboriousness, or even the exhausted triumph of surviving a perilous ordeal.
The Finale also features 252 consecutive "A" notes. While this alone may bring to mind the concept of "forced rejoicing," the note "A" in particular could carry a few interesting meanings. In Russian solfege, "A" is represented by the letter Я (pronounced "ya"). Я can also mean "I" or "I am," and this interpretation suggests that perhaps Shostakovich is repeating an affirmation of his own personhood over and over- "I am, I am, I am," 252 times in a row. A less common interpretation also suggests that the use of "A," or "Я," could represent Elena Konstantinovskaya, a young translator whom Shostakovich had an affair with in 1934. Konstantinovskaya was arrested during the Purges (and later released), and supposedly, Shostakovich had visited her once while she was in prison and told her, "aren't you glad you didn't marry me?" William T. Vollmann's historical fiction novel Europe Central entertains the idea that Shostakovich retained a lifelong obsession with Konstantinovskaya, and while we have no proof that this was the case, we do know he used the nickname "Lyalya" (Ляля) for her. Could the letter Я in this case be a reference to her? We don't know.
However, there is a far more direct likely reference to Konstantinovskaya in the 5th. The symphony includes a quotation from the famous aria "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle" from Bizet's opera Carmen, in which the words "l'amour, l'amour" are sung. Konstantinovskaya married a photographer named Roman Karmen and they moved to Spain, and so the reference to love in Carmen (Karmen), an opera that takes place in Spain, may be perhaps a hint towards personal heartbreak within the symphony.
All that aside, one of the most interesting- and telling- "Easter eggs" in the 5th is a quotation of a musical setting of Pushkin's "Rebirth." While the symphony does not have words, these are the words of the poem that this musical quotation was set to:
“A barbarian painter with his somnolent brush
Blackens the genius’ painting
Slapping over it senselessly
... That right there is as direct as it gets.
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