Shostakovich's Enigma

By W.B.

"This is one of Shostakovich's most profound works. It is filled with optimism, affirmation of life, and trust in man's inexhaustible strength." So said Tikhon Khrennikov, head of the Soviet Composers Union, last January after the Moscow premiere of Dmitry Shostakovich's Symphony No. 15.

The new work by the 66-year-old Soviet composer was played in Manhattan last week by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. It is in deed affirmative, at least by contrast with Shostakovich's bleak 14th Sym phony (1969), a meditation on death.

But the 15th is also grandiose and tire some, a big, empty balloon of a symphony. Shostakovich makes all the right orchestral gestures. Snare drums tap away energetically. Muted trumpets wail balefully from some nostalgic never-never land. The first cello sings a sad song. At the proper climactic moments, the strings and brass saw away at each other like legions at war. Yet gesture is just about all there is to it.

Shostakovich also indulges in the voguish fad of musical collage in which a new work is created partly by grafting together chunks of other composers' music. The first movement had barely begun last week when, to the chuckles of the audience, out trumpeted the clarion call from Rossini's William Tell Overture (the Lone Ranger's theme in bygone days). In the lugubrious second movement came some wintry wood wind chords right out of Debussy's Jeux.

The fourth and final movement seemed dedicated to Wagner -- first the somber three-note motif from the Ring cycle, then a bare but undisguised hint of love theme from Tristan und Isolde.

What could the former bad boy of Russian music be up to now? Fanciful theories abounded in the after-concert chatter. Rossini's William Tell is based on one of Schiller's strongest freedom plays. Was Shostakovich, by quoting from the opera, signaling his support of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other persecuted Soviet dissidents? By incorporating touches of Wagner, was Shostakovich perhaps giving artistic voice to the new spirit of friendship between the Russian and German peoples? So it went. It seemed that the new symphony, already recorded by Ormandy for RCA, might almost become as popular for guessing games as Elgar's Enigma Variations.

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