Britten & Shostakovich
Written for a concert featuring Britten’s Cello Suite No. 1, op. 72, and String Quartet No. 1 in D major, op. 25, and Shostakovich’s String Quartet in E-flat major, op. 117.
Britten & Shostakovich
In a 1935 letter, Benjamin Britten wrote, “The real musicians are so few & far between, arn’t they? Apart from the Bergs, Stravinskys, Schönbergs & Bridges one is a bit stumped for names, isn’t one… Shostakovich — perhaps — possibly.” A few years later, he attended a concert performance of the composer’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and his diary records the reaction: “The satire is biting & brilliant. It is never boring for a second.”
Dmitri Shostakovich, on the other hand, likely first learned of Britten when the English composer was condemned at the 1948 General Assembly of Soviet Composers as “reflecting the universal dissolution and spiritual impoverishment of bourgeois culture… a conglomeration of wild harmonies, far removed from natural human song. In this music there is frankly proclaimed a reversion to the primitive savage cultures of prehistoric society.”
However, in the same speech, Shostakovich himself was described as a “decadent influence calculated to destroy the principles of classical music.”
So, you know — grain of salt and all that. And quite possibly the seeds of kinship.
Britten’s music wasn’t allowed in the USSR until the 1950s, during the cultural thaw under Khrushchev. Even then, the only work of his that made its way onto concerts for many years was The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. So for decades, geopolitical realities forced these two artists to observe each other’s careers from afar. And yet, they had much in common.
Both showed a natural attraction to the theater and narrative music. Both showed a fascination with reinventing neglected baroque and classical forms. Both spent a lifetime walking the tightrope between innovation and tradition.
And each managed to achieve the great contradiction of becoming the iconic symbol of their national musical establishment while somehow remaining a rebel and social outcast — Shostakovich due to his political satire and resistance to Communist Party ideology, and Britten because of his pacifism during the war and decision to live openly in a committed relationship with Peter Pears at a time when homosexuality was a criminal offense in the UK.
So when the Leningrad Philharmonic traveled to London in 1960, the opportunity for these composers to meet was long overdue. The concert included the UK premiere of Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto, featuring Mstislav Rostropovich. Also on the program: The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.
Shostakovich invited Britten to join him in his box and later fondly recounted their interaction to Rostropovich: “I am aching from so many bruises along my side… Every time Britten admired something in your playing, he would poke me in the ribs and say, ‘Isn’t that simply marvelous!’ And he liked so many things throughout the concerto, I am now suffering!”
Neither composer spoke the other’s language, but both knew enough broken German to communicate, and the rapport was instant.
(Following the concert, Shostakovich introduced Britten to Rostropovich, and a second iconic musical friendship was born — one that would lead to the creation of the Cello Sonata, three Cello Suites, and the Cello Symphony.)
Over the subsequent years, the Cold War made travel difficult and often erected obstacles to their friendship, but Britten and Shostakovich’s mutual admiration continued to grow.
In a 1963 interview, Britten listed “Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Copland, Tippett” as the living composers he most admired. A few years later, Britten and Pears visited Shostakovich and his family at their dacha in the Soviet Union. They returned the next year and spent Christmas with the Shostakoviches.
In 1968, Britten dedicated The Prodigal Son to Shostakovich. The following year, Shostakovich dedicated his Symphony No. 14 — an artistic response to the War Requiem — to Britten. Britten conducted the UK premiere the following summer.
In 1972, the composers met for the last time when Shostakovich visited Britten’s Aldeburgh Festival. Britten invited him to review the sketches for Death in Venice, which struck their friends as a remarkable gesture of trust and respect. Rosamund Strode, Britten’s assistant, later recalled her surprise: “Ben never, never showed an incomplete work to anyone, especially another composer.”
In November 1976, a year after Shostakovich died and one week before Britten would pass away, Rostropovich — now living in exile as the conductor of the National Symphony in Washington — visited Britten at Aldeburgh. He later recalled, “[Britten] said, ‘Slava, I’ve got a present for you,’ and from the piano Peter brought the beginning of a cantata Ben was writing for me to conduct in Washington. You see, Shostakovich had started to write a piece for my first season in Washington, but then he died; so Ben had said, ‘Now I must write it twice — once for myself, and once for our Dimity.’”
Britten: Cello Suite No. 1, op. 72
The Cello Suite No. 1 is the second of five works that resulted from Britten’s friendship with Rostropovich. Composed in 1964 and premiered by Rostropovich at the 1965 Aldeburgh Festival, this piece manages to walk Britten’s usual line between respect for tradition and embrace of innovation.
The obvious debt to Bach is present, as one would expect in this genre. However, rather than embrace Bach’s model of a baroque dance suite, Britten created a series of six character pieces. The four “cantos” which frame these movements aren’t really “songs” as their name might imply. Rather, they function as a kind of toolbox, displaying the melodic and harmonic elements that will be used in the course of the suite, with each recurrence emphasizing different details.
One baroque element that Britten does embrace is the use of “style brisé” (“broken style”). In this approach to counterpoint, the musical lines are placed in different registers, and the notes of each line are unsustained, allowing a monophonic instrument to imply multiple melodic voices. This technique is most prominent in the fugue.
And, of course, if Britten is writing for a virtuoso like Rostropovich, he’s going to throw in plenty of surprises to challenge his technique — everything from harmonics to plucking with the left hand while bowing with the right.
Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 9 in E-flat major, op. 117
Completed the same year as Britten’s Cello Suite, Shostakovich’s Ninth Quartet is the third of a group of deeply personal quartets that are often viewed as a trilogy. Shostakovich dedicated his Seventh Quartet to the memory of his first wife, Nina Varzar. His Eighth was dedicated to “the victims of fascism and war,” but his daughter, Galina, claimed that this was his cryptic way of dedicating it to himself. And the Ninth Quartet was dedicated to his third wife, Irina Supinskaya.
It took Shostakovich more than three years to complete this quartet — longer, if you consider that he destroyed an earlier version in what he called “an attack of healthy self-criticism.” In this quartet, we begin to see elements of the composer’s later style appear, especially an embrace of silence and extremely slow tempos.
The piece is in five movements, all of which are linked together so that the music proceeds without pause. In the third movement, we hear hints of classic Shostakovich as he quotes Rossini’s William Tell Overture — a melody that would also appear in his 15th Symphony.
The final movement is as long as the previous four combined and is itself divided into five parts. At the beginning of this movement, themes from the first movement reappear. The dark theme from the fourth movement makes an appearance before we engage with the heart of this movement: a fugue. Each of the quartet’s major themes are restated, and then we begin a 200-bar crescendo into one of the most exhilarating endings Shostakovich ever composed.
Britten: String Quartet No. 1 in D major, op. 25
Britten composed his String Quartet No. 1 in 1941 while living in Escondido, California, where his pacifism led him when war broke out in Europe. In his diaries, he complained about having to compose in a backyard tool shed with a fan blowing to drown out his hosts’ piano practice. Written a year after his Sinfonia da Requiem, this quartet was the last work of his American period. It would also be the last major instrumental work of his younger years. Shortly after the quartet’s premiere, Britten and Pears returned to England, and Britten began work on Peter Grimes.
While Shostakovich’s quartet is a very personal statement, this quartet seems first to be a demonstration of virtuosic compositional skill. The first movement is in a traditional sonata form disguised through a trick of alternating tempos — the andante and allegro alternate three times, and what first appears to be merely a slow introduction turns out to be an integral theme. Britten’s compositional skill becomes evident again when the “slow introduction” material reappears near the end of the piece, this time disguised in the allegro tempo. After an energetic scherzo in which triplet figures bounce from key to key, we come to the slow movement. Here, Britten demonstrates his uncanny ability to create profound melodies out of simple ideas — in this case, a descending scale. The fourth movement begins with material from the first movement’s allegro theme, and its enthusiastic energy brings the work racing to a joyous conclusion.
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