…Duluth Superior Symphony Concert.
Once again it was outstanding. When I first attended the Symphony thirty years ago I would wince regularly. Today it is a very fine symphony indeed and has proven so under the baton of a succession of applicants for the position of maestro.
The last half of the symphony was Shostakovitch’s fifth Symphony. It was superlative.
Here’s the back story. Its composer read a damning review of his work likely written by mass murderer Joseph Stalin in 1936. It was tantamount to a death sentence as Papa Joe was in the midst of another of his purges at the time. Dimitri spent the next year looking over his shoulder waiting for the secret police to haul him off and disappear him. While waiting for the knock on the door he wrote the symphony.
He performed it a year later in 1937 (it was first performed in Duluth in 1953 three years before Stalin’s death) The Russian audience of 1937 applauded for half an hour.
Much of the music is uncomfortable to listen to. It is grand. The interpretation of the music after its performance was that it was about happiness and triumph following despair and sorrow. That accorded with Stalin’s views. Years later the composer ridiculed that interpretation saying in effect that it was about the sort of feigned happiness one could expect from a person with a gun put to his head being told to be happy.
Having read the notes in advance of the work and heard the conductor’s reiteration of them that’s just what I heard. I thought of Joseph Stalin all through the piece. I was one of the first to stand up and applaud at the work’s conclusion. I didn’t stand for half an hour but before long everyone else was standing too.
I can’t help but wonder if the concert goers in 1937 weren’t aware that Shostakovitch was a hair’s breadth from death at the hands of the Secret Police and stood clapping for that half hour willing the state to spare the composer’s life.
