I’ve just gone quickly through that old (and quite long) Shostakovich thread to see if Veronika had anything to say that’s worth preserving, and the answer was not much, but here’s more than that (somewhat edited):
Regarding melodic strength or weakness in Shostakovich: let's not forget that the fixation with "strong melodies" as a prerequisite for "great music" hasn't been around for that long, maybe (from our present perspective, I hasten to add) since Purcell or thereabouts. Nobody concerns themselves with the "strength" or otherwise of the melodies in, say, the masses of Dufay, Ockeghem or Josquin, or for that matter in the operas of Monteverdi. Shostakovich's music questions the musical priorities and assumptions of its time but does this on the level of entire musical "objects" like melodies and harmonic sequences, rather than at a more microscopic level like Schönberg. This is why his music often sounds superficially as if it's made out of familiar components, although the undermining and recontextualisation of those components is at the same time at least as radical a statement as composing with "twelve tones related only to each other". We know from moments in Shostakovich's film and ballet music that he could write a traditionally memorable tune, an "earworm" as we say in Germany, when he wanted to. Which suggests that in the symphonies he had a reason for not wanting to; his intent was rather (as Ron incisively points out in his contribution on the finale of the 5th) to fragment and reconfigure the elements of "received" music in order that they should serve new and multiple expressive and structural purposes. Another example: the first subject of the first movement of the 4th, which sounds to me like several melodic ideas broken up and recombined so that our attention is drawn to the disjunctures rather than the "tune" (this is a technique explicitly and systematically used by Birtwistle, by the way).
Sorry to go on. What I mean to say is: before dismissing an aspect of a composer's work as "weak" it's often enlightening to proceed from the assumption that they know what they're doing and to interpret what seems to be "missing" as a deliberate strategy on the composer's part to direct our attention elsewhere.
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Looking further through the thread, I found these excerpts Reiner had posted from a 1967 Russian-English phrasebook, which he promised he hadn’t made up and which I thought newer contributors might find diverting:
IN THE TAXI:
"How much is it to Aldwych?"
"Two shillings, Sir"
"Here is a Pound, keep the change"
AT THE TAILORS:
"I want a suit similar to Winston Churchill's"
AT THE THEATRE:
"What is the performance this evening?"
"We are giving the tragedy of King Lear, by Shakespeare, Sir".
"Who is playing the King?"
"The leading role is played by Kenneth Williams, Sir"
"I will have two best seats in the Stalls, please"
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Back to Veronika, on Shostakovich’s 1st:
This is the one I know least well, and what struck me immediately is now much of the later Shostakovich is already there, in the melodic and harmonic turns, in the tendency towards fragmentation which already announces itself in the introduction to the first movement and in numerous other ways. I'm sure I'm the thousandth person to point out that the 1st is more similar to the 15th than any of the others are, and I may have been nodding off but I seem to remember I heard a cello figure somewhere which connects to the apparition of "Tristan" (or is it) in the later work. The mosaic of stylistic references (especially in the first movement) and the often soloistic orchestration punctuated by abrupt tutti passages connect to the 4th as well as the 15th. I was left with the impression that the "language" (for want of a better word) was already well-formed, but he wasn't yet sure what it was for.
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… and on the 3rd:
The more I hear it the more it grows on me, and the less the final chorus sounds tacked on to the end. Another perhaps interesting aspect I noticed was that near the beginning (2'20" according to Barshai; I don't have a score) Shostakovich introduces a repeated-note accompaniment which is maybe alluded to (negatively) by the slower and much more insistent sawing which runs doggedly through the closing stages of the 5th.
As for the piece consisting of excerpts from a journey rather than the whole journey, I find that a highly astute analysis. Although I am beginning to think there's a symphonic form hidden in there, even if the rare occurrences of "development" are somewhat perfunctory and short-lived. Another way of looking at the piece, then, might be as a kind of Futurist, multiperspectival and truncated view of Beethoven's 9th (which also lets itself down at the end, in my opinion).
Anyway, I think the 3rd should be taken more seriously. One of these days a revelatory performance of it could well change a few minds.
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on the 4th :
I've been trying to organise some thoughts on the 4th, although it's been discussed "out of order" previously... and, for anyone who's interested, the introduction to Pauline Fairclough's book on the piece is at
http://www.ashgate.com/subject_area/downloads/sample_chapters/Soviet_Credo_Shostakovichs_Fourth_Symphony_Intro.pdfand makes very interesting reading indeed. I'd been wondering fruitlessly why so many of the more obvious Mahlerisms seem to relate specifically to Mahler's 2nd symphony (even specifically the scherzo thereof), a fact which PF mentions in the introduction and which she presumably expands later on.
Other specific Mahlerisms involve not only Mahler 1 (beginning of DSCH 4/iii, but, as in most such references, intervallically "distorted") but also seemingly the 10th, if I'm not mistaken, although I may well be - the ascent at the beginning of the first subject of i, when stated later on in a variant rhythm, brings to (my) mind the opening, repeatedly interrupted, figure of Mahler 10/v. Would I be right in recalling from somewhere that DSCH was one of the composers approached to complete that work, but refused?
The 4th tends to be seen (by both sides) as a key to solving the "Shostakovich controversy", because of its being written around the time of the famous Pravda attack, which made me think about where the roots of that affair actually lie. Opinion in the former USSR tends to agree, as Reiner has pointed out, with the broad lines of Volkov's thesis, however bogus some of his book might be and however propagandistic (presenting as it does, at a time when the USSR still existed, a decidedly "West-friendly" view of the composer). It's clear, then, that Shostakovich abhorred the murderous totalitarianism of Stalin. But what was his opinion of the Bolshevik Revolution before it became apparent that it had been hijacked by that brutal bureaucrat? There was a time, after all, when emancipation from the feudalism of the tsars was still remembered as a glorious moment in history. Perhaps what the 4th is doing is (consciously and/or not) tracing that process of disillusionment, however not in the linear narrative of a Straussian tone-poem (or DSCH's own 11th symphony, for example) but in a multiplicity of perspectives which reflects the conflicts and complexities in the position and thoughts of an artist who had grown up in revolutionary times. And these conflicts are reflected onto the music at every level - in its broad formal divisions, in the intricately twisted extrapolation of symphonic form which characterises the first and third movements, in the way almost every detail is distorted, exaggerated or just "not quite itself" in some way. I have the feeling of understanding more about those times and the impossibility of an uncomplicated response to them every time I hear the 4th, and while it becomes more familiar it doesn't become less disturbing.
Of course there are still more questions than answers, one of which is: why the (not quite right as usual) quotation from Irving Berlin's "Always" (1925)
