Download PROGRAM NOTES Dmitri Shostakovich Symphony No. 6

PROGRAM NOTES
by Phillip Huscher
Dmitri Shostakovich
Born September 25, 1906, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Died August 9, 1975, Moscow, Russia.
Symphony No. 6, Op. 54
Shostakovich composed this symphony in 1939. The first performance was given on November 5 of that
year in Leningrad. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, three clarinets,
E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three
trombones and tuba, timpani, triangle, tambourine, drum, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, xylophone,
celesta, harp, and strings. Performance time is approximately thirty minutes.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first subscription concert performances of Shostakovich’s Sixth
Symphony were given at Orchestra Hall on April 14, 16, and 17, 1942, with Frederick Stock conducting.
Our most recent subscription concert performances were given on December 9, 10, and 11, 2004, with
Leonard Slatkin conducting. The Orchestra first performed this symphony at the Ravinia Festival on
August 11, 1945, with Pierre Monteux conducting, and most recently on August 9, 1966, with Kirill
Kondrashin conducting.
With his Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich reestablished himself as a great and popular composer. That work
was his answer to the Soviet authorities who had denounced him and his music—and it was, no doubt, a
way of proving to himself, as well as to his public, that he could be castigated and intimidated, but he
would not be defeated. It’s a brilliant and triumphant piece, although Shostakovich’s own personal victory
wasn’t unequivocal, and in order to revive his career and maintain his good name, he had even hidden a
complete symphony (his fourth) in his desk drawer, where it would remain for twenty-five years.
For some time, Shostakovich didn’t know how to follow the success of his Fifth Symphony, which had
been written with great almost life-and-death urgency in just three months, and which was greeted with
reassuring cheers at the premiere late in 1937. For several months, he turned his attention to chamber
music, composing the first of his fifteen string quartets. He also wrote film scores and a suite for jazz
band, as if to distance himself from the world of the classical symphony as much as possible. From time
to time he talked about writing a “Lenin symphony” in no less than four movements, although we don’t
know if he ever actually started it.
Then, in 1939, he began a new symphony. It is, almost inevitably, a complete contrast to the Fifth, and
placed side by side with that work, it calls attention to the dramatic polarity of Shostakovich’s nature—the
same night-and-day dichotomy that would eventually be apparent in the neighboring eighth and ninth
symphonies as well. Since his youth, Shostakovich had been unpredictable and moody—lighthearted one
day, troubled and pensive the next. Once he became a well-known composer, his dual nature only
became more pronounced as he tried, sometimes with obvious pain, to balance his public face and
private life, and to reconcile political pressure with personal needs. But the remarkably wide compass of
his mood swings and the extreme range of his emotions enabled him to write music of an unusually rich
and complex character.
At first, music lovers didn’t know what to make of Shostakovich’s new symphony, particularly since it
lacked an obvious theme—like the compelling conflict-to-triumph progression of the Fifth—or a gripping,
inspirational finale. The Sixth Symphony is laid out in an unusual pattern of just three movements, with a
large, somber first movement followed by two short ones—a breezy scherzo and a circus-like finale. The
first movement, longer than the second and third combined, is very slow throughout; it’s a grand and
dramatic opening statement that catches something of the danger that was in the air in 1936. It’s so
burdened with anxiety and desolation that it barely seems to move forward—music of meditation, not
action, and that’s what distinguishes it from the big slow movements that open Shostakovich’s later Eighth
and Tenth symphonies.
The second-movement scherzo, by contrast, bristles with activity; the tone is both light and sinister,
sometimes alternately and sometimes simultaneously. The exuberant finale, an almost Rossinian romp,
remains in high spirits throughout, although occasionally, as in much of Shostakovich’s “happiest” music,
the smile seems forced. Shostakovich thought the finale was so infectious and unthreatening that “even
the most fastidious critics won’t have anything to pick at.” At the premiere, the audience demanded to
hear it again.
This strangely lopsided symphony doesn’t “add up” until one understands that it was composed as war
clouds were gathering—and that, given the political situation of the time, the tragedy implicit in the first
movement had to be masked by the cheerful public face of the conclusion. It was the same kind of
duplicity with which Shostakovich was only too familiar—and at which he had, by now, become a master.
Not long after Shostakovich finished his Sixth Symphony, Stalin launched his invasion of Finland and
Shostakovich moved on to two symphonies in which the devastation and agony of war are confronted
head-on in music of searing brilliance. The Sixth has, as a result, often been overlooked between the
famous heroic testimony of the Fifth and the overwhelming wartime statements of the Seventh and the
Eighth. But the Sixth is, in many ways, a more personal work, reflecting not only the difficult and trying
times in which Shostakovich lived and worked, but also the resilience and strength of his character.
Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
For the Record
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra recorded Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony in 1968 with Leopold
Stokowski conducting for RCA.
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