Germany Shostakovich’s composing colleagues – 22nd Musicological Symposium: University of Music and Theatre ‘Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’ Leipzig, 19 & 20.5.2025. (GT)
The 22nd event organised by the German Shostakovich Society, held every two years, was threatened by the unexpected death of one of its founders Bernd Feuchtner earlier this year – the distinguished musicologist was chairman of the Shostakovich Society in Germany from 2018. Fortunately, Elisabeth von Leliwa and Ronald Freytag and others ensured the seminar proceeded as normal, including several international guests. It was held at the Mendelssohn Music and Theatre Hochschule during a gap in the two-week Shostakovich Festival held by the Gewandhaus in Leipzig in May.
The two-day symposium was opened by the distinguished musicologist and historian Simon Morrison from Princeton University. His talk, headlined ‘Shostakovich’s Second Wife’, covered a little-known period in the composer’s life. He mentioned in opening that the present period of musicology has witnessed a decline in Russian studies, and this was evident in the politisation in programme notes and low level of discourse on Soviet music. Owing to which, Shostakovich is incorrectly portrayed as a ‘suffering genius.’
Morrison spoke about the brief period of Shostakovich’s marriage to a Komsomol member Margarita Kainova during which his music became lighter, more Soviet, and Russian including a spell of fresh melody. He mentioned film scores The First Echelon, and Farewell to Granada and the Sixth Quartet as evidence of his change in style.
A most important contribution was from the director of the Shostakovich archive in Moscow, Olga Digonskaya who mentioned the recent discovery of documents which offered a new side of the composer from past perceptions. These offered a picture of Shostakovich tormented by shame, fear for his conscience. Digonskaya’s discoveries will be published in due course.
A major contribution was that of Professor Jürgen Stolzenberg from Halle who spoke about Gavriil Popov who was considered more important than Shostakovich in the 1920s, yet his First Symphony was banned before the crisis of music which saw the banning of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth. Despite changing his style, he continued to write outstanding music, notably in his Symphony Quartet of 1951 which was ignored, yet a new CD released by the Berlin-Tokyo Quartet has earned international acclaim.
Dorothea Redepenning spoke on Shostakovich’s friend Boris Tishchenko who collaborated in orchestrating several of Shostakovich’s late works, including his vocal cycles of the 1960s. Other speaker, Tobias Schick, talked about the evidence of similar styles appearing in works by Kabalevsky and Khrennikov from the composing style of Shostakovich in the 1930s and 40s. Contributions were made on Ukrainian composers such as Akimenko, and Jasha Nemtsov spoke about Gozenpud and Silvansky whose music has been neglected in past decades. The symphonist Boris Lyatoshinsky was mentioned in my own talk on Yevgeny Mravinsky who made significant contributions in expression and orchestration of the Fifth, Eighth and Tenth Symphonies by Shostakovich and helped in non-musical ways by helping Shostakovich’s works to be performed and recorded when he was threatened by being cancelled by the Composers Union. Mravinsky helped Lyatoshinsky in the instrumentation of his Third Symphony after criticism of formalism by the Kiev Composers Union. He was the only conductor to perform and record the Ukrainian composer’s music at this time.
The composer Sviridov was the subject of two speakers, one of whom, Andrei Goretskii, criticised him for being a ’Second Shostakovich’ copying his stylistics and language yet later, as Anastasia Timofeeva said, turned against his former mentor by opposing contemporary music especially avant-garde modernism. The composer Karamanov, according to Amrei Flechsig, was discussed for his conventionalism earlier in his career when he was a fellow student of Schnittke yet switched to religious influences and wrote many symphonies after his return to the Crimea after independence in 1991. Yaroslav Timofeev spoke on two contemporary composers, Pärt and Kancheli who changed from early influences, to adopt quite distinctive styles in their later careers; from conventional writing to religious texts and more colourful orchestrated models. The British writer, Elizabeth Wilson spoke on the influence of Rostropovich in popularising the twentieth-century cello concerto by his championing of new cello works across the world.
Of particular interest was the talk by Boris Yoffe about two neglected composers, Lokshin and Chargeishvili whose music was ignored during their life’s and only gained fame through writing music for the cinema or theatre. Sadly, Chargeishvili committed suicide after the failure of his First Symphony at the age of only thirty-four. Another composer who suffered from neglect and indeed suffered a jail sentence was the Chinese composer Wang Xilin who was influenced by Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony and wrote music in the spirit of the Russian composer, and only after 1989 did his music gain recognition in his homeland. Matthias R. Entress gave the talk on Wang Xilin. Alexander Gurdon spoke about the German conductor Kurt Masur who was the first to perform and record all Shostakovich’s symphonies in Germany after the composer’s passing in 1975, he made comparisons between archive recordings of the symphonies recorded by DDR Radio at the time.
This was a highly interesting event which attracted many members of the public, including young people, and will surely lead to greater recognition of this leading composer whose music tells us something about ourselves and the world we live in.
Gregor Tassie