KSO Programme notes: McCabe, Janáček, Shostakovich

Leoš Janáček (1854-1928)
Taras Bulba

1. The Death of Andrei
2. The Death of Ostap
3. The Prophecy and Death of Taras Bulba


Nikolai Gogol’s novel Taras Bulba tells the story of a Ukrainian Cossack and his two sons. Ostep is the more adventurous and true to the Cossack nature of the two, while Andrey is a romantic. They set out to join the war against the Poles who have occupied the western Ukraine. They besiege Dubno Castle. Andrey falls in love with a Polish girl, and renounces his heritage to help her and the besieged Poles. Taras discovers his son’s betrayal and executes him. Ostep, meanwhile, is captured during battle and tortured by the Poles. Taras attempts to disguise himself to reach the prison to see his son, but his ruse fails, and he witnesses Ostep’s execution from the crowd. Finally, Taras is caught in battle, tortured and burned to death by his captors. Even as he dies, Taras calls on his men to continue the fight, and predicts that a great Tsar will come to rule the world.

Leoš Janáček read the novel in 1905 and made extensive notes. At a time when the Czechs were still ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Taras Bulba’s tale of a nation’s struggle to free itself from oppression struck a chord. However, it was not until 1915 that he began work on his orchestral work based on Gogol’s tale. The First World War was raging, and the Czech nationalist movement was gathering pace, inspired by Russia’s offensive against Austria-Hungary at Galicia. By the time he completed Taras Bulba in 1918, the war had left the empire exhausted. Later that same year the creation of the state of Czecho-Slovakia brought an end to 200 years of Austro-Hungarian rule.

Trying to map the plot of Gogol’s novel onto Janáček’s music in any more than a vague way is problematic. Janáček’s memory of a story he had read a decade earlier would seem to be less than crystal clear. His own note on the work, written in one long, breathless sentence for the Prague première, perhaps reveals that the spirit that is more important than the detail:

“Not because he beat to death his own son for betraying the nation – Part I (the Battle of Dubno);
not because of the martyr’s death of his second son – Part II (the Warsaw torments);
but ‘because the fires, the tortures that could destroy the force of the Russian people are not to be found on earth’ – for these words that fall into the fiery sparks and flames of the stake at which the sufferings of the famous Cossack ataman Taras Bulba finally ended – Part III and conclusion, did I compose this rhapsody in 1915-16 based on a tale written by N.V. Gogol. Leoš Janáček.”



John McCabe (b. 1939)
Symphony “Labyrinth”


Underneath Edge Hill in Liverpool lies an extensive network of underground passages. The Williamson Tunnels were excavated between 1805 and 1840 at the behest of Joseph Williamson, an eccentric entrepreneur. Quite why he built them is not known for sure. Rumours spread at the time that they were intended to shelter a religious sect that believed that the end of the world was imminent. But it is quite possible that they represent nothing more sinister than a rich philanthropist’s desire to provide honest work for unemployed men returning from the Napoleonic Wars. Williamson himself declared that his workers “all received a weekly wage and were thus enabled to enjoy the blessing of charity without the attendant curse of stifled self respect.”

In the 1830s, Williamson’s path crossed both figuratively and literally with George Stephenson: the great engineer bored his own tunnel through the area to carry trains to and from the new railway station at Lime Street. Over a century later, the young John McCabe’s imagination would be fired by the thought of Williamson’s labyrinth as he rode the trains. Occasionally he would catch a glimpse of a bird in flight in a small patch of sky seen through a ventilation shaft in the tunnel.

That childhood memory provided the impetus when he came to compose a work for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra to perform in celebration of his home town’s 800th anniversary in 2007. “Labyrinth” is John McCabe’s seventh symphony, and like Sibelius’s seventh is cast in a single movement. It has no programme, although McCabe concedes that the bird glimpsed from a train can be heard in the piccolo that begins the symphony, while the sinewy lines that soon emerge in the cellos and basses perhaps suggest the darkness of the abandoned caves beneath Edge Hill. From this darkness, the symphony strives towards light, a struggle that reflects the turbulence of Liverpool’s history. A gradual, constant acceleration leads to a driving climax, which then evaporates, leaving the opening idea subtly transformed, as though we are now in the clouds with the bird we glimpsed at the outset.


Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Symphony no.5 in D minor, op.47

1: Moderato
2: Allegretto
3: Largo
4: Allegro non troppo

The singer Galina Vishnevskaya recalls a pointedly ambiguous statement made by Shostakovich in one of the many public submissions he had to make to the state during his life: “Our Party has so closely followed the growth of all musical life in our country. I have been aware of that close attention throughout my creative life.”

Shostakovich was particularly aware of that close attention in 1937. Since the attacks on his opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” and his ballet “The Limpid Stream” in Pravda the previous year he had found himself transformed overnight from the Soviet Union’s foremost composer to a non-person. The Great Terror that Stalin inflicted on Russia was at its height. Arrests and disappearances reached a vertiginous level. Stalin declared that 10 per cent of the population was subversive. The only way the police could make enough arrests to match this figure (which, coming from the leader himself, must be correct) was to detain people more or less at random. Like many others, Shostakovich kept a packed suitcase by the door, ready for the knock in the night signalling the arrival of the secret police to take him away. T be seen in public without a smile was to court arrest. Solzhenitsyn summed up the times: “Black Marias by night, demonstrations by day.”

Shostakovich completed his Fourth Symphony in May 1936 in the wake of these attacks. A performance was planned, but it became clear that the consequences of playing such a work could be severe for all concerned. After some strained rehearsals, Shostakovich withdrew the symphony, claiming dissatisfaction with it. The extraordinary, dissonant and dissident work would not be heard until 1961.

The only work available to him was film and theatre music. This may have worked to his advantage: Stalin was a keen film buff, and his awareness of Shostakovich prior to the Lady Macbeth controversy would have been as a film rather than a concert composer. Loyalty was next to impossible to demonstrate when the leader’s whims made citizens into enemies of the state overnight. Usefulness was another quality entirely, and Shostakovich’s film work made him look useful. This may be how he avoided the gulag: it also gave the party and Stalin an opportunity to be publicly merciful.

From the tone of the Pravda articles, Shostakovich knew that at the least he was expected to make his musical language simpler and more obviously tonal. What is remarkable about the Fifth is not, however, the compromise in style. The melodies are less angular and the harmony more straightforward than the Fourth Symphony, true, but it wilfully ignores the demands of the party in one very important respect: the Fifth is an explicitly and overwhelmingly tragic work.

Its famous and verbose subtitle, “A Soviet Artist’s Practical Creative Reply to Just Criticism,” was not Shostakovich’s invention. A journalist previewing the première in January 1938 coined it. The composer happily went along with the idea: it offered a very useful shield. He gave interviews in which he made vague pronouncements that the new symphony concerned “the making of a man.” The première in January 1938 was a huge success: it received a standing ovation nearly as long as the entire symphony. A long debate ensued, during which some astonishing logical somersaults were performed by party officials in order to explain why the symphony was in fact a straightforward, optimistic piece of Soviet Realist art. A “Hamlet” theory quickly became popular, which cast Shostakovich in the role of Shakespeare’s Dane. Thus the tragic element could be explained away as a superficial precursor to Soviet enlightenment. Shostakovich was rehabilitated – although he still kept the suitcase by the door, just in case.

The first movement’s opening gesture contains the seeds of almost everything that follows. It settles into an uncertain, shell-shocked mood, into which grotesquery gradually intrudes. A parody of the kind of four-square march beloved of totalitarian regimes throughout the world breaks out, before a climactic cry of anguish. This subsides into a deadpan passage in which a horn attempts to follow a flute into the stratosphere, before disappearing into an uneasy mist.

The second movement is a clodhopping affair brimming with irony. It attempts to display some finesse in its dance, but is never very far from a banana skin.

If the first half of the symphony is characterised by irony and distance, the third movement provides the emotional heart of the symphony. It was this intense, deeply tragic music that moved its first audience to tears. The effect of such deeply and genuinely emotional music on an audience that was effectively forbidden to have genuine emotion must have been overwhelming.

The finale continues to be the subject of controversy. For many years the official explanation was accepted without question in the West: that the “Hamlet-like” tragic (and therefore individualist and superficial) themes are overcome by the profound joy and triumph of the collective Soviet will. But one only has to listen to realise that the “triumph” is imposed. Any sign of genuine emotion is trampled by bullying brass. In a brief moment of hope, an undulating motif in the harp alludes to Shostakovich’s setting of Pushkin’s Poem “Rebirth.” But the “new and brighter day” promised does not dawn. Instead a darkly menacing restatement of the movement’s opening theme builds to a witheringly ironic conclusion: A crude, banal fanfare is upstaged by its own accompaniment of a single note hammered out 251 times, as Vishnevskaya describes it, “like nails being pounded into one’s brain.”

The conductor Boris Khaikin recalled a conversation he had with Shostakovich after the symphony’s premiere. The composer remarked, “I finished the Fifth Symphony in the major and fortissimo… It would be interesting to know what would have been said if I finished it pianissimo and in the minor?”

Notes & Queries

A trombonist and me in the pub after the concert on Saturday:

"Great programmes notes!"
"Thanks!"
"Not much about music in them, is there?"
"Well, writing about music's a waste of time, really."

And it is.

Well, I should qualify that. There's plenty to be had out of the study of music, for performers and composers. But when you're writing for an audience the rules are different, I think. Maybe once upon a time you could have assumed a certain level of knowledge about how a piece of so-called-classical music works, but the fact is that you can't anymore. I write programme notes for intelligent people who have no musical education. I could witter on about sonata forms or whatever happens to be the bottle tonight's wine is poured into, but for those who know about such things it's unnecessary, and for those who don't it's a confusion. All those descriptions of what happens in the piece you read in most programmes - what's the point? I don't want to be told the plot before I read a book. But it does help to have the scene set, and as a lot of the time we're talking about something that was written in a different age or society, it's good to know the context in which it was created. I usually mention something that happens near the end, so that the audience knows it's nearly done. But really my ideal programme note wouldn't talk about the music at all. Long-winded technical descriptions put the layman off, make it seem an esoteric exercise that you can't begin to understand without a degree. Music should be experienced viscerally.

In the case of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony, the political context of its creation is vital to understanding the work, but that's true of anything. No composer exists in a vacuum. To put a work in context doesn't diminish its universality (as some try to claim, particularly in the case of Shostakovich). When making a case, one argues from the specific to the general, and knowing how, when and why DDS composed his Fourth can only help in understanding its wider relevance today.

These thoughts are with me regularly as I write, of course, but they also come to mind this morning reading the comments on Pliable's post about the review of Alex Ross's book on Radio 3. It's true that there's not much in the way of discussion of music in the book, but is that its purpose? My impression is that the point of it is to put 20th century composers into a social context, something which has been largely lacking. I find the earlier part of the book more successful in this than the latter - although perhaps that simply reflects the extent to which the post-war composers abdicated social responsibility? It's also true that Ross's story peters out sometime in the early 70s, but perhaps with music since then it is too soon to tell. Certainly, the book isn't as wonderful as it's been made out to be - what could live up to such hype? - but Ross has attempted to put 20th century composers before a general audience, and that's something to be admired and encouraged.