Symphony No. 15, Opus 141
Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on September 25, 1906, and died in Moscow on August 9, 1975. He began the Symphony No. 15 in Kurgan on April 2, 1971, completing it in Repino, outside Leningrad, on July 29, 1971. The premiere took place on January 8, 1972; the composer’s son, Maxim Dmitrievich Shostakovich, conducted the Bolshoi Symphony Orchestra of the All-Union Radio in the Bolshoi Hall of the Moscow Conservatory.
The Symphony No. 15 is scored for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, castanets, soprano tom-tom, snare drum, wood block, slapstick, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, xylophone, glockenspiel, vibraphone, celesta, and strings. The composer specifies a minimum of 16 first and 14 second violins, 12 violas, 12 cellos, and 10 double basses.
The ghosts of music past haunt Shostakovich’s fifteenth—and final—symphony. The famous galloping theme from the overture to Gioachino Rossini’s opera William Tell (later appropriated for the theme music of the Lone Ranger television series) appears in the first movement. (Here played by brass rather than strings.) The opening bars of the last movement quote the portentous “fate” motif from Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle. Reminiscences of Shostakovich’s own compositions also pop up here and there. The repeated bass line passacaglia in the finale, for example, echoes the insistent march from his Leningrad Symphony (No. 7). Confused and encouraged by Shostakovich’s own contradictory statements about the Fifteenth, sleuthing commentators and musicologists have also uncovered possible references to music of Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mahler, and Glinka. It has furthermore been suggested that the entire symphony is a response to a story (The Black Monk) by one of the composer’s favorite writers, Anton Chekhov.
Shostakovich’s obviously retrospective mood at the time he was composing the Fifteenth Symphony (approaching his 65th birthday) was surely due in part to his failing health and increasing awareness of his own mortality. He had been suffering from various serious ailments for years. The most debilitating was a form of poliomyelitis that restricted the movement of his legs, arms, and fingers, making it almost impossible for him to play the piano. In 1970 and early 1971 he traveled several times to the Siberian city of Kurgan to receive treatment from the highly regarded orthopedic surgeon Gavriil Ilizarov. In Kurgan Shostakovich began writing the Fifteenth Symphony, as well as another work treating the theme of mortality: the music for Grigori Kozintsev’s brilliant film version of Shakespeare’s King Lear. In an interview with Royal Brown in New York in 1973, he said of the symphony,
I was working very hard on it, and even though it may sound strange, I was composing in the hospital, then I left the hospital and continued writing at my summer house—I just could not tear myself away from it. It’s one of those works that just completely carried me away, and maybe even one of my few compositions that seemed completely clear to me from the first note to the last. All that I needed was the time to write it down.
While completing the symphony at the Composers Union Retreat in Repino, a picturesque resort town near the Finnish Gulf, Shostakovich devoted each morning to composing. At one o’clock in the afternoon, as recorded in Elizabeth Wilson’s Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, he would meet his neighbor Venyamin Basner for a short walk followed by lunch (accompanied by a “measure of vodka”) and then spend some time listening to the BBC Russian Service on the radio. Since this was technically a banned Western broadcast, Shostakovich was careful “to tune the radio back to the bandwave of Radio Moscow—just in case anybody bothered to check!” Some days, however, he would forego the lunches and lock himself in his cottage to work without distraction, “writing day and night.”
The effort took nearly all of Shostakovich’s declining strength, as he wrote to his friend, the writer Marietta Shaginyan, shortly after the first audition of the work in a four-hand piano version at the Composers Union in Moscow in early August. “I worked on this symphony to the point of tears. The tears were flowing not because the symphony is sad, but because my eyes were so tired. I even visited the optometrist, who advised me to take a short break from the work.”
The Fifteenth is unusual for Shostakovich’s work as a symphonist in several ways. First, as noted, it features quotations from other composers, in a kind of collage technique that he had not previously employed. (Such eclecticism was very popular with the next generation of Soviet composers, especially Alfred Schnittke.) Second, it has no descriptive title, unlike his symphonies 2 (To October), 3 (The First of May), 7 (Leningrad), and three of the four written just before it: the Eleventh (The Year 1905), Twelfth (The Year 1917), and Thirteenth (Babi Yar). Third, it is scored for orchestra alone, without voices or texts of any kind; his preceding two symphonies were settings of poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko for bass soloist, chorus, and orchestra (Babi Yar) and by Lorca, Apollinaire, Küchelbecker, and Rilke, for soprano, bass, and chamber orchestra (No. 14).
So the Fifteenth is more purely “abstract” and enigmatic music than Shostakovich had previously written in the symphonic form, and more rhapsodic in structure than the classically structured Fifth Symphony, the best-known of his fifteen. To his close friend Isaac Glikman, the composer joked ironically that the symphony was “turning out to be lacking in ideals” (“bezideinaya”), a label often applied by Communist Party officials to compositions they found politically deficient. Moreover, the Fifteenth includes (in the second and third movements) several themes organized according to the dodecaphonic (twelve-tone) method, which Shostakovich used sparingly in some of his late works. Dodecaphony, a form of serialist composition in which a series of pitches becomes the basis of the melodic and harmonic structure, was closely associated with the music of Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School. For many years it had been virtually banned from Soviet music as a decadent, formalist, and inaccessible Western import.
The largest of the Fifteenth’s four movements, each about fifteen minutes in length, are the slow ones, the second and fourth, both marked Adagio. By contrast, the third movement Allegretto is the shortest of all of Shostakovich’s scherzo movements. The first movement, Allegretto, recalls the humorous, sarcastic character of some of the composer’s early works, such as the First Piano Concerto, the ballets The Golden Age and Bolt, and the orchestral interludes from his scandalous opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, all combined with the manic energy of the William Tell motif. In an interview around the time of the premiere, Shostakovich reportedly told a journalist that “The first movement describes childhood—just a toy shop, with a cloudless sky above.” This statement has fueled considerable speculation as to the composer’s meaning: was he being serious, or wickedly ironic in view of his frequently tortured life at the mercy of Communist officials?
In the somber, mournful, even liturgical second movement, the orchestral forces are often reduced to chamber size and to solo voices (especially the cello), until the Largo section. From there a funeral march builds to a massive climax with large percussion forces, including whip, xylophone, wood block, and drums, before receding into a heavenly calm created by strings with vibraphone and celesta. Squealing and laughing woodwinds dominate the grotesque, darkly humorous scherzo, creating the same sort of frantic dance atmosphere found in several of Shostakovich’s string quartets, which occupied much of his creative energy in his last years.
The fourth movement opens with three clear references to Richard Wagner. First comes, as already noted, the “fate” motif from the Ring cycle. The solo timpani line that follows suggests the rhythm of “Siegfried’s Funeral March” from the last Ring opera, Götterdämmerung. And the three notes (A-F-E) played by the first violins at the end of the introductory Adagio section (as a bridge to the Allegretto) echo the opening notes of the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde. In the Allegretto, a pleasantly lyrical theme meanders through thinly scored string, woodwind, and brass passages. Then the mood darkens with the entry of the sinister marching passacaglia in the low strings. Eventually the lyrical theme joins in, and then again the Wagnerian motif. The relentless passacaglia theme builds to what Krzystof Meyer has described as a “soul-searing climax,” and then the music begins to fade and fragment into a weirdly ethereal coda, taken over by knocking instruments (timpani, triangle, castanets, wood block, drum, xylophone, celesta) tapping out what sounds like the ticking of a clock pronouncing the end of time, or asking a question. These final measures seem to recall the similar ending of the second movement of the Fourth Symphony, banned in 1936 for twenty-five years following Stalin’s denunciation of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
While it may not possess the structural integrity of the Fifth Symphony, or the sheer force of the Seventh, Symphony No. 15 stands as an encyclopedia of Shostakovich’s masterful manipulation of the orchestra as an endless source of drama, shifting moods, vivid contrasts, philosophical depth, and emotional expression. The premiere was a triumphant occasion, even though Kiril Kondrashin was too ill to conduct as scheduled and was replaced by Shostakovich’s son Maxim. Many of the stars of the Soviet musical firmament attended. By this time Shostakovich’s health had worsened; he had suffered a second heart attack in September, near the date of his sixty-fifth birthday, and came out on stage only with difficulty to acknowledge the long ovation at the premiere. Less than four years later he would be gone.
Harlow Robinson
Harlow Robinson is an author, lecturer, and Matthews Distinguished University Professor of History, Emeritus, at Northeastern University. His books include Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography and Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood’s Russians. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Boston Globe, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Cineaste, and Opera News, and he has written program notes for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, and Metropolitan Opera.
The first American performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15 was given by the Philadelphia Orchestra with Eugene Ormandy conducting on September 28, 1972.
The first Boston Symphony performances of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15 were led by Maxim Shostakovich, the composer’s son, in December 1981.
