Symphony No.15 in A major, Op.141

Shostakovich was not, in the conventional sense, a hero. Although he was strongly opposed to the repressive aspects of the Soviet regime, he avoided speaking out against it. In fact, rather than join the dissident movement, he was more likely to speak up for the official line - even to the extent of making misleadingly conformist statements about his own music. He was only being realistic: “Don’t waste your efforts,” he would say, “You’re living here, in this country, and you must see everything as it really is.” Having experienced political persecution at first hand under Stalin, his priority was to retain the freedom to compose and the right to have his works published and performed. The truth, heroically if cryptically expressed, is in the music.

Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony is about heroism. His last orchestral work, written in a state of increasingly ill health, it is also about death. It is about death not in isolation, however, but in the youthful context of the first and last movements. The A major opening of the first Allegretto - with its high-pitched bell sounds, its playful flute, its boisterous bassoon- has a nursery atmosphere about it. But what is William Tell doing here? It could be that the toy-soldier second subject, introduced by a solo trumpet, reminded the composer of the familiar Rossini tune and that he just quoted it in a spirit of mischief. It is more likely, in a work as abundant in symbolism as this one, that it is a satirical comment on the kind of heroism Shostakovich himself avoided and on how trivial it now seems. Later, as the movement develops, he postulates another kind of heroism in a rhythmically and harmonically contradictory canon for three groups of strings moving in three different metres. The sort of thing which would have been denounced as “formalistic” in the Soviet Union a few years earlier, it finds little approval here either. Only the childishly high spirits survive the irony.

The Adagio is deeply serious. A solemn brass chorale alternates with a sustained lament for solo cello drawing a freely expressive line over the full extent of its range. As if the dread message were not already clear, after brief but chilling exposure to a sinister pair of chords on woodwind and muted brass, two flutes quietly introduce a funeral march. The parade of grief mounts to a climax of anguish and then retreats more or less the same way as it approached, the sinister woodwind and brass chords now introducing a variant of the opening chorale on ten-part strings. The dying moments of the movement include a touching reference on celesta to Shostakovich’s own youthful First Symphony and an eerily scored trio for solo double bass and vibraphone in unison with cello harmonics.

After that, the rasping open fifths on two bassoons, leading directly into the third movement, seem highly incongruous. But the incongruity is deliberate, for this is neither jokey scherzo nor macabre dance of death. It is an inspired compromise, containing elements of both the preceding movements. From the middle section onwards, with its grotesque trombone glissandi, the atmosphere becomes distinctly brighter. But the true resolution of the conflict is reserved for the finale.

At first the prospect sounds bleak: Wagner’s Fate motif on lower brass is followed by the drum beats associated with the death of another hero, the Siegfried of Götterdämmerung. But then, with a three-note sigh reminiscent of the Tristan Love motif, the first violins glide into a quietly hopeful Allegretto melody. The key is still A minor, however, and an allusion to the Fate motif interrupts the melodic flow after only two bars. That melody emerges in its true light only after much philosophical deliberation in chaconne form in the middle section. Cellos and basses quietly pluck out a new theme - a complex pattern based on a 12-note cycle but recognisable always by its initial rising fifth - which becomes the recurring basis of a series of variations. The last of them is a full-orchestral protest with the theme in expressive prominence on the trumpets.

A happy reconciliation now seems more unlikely than ever. The Allegretto material reappears with little hope, as the Fate motif seems to confirm. But this time the Tristan sigh leads not into resignation but an A major version of the main theme - now fresh and youthful and capable, eventually, of converting the sinister chords of the slow movement to prolonged A major harmonies. With the return of symphony’s opening theme on piccolo amid the radiance of the percussion colours in the coda, irony is finally replaced by innocence and death offset by new life.

It is not irrelevant to the argument to add that it was the composer’s son Maxim who conducted the first performance of the symphony in Moscow in January 1972.