Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Opus 54
Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on September 25, 1906, and died in Moscow on August 9, 1975. He composed his Symphony No. 6 during the spring, summer, and early autumn of 1939. Evgeny Mravinsky conducted the Leningrad Philharmonic in the premiere on November 5, 1939, in Leningrad.
The score of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 6 calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, E-flat clarinet, and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, three trumpets, four horns, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, tenor drum, snare drum, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, xylophone, celesta, harp and strings.
Sandwiched between two of Dmitri Shostakovich's most celebrated works, the meditative and whimsical Sixth Symphony has often been overlooked. Composed two years after the Fifth, which resurrected Shostakovich's ideological reputation after his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District had offended Stalin, and two years before the Seventh (the Leningrad, the massive wartime opus that became one of the 20th century’s most popular symphonies), the non-programmatic Sixth has always been somewhat elusive and difficult to categorize.
Shostakovich wrote the Sixth between April and October 1939. At about thirty minutes long, the work is considerably shorter than both the Fifth (forty-five minutes) and the Seventh (well over an hour). But it is the Sixth Symphony’s unusual structure that provoked the greatest confusion and—in the highly politicized environment of Soviet music—controversy: a long slow movement (Largo) followed by two much shorter fast ones (Allegro and Presto). “It is only natural to expect profound thoughts and meaningful artistic concepts from such a brilliantly gifted master, who is acclaimed by the widest possible public,” complained the critic for Soviet Music, the official organ of the Soviet Composers Union, after the Moscow premiere, in an unfairly harsh assessment. “But there are none in the Sixth Symphony. The flashiness and refinement of the orchestration cannot conceal the absence of a unified symphonic conception.”
The realities of the international political situation undoubtedly played a role in the cool official reception given to the Sixth Symphony. On August 27, 1939, the very day that Shostakovich finished the second of its three movements, Stalin and Hitler signed their infamous non-aggression pact. Under the terms of this agreement (called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact after the Soviet and German foreign ministers who created it), Stalin agreed that he would not launch military action against the increasingly aggressive Nazi regime. In return, he received assurances that the Red Army could occupy the independent Baltic states and Bessarabia. Most important, the pact cleared the way for the Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland, which began on September 1, 1939. (Less than two years later, in June 1941, Hitler would break this pact and launch a massive invasion of the USSR.) At such a fraught moment, with Europe on the edge of war, the oddly disengaged, even ironic quality of the Sixth Symphony—especially in its last two movements—seemed inappropriate to some official critics. They were waiting for something more heroic, more like the concluding Allegro of the classically proportioned and pathos-laden Symphony No. 5.
They noted an apparent lack of connection between the three movements, and accused the composer of having produced a suite, not a symphony. But as Shostakovich had already shown in his Second Symphony, and would show again numerous times in the future—notably in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth symphonies—his definition of a symphony (the number of movements, their respective length, and sequence) could be very broad and innovative, stretching the traditional idea of the genre to its very limits.
While working on the new symphony, Shostakovich made clear that it would represent a departure from his previous work. “The music of the Sixth Symphony,” he told a correspondent from Leningrad Pravda in late August, “will be distinct in mood and emotional tone from the Fifth Symphony, characterized by moments of tragic feeling and intensity. Music of a contemplative and lyric nature predominates in this latest symphony. Here I wanted to express feelings of springtime, joy, and youth.”
The more contemplative, cheerful, and less conflicted mood of the Sixth Symphony emerged from what was an unusually calm and contented period in the composer's life. After early turmoil, his marriage to Nina Varzar was happy and had made him the proud new father of a son and daughter. Having at last overcome the disaster over his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which was castigated at the highest levels of the Communist Party for inaccessibility and obscenity, Shostakovich, now thirty-three, seemed to be entering a more hopeful phase in his turbulent career. The triumph of his Fifth Symphony in late 1937 had restored him to official favor and given him breathing room. Soon after its premiere, he completed another film score (his fourteenth) for The Man with A Gun, a pedestrian and frankly propagandistic biopic about Vladimir Lenin. Then he began the first of what would be a distinguished cycle of fifteen string quartets. The unusually simple and transparent lyricism of the String Quartet No. 1, his “Springtime Quartet,” stands in stark contrast to the dark, complex musical style of most of the quartets that would follow. Shostakovich appeared to be enjoying life. A passionate soccer fan, he took a trip to Moscow to see a match between the leading Leningrad and Moscow teams.
But behind the scenes of Stalin’s self-aggrandizing parade of prosperity and “normality” lurked pervasive terror and paranoia. Some of Shostakovich’s closest friends, associates, and collaborators were being arrested as “enemies of the people” in ongoing purges of the artistic community. These included the brilliant avant-garde stage director Vsevolod Meyerhold, apprehended in June 1939 while the composer was writing the Sixth Symphony. Seven months later, after terrible torture, Meyerhold, one of the great theatrical minds of the 20th century, was executed. Given their close personal and creative relationship, one can imagine that Meyerhold’s arrest and disappearance must have shocked and unsettled the hypersensitive Shostakovich.
In her indispensable book on Shostakovich’s symphonies, Russian musicologist Marina Sabinina has pointed out that of all of the composer's symphonies, the Sixth is closest in technique and spirit to Tchaikovsky. Particularly in the first movement, melody is the most important compositional element, a rare event in Shostakovich's music, usually propelled by and unified around a rhythmic “motor” impulse. Both harmonically and structurally, the Largo is unusually spare and plain; it progresses around the repetition (in only slightly altered form) of two lyrical, even requiem-like themes. The strong sense of musical conflict found in so many of the composer's symphonies is almost entirely missing here. “Teetering on long tremolando pedal-points,” Ian MacDonald has written colorfully in his book The New Shostakovich, the first movement “hardly moves, employing only pallid colours and restricting its discourse to a brooding game of patience with its germinal cells.”
In dramatic contrast, the two succeeding movements overflow with ironic joie de vivre, recalling the romping high spirits of the composer’s early ballet scores, especially The Golden Age. Against the background of the austere opening, the waltz-like theme of the Allegro and the joking Rossini-esque buffoonery of the Presto (where neoclassical elements spar with images borrowed from Soviet popular music in sonata-rondo form) create an atmosphere of musical and emotional eclecticism. This careening between the sublime and the ridiculous would become increasingly characteristic of the mature Shostakovich.
Despite mixed reviews, the Sixth Symphony was never banned from the Soviet concert hall, and Mravinsky continued to perform it with the Leningrad Philharmonic, the most esteemed orchestra in the USSR. The Sixth was also a great favorite of BSO conductor Serge Koussevitzky, a consistent champion of the composer, and also of Leopold Stokowski, who conducted it with the Philadelphia Orchestra several times in 1940 and said,
With each new symphony Shostakovich reveals himself as a master who continues to grow, constantly developing his creative fantasy and his musical self-awareness. In the Sixth Symphony, he has reached new heights—especially in the first movement. It contains harmonic sequences and melodic turns of remarkable expressiveness and highly original sonority. Upon first hearing, they can sound strange and even incomprehensible, and their meaning seems hidden from us. But later, upon a third or a fourth hearing, the symphony’s unusual expressive profundity becomes clear.
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. 6 was on November 29, 1940, with Leopold Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra.
The first Boston Symphony performances of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 6 were given by Serge Koussevitzky on March 20 and 21, 1942, with further Symphony Hall performances the following week on March 27 and 28, followed by performances in Washington, New Brunswick, New York, Providence, Boston again, and Cambridge.
