Afternoon in Two “2” Time

One composer is currently being feted as a “neglected genius” whose music possesses the “potential power to… change lives for the better [author’s emphasis].” Another’s music is derided as “facile, badly orchestrated, and comically derivative.” Within a span of five years in the 1940s each of them penned their respective second symphonies. A couple of weeks ago, I spent a few hours listening, then re-listening to each one, coming to some surprising personal conclusions.

Mieczysław Weinberg, whose music has garnered wider attention in recent years, managed to live long enough to see the first flickerings of interest in his work outside of Russia, which began shortly before his death in 1996. At the time his name was known almost exclusively to Shostakovich experts. Not only was the elder composer a mentor and personal friend of Weinberg’s, he also had esteemed his talent very highly, ranking him among his own personal favorites. 

Discussion of Weinberg’s tragic biography, with his early years being disfigured first by the aggression of Hitler, then by the paranoia of Stalin, has become difficult to disentangle from the music. In light of this, one can only marvel at Weinberg’s sheer fecundity and sense of craftsmanship, which alone are an eloquent testament of civilization’s tenacity in transcending barbarism. Remarkably, he managed to be the sole survivor of his family and even more remarkably went on to live a full life; eventually penning over 150 numbered works, some with laudably humanist themes like his opera The Passenger and his final symphony from 1991. 

Putting aside these extramusical considerations, however, it is hard to ignore the fact that he never seemed quite able to come out from under the Shostakovichian shadow which looms over all his work (although one could argue that it was he who influenced the elder composer as Weinberg’s early music sometimes eerily prefigures his mentor’s late music in texture, if not exactly in quality). Whereas Shostakovich’s absorbs and unifies various disparate elements—Honegger, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Krenek, Mahler, jazz-flavored pop, Russian folk song, and Soviet mass choruses—into a single, unmistakably original artistic voice, the only significant influence readily discernible in Weinberg is Shostakovich. So derivative is his music that one is tempted to view Weinberg’s catalog as a grand, extended musical commentary on Shostakovich.

His Symphony No. 2, Op. 30 from 1946 (recently recorded and issued by Deutsche Grammophon) vividly illustrates this problem. Composed only a handful of years after Weinberg escaped his native Poland, the symphony bares its emotional scars with uncompromising directness. Facile and badly orchestrated it most certainly is not, but the symphony’s derivativeness brings to mind how César Franck, in a fit of frustration, scrawled “poison” across the title page of his copy of the score to Tristan und Isolde, so threatened was he (and many other French composers) by the force of Wagner’s style, which he feared would reduce him to a mere imitator. If the Soviet cartoon of “Shostakovich clones” that graces the cover of the book Shostakovich In Context is any indication, the Russian symphonist’s music was similarly believed by at least some of his contemporaries to be a stifling influence on younger composers. Even those who emerged into maturity with a distinctive style haven’t been safe. One is reminded of the lamentable decline in Krzysztof Penderecki’s music after his Symphony No. 1. A few, like Tigran Mansurian or Boris Tchaikovsky, came under the influence of Shostakovich, but also possessed the willpower and strength of personality to resist being subsumed by it, instead forging ahead with their own highly individual idioms. 

Ian McDonald perceptively noted in his The New Shostakovich—by way of critique of his subject’s Symphony No. 8—that composers whom he considered, like Penderecki, to be the elder’s epigones were “one-dimensional.” 

“The tragic earnestness is laid on too thickly and too monotonously; there is little sense of perspective; and no ironic contrast, characterisation, or humor.”

He could very well have been describing Weinberg’s Symphony No. 2 which—at least to me—swings a heavy black brush relentlessly against its canvas in a manner which Shostakovich himself rarely indulged in. Worse it (and by extension most of Weinberg’s music) has little of the structural tightness, rhythmic zest, and playful surprise which his mentor had to a seemingly limitless degree. 

Listening to Tikhon Khrennikov’s Symphony No. 2, Op. 9 from 1942, on the other hand, proved to be a surprisingly enjoyable romp.

For most of his life, Khrennikov was best recognized at home and abroad not for his compositions, but for his over forty years as Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, becoming essentially the face of Soviet musical policy. As such, he was equally courted and disliked, the latter much more so and with a vengeance once his power crumbled along with the former USSR’s. 

Disagreeable and reprehensible though he may possibly have been as a man, the professional quality of his music is beyond reproach, and is anything but “badly orchestrated.” Khrennikov in this symphony displayed an uncanny ear for orchestral brilliance and sparkle. (Not for nothing did Leopold Stokowski champion his Symphony No. 1 long before its composer became the top musical bureaucrat in the Soviet Union.) His thematic material is clear-cut and memorable; many more talented composers would have been envious of his ease with melody. And if it isn’t going to be setting the world afire with its originality, Khrennikov’s Symphony No. 2 is less derivative of, say, Dmitri Kabalevsky and Gavriil Popov than Weinberg’s corresponding symphony is of Shostakovich. Rhetoric about “Socialist Realism” and heroism notwithstanding, the symphony purports no metaphysical profundities which require searching beyond the music itself. It is simply an exuberant collage of marches, mass songs, and folk melodies which ingratiates itself to the listener with an appealingly abstract quality; contenting itself with being accepted at face value, and without having need of socio-political props.

Having spent over 20 years listening to Weinberg—not only his symphonies, but also his vast catalog of chamber, vocal, and piano music—I find that not only is his music mostly unable to dispense with those props, but that sweeping them away reveals nothing but the aesthetic void they had concealed. When the listener arrives at the coda of his Symphony No. 2, one comes to the uncomfortable realization that its composer’s desire to vent his emotions exceeded his ability to impose order and cogency upon them, that the sum of his good deeds in life amounts to precious little in the cold retrospective gaze of musical posterity. 

On the occasion of what would have been Shostakovich’s 70th birthday, Khrennikov declared that to follow in his late colleague’s tradition was to commit to “uncompromising service to his affairs, to his calling as an artist of the socialist epoch.” That he himself—more Czerny than Shostakovich; his character streaked with a pungent Mephistophelian aroma—contradicted these lofty aims is a delicious irony that is positively, well, Shostakovichian. 

A skin-deep smile for skin-deep music: Tikhon Khrennikov’s moment in the spotlight in the film The Train Goes East (1947). [Wikimedia Commons]