Shostakovich 15

In the last few weeks Shostakovich symphony 15 has become a huge drop dead, oh-my-god, favorite. Walking in to school at too many minutes past nine o' clock today the last movement really did me in... It's Op. 141, six before his last; I feel like it describes his life, and its fading out.

The first movement is the naivety and playfulness of his youth. The second the looming thunderheads of Stalin - it reminds me of the third movement of the 5th. The third is the energy, hope, and openness after Stalin died... and the fourth....

The fourth is calmly brutal. I see it is like this: just as things started looking more open and free after the death of Stalin, he was getting old, and could see his death ahead. Just as he broke free of one fate, another, even greater loomed. The quotations in the fourth movement which I can see so far are (in order):

1. The "Fate" motif from Wagner's Ring cycle
2. The music from Siegfried's funeral, from Wagner's Ring cycle
3. The start of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde
4. Glinka's "Do not tempt me needlessly"
5. the "invasion" theme from the 7th symphony.

The first two are fate and death: you can't escape it, it's coming for you, you're screwed. Tristan and Isolde is full of the idea that we normally experience the unreal world, and the real world is hidden from us; and in particular that we can only see this real world in death. This brings to mind for me the subtexts in his symphonies, the duality of his music because of his lack of creative freedom. The fourth quote is his pain in watching Russia move toward greater freedom of expression, but knowing that he would not survive to live freely in it. The artistic environment he had desired for so long was going to be snatched away, just as it was arriving. The invasion theme is, not Stalin or Hitler this time but the more deadly figure of death, inexorably invading life.

The last two minutes are absolutely electric, like the clockwork of life unwinding and unravelling and finally releasing. As Boosey and Hawkes put it:

"An unearthly sense of bright light playing on a surface beneath which lurk great depths of darkness"

I think that's bang on.