European Doctors' Orchestra 20 October 2020

The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester

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Aaron Copland (1900-1990) - Fanfare for the Common Man (1942)

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Background

More than any other composer, Aaron Copland’s music is inextricably associated with his native America. His most popular works, the Hoe-Down, Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid and Fanfare for the Common Man readily conjure imagery of expansive prairies, and so it is easy to forget that his formative years were spent studying with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. After finding that his modernist style was not overly successful at paying the bills, he pragmatically adopted a more accessible style, making the 1940s a period of relative security as his populist works filled concert halls. After the war, his attentions returned to Europe and the serialism of Arnold Schoenberg, though he also found success in conducting.

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Fanfare for the Common Man stands in the company of Shostakovich’s Leningrad symphony, Berg’s Wozzeck and Nielsen’s fifth symphony among others as musical products of war. During World War One, Eugene Goossens, conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, had commissioned a series of fanfares by British composers as short exercises in instant patriotism. When America joined World War Two, he began a similar project, commissioning another eighteen fanfares. Copland’s is the only one of the set to have achieved regular performance.

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The curious title was lifted from a 1943 speech by Vice President Henry A. Wallace. Copland was sympathetic: "It was the common man, after all, who was doing all the dirty work in the war and the army. He deserved a fanfare." Goossens was so fascinated both by the title and the music, instantly recognising that it would appeal to listeners, that he arranged the première for 12 March 1943, just as income tax was due. To this Copland recalled “I was all for honouring the common man at income tax time.” The fanfare was an instant success, and proved so popular that Copland recycled it into the finale of his third symphony.

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I say that the century on which we are entering…must be the century of the common man… Everywhere the common man must learn to build his own industries with his own hands… to increase his productivity so that he and his children can eventually pay to the world community all that they have received. No nation will have the God-given right to exploit other nations. Older nations will have the privilege to help younger nations get started on the path to industrialization, but there must be neither military nor economic imperialism.

Henry A. Wallace, 1943

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The short fanfare is scored simply for the brass section of a standard symphony orchestra (4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones and tuba) and percussion. After a bold summons from timpani, the trumpets play their simple theme without accompaniment, giving a sense of air and space before the horns add a layer accompaniment. The trombones join the fray amid more percussion, and the fanfare grows into a rousing finish.

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Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) - Schicksalslied (‘Song of Destiny’), Op. 54 (1871)

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1. Adagio: Ihr wandelt droben im Licht –

2. Allegro: Doch uns ist gegeben –

3. Adagio: Epilogue

 

Background

The rapturous success which greeted Brahms’ humanist Ein Deutsches Requiem in 1868 prompted a flurry of further writing for chorus and orchestra. While visiting his friend Albert Dietrich, who had arranged the première of the Requiem, he chanced upon the letter-novel Hyperion oder der Eremit in Griechland (Hyperion or the Hermit in Greece), by the early Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin. He was instantly struck by Hyperion’s Schicksalslied, or ‘Song of Destiny’. The poem, derived from classical sources, contrasts the blissful Elysian lives of the gods with the painful existence of mortals in their eternal struggle against fate. The poem is strikingly pessimistic; though its first two verses portray the blissful lives of the blessed, the third and final stanza bleakly describes the futility and torment of human existence.

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The composer was instantly moved by the poem, as Dietrich recalled:

One morning we went together to Wilhelmshaven, for Brahms was interested in seeing the magnificent naval port. On the way there, our friend, who was usually so lively, was quiet and grave. He described how early that morning, he had found Hölderlin’s poems in the bookcase and had been deeply impressed by the Schicksalslied. Later on, after spending a long time walking round and visiting all the points of interest, we were sitting resting by the sea, when we discovered Brahms a long way off sitting by himself on the shore writing. It was the first sketch for the Schicksalslied, which appeared fairly soon afterwards. A lovely excursion which we had arranged to the Urwald was never carried out. He hurried back to Hamburg, in order to give himself up to his work.

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Lively though Brahms could be, he would be no stranger to pessimism in his later career. In the late 1860s, though, the text of Schicksalslied was inconceivably gloomy even to a man who would go on to write the desperate tragedy that is the fourth symphony. The problem of how to finish his setting of Hölderlin’s text troubled him for three years, confining the score to a desk drawer. His ultimate solution was simply to repeat the warmly optimistic orchestral introduction as a short epilogue. “I am saying something the poet does not say,” he wrote, in contradicting the pessimism so blatantly, but the result is a work of extraordinary beauty in its reflection on human suffering.

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The music

The fifteen-minute work is in three parts, played without a break. The first deals with the first and second verses of the poem in the glowing warmth of E-flat major. An expressive string melody flows around golden woodwind chords, above the gently pulsating tread of timpani strokes. The reverential tranquillity of Elysium is conjured by the ethereal entry of the chorus, first with altos alone, accompanied only by high winds. The musical writing neatly complements the text at every turn, with flutes evoking ‘luminous heaven-breezes’ and soft trombones announcing the ‘slumbering infant’.

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For the third verse, turning towards strife-ridden human existence, the tempo abruptly quickens, and the key changes to C-minor, the dark, fateful key of Beethoven’s fifth symphony. The music rolls restlessly and unstoppably onwards, vividly depicting the pained mortals tumbling down helplessly and inevitably  into  the unknown.

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The storm subsides, though, in stark contradiction of the poem. Shifting to C-major, the orchestral prelude is repeated, bringing the music back into the light. The subterranean tap of the timpani rumbles below the surface, again echoing Beethoven 5, but ultimately Brahms offers a powerfully consoling conclusion.

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The text

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Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) - Symphony No. 7 in C major, ‘Leningrad’, Op. 60 (1941)

1. Allegretto

2. Moderato (poco allegretto)

3. Adagio –

4. Allegro non troppo

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Background

There are few works of art with a story as compelling or cryptic as Shostakovich’s Leningrad symphony. The number of people killed by the Soviet regime between 1928 and 1941 is conservatively estimated to be around 7.9 million, with other guesses two or three times as high. An artist’s career and indeed life might depend on toeing the Party line, a creative boundary which Shostakovich pushed to its limit, surviving two denunciations by Stalin, in 1936 for Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District and for decadent Western ‘formalism’ in 1948. Though his work was necessarily enigmatic, his legacy of fifteen symphonies and string quartets documents with unwavering humanity the most appalling half century of human existence.

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Shostakovich was born in Leningrad, now St Petersburg, a city famed for its culture and proud aesthetic heritage and now twinned with Manchester. As a dreamy, bookish boy, he found employment as a cinema pianist, where his imagination and improvisatory skills bloomed. He and his sisters witnessed the violence and celebration of the 1917 revolution at close quarters, on one occasion having the family car requisitioned by soldiers for the revolution on the way home from school. By 1941, he was established as a successful composer with celebrity status, having been rehabilitated from state denunciation via his fifth symphony (‘A Soviet artist’s response to just criticism’) and receiving the Stalin prize for his Piano Quintet. He was dedicated to his craft; after putting on his suit at 6am, he would emerge from his study only for meals at 9am, 2pm and 7pm. In his spare time, he was an avid football fan and amateur referee, with a season ticket for FC Zenith St Petersburg. Parties at his apartment would often seem him bang out tunes at his piano amid drunken games of indoor football in his study. He recalled hosting his beloved Zenith for dinner and accompanying some of the players on guitars late into the night.

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Leningrad was perceived as a possible rival to the power of Moscow, and as a city renowned for its intelligentsia, arts and culture, it felt the sting of Stalin’s purges acutely. The incalculable disappearances and arrests Shostakovich witnessed as a young composer had a profound impact on him. The suggestion in  Testimony (Shostakovich’s memoirs of disputed authenticity) that his seventh symphony was actually conceived several years before the German invasion, as a requiem to the victims of totalitarianism, is supported by his later comment that  “It’s not about Leningrad under siege; it’s about the Leningrad that Stalin destroyed, and that Hitler merely finished off”.

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“I feel eternal pain for those who were killed by Hitler, but no less pain for those killed on Stalin’s orders. I suffer for everyone who was tortured, shot or starved to death. There were millions of them in our country before the war with Hitler began".

From Testimony

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Shostakovich heard the news of the German invasion while on his way to a football match in 1941. He was turned away from military service due to his poor eyesight and instead found work as a city firefighter, in which role he featured on the front cover of Time magazine in 1942, tackling a blaze on the roof of the Leningrad Conservatory. The appalling horror of the 872-day siege saw the deaths of a million residents, roughly a third of the population. With the frozen city entirely cut off from supply chains, the starving living turned to diets of rat and even cannibalism, and unburied bodies piled up in the snow. The idea of a grand, triumphant symphony celebrating Soviet resilience suddenly became an attractive prospect to the authorities, and provided for Shostakovich a convenient cover subject for a symphony about terror. The music came to him at an unprecedented speed from July; “Neither savage raids, German planes, nor the grim atmosphere of the beleaguered city could hinder the flow,” he wrote. “I worked with an inhuman intensity I have never before reached.” He stayed in the crumbling city for a month, writing the first three movements in quick succession, before being moved to Moscow and then to the temporary capital Kuibyshev, where the finale was completed in December. The world première took place in Kuibyshev in March 1942, by the Bolshoi Orchestra. The score, condensed onto microfilm and hidden in a tin can, was smuggled out of Russia and to the West via Tehran, Cairo, Casablanca and Brazil on an American warship. It was performed in London in June by Henry Wood, and in New York in July by Toscanini.

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The score was smuggled into the besieged Leningrad over German lines by aircraft in the middle of the night. As the symphony’s much anticipated Leningrad première loomed in August, though, the obvious problem of there being no orchestra remaining in the city presented itself. The piece would require virtuosic forces of enormous number, with the physical strength to play for nearly 90 minutes. With the city’s esteemed Leningrad Philharmonic having been evacuated, only the ‘B-team’ that was the Leningrad Radio Orchestra remained, and at that, only fifteen of them. The conductor, Karl Eliasberg, himself being treated for ‘dystrophy’, recorded the despair in the orchestra: “Rehearsal did not take place. Srabian is dead. Petrov is sick. Borishev is dead. Orchestra not working.” He went on a door-to-door recruitment campaign, and authorities arranged for musicians to be recalled from the front line. He found his principal percussionist, Dzaudhat Aydarov, lying in the mortuary, presumed dead; noticing a twitch and a shallow gasp of breath, he retrieved and revived the emaciated drummer and set him to the side drum part, one of the most challenging in the repertoire. The oboist, on having his instrument repaired, was asked for payment in the form of a cat by the starving technician.

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Rehearsals eventually began, but the malnourished orchestra managed only fifteen minutes before syncopal wind players collapsed, exhausted. Eliasberg was a ruthless taskmaster; although players were given an escalated 125g of ‘bread’ (mostly sawdust) daily, underperformers had their rations slashed. Three members died during rehearsals in the cold, damp hall, and when one apologised for his lateness to rehearsal after burying his wife, Eliasberg responded with a dry “Make sure it’s the last time”. After weeks of rehearsal, the emaciated musicians proudly donned their comically oversized tailcoats, and the Soviet artillery fell silent. The concert was greeted by a tear-soaked hour-long ovation in the concert hall, and was broadcast onto loudspeakers placed around the city, to be blasted out at the enemy as a grim statement of defiance.

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When Eliasberg was visited in 1950 by former German soldiers who had heard that loudspeaker broadcast, they confessed to their tears during the performance. The conductor Semyon Bychkov summarised it elegantly: “Here were people representing the opposing side of the war, who needed music just as badly as the ones for whom it was composed. Because in the end it was composed for humanity. And the best proof is that today we still need it, we are still listening to it.”

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The music

The symphony is in traditional four-movement form, though on a Mahlerian scale in terms of length (80 minutes) and scale, with vast brass and percussion sections. Shostakovich originally gave the movements the titles War, Remembrance, The Vastness of Russia and Victory, though later abandoned these. A handful of recurring themes run through the symphony, unifying its monstrous sprawl into a cohesive narrative.

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The unique first movement is epic in scale even in the context of the symphony. The scene opens abruptly on a bright Leningrad morning, proudly (though some have said ‘mockingly’) portraying the selfless work ethic of the earnest proletariat. The Leningrad spirit motif seems to rise inexorably in pitch, echoing the aspirational industriousness of the Soviet people. The scene dissolves via a flute solo into more meditative, nostalgic music. This is short lived, as the side drummer beings his long journey with a relentlessly repeated two-bar rhythm, hauntingly echoing Ravel’s Bolero. An idle and innocent tune is heard, at first almost inaudible as the violins tap their bows on their strings, and then in the woodwind. The origins of this tune are almost certainly in Franz Lehár’s 1905 operetta The Merry Widow, in which Count Danilo finds relief from his duties among the grisettes and can-can girls at Maxim’s nightclub. The operetta was popular, and Shostakovich would often play extracts for his son Maxim on the piano. Other listeners find hints of the third line of the ‘big tune’ of Tchaikovsky’s fate-ridden fifth symphony. The Invasion theme, repeated over and over, steadily takes on a more and more sinister atmosphere as the full orchestra joins in, trombone slides echoing air ride sirens and two more side drummers joining the fray. It is impossible not to hear the creeping spread of fascism in this passage, one of the most overwhelming in music, and while we will probably never know which brand of fascism the composer is describing, that detail seems to fade into insignificance.

 

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After a tumultuous climax, a prolonged bassoon solo of extraordinary pathos clears the air, and the Leningrad spirit theme returns, now watery and autumnal. The Invasion has the final word though, now distantly echoed with a return of the side drum rhythm.

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The two inner movements both flank lively central passages with softer, more circumspect music. The second movement takes the role of the scherzo, opening with an enigmatic tune of deadpan simplicity. An oboe offers a glimpse of optimism, though it is anaemic and short lived. The shrill voice of the E-flat clarinet rudely interrupts proceedings with an outburst of ghoulish high spirits. Images of circuses and tightropes flash past, amid scenes of mocking faux-bravura and unconvincing heroism. The original theme returns, now set above a tersely repeated rhythm (unusually scored for flutes) with contrasting solos for bass and regular clarinet.

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The slow movement begins with a brief requiem chorale for wind choir. With the movement’s original title referring to Russia’s ‘native expanses’, the tragic violin lament and optimistic flute solo which follow have a clear subject in mind. The nostalgic sentiment, however, is once again disrupted by a more vigorous central passage. Here, the music blisters along in a rollicking 3-in-a-bar, searing brass writing carrying the music thrillingly forwards. The warm nostalgia returns, but is eventually enveloped into a murky cloud of low woodwind writing.

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Without pausing for breath, the third movement moves to the finale, the main theme of which ingenuously combines three sub-themes. A jumping chromatic motif (‘Danger’) launches a brisk, sleeves-up allegro (Mourning) which careers wildly into scenes of terrifying peril. The violence pounds relentlessly ahead, until it eventually burns itself out. An uneasy stillness is reached, and great blocks of chords seek to cement the apparent peace with brutal force. The Mourning sub-theme returns, now almost unbearably sorrowful. It is passed upwards through the orchestra, each time hitting a wall at an immoveable semiquaver drone (the Siren). Eventually, via a monumental uphill struggle and with full brass exclaiming the Danger theme, the music finds a way into the light. The Leningrad spirit theme returns, now held aloft triumphantly. The whole orchestra plays C-major, the most innocent and perfect of keys, except for the timpanist, who in the very last bars of the symphony thunders out the Danger theme as a desperate warning to the future.