Program Notes: Between Laughter and Tears 

November 8th, 2024 

There is no more evocative figure who exemplifies the tension between East and West during the Cold War than Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975). Torn between a desire for freedom of musical expression and the responsibilities of his role as a cultural ambassador for the Soviet Union, Shostakovich often found himself in the space between laughter and tears. Much of his work explores the line between ironic self-expression and deeply felt tragedy. The concert on November 8th, 2024 at Guarneri Hall features Shostakovich’s song cycle Satires: Pictures of the Past as well as his Eighth Quartet. 

This concert also features the work of Sofia Gubaidulina (b. 1931), one of the foremost Russian composers of the second half of the 20th century. Having discovered spiritual ideas in the works of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven at a young age, she quickly learned to keep her spirituality secret from her parents and Soviet society at large. As a result, her music explores the tenuous line between expression of one’s spirituality and the necessary concealment that comes with living in a repressive society. 

This program evokes the tensions between a desire for freedom and a necessity to conceal one’s true thoughts for fear of retaliation. 

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975): Satires: Pictures of the Past (1960)

In June of 1960, while living in Leningrad, Shostakovich suffered an emotional breakdown brought on by the prospect of an imminent convocation to set in motion his initiation as a communist party member. It was then that he conceived the songs of his scarcely-performed Satires: Pictures of the Past. After returning from a trip to Dresden in the middle of the month (more about that later), Shostakovich quietly completed the Satires for soprano and piano, setting five poems by the turn-of-century poet Sasha Chorny. Chorny’s poems sarcastically point out the foolishness of blindly following and embracing the hysteria of post-revolutionary ideas. The title Shostakovich gave his work, Satires: Pictures of the Past, also displays irony in the face of cultural oppression. While officials may have assumed that the Satires were intended to satirize the pre-Soviet revolutionary past, in reality they very much commented on the present. As the great Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya recalls, it was her idea to add a subtitle to the song cycle: Pictures of the Past. With the new sub-title, the hope was that the authorities would see the set as a satire of imperialist Russia before the Communist revolution. However, the composer and performers alike hoped that the public would be able to understand the commentary anyway, and this subtitle furthers the ironic existence of the piece as it can be viewed from both the perspective of the official and the common listener. 

The song cycle was originally written and intended for Vishnevskaya, who happily became the originator of the work. Alongside her husband, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, Vishnevskaya performed the song cycle in various concerts throughout her career. The song cycle contains five songs:

1. To a Critic
2. Spring Awakening
3. Descendants
4. Misunderstanding
5. The Kreutzer Sonata

Each song, based on Sasha Chorny’s poetry, sarcastically points out the irony of Russian life, a life that contains many contradictions. The poetry is, at times, absurd, but always indicates the irony of existing within an oppressive society. The full text with translations can be found below: 

“The set begins with the mocking address ‘To a critic’, and continues with ‘Spring Awakening’ in which Chorny pokes fun at writers who wax sentimental about the coming of spring and Shostakovich has boyish musical fun at the expense of Rachmaninov’s famous romance ‘Spring Waters’. Two cynical little numbers about human motivation are finally rounded out with a poem referring to Tolstoy’s famous murder-story ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’. The reference to Beethoven gives Shostakovich the chance for some more musical jokes.” (Gerard McBurney) 

SOFIA GUBAIDULINA (b. 1931): Dancer on a Tightrope (1993)

For Gubaidulina, music was an escape from the repression of Soviet times. Her music often explores her own confrontations with her faith and spirituality, exploring the meaning that she was searching for within herself. She was often influenced by electronic music and improvisational techniques. By combining contrasting elements, unique instrumentation and traditional Russian folk elements, Gubaidulina created an original sound that walks the line between early and late 20th century composition. 

Gubaidulina studied composition and piano at the Kazan Conservatory, graduating in 1954. During her studies, Western contemporary music was banned and raids often took place in the dormitory halls to search for banned scores. Nonetheless, she and her peers found ways to study Western scores and under this pressure and secrecy she began her musical training. She was eventually awarded the Stalin fellowship, while simultaneously having her music be deemed ‘irresponsible’ during her studies in Soviet Russia. Because of her exploration of alternative tunings, she was closely watched and examined. She was supported, in fact, by Dmitri Shostakovich, who encouraged her to continue on her path despite the risks. She composed many film scores in the subsequent years, continuing to explore and express her modernistic composition style. Since 1992, Gubaidulina has resided in Hamburg, Germany, and is still an active member of the musical academies in Frankfurt, Hamburg and the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. 

Gubaidulina wrote ‘Dance on a Tightrope’ in 1993, as music began to flourish in the immediate post-Soviet era. She self-describes the piece as: “a metaphor for life as risk, and art as flight into another existence…”

Gubaidulina goes on to state: “In this piece what interested me was to create the circumstances for the play of contrasts, where the precise dance rhythm of the violin overcomes its inclusion in the eventful course of the piano part. All these events are overcome by the violinist in an ecstatic dance that ascends finally to the upper register of the instrument to tremolo double harmonics; risk, overcoming, the flight of fantasy, art, dance.”

Thus, this piece further explores the space between laughter and tears, of using opposition as a means of exploring the boundaries between human emotions and of walking the fine line through seemingly impossible circumstances. Contrast is what creates musical interest, emotional expression and ultimately artistic freedom. 

SHOSTAKOVICH: Eighth Quartet, Op. 109 (1960)

Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet, Op. 110 completes our exploration of contrast, metaphor and irony. This piece is one of the most well-regarded in the string quartet genre, receiving performances by some of the most famous string quartets in the world throughout the 20th and into the 21st century. 

Shostakovich wrote the piece in 1960, shortly after completing his Op. 109, the Satires, and soon after reluctantly joining the Communist Party. According to the score, it’s dedicated “to the victims of fascism and the war”. Many of those closest to Shostakovich at the time regard the piece as self-reflective of his personal struggles with totalitarianism; however, the piece also implies a personal struggle to comprehend the tragedies of the Second World War. 

The piece was written in Dresden, where Shostakovich was sent to write music for a film project in collaboration between the Soviets and East German filmmakers. In Dresden, Shostakovich was confronted with the horrific realities of the Holocaust, witnessing the city in its post-fascistic state and encountering the throbbing absence of the Jewish community. During the Nazi era, the Jewish community was reduced from well over 5,000 to less than 50 as a result of emigration but also vast deportation and murder. This absence and lingering pain would undoubtedly influence the immensely tragic quality of the Eighth Quartet. 

The work is highly personal, with its first performance reportedly bringing Dmitri to tears. Having exposed himself so fully and vulnerably, his Eighth Quartet serves as a direct look into his mind and soul, weary from war and societal repression. 

The Eighth Quartet consists of five interconnected movements: 

1. Largo
2. Allegro molto
3. Allegretto
4. Largo
5. Largo
   
   

The first movement opens with the DSCH motif, which becomes the notes D-E flat-C-B. This motive is Shostakovich’s compositional signature, appearing in many of his works as a marker of a kind of self-memorialization. This theme is developed in a fugal fashion, slowly building momentum into the second movement. From the beginning of the Allegro molto, the second movement is relentless in its pacing, shifting the fugal theme between each instrument until hitting a dynamic climax in the middle of the movement that features a theme from Shostakovich’s Second Piano Trio. This theme is reminiscent of Jewish folk music, directly referencing the victims of the tragedy of the Second World War. The third movement continues on, slowing the pace and referring to a waltz-like rondo that shifts ambiguous between tonal areas, never fully settling and leaving the listener uneasy. The fourth movement explores self-quotations and existential questioning through the use of the Dies Irae, a well known funeral march, followed by a Russian funeral anthem and closing with a Russian revolutionary song and a self-quotation of an aria from his first highly criticized opera, Lady Macbeth of of Mtsensk. The quartet ends with a furious, fugal elegy that ties together the opening DSCH motif with the momentum built up throughout the fourth movement. 

The Eighth Quartet has been argued as being incredibly self-referential and this personal nature becomes highly evocative. However, even amidst the tragedy, the piece has a thread of irony, almost as if Shostakovich is laughing at his own misery. He understands his own suffering and he holds it under control, closely, secretly. A self-referential kind of irony is created wherein he exaggerates dynamics, instrumentation and fugal forms in order to create a satirical version of his own suffering. Dmitri Shostakovich was no stranger to surviving through difficult times and as a result often walked the line, throughout his composition, between laughter and tears.