Over the past eight years I’ve had more than a passing acquaintance with the music of Dmitri Shostakovich. With the two string quartets that I’ve been part of, I’ve performed the quartets nos. 1, 3, 8, 9 and 15. In various orchestras I’ve performed the symphonies nos. 1, 4, 5, 7 and 9 (coincidentally, DSCH wrote 15 quartets and 15 symphonies).
With this experience of performing his works, plus listening to and studying many of his other works, I am convinced that the Eighth Symphony is a very different sort of animal than all the rest of his output. The first thing that strikes one as both performer and listener is the sheer breadth of the symphony. The opening movement lasts close to 25 minutes – similar to the massive world-encompassing first movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony for a sense of sweeping scope. What makes this scope even more impressive is Shostakovich’s monochromatic palate: the movement is almost uniformly bleak and desolate, like a blasted, apocalyptic landscape. If you’ve read Cormac McCarthy‘s bleak yet terribly beautiful Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road, this is the musical equivalent. You don’t want to hear what you’re hearing, but you’re mesmerized by its hypnotic power, held in its thrall by its single-minded intensity of expressing of the inexpressible.
People often ask why there is “ugly” or “unpleasant” music. I ask, is life always pleasant and beautiful? Great works of art reflect the times in which they are made, and the best of these take and transform and transcend their times, becoming cultural touchstones for future generations. The photojournalism of James Nachtwey, most terribly and honestly expressed in his monograph Inferno is an example of how the awful expressions of humanity at its worst can be turned into art which inspires change. Picasso’s Guernica is a similar example in the realm of fine art.
To me, music which enables us to imagine the unimaginable and to empathize with those who have gone before us is the highest calling to which music and musicians can aspire. Shostakovich, regardless of where his true loyalties lay and how much he truly suffered for his art, found a way to speak for the thousands which were being killed or exiled during his lifetime, and whom we remember each time one of his unique and uncompromising works enter our concert hall.