Symphony No.9 in E flat major, Op.70

Composers have been nervous about approaching a ninth symphony ever since Beethoven’s Ninth so intimidatingly proved to be both his greatest and his last. For Shostakovich the dilemma was particularly acute when - at the end of a war which had inspired his monumentally violent Seventh and Eighth Symphonies - he was expected to produce a new symphony which would be not only a full-scale Ninth but also a celebration of the epic triumph of Soviet forces over Fascism and an apotheosis of their glorious leader.

So when the Ninth Symphony was first performed, under the direction of Evgeny Mravinsky in Leningrad on 3 November 1945, official opinion was outraged. “Stalin was incensed,” the composer is reported to have told Solomon Volkov. “He was deeply offended because there was no chorus, no soloists. And no apotheosis. There wasn’t even a paltry dedication. It was just music, which Stalin didn’t understand very well… I couldn’t write an apotheosis to Stalin, I simply couldn’t.” In fact, in its historical context, the Ninth Symphony was more than “just music.” It was offensive not so much because the composer had failed to produce the national epic he had promised as because he had delivered a burlesque instead. It was a frank and provocative evasion of the creative and political issues involved in writing a Ninth Symphony in this particular time and place: rather than fail to live up to such lofty expectations, the composer implicitly declares, I’m not even trying.

That much is clear from the playful E flat major beginning, which seems to be emulating Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony in its irrelevance to here and now. The neo-classical orientation of the first movement is confirmed by such diagnostic structural features as a second subject in the dominant and a formal exposition repeat. But there is a prominent music-hall element too. The uncouth gesture addressed by the trombone to the piccolo, reminding the latter instrument of its duty to introduce the second subject, is only the first example. A later, still wittier example occurs in the recapitulation where the same trombone gesture fails to attract the attention of the piccolo and, after five attempts, rouses a solo violin instead.

The new work must have seemed even more subversive to those awaiting “our national Ninth” in that, alongside the burlesque, it has its own private and inscrutable thoughts. The Moderato is a peculiarly equivocal inspiration. Beginning in B minor with an intimately pensive melody drawn in a long and shapely line on the clarinet, it modulates to F minor for a faintly sinister waltz-like theme on the strings. It is only at the very end of the movement, after an understated but distinctly uneasy development of the two main themes, that the tonality definitively settles on B major.

The G major Presto , which evades the here and now by disguising itself as Tchaikovsky at one point and Rossini at another, seems to be a straightforward scherzo - until, that is, it slows down to merge into the grotesquely ambiguous Largo. The heavily dramatic trombone recitative and the clashing trumpet harmonies, recalling something from Rimsky-Korsakov or Mussorgsky perhaps, are surely parodistic. But is the bassoon really set up with two highly eloquent cadenzas just to be knocked down by the jocularity of the tune it goes on to introduce as the main theme of the last movement?

Apart from what might be a significant allusion to Shostakovich’s own First Symphony in the second subject, the Allegretto offers no clue either way. If it seems to be moving towards a more serious climax, it is only to reintroduce the jocular main theme in an incongruous tutti, with the melodic line relegated to the lowest instruments in the orchestra. The Allegro coda confirms that this is a Ninth Symphony with no pretensions to be one.

Gerald Larner©