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Shostakovich vocal cycles for bass and piano Although he remains most celebrated for his symphonies and string quartets, Shostakovich wrote music in almost all the traditional genres, and was highly productive as a vocal composer, writing songs to Russian and other poets throughout his career. Though his songs are mostly not very well known, they mark him out as a significant practitioner of word-setting who deserves a high place in the history of 20th-century art song. The Four Romances on Poems by Pushkin Op.46 were among Shostakovich’s first mature songs. They were composed between December 1936 and January 1937 in commemoration of the centenary of the poet’s death. Shostakovich had planned a cycle of twelve songs to Pushkin poems, but these were the only ones he completed at this time. They were composed at a time when Shostakovich was in deep disgrace, following the denunciation in Pravda of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and when the Stalinist Terror was at its height, so they were, in a sense, private meditations. (They were not heard in public until 8 December 1940, when Shostakovich himself accompanied the bass Alexander Baturin at the Polytechnic Museum Hall, Moscow.) These Pushkin songs seem to mark a new beginning in Shostakovich’s music. Gone is the satirical energy which had marked him out as the young ‘Soviet Rossini’. Instead a profound tone-poet, lyrical and thoughtful, makes his appearance. Their harmonic language and organic sense of growth are
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new in Shostakovich’s music, and they point towards the great Fifth Symphony that he would shortly begin composing. Indeed, the finale of the Fifth Symphony alludes to the music of the first of these songs, significantly entitled ‘Rebirth’ – a passionate statement of the power of art to survive barbarism and oppression. It is clear that the songs of Gustav Mahler were another inspiration. In ‘Foreboding’ the poet rails against ‘envious fate’ as his works are assessed by the state censor – a situation Shostakovich was familiar with. The last song, which Shostakovich called ‘Stanzas’, is a setting of Pushkin’s poem ‘Whether I wander along noisy streets’, a meditation on the inevitability of death and the resilience of nature. The set of Six Romances on Verses by British Poets Op.62 is called simply ‘Six Romances for Bass’ on the autograph. For the first and fifth songs Shostakovich drew on Russian translations by Boris Pasternak of poems by Sir Walter Raleigh and William Shakespeare, while the remaining songs – three to Scots poems by Robert Burns and the last to a traditional English nursery rhyme ‘The Grand old Duke of York’ – were set in translations by Samuel Marshak. He composed this cycle between May and October 1942 at Kuibishev, where he had been evacuated following the defence of Leningrad from the Nazi invasion. It may be that Shostakovich decided to set these texts as a gesture of solidarity with Russia’s allies in the fight against Hitler; he also made a version for voice and orchestra in 1943. The three Robert Burns settings were premiered in Kuibishev on 4 November 1942, the complete cycle on 6 June 1943 in Moscow. In this cycle Shostakovich concentrates on
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the poets’ response to forces of oppression and tyranny. In the poetry of Robert Burns he portrays the voice of the common people, defiant before authority. Raleigh’s ‘To His Son’ is a warning against the dangers of courtly intrigue, and the concluding children’s nursery rhyme is used as an acid comment on the uselessness and childishness of war. Shostakovich’s second set of Pushkin songs, the Four Monologues on Verses by Pushkin Op.91, were composed on consecutive days from 5–8 October 1952, in Moscow. The title ‘monologues’ is explained by their rather declamatory nature, and they are among Shostakovich’s most profound songs. The first song – to an untitled poem that Shostakovich just calls ‘Fragment’ – is a portrait of a Jewish family that has fallen on hard times, and belongs to the long line of works in which Shostakovich had expressed sympathy and solidarity with Russian Jews. ‘In the Depths of Siberian Mines’ is a poem in which Pushkin expressed his solidarity with the Decembrists, the unsuccessful conspirators against Tsar Nicholas I in December 1825 – for Shostakovich this must surely have been a symbol of the Stalinist Gulags. The other two songs seem lighter, yet are full of irony and delicate feeling. A different side of Shostakovich is shown by the Five Romances on Texts from ‘Krokodil’ Op.121 – composed in a single day, on 4 September 1965. The satirical magazine Krokodil (Crocodile) was a much-loved feature of Soviet life, though its satire was often muted compared to Western contemporary publications; indeed it had been created by the Soviet authorities as a kind of safety-valve for feelings of dissent. The poems had
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been submitted by readers of the magazine for a feature called ‘Believe it or not’ in the issue of 30 August 1965. They are vignettes of ordinary life: a pensioner attacks a bus driver, a bachelor despairs of finding a wife, the police are to be mistrusted, a country girl yearns for a man, and finally a piece of fresh bread from the harvest is praised. Shostakovich sets these poems to a kind of 19th-century parlour music in the manner of Mussorgsky. The cycle was premiered in the Glinka Concert Hall, Leningrad by the bass Yevgeni Nesterenko with Shostakovich at the piano. With their gentler, but no less mordant commentary on the slight imperfections of life as it was lived in 1960s Russia, these songs form a kind of lightweight footnote to Shostakovich’s far more serious Thirteenth Symphony to words by Yevtushenko, completed two years previously. Shostakovich’s last and in some ways strangest song-cycle is the Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin Op.146, which he completed on 23 August 1975, less than a year before his death – his penultimate composition. In its truly Russian grotesquerie it looks back to the gleefully satirical Shostakovich of The Nose and the First Symphony. The spirit of Mussorgsky looms ever more clearly – but Mussorgsky refracted through a very murky glass. The words derive from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Devils (1871), in which Captain Ignaty Lebyadkin is a minor character, and a wholly disreputable one: a buffoon, a drunkard, a scoundrel, whom Dostoevsky describes in terms of ridicule. With his clumsiness, his absurd ambition, his alcoholic muddle-headedness and his atrocious verses, he is a helpless tool of the real
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revolutionaries, who cast him aside and murder him when he has served his purpose. Shostakovich’s only reported comments on the cycle implicitly acknowledge the disturbing ambiguities of his settings: ‘I think I’ve managed to capture the spirit of Dostoevsky … Lebyadkin is of course a buffoon, but from time to time he becomes terrifying.’ To his friend Isaak Glikman he wrote: ‘I think I have achieved a very sinister composition.’ For Lebyadkin’s verses are the most interesting things about him. They come out as half-nonsense, half-satire, and it’s difficult to know how seriously they might be meant. So, are Shostakovich’s apparently simple settings of ambiguously awful doggerel by a doomed fool who is one of the more unsavoury characters in Dostoevsky’s most controversial novel, ‘just a lampoon’, or something more serious? Nothing here is as straightforward as it seems – not even the constitution of the texts themselves. The words of the first song, ‘The Love of Captain Lebyadkin’, are actually stitched together from four separate passages in The Devils, and include passages of prose from the main text in which the drunkard breaks off to explain things to the narrator. This kind of ‘double focus’ extends further in the second song, ‘The Cockroach’, which is a kind of mock-ballad, a beast-fable of the sort made popular by Ivan Krylov (c. 1769–1844). In the novel, Lebyadkin’s hearers keep interrupting him – and Shostakovich faithfully sets the resultant altercation. The third poem is an ill-mannered lampoon, but perhaps the most ambiguous of the lot is the final song, ‘A Pure Soul’. In The Devils, this particular piece of versifying isn’t actually attributed to Lebyadkin, and some
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of the characters take it quite seriously as a bit of seditious revolutionary propaganda which expresses hope in a coming, world-reforming revolution. But in fact, Dostoevsky is showing up the character of the poem’s protagonist, the ‘Pure Soul’ who tries to whip up rebellion from the safety of abroad, well out of reach of ‘the whip, the thumbscrew and the executioner’. Whereas the other three songs are open-ended and continuously developing in their structure, this last one is a simple strophic song, with a pawky little refrain on the piano. Is Shostakovich hinting here, in blandly merry music that underlies mock-serious words, that paying lip-service to Revolution and social justice without actually doing anything about it, or taking any risks, is as cushy a way of having a career as any? 훿 Malcolm MacDonald, 2011
Recorded: Moscow Conservatory, 1994 Engineer: Vadim Ivanov Editing: Vladimir Kiselev Licensed from National Music Publishers, Russian Federation Cover: akg-images 훿 2011 Brilliant Classics
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