“Jazz,” wrote George Gershwin, “is an American folk music, a very powerful one which is probably in the blood of the American people more than any other style of folk music … I believe it can be made the basis of serious symphonic works of lasting value.” This is a much-debated assertion, not so much because of its argument about the constitution of American blood, but because of its argument about jazz. Gershwin managed to bring down the wrath of two kinds of purists—1930s disciples of “The True Jazz,” who lambasted Gershwin for trying to codify an improvisatory form, and conservative music critics who, as Edward Jablonski puts it, denounced him for introducing “all that bawdy-house music into the sacred precincts of Carnegie Hall.” Several American composers—perhaps envious of Gershwin’s enormous popular success—have echoed this criticism, chiding him for his “superficial Americana” (Virgil Thomson) and his failure to concentrate jazz elements into “a significant formal cast” (William Flanagan).
Despite these criticisms, Gershwin arguably remains one of the most popular American composers, and his stock has steadily risen with academics. To the charge that Gershwin’s source was less “pure” jazz than commercial popular music of the 1920s, the composer’s admirers reply, “So, what?” Indeed, it is precisely Gershwin’s fondness for amalgamation—with combined elements of jazz, pop, classical, blues, ragtime, and Tin Pan Alley—that are part of his peculiarly American charm. European masters and Gershwin champions like Stravinsky, Ravel, and Schoenberg recognized this charm from the beginning, often in stark contrast to their American colleagues.
The Piano Concerto in F—which the composer himself premiered in 1925 at Carnegie Hall with Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony—is quintessential Gershwin. Sometimes brash and saucy and at other times swooning and sentimental, it whirls the listener along with a dizzying succession of ideas inspired by blues, ragtime, the Charleston, and dance-band waltz rhythms, encompassing enough ideas for two or three concertos.
Gershwin’s music has a distinctive, instantly recognizable voice, yet his achievements align with those of Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and Bartók: He was a virtuoso pianist who premiered his own works and brought the vernacular culture of his country into the classical repertoire. In the Piano Concerto in F, Gershwin deftly contains his clashing moods and themes within the structure of the classical concerto. The work includes a sonata-form first movement, a soulful slow movement, and a brilliant Allegro agitato finale. The main unifying element, however, is Gershwin’s strong musical personality, which imprints every note. Whether it’s the formal and dignified opening theme for piano, the intentionally cloying show tune for strings just before the development section, the toccata-like main theme of the finale (an outgrowth of Gershwin’s admiration of Bach), or the steamy blues riffs in the slow movement, it all sounds distinctly Gershwin.
Though The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians describes Gershwin’s works as too episodic and not properly developed, Gershwin invented a new sound, one that is neither popular nor classical, but rather defined precisely by its distinctive flexibility. There is a freedom in Gershwin, a willingness to take risks and swing casually from elegance to vulgarity, from earnestness to campiness—a daredevil quality that is not found in the more neoclassical jazz pastiches of Milhaud, Stravinsky, and Ravel.
Often called upon to caress the keys with silken suaveness only to suddenly begin thumping and pounding into a new dance episode, the pianist’s role in the concerto is particularly unpredictable. Yet with the possible exception of the rapid repeated notes in the finale, the soloist is not allowed to be as ostentatious and independent as in the concerto’s smash hit predecessor, Rhapsody in Blue. Throughout the concerto, the pianist is an equal partner with the orchestra: This is a “real” concerto rather than a rhapsody, with fascinating interplay between the soloist and Gershwin’s lavishly colored orchestra. The concerto offers such an abundance of big moments that the listener soon surrenders to them rather than trying to sort them out. One moment that stands out is the swaying, melancholy tune that the orchestra introduces after a piano cadenza in the middle of the second movement, which makes up the soul of the work with its bluesy trumpet solos and bittersweet mood.
The first two movements spill over into the finale, which can’t resist reintroducing several of the earlier themes. The most dramatic example of this cyclical style is a final reappearance of the concerto’s opening theme just before a series of shuddering orchestral tremolos leads to the work’s exhilarating close.
Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” Symphony, one of the most searing works of musical art to emerge from World War II, has recently undergone a rehabilitation in the eyes of major music critics. Censure followed by rehabilitation was, of course, a familiar pattern for Shostakovich throughout his troubled career in the Soviet regime. Now, ironically, we see the same phenomenon operating posthumously.
The “Leningrad” Symphony has always been popular with the Russian people, who to this day celebrate their remarkable resistance to the Nazi siege of Leningrad and any art depicting it. But for years, the symphony was denigrated by the non-Russian musical intelligentsia for alleged bombast and self-indulgence, much as Mahler’s symphonies were a generation earlier. (Virgil Thomson wrote that the symphony “seems to have been written for the slow-witted, the not very musical, and the distracted.”) Even one of Shostakovich’s colleagues, Béla Bartók, took a swipe at this symphony by lampooning its famous “invasion theme” in the fourth movement of his Concerto for Orchestra.
Recently, however, the symphony has (with some caveats) been reevaluated as a complex, satiric, even cynical piece rather than a straightforward epic of survival and heroism—an angle our culture apparently finds more comfortable than simple inspiration or heroics. Shostakovich’s purported remark in Solomon Volkov’s controversial 1979 “oral history” Testimony started the re-reading: “I have nothing against calling the Seventh the ‘Leningrad’ Symphony, but it’s not about Leningrad under siege, it’s about the Leningrad Stalin destroyed and Hitler merely finished off.”
This remark shocked many of Shostakovich’s admirers (and Testimony itself has been the subject of controversy over its veracity), but it has helped the composer’s cause by throwing this and other “heroic” pieces into a new dimension—and giving music critics something new to write about. The opening theme, for example, once universally read as representing Soviet determination and will over the Nazi aggressor, is now re-read as a satire on Soviet militarism and “gigantism,” the evidence cited being the ponderous scoring and boorish repetitions. Even the lyrical second theme, once thought to be the epitome of Mother Russia, has been reinterpreted as a sullen anti-Soviet commentary. As for the snarling, hair-raising “invasion theme” in the middle (replacing the usual development section in first-movement sonata form), the conventional reading of it as a brutal depiction of the Nazi war machine has now been supplemented by the idea that it represents Soviet militarism as well. In the words of David Wright, it “sounds for all the world as if a committee of the Soviet Composers Union had tried to write Ravel’s Bolero.”
And so it goes: The middle sections of both the second and third movements are seen as comments on Stalinist oppression since they are based on the kind of obsessively repeating two-note motifs that Shostakovich often used to represent Stalin. And the “victory” celebration of the finale has been reinterpreted as being darkened by the continued rule of Communism represented by dissonant notes in the C-major peroration right up until the end. In this reading, the return of the “invasion” theme as a dirge is a funeral for the Russian people.
Against all this is the evidence that the piece—at least in its initial inception—was indeed meant as a comment on the war and Russian resistance to Hitler, and a vividly heartfelt one at that. The Testimony version of the symphony may be the newest revisionist interpretation of a composer whose entire career was plagued by demands for “revisions” by political orthodoxies. By all contemporary accounts, including his own, Shostakovich did mean the “Leningrad” to be his “Eroica”—a work dedicated, in his words, to “the struggle in the Great Patriotic War.”
Despite all the Stalinist censure he had endured, Shostakovich was a genuine patriot and hater of Fascism, going so far as to try to enlist in the army immediately following Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union. When he was turned down (all artists were exempt), he still joined a voluntary fire-watch brigade.
Shostakovich dedicated the symphony to Leningrad in its resistance to 900 days of Nazi siege, with the dead estimated at one million. The urgency of his mission in writing the symphony is communicated in his own words: “The work on my new score completely captivated me. Neither the pitiless air raid nor the oppressive atmosphere of the besieged city could impair my creative imagination. I completed the first movement on the 3rd, the second on the 17th, the third on the 29th of September. I worked day and night … Bombs fell all around, and the anti-aircraft guns went into action, but I never interrupted my work for a moment.”
This stirring account does not appear to be exaggerated; by the end of September, Shostakovich was evacuated against his will to Moscow, then to a village called Kuibyshev (now again called Samara, just as Leningrad is now again St. Petersburg), where he completed the symphony.
The programming of the symphony was as dramatic as its composition. It was premiered in Kuibyshev in March 1942 by players in the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra, many of whom were evacuees; later that month, the symphony was performed in Moscow, then—in a remarkable bit of anti-Nazi propaganda—in Leningrad, still under siege, with musicians flown in from the front. A microfilm of the score was sent to America, where the symphony was programmed by Toscanini, and in a final burst of PR, Shostakovich appeared on the cover of Time magazine, with the requisite helmet and protective clothing.
Audiences around the world were deeply moved by the work. With its 60 or more performances in its first year alone, the “Leningrad” Symphony may well have had the most immediate impact of any “message” piece in the history of concert music. “No other piece of music,” wrote Wolfgang Dömling in a 1993 essay, “has ever been able to arouse such reactions.”
Despite grumpy caveats about aesthetics of the piece after its wartime glory days, there is no way a piece this long and complex could have aroused such a reaction were the music itself not compelling. “All art is propaganda,” said George Orwell in the 1940s, “but not all propaganda is art.” This symphony is clearly both. No matter how it is interpreted, whether as anti-Nazi, anti-Stalin, or both, the “Leningrad” is an electrifying experience, full of epic ideas, eloquent solos in every section of the orchestra, and some of Shostakovich’s most sensational large-scale effects. The controversial “invasion” sequence in the long first movement is a tour de force—not only the march itself, with its brilliant accretion of orchestral layers in each of its repetitions, but the terrifying disintegration of the whole edifice once it reaches its maximum intensity. The slow movement, of Mahlerian intensity and anguish, transcends all programmatic references, even the original subtitle, “Our Country’s Wide Vistas.” Most awesome of all are the symphony’s final bars, where everything builds toward a thrilling affirmation of victory but with a dark subtext suggested by the subtle dissonance of the spiking, resplendent, C-major “victory” chords.
It is this final combination of exhilaration and despair—so completely contiguous—that gives credence to both political readings of the symphony. The Nazis were vanquished soon after the “Leningrad” Symphony’s premiere, but Shostakovich would struggle against the ravages of Stalinism for the rest of his life.
—Jack Sullivan