The Worst First!

[greg]

But we deem that Shostakovich has inferior vibrational fields...

[Cato]

http://web.ukonline.co.uk/nso/Shosta1.htm

"In October 1924, he wrote to his girlfriend, Tanya, that he was so fed up with his family's poverty that he had taken an engagement as a cinema pianist. A month later he tells Tanya that he is writing a symphony saying that it is "quite bad, but I have to write it so that I can have done with the conservatory this year, since I'm sick of it and don't feel like writing a symphony now." By the beginning of January 1925 he had finished three movements. "In my view it's turned out very well, the most substantial of my works" adding "and it'll be performed badly since I won't be there to show them how it should go." At the same time, Shostakovich's sister, Maria, found employment as a dance teacher and he was able to give up a cinema job which had become ever more demanding and irksome although he still had the energy to sue the cinema owner for unpaid wages. Life continued to lurch between moments of blissful happiness and suicidal depression. "Doubts and problems, all this darkness suffocate me. From sheer misery I've started to compose the finale of the Symphony. It's turning out pretty gloomy - almost like Miaskovsky, who takes the cake when it comes to gloominess." A further letter to Tanya describes his "sweet ecstasy" whilst composing, often until the early hours of the morning, but outlining an attempt to hang himself yet not having the courage to kick away the chair. At last on the 26th April he had finished the symphony announcing that he was pleased with the result.

Although in his adult years Shostakovich wrote his orchestral music directly to manuscript, his First Symphony was in piano-score and the arduous task of writing out the score and orchestral parts made him ill again. A first performance was scheduled for the 12th of May, 1926, at the Leningrad Philharmonic Hall with the great Nicolai Malko in charge of the Leningrad Philharmonic - a prestigious debut that would have thrilled most student composers. Even so Shostakovich had doubts, regarding Malko as a good conductor yet afraid that he was incapable of presenting the symphony the way it should be, "Even the slightest deviation from my wishes is painfully unpleasant." After all this angst, it was an enormous boost to Shostakovich that the première received a triumphant reception.

... Shostakovich's contemporary, Lev Lebedinsky, portrayed the Symphony as "An alarm, a forecast of the terrible future." Some years later he expanded on this statement: "As a true democrat, he [Shostakovich] deeply detested the communist system, which continually threatened his very life. In his first major work, his First Symphony, he already challenged the forces of evil. I was the first to note that the timpani in the last movement sound like a depiction of an execution on a scaffold. When I remarked to Shostakovich, 'You were the first to declare war against Stalin,' he did not deny it. Already, from his early years, Shostakovich understood what was going on in our country and what was to come."

(My emphasis above)

No mention of Prof. Steinberg in this analysis.

I would assume the Maximilian Steinberg mentioned by Mr. Grew earlier is the son-in-law of Rimsky-Korsakov?

[m_gigena]

His initial effort was so profoundly incompetent and downright bad that his teacher Maximilian Shtaynberg (or Steinberg - there are various transliterations) kindly cleaned it up for him and made it at least presentable. What we hear now is something like 30 per cent Shostacowitch and 70 per cent Shtaynberg. Unfortunately Shostacowitch took all the credit, but as might be expected nothing he managed to produce subsequently rose to the standard of that first symphony.

Hey! I remember you from Talk Classical, you appeared there as Egregious Professor

You cannot go wrong with Alexander Scryabine; any of his wonderful symphonies or piano sonatas for instance. The Poem of Ecstasy! Is not the title enough to capture any one's interest!

Another great Russian was Rachmannineff. It will at once be clear from a first hearing that his symphonies and concertos are a hundred times better than those of Shostacowitch.

[btpaul674]

What about Bax's first?  Last I remember, it was hard to get through.

I love Bax's first.

[PerfectWagnerite]

Anyone mentioned Vaughan Williams? What a horrid work that is, the Sea Symphony, I thought it would never end.

[71 dB]

Anyone mentioned Vaughan Williams? What a horrid work that is, the Sea Symphony, I thought it would never end.

I disagree. I heard the work some time ago and I was pleasantly surprised!

[Kullervo]

Erm, I respectfully--and completely--disagree, both with "as might be expected" and with the assessment of his later work.

--Bruce

Bruce, there's no need for respect where respect is trampled.

[jochanaan]

I disagree. I heard the work some time ago and I was pleasantly surprised!

For once I agree with you unreservedly.  This is one fine choral symphony.  It sprawls a bit--but that might be said of many other masterpieces.  (I highly recommend the old Adrian Boult/London Philharmonic recording.  Boult really had a way with English music. )

[Sydney Grew]

Wagner's, while by no means his best work, has some real substance.

The principal problem with the 1832 symphony of the German man Wagner is that it shows no feeling for form whatever. We believe that that is the secret reason why he turned thereafter to writing operas of the "continuous recitative" type, in which this deficiency of his talent would be less noticeable.

In that respect - the sense of musical balance - he was at the opposite pole to the older Mozart; but even the latter's first symphony did not manage much did it.

Some listeners of course do not care about musical structure; but to a good many its absence is painful. Richard Strauss was another one in the Wagner mould; he wrote - what is it? - four meandering symphonies, the first of which he did not dare even to publish, and he became much more successful once he turned to opera with its dramatic scenes and loud voices.

[Brian]

Richard Strauss was another one in the Wagner mould; he wrote - what is it? - four meandering symphonies, the first of which he did not dare even to publish, and he became much more successful once he turned to opera with its dramatic scenes and loud voices.

Have you heard it, by the way? I actually do not mind it at all; the first movement's first subject has an interesting little jolt to it and I remember the finale being rousing ... though it has been a full two years since I have heard the piece 

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

I love Bax's first.

So do I. That second, funereal movement is one of his greatest.

[karlhenning]

http://web.ukonline.co.uk/nso/Shosta1.htm

"In October 1924, he wrote to his girlfriend, Tanya, that he was so fed up with his family's poverty that he had taken an engagement as a cinema pianist. A month later he tells Tanya that he is writing a symphony saying that it is "quite bad, but I have to write it so that I can have done with the conservatory this year, since I'm sick of it and don't feel like writing a symphony now." By the beginning of January 1925 he had finished three movements. "In my view it's turned out very well, the most substantial of my works" adding "and it'll be performed badly since I won't be there to show them how it should go." At the same time, Shostakovich's sister, Maria, found employment as a dance teacher and he was able to give up a cinema job which had become ever more demanding and irksome although he still had the energy to sue the cinema owner for unpaid wages. Life continued to lurch between moments of blissful happiness and suicidal depression. "Doubts and problems, all this darkness suffocate me. From sheer misery I've started to compose the finale of the Symphony. It's turning out pretty gloomy - almost like Miaskovsky, who takes the cake when it comes to gloominess." A further letter to Tanya describes his "sweet ecstasy" whilst composing, often until the early hours of the morning, but outlining an attempt to hang himself yet not having the courage to kick away the chair. At last on the 26th April he had finished the symphony announcing that he was pleased with the result.

Although in his adult years Shostakovich wrote his orchestral music directly to manuscript, his First Symphony was in piano-score and the arduous task of writing out the score and orchestral parts made him ill again. A first performance was scheduled for the 12th of May, 1926, at the Leningrad Philharmonic Hall with the great Nicolai Malko in charge of the Leningrad Philharmonic - a prestigious debut that would have thrilled most student composers. Even so Shostakovich had doubts, regarding Malko as a good conductor yet afraid that he was incapable of presenting the symphony the way it should be, "Even the slightest deviation from my wishes is painfully unpleasant." After all this angst, it was an enormous boost to Shostakovich that the première received a triumphant reception.

... Shostakovich's contemporary, Lev Lebedinsky, portrayed the Symphony as "An alarm, a forecast of the terrible future." Some years later he expanded on this statement: "As a true democrat, he [Shostakovich] deeply detested the communist system, which continually threatened his very life. In his first major work, his First Symphony, he already challenged the forces of evil. I was the first to note that the timpani in the last movement sound like a depiction of an execution on a scaffold. When I remarked to Shostakovich, 'You were the first to declare war against Stalin,' he did not deny it. Already, from his early years, Shostakovich understood what was going on in our country and what was to come."

(My emphasis above)

No mention of Prof. Steinberg in this analysis.

Thank you for setting the record straight, Cato.

I thought Syd an eccentric ere now. But now . . . .

[karlhenning]

Shostakovich conceived the idea of the First Symphony in July 1923.  Probably his early Scherzo Opus 7 was initially intended as its third movement.  The young composer noted, not without satisfaction, that he had provoked Steinberg's displeasure with this piece: 'What is this obsession with the Grotesque? The [Piano] Trio alreaday was in part Grotesque!' Steinberg's comments did not have much effect.  The young composer went on to to ridicule the traditional tenets of his teacher: 'The inviolable foundations of The Mighty Handful, the sacred traditions of Nikolai Andreevich [Rinsky-Korsakov] and other such pompous phrases.  Unfortunately, I can no longer indulge him with my music.'

[Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, p. 50 ]

That doesn't really sound like two 'collaborators', doesn't at all sound like a situation which will result in a piece which is 30% Shostakovich and 70% Steinberg.

Does it?

[Dancing Divertimentian]

[Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, p. 50 ]

That doesn't really sound like two 'collaborators', doesn't at all sound like a situation which will result in a piece which is 30% Shostakovich and 70% Steinberg.

Does it?

Wouldn't fit that a composer of Shostakovich's caliber would even allow a work 70% someone else's out of the drawing room. Despite the early date.

Ego's bound to play some part...

[Pierre]

It is not so surprising when one realises that it was not really written by Shostacowitch at all. His initial effort was so profoundly incompetent and downright bad that his teacher Maximilian Shtaynberg (or Steinberg - there are various transliterations) kindly cleaned it up for him and made it at least presentable. What we hear now is something like 30 per cent Shostacowitch and 70 per cent Shtaynberg. Unfortunately Shostacowitch took all the credit, but as might be expected nothing he managed to produce subsequently rose to the standard of that first symphony. It was thought to be the work of a "brilliant young composer" but in actuality it was knocked into some sort of shape by a "clever mature man"!

For more information about this shameful affair please refer to Gerald Abraham's well-known book entitled Eight Soviet Composers.

I've indeed checked what is published in Gerald Abraham's book, and was reminded of the significant context from which that British musicologist took the rather slender evidence for his claim - that Steinberg assisted Shostakovich in composing Symphony No. 1. His evidence is simply a statement Steinberg made at one of the various meetings held in 1936 when it was obligatory to denounce Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth, and indeed it seemed likely that the composer himself was soon to meet a sticky end:

"A number of speakers have referred to Shostakovich's First Symphony as one of his best works, but no one has reminded us that this Symphony was written in the Conservatoire class. The First Symphony, the highest possible expression of his talent, is the result of his study in the Conservatoire. I was very distressed by Shostakovich's published allegation that in the Conservatoire we only 'hindered him from composing'."

Gerald Abraham goes on to say: 'The fairly obvious inference is that Steinberg himself had had some hand in the polishing of the Symphony, that his relationship to it was (shall we say?) similar to Stanford's rumoured relationship to Hiawatha's Wedding Feast. That may be one reason why Shostakovich has never done anything as good as his Op. 10.' [end of extract]

I'll make two observations: a) Gerald Abraham has not a shred of evidence that Shostakovich was helped by Steinberg - he draws an inference which I think is quite incorrect. The context was that both the St Petersburg and Moscow Conservatoires had suffered some brutal handling during the years of the cultural revolution (in the late 1920s and early 1930s - roughly the period of the First Five-Year Plan), during which many distinguished professors had been sent away on 'leave of absence' or bluntly told to shut up, put up or get out while musically illiterate but politically orthodox people interfered with their organisation and how courses were run; any students who had any bourgeois background were kicked out, while musically illiterate students barely able to compose a competent tune but with working class backgrounds were recruited and allowed to best professors unable to explain the significance of a piece of music to the working class struggle. Steinberg himself confided to his diary that it was a time of 'real bedlam, threatening the annihilation of professional art and the reduction of everything to complete dilettantism'. All this was brought to a halt in 1932 with the abolishment of the proletarian unions, but as Steinberg and his colleagues well knew, a lot of those who had been active in decimating the Conservatoires until then were still in positions of power and potentially waiting for their chance to attack the 'bourgeois' professors.

In short, Steinberg in 1936 clearly felt he was turning the tables on those who wished to suggest the professors at the (pre-Cultural Revolution) Conservatoires had a destructive influence on their students, pointing out that the very works Shostakovich was being attacked for were in reaction against what had been fostered in the Conservatoire. I don't think even Steinberg would have claimed that he helped Shostakovich actually compose the Symphony, let alone Grew's mischievous '30 per cent Shostacowitch and 70 per cent Shtaynberg' claim (nowhere to be found even in Abraham).

Observation b): Abraham's claim that by 1943 (when his book was published) 'Shostakovich has never done anything as good as his Op. 10' is patently no more than a personal opinion – not a statement of fact – and almost certainly not one informed of remarkable things like Shostakovich's Symphony No. 4 (suppressed at that time). Abraham had clearly encountered The Nose (another remarkable opera IMHO) but thought it 'clever' and 'vulgar' (though, by the way, Abraham was equally obtuse when it came to Britten's talent, thinking Les illuminations 'clever', yet the equally sure-footed Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings 'poetic', presumably simply because it had a more recognizably pastoral vein more to Abraham's taste).  To be charitable, Abraham was perhaps mindful of not offending the Soviets by praising a work – Lady Macbeth - which was still officially banned, but I suspect he probably also found this opera 'vulger'.

Sorry to have gone on at some length here – I think this issue's too important to drift off unchallenged, and I've only just come across Sydney Grew's mischievous post. Whoever 'Grew' is should be ashamed of propagating a malicious lie and pretending it has the authority of Abraham.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Sorry to have gone on at some length here – I think this issue’s too important to drift off unchallenged, and I’ve only just come across Sydney Grew’s mischievous post. Whoever ‘Grew’ is should be ashamed of propagating a malicious lie and pretending it has the authority of Abraham.

Don't apologise for an excellent piece of investigative journalism...

[knight66]

Pierre, Thanks for the information.

Mike

[greg]

phew, i was starting to think the 1st wasn't really his. Thanks, Pierre. 

[Sydney Grew]

Grew's mischievous ‘30 per cent Shostacowitch and 70 per cent Shtaynberg’ claim (nowhere to be found even in Abraham).

Of course the per-centage is not found in Abraham; it comes from our own two ears. There is nothing remotely mischievous about our own ears!

And if we disregard all the guff about "working-class struggle" what the rest of Member Pierre's message boils down to is a confirmation (by looking it up in the book) of what we originally wrote: namely that Abraham (one of our foremost authorities on Russian music remember) stated that Shtaynberg knocked the symphony into shape. And Abraham, who did not expire until 1988, never as far as we are aware retracted that statement. He was in a position to know and we should trust his authority.

[karlhenning]

. . . let alone Grew's mischievous '30 per cent Shostacowitch and 70 per cent Shtaynberg' claim (nowhere to be found even in Abraham).

No, that bizarre fantasy does not exist outside "Syd"'s feverish brain.