Arts unravelled: The secret signals in Shostakovich’s symphonies

Born in St Petersburg in 1906, Dmitri Shostakovich showed a prodigious musical talent from an early age.

Admitted to the Petrograd Conservatory at the age of 13, he studied under  Leonid Nikolayev, Alexander Ossovsky and Nikolai Malko. At the age of 19 he completed his First Symphony, which was premiered by the Leningrad Philharmonic in May of 1926 to much acclaim.

The reaction to his First Symphony brought Shostakovich great recognition in the Soviet Union, something he would enjoy for much of his twenties, even if his modernist approach to subsequent works meant they didn’t necessarily meet with as much success as his debut. However, he remained a popular figure in his home country through this time, with his work, such as his 1934 opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, often championed as the result of and an illustration of exemplary Soviet culture.

However, in 1936, the tide turned for Shostakovich when Soviet General Secretary Josef Stalin attended a performance of the opera, flanked by a number of his politburo. Shostakovich was reportedly ‘white as a sheet’ as he took his bow following the third act, and with good reason. An audience from Stalin could make or break an artist’s reputation in the Soviet Union, and in this instance the latter proved true. The leader was not happy.

Writing for BBC Culture, Clemency Burton-Hill tells us the next day, Pravda ran with the headline ‘Muddle instead of music’ denouncing the composer’s work as ‘coarse, primitive and vulgar’. It also hinted that ‘things could end very badly’ for Shostakovich unless he switched musical gears and toed the expected Soviet line. As a result Shostakovich was subsequently shunned by almost everyone he knew.

A bad end for a composer in the Soviet Union of the 1930s meant much more than a bad review. In the same year as Shostakovich was denounced as an enemy of the people by Stalin, many of the composer’s closest friends and relatives were imprisoned or executed. These included his brother-in-law, the physicist Vsevolod Frederiks; his great friend the musicologist Nikolai Zhilyayev and his mother-in-law, the astronomer Sofiya Mikhaylovna Varzar.

In 1937 Shostakovich was summoned for interrogation, but, according to Burton-Hill, enjoyed a rare moment of fortune – the composer’s interrogator was arrested before his own appointment came. Spared in this instance, but such was the fear of what may happen Shostakovich had reportedly taken to sleeping in the stairwell of his building with a small suitcase prepared should he need to flee.

Yet despite the ever-present fear of repercussions from the Soviet government, Shostakovich not only remained in St Petersburg but composed a number of more works. These included his Fourth and Fifth Symphonies – although an ongoing Pravda campaign against the composer meant his Symphony No. 4 would not be heard until 1961.

Evacuated to Samara and then ultimately Moscow following the siege of Leningrad in the Second World War, Shostakovich continued to compose throughout Stalin’s dictatorship until, in 1948, he was once again denounced by the ruling party, this time by Central Committee secretary Andrei Zhdanov for writing ‘inappropriate and formalist music’. He would not publish another significant composition until Stalin’s death in 1953.

The messages of dissent

Given the treatment of himself and his peers it can be no surprise to know that Shostakovich was strongly opposed to Stalin’s dictatorship. He was also an opponent of anti-Semitism, something that was on the increase in the Societ Union at the time, and would escalate significantly in the years following the Second World War. Shostakovich was not only continuing to compose new works in spite of Stalin, he was doing so against him.

The composer began to include anti-government messages within his work; often mocking Stalin’s anti-Semitism by bringing Jewish musical elements into his compositions, such as the klezmer-like music in the finale of his 2nd Trio for Piano, Violin and Cello. In 1948 – the same year that Stalin began his murderous campaign against the country’s leading Jewish poets, actors, and writers – Shostakovich composed the song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry, which included several pieces said to depict the hardships of being Jewish in the Soviet Union.

To write music on Jewish themes was a provocative act, a direct critique of Stalin, and although Shostakovich attempted to disguise his aims by throwing a trio of lighter pieces into the cycle it didn’t wash with the Union of Composers. They refused to approve the work and it remained in the composer’s desk drawer, unperformed not until after Stalin’s death.

The death of Stalin in 1953 brought Shostakovich back in from the Soviet Union’s musical cold, and having not produced a major new composition since that second denunciation, he now produced two string quartets and a symphony, his Tenth. It’s believed by many that this Symphony too was composed in mockery of the recently departed leader, sending up the triumphalist Stalinist parades. Yet despite this, and some objections to the work from the Composers’ Union, his Symphony No. 10 won Shostakovich the People’s Artist of the USSR award. Back in favour, the composer flourished, premiering a number of works he’d written, but was unable to have performed during his denouncement.

The recurring cryptogram

The hidden messages within Shostakovich’s music weren’t limited to political protest and dissent. Buried within much of his output is his own musical tag, a personally adopted monogram of music notes that put the composer’s stamp on his compositions.

He wasn’t the first composer to take this approach, having been predated quite significantly in the 1700s by Bach. With German musical nomenclature determining that the note B natural is named H and B flat named B, Bach adopted the succession of notes, B flat, A, C, B natural, as his compositional signature; BACH. One of the most frequently occurring examples of a cryptic musical motif of this nature, it can be found in a host of Bach’s works including the Fugue from BWV 898, the continuo part of BWV 104 within his Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, and gigue from his 6th English Suite for keyboard.

Shostakovich, like Bach, took advantage of the German naming of B natural as H to adopt the musical motif D, E-flat, C, B natural; E-flat in German being noted as Es, thus DSCH – Dmitri Schostakowitsch. Like Bach, Shostakovich employed his musical motif in a number of his works, and it can be heard in his Symphony No. 10, which will be performed in Orchestre symphonique de Montréal’s 28 October Southbank Centre concert, and his String Quartets, a number which are to performed by the Emerson String Quartet here in November.

DSCH is not solely found in the work of Shostakovich, having since become adopted by many subsequent composers as a tribute, or a hat-tip, to the pioneering Russian. Among them are Shostakovich’s protege Edison Denisov, who very directly employs the motif in his 1969 DSCH for clarinet, trombone, cello and piano; Benjamin Britten in both Rejoice in the Lamb (1943) and The Rape of Lucretia (1946); and more recently Danny Elfman in his Russian influenced score for the 1995 film Dolores Claiborne.