"I'm going through the ones I know, and I plan to... study
systematically the symphonies I don't really know, even if I may have
heard them once or so."

--
Matthew B. Tepper:  WWW, science fiction, classical music, ducks!
Read about "Proty" here: http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/proty.html
To write to me, do for my address what Androcles did for the lion
Opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of my employers

Thanks for reading.

I feel that in my posts I have over-emphasized the weight of the first
movement. No question, the first movement deals with the most concrete-
serious-historical-overwhelming subject imaginable. However, the real
miracle is in how Shostakovich creates something beyond ideology,
beyond history, beyond parti pris. Music of ultimate genius
transcending the no doubt inspired, sincere poems of a most talented
poet (who is still among us, and teaching in the US, as far as I
remember).

In fact the whole symphony is a miracle of meaning. Comparing the 13th
and the 5th, to exaggerate just a tad, let's think of the aesthetic
proportion between Don Giovanni and a Sonata Facile with more minor
modulations.

I am slightly less enthralled by the fifth movement of the 13th, but
the first four movements are almost autonomous poetic/musical
masterpieces somewhat united by a valiant, underlying humanistic
purpose which both goes beyond music and is perfectly/genuinely
musically motivated. If I had to pick a favorite, the first movement
would be probably no. 2. The third movement would be number one,
because the (relatively more trivial) poetry is being added a factor
of musical meaning which no other composer could. Not even Mahler.

Sometimes muses and darkness concur into creating miracles one feels
trivial in commenting about.

regards,
SG

--
Matthew B. Tepper:  WWW, science fiction, classical music, ducks!
Read about "Proty" here: http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/proty.html
To write to me, do for my address what Androcles did for the lion
Opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of my employers

I didn't mean that Shosty would be greater than Mahler, Mahler greater
than Shosty, or any such ultimately meaningless generalisation. I
perhaps find Mahler's symphonic output more objectively varied and
subjectively indispensable in each symphony of his. Mahler wrote
"only" nine of them, but none of them is dispensable or like another
one.

What I meant, regarding the third movement (In the Store) of DS's 13th
Symphony, was that I have never experienced a composer taking such a
poem (good, but not really earth-shattering) and adding *in the music
itself* SO much to it that it ends by sounding like an ultimate poetic
masterpiece. Even harder to do than write the overwhelming music to
the overwhelming Babi Yar poem of the first movement. On an aesthetic
level, proof of compositional mastery, proof of elemental strength of
music among arts, which challenge reason and legitimate expectation.

Incidentally, here's what Maria Yudina wrote to Shostakovich
(Shostakovich admired her greatly, he thought nobody could play Bach
fugues as "choir-like" as Yudina) after the premiere:

'I can say thank you from the late Pasternak, Zabolotsky, innumerable
other friends, from the tortured-to-death Meyerhold, Mikhoels,
Karvasin, Mandelstam, from the nameless hundreds of thousands of "Ivan
Denisoviches", they cannot be counted, the ones Pasternak called
"tortured alive" - you know all that, they all live in you, we are all
burning in the pages of The Score, you have given it as a gift to us,
your contemporaries - for generations to come'.

It is "politics" in a way but, more importantly, it is so much more
than politics. It is a Black and Luminous Book of communism and hope,
black for communism, luminosity for hope, and what it really
represented, in life rather than in ideology.

regards,
SG