I found this via Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise blog: a Youtube video the New York Philharmonic playing the finale to Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, Leonard Bernstein conducting, but with recitations of some of the Youtube comments heard over the sound of the music.
I hadn’t heard of the Youtube Commentary Project before, but it’s just too meta for me. Also, most Youtube comments are really dumb (case in point, the title of this blog post).
If you know the history of the piece, it’s sort of interesting to hear people talk about it (not all of the comments are dumb: somewhere in the first few minutes is someone talking about how Shostakovich “fucked like a jackhammer”, which is certainly topical). After reading the Wikipedia entry on the symphony, I’m thinking I’ve had too many beers between music school and now to remember the facts right, but then again Shostakovich has only rarely come up in conversation in the past decade.
The general and potentially incorrect story as I know it is that back in the 1930s Stalin decided he hated Shostakovich and said his music was anti-socialist (or anti-Stalinist), possibly because it wasn’t a short ditty you could tap your feet to. From what I’ve heard, Stalin was one of those guys you didn’t want not liking you, and Shostakovich was in fear for his life. Hard not to be when your friends keep disappearing.
Supposedly Shostakovich had gone to some government official on a Friday and was told to come back on Monday, with the assumption that this was his last weekend on Earth so he might want to wear fresh underwear. So Shostakovich spent the weekend setting his affairs, saying goodbye to people, and whatever else one does in such a situation. Then he comes back to the official’s office on Monday, to discover that the official himself had been “removed”. According to the Wikipedia page I might be talking about this guy, but I don’t know. It’s both fascinating and terrifying, how close he was to death.
Shostakovich then went on to compose this symphony, in an attempt to keep himself alive just a little longer by making government-approved music. Or not; the jury’s still out on whether he was specifically trying to woo Stalin with this, and he’s dead now so we can’t ask him. I never studied Shostakovich enough to say what changes he made between his earlier works and this one, either, but he changed something, and it worked. It was a success, and Stalin liked it and declared Shostakovich worthy of not being shot, so all was good.
This finale is interesting because the assumption nowadays is that it’s meant to be a parody of a triumphant march, and that the beats feel forced in the same way as people in the day were forced into slavery and brainwashed against their will. Scholars think this was Shostakovich giving Stalin the middle finger salute while his back was turned, but again, who knows? It could be wishful thinking, but it does make for a good story.
When I first heard this piece and was told about it (in 20th century music history class), I thought that it did have an uneasy, frenetic feel to it, so the story and the theory behind it seemed plausible enough. It’s harder to tell in this video, though, what with all the talking about how funny Bernstein moves around, and how the flautist is a dead ringer for Michael Caine. Some of the commenters mention that Bernstein takes it faster than is usual and that it comes out sounding far more authentic than Shostakovich intended, but again, I can’t really give an opinion on that; it doesn’t sound any faster to me. And there’s such a fine line between parody and cacophony in music, and maybe we just don’t have the subtlety to hear Bernstein’s version of Stalin’s Terror.
Here’s the original video, in case you’re interested in hearing it without all the annoying chatter: