Zusammenfassung

Seit der Erstaufführung von Beethovens berühmter Sinfonia Eroica 1805 wurde der Trauermarsch zu einem rekurrierenden Topos in der symphonischen Musik. Vor allem in den Symphonien Gustav Mahlers (1860-1911) und Dmitri Shostakovich’ (1906-1975) evoziert seine Verwertung gelegentlich Konnotationen von tragischem und/oder gescheitertem Heroismus. Ein besonders interessantes Beispiel ist die letzte Bewegung in Shostakovich’ Fünfzehnte (und letzte) Symphonie, wo der Trauermarsch-Topos mit erstaunlicher Ambivalenz verwertet wird. Obwohl der Passage eines der typischen Merkmale des Trauermarsches fehlt – das Zweier-Metrum –, suggerieren drei Kontextelemente, dass die Musik als „getarnte Trauermarsch“ interpretiert werden sollte. Diese Elemente sind (1) die extensive Anwendung eines berühmten Leitmotivs aus Richard Wagners Der Ring des Nibelungen, (2) die stark hervorgehobene Selbstzitierung aus der Leningrad-Symphonie und (3) die Innenstruktur der Fünfzehnten Symphonie selbst.

Abstract

Since the premiere of Beethoven’s famous Sinfonia Eroica in 1805, the (funeral) march has become a recurrent topic in symphonic music. Especially in the symphonies of Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) and Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) it is regularly used to create connotations of tragic and/or failed heroism. A particularly interesting case is the last movement of Shostakovich’s Fifteenth (and last) Symphony, in which the funeral-march topic is used with puzzling ambivalence. Although the passage under concern lacks one of the hallmark characteristics of a (funeral) march – duple meter – three contextual elements strongly suggest that the actual music must be interpreted as “a funeral march in disguise”. These elements are (1) the extensive use of a famous ‘Leitmotiv’ from Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, (2) the over-emphatic self-quotation from the Leningrad Symphony, and (3) the internal structure of the Fifteenth Symphony itself.

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Pieter Bergé

Shostakovich Hero. The Disguised Funeral March in the Final Movement of his Fifteenth Symphony

To quote this article: Pieter Bergé «Shostakovich Hero. The Disguised Funeral March in the Final Movement of his Fifteenth Symphony», in: Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties, 22, « Un-Fading the Hero. Reconfiguring Ancient and Premodern Heroic Templates in Modern and Contemporary Culture», ed. by Michiel rys & Bart PhiliPsen, September 2018, 183-192.

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Shostakovich HeroThe Disguised Funeral March in the Final Movement of his

Fifteenth Symphony

In his bestselling novel, The Noise of Time,1 the British author Julian Barnes depicts three episodes in the life of Dmitri Shostakovich, in which he focuses on the composer’s complicated relationship with the Soviet authorities. The novel is largely based on an extremely influential book on Shostakovich that was published in 1979, four years after the composer’s death: Testimony. The Memoirs of Shostakovich as Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov.2 Ever since its publication, this book has been the subject of a vehement debate between believers and non-believers. The very reason for this escalating controversy is the huge impact it has had on the image of Shostakovich as a person and cultural figure, especially in the West. In fact, before 1979, Shostakovich was largely considered to be a committed communist and a loyal apologist of the soviet regime. After Testimony, this image was almost completely reversed: Shostakovich was now seen – at least by the believers – as a silent but embittered dissident who gave a damning verdict on the pernicious regime through secret codes in his music. Shostakovich, once a hero and standard-bearer of the soviet ideology, was suddenly re-cast as a hero of encrypted resistance. The now anti-hero of the communist regime was, so to speak, re-hero-ized in a Western disguise.

It almost goes without saying that such a polarized view is utterly simplistic.3 The very fact that the composer’s career was riven with denunciations and rehabilitations by the soviet authorities testifies to the fact that a strict and antithetical interpretation makes little sense. Nonetheless, after the publication of Volkov’s book, the heroic and dissident Shostakovich-image became the prevailing presentation of the composer in the West. By and large, it followed the view that was presented by the Russian pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy in the “New Foreword” included in the 25th-anniversary edition of Volkov’s book, claiming that “Shostakovich acted heroically managing, against all the odds, not only to survive but to leave for posterity great music of shattering intensity and quintessential spiritual and musical validity.”4 Still,

1. Julian BARNES, The Noise of Time, London, Jonathan Cape, 2017.2. Originally published by Harper & Row Publishers, Inc.; published in paperback by Limelight

Editions in 1984; Twenty-fifth anniversary edition published in 2004 “with a New Foreword by Vladimir Ashkenazy” (id.), followed by several reprints.

3. For a concise, but very well-balanced discussion on the reception of Volkov’s book, see: Francis maes, A History of Russian Music. From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar, University of California Press, 2006 (Chapter 14). In the present essay, the factual truth of Shostakovich’s “testimony” is not taken for granted. Inevitably, however, this book is considered to be an essential element in the reception history of the composer and his music. As such – but invariably with great precaution and restraint! – it plays its role in the hypotheses developed below.

4. Solomon VOLKOV, Testimony, xliv.

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according to Ashkenazy “[W]e do not have to infuse every note by Shostakovich with extra-musical connotations, but we need to understand what he endured in his life – the inhumanity, moral depravity, and hopelessness which the murderous Soviet system inflicted on its people.”5

Ashkenazy’s warning against an over-interpretation – eventually a heroic over-interpretation – of Shostakovich’s music was certainly not superfluous. After Testimony, several authors shamelessly fell back on an old-fashioned and ruinous tradition of musical hermeneutics, in which each bar of music is potentially understood as a musical translation of precise extra-musical meaning. In the earlier days of his career, Shostakovich himself strongly opposed to such an over-explicit approach. Nevertheless, many other remarks by the composer (and not in Testimony exclusively!) indicate that a significant part of his works – including the purely instrumental ones – are based on so-called ‘implicit’ programs: these programs express more general ideas, and contexts that are related to them, but in such a way as to exclude a reduction of the music to a simple and unambiguous signifier.

Apart from such direct verbal indications, Shostakovich also used much more sophisticated techniques to create meaning. In this chapter, I want to focus on two such strategies and try to describe how they are elaborated in parts of his Fifteenth (and final) symphony. The first technique is the use of so-called musical topics, the second one is musical quotation and self-quotation. My focus on the Fifteenth Symphony is motivated by the fact that in this work both topics and quotations directly and indirectly refer to “the heroic”.

*A musical topic is a specific constellation of musical characteristics that,

by convention, refer to an extra-musical context, such as a pastoral scene, hunt, war, etcetera.6 Two of the most recognizable topics in the repertoire are directly connected with the image of the hero, namely the march and – its counterpart – the funeral march. The march, usually set in a major key, is characterized by a steady binary rhythm, a simple harmonic structure, primitive melodic lines (often using broken chords), a conventional and easily graspable formal organization (with many repetitions of short phrases), a predilection for regular and simple rhythmical patterns, transparent textures and – if employed in ensemble or symphonic music – by the use of military instruments such as trumpets and drums. As such the march has expressive connotations of joy, virility, power, and in some cases triumph. Many famous examples can be found in a repertoire that ranges from more intimate examples such as the wedding march in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro to more exuberant ones like the triumphal march in Verdi’s Aida or the whole bunch of marches that are yearly recycled on the occasion of the popular Viennese New Year Concert (e.g. the popular Radetzky March).

The funeral march shares a lot of these characteristics, but proceeds much slower, is usually set in a minor key, makes particularly use of the lower registers, especially the bass drum, and is very often characterized by dotted rhythms on weak

5. Ibid. 6. Topical theory in music was mainly developed from the 1980’s onwards. A milestone in

this evolution was Leonard ratner’s book Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (Schrimer, 1980). Other prominent authors in the field include Kofi Agawu, Why J. Allanbrook, Byron Almén, Mark Evan Bonds, and Raymond Monelle.

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beats and by a reduced ambitus of the melodic line. Evidently, the funeral march has connotations of mourning, grief and death, especially but not exclusively in a military context. The most widespread example is the third movement of Chopin’s Second Piano Sonata: Marche funèbre: Lento.

In Shostakovich’s symphony, both the march and funeral march appear several times. In this chapter we will focus mainly on the two vast passages in which the funeral-march topic plays an essential role. It first occurs in the second movement, in a straightforward form. It is presented there as a theme, which is than freely elaborated upon in a series of variations. Fully in keeping with the tradition of symphonic march music, the march is connected with a gradual process of dynamic growth and decrease, so as to suggest the motional contours of an approaching and vanishing funeral procession. The second appearance of the funeral-march topic – in the central part of the final movement of the symphony – is much more ambiguous. Here, there is no “literal” funeral march. The passage undeniably contains a lot of typical characteristics of a funeral march – including the register, the instrumentation (with the continuous pulses in the timpani), the repetitive rhythmical patterns, the small intervals, and the creation of a spatial illusion of a moving procession – but it also lacks one of the hallmarks of the march, namely its double meter. By consequence, the funeral march here is certainly not straightforward, but rather suggested. On closer scrutiny however, it seems that the funeral character of the whole passage is reinforced by at least three contextual elements: the extensive use of a famous ‘Leitmotiv’ from Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, the over-emphatic self-quotation from the Leningrad Symphony, and the internal structure of the Fifteenth Symphony itself.

Wagner’s fate motifThe last movement of Shostakovitch’s symphony has a quite disturbing and

a-typical opening. Rather than presenting a new theme – as would be customary – Shostakovich opens the movement by quoting one of the major ‘Leitmotifs’7 from Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen,8 for almost one and a half minutes! In Wagner’s magnum opus this motif appears for the first time in the fourth scene of the second act of Die Walküre, a scene in which Wotan’s heroic daughter Brünnhilde is sent to Siegmund to announce his impending death. She approaches him with the following words:

Siegmund! – Sieh auf mich! Ich bin’s, der bald du folgst. (…) Nur Todgeweihten taugt mein Anblick: wer mich erschaut, der scheidet vom Lebens-Licht.[Siegmund! Look on me! I come to call thee hence. (…) Death-doomed is he who looks upon me; who meets my glance must turn from the light of life.]

7. A ‘Leitmotif ’ is a short, self-contained musical unit, which is repeated regularly during a musical piece and thereby invariably refers to an extra-musical data, such as a person, a place, an idea, an occurrence, an emotion, etc. Especially Richard Wagner’s elaboration of this technique from the 1840’s onward, has exerted an extremely strong influence on the history of music, both in the 19th and 20th centuries.

8. Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen is an opera cycle, composed between 1853 and 1874, and consisting of four parts: Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. The so-called tetralogy, with a full length between 13 and 15 hours, is one of the most ambitious projects in the history of opera, and also one of the most influential ones.

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In the reception history of Wagner’s tetralogy, the motif connected with this text is mostly labelled as “Schicksalsmotiv” or “fate motif ”.9 It is, from this scene onwards, a recurring motif that consistently relates to the inevitability of destiny (in general) or death (in particular). In short, it consists of two elements that can easily be separated: on the one hand, there is the solemn chordal progression in the brass instruments; on the other hand there is the threatening one-pitch pulsation in the timpani (Example 1).

Example 1: Wagner’s ‘Fate Motive’

The most iconic moment on which Wagner gives exposure to this motif, is in the penultimate scene of the whole cycle, more precisely right before the beginning of Siegfried’s famous funeral march.10 In this tragic scene, Siegfried is cowardly murdered by Hagen, who thrusts his spear into the hero’s back. The murder is a part of the so-called Siegfrieds Tod-scene, which begins and ends with the fate motive, and then ultimately connects with the impressive funeral march (Siegfrieds Trauermarsch). In Shostakovich’s symphony this sequence is somehow copied. The movement as a whole has a ternary form, in which the outer parts are dominated by the fate-motif, whereas the central part is conceived as a long passacaglia.11 The reference to Wagner’s fate motif, which has such a strong dramatic implication, therefore can be seen in this new context as an annunciation of the funeral content.

The Leningrad allusionCertainly this connection is strengthened by the fact that the passacaglia

theme on which the whole construction is based, is not an entirely new theme, but a variant – and easily recognizable – version of the so-called ‘invasion theme’ from Shostakovich’s own Seventh Symphony, commonly known as Leningrad (Examples 2a and 2b). Written some thirty years earlier, in 1941, this Symphony was considered from its premiere onwards as the composer’s evocation of the Russian resistance against the German oppression. The invasion theme that is displayed in the first movement is an extremely persistent one. Similar to the procedure used by Maurice Ravel in his famous Bolero, the theme is subjected to a slow and gradual growth

9. Wagner himself did not explicitly denote the Leitmotifs, nor did he use the concept himself. The tradition of Leitmotif-naming only began in 1876, when Hans von Wolzogen published his Thematischer Leitfaden durch die Musik van R. Wagners Festspiel ‚Der Ring des Nibelungen‘. Wagner himself never authorized this practice of labelling. Nevertheless, it was (and is still) continued by many Wagner scholars, including Ernest Newman, Deryck Cooke and Robert Donington and has created a complex, and often contradictory whirl of names and labels.

10. Richard wagner, Götterdämmerung, Act 3, Scene 2.11. A passacaglia is a traditional composition pattern in which a recurring bass sequence is

repeated over and over again, and elaborated by constantly varying upper and middle voices (as for instance in Pachelbel’s famous Canon in D Major).

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process that takes about ten minutes and culminates in a quasi-cacophonous apotheosis. Clearly, this invasion theme is an obvious march sequence. Recognizing the varied version of this theme in Symphony No. 15 obviously implies having heard it before in the Leningrad Symphony. But then, inevitably, the almost intolerable, over-explicit fashion in which the invasion theme is elaborated in the earlier work sheds a light (or a shadow) on its new version in the later symphony. The self-allusion, so to speak, implies the context from which it is taken, all the more so since in both works the theme forms the basis of an extended variation set. This element, in connection with the Wagnerian reference, lends the whole passage the strong connotation of a funeral march despite the ternary meter.

Example 2a: The ‘Invasion Motive’ in Shostakovitch’s Leningrad Symphony

Example 2b: The rhythmical pattern of the passacaglia in the finale movement of Shostakovitch’s Symphony No. 15.

Obviously, the question must be raised here as to why Shostakovich chose to include these references in his final symphony, and whether or not there are more fundamental reasons than the one that the composer mentioned himself, namely “that he didn’t know, but that he simply could not not include them”.12 As a general point, we should keep in mind that the Fifteenth Symphony was Shostakovich’s last one. It was written during a period of weakening health, and an increasing conscience of his own mortality, that permeates almost all of his later works. This specific context is interestingly connected with Shostakovich’s own description of the symphony’s first movement as “a scene in a toy store”.13 In fact, the tension between the childish context of the opening, and the deathly atmosphere of the final movement gives a strong indication that the symphony might have been conceived as the musical representation of the life cycle. Within this perspective, Wagner’s fate motif easily can be understood as a general memento mori, but possibly more specific connotations may play a role as well – connotations that may also explain why the fate motif is associated here with the Leningrad march. A crucial element to understand this connection can be found in Volkov’s Testimony.

12. See Story of a Friendship: The Letters of Dmitry Shostakovich to Isaak Glikman, 1941–1975, 315.13. Ibidem.

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According to Volkov, Shostakovich in this context repeatedly referred to a historical performance of Die Walküre at the Bolshoi theater, by Stalin himself, shortly before World War II. Referring to that event, Shostakovich proclaimed that this production certainly should not be seen to be “proof of Stalin’s love of Wagner”, but rather “a declaration of his love for Hitler.”14 In fact, the whole enterprise of staging Die Walküre fitted in the broader context of the Molotov-Ribbentrop-Pact in August 1939, a non-aggression treaty between the Soviet Union and Germany. Predictably, the despotic love affair between Stalin and Hitler didn’t last for long. In early 1941 the Nazis rushed over Russia, and a few months later they besieged Shostakovich’s home city Leningrad. For Shostakovich, however, the political switch itself did not influence his basic view on both leaders. Whatever their political agendas, he saw them as above all “spiritual relatives”15 and “criminals”16 driven by power rather than by ideas, let alone by ideals. To quote Volkov’s Shostakovich more extensively:

Stalin never had any ideology or convictions or ideas or principles. Stalin always held whatever opinions made it easier for him to tyrannize others, to keep them in fear and guilt. Today the teacher and leader may say one thing, tomorrow something else. He never cared what he said, as long as he held on to his power. The most striking example is Stalin’s relationship with Hitler. Stalin didn’t care what Hitler’s ideology was. He made friends with Hitler as soon as he decided that Hitler could help him keep and even expand his holdings. Tyrants and executioners have no ideology, they only have a fanatical lust for power.17

Although it’s somewhat hazardous to make comparisons between historical and mythological characters, it is hard to overlook in this context the analogies between Shostakovich’s description of the two tyrants and Wagner’s Siegfried. Siegfried is generally seen as a heroic prototype (which has made him, without any doubt, so attractive to Hitler), but in Wagner’s poem, this hero is a morally weak, antipathetic, and unstable creature, a symbol of blunt force. He is aggressive, impulsive, crude and spoiled, he is not able to feel fear but likes to frighten others, he is ignorant and naive, not capable of properly addressing women, his actions are not driven by self-developed goals or ideas, but suggested by the songs of a forest bird, he is easy to manipulate, quickly mislead by the enemy, and – in the end – dies as a traitor. It would be too gratuitous, of course, to claim that Shostakovich’s reference to the fate motive and Siegfried’s funeral march, are explicitly meant to bring all those parallels to mind. On the other hand, it would equally be mistaken to neglect the context of meanings that is associated with this impetuous character. For Shostakovich, Stalin’s and Hitler’s shared predilection for Wagner’s Ring Cycle, with its imploding heroic protagonist, must have infected the work to such an extent that it became almost impossible for him to disconnect it from this destructive connotations, including those that were incorporated by the character of Siegfried.

From this perspective, it is also telling that Shostakovich – at least, following Volkov’s testimony – strongly rejected the persistent interpretation of his Leningrad Symphony as being an evocation of the Nazi invasion. According to Testimony,

14. Solomon VolKoV, Testimony, 128.15. Ibid., 13116. Ibid., 15517. Ibid., 187

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such a nationalistic and self-protecting view only distracted from the harsh internal criticisms it contained. To quote Volkov’s Shostakovich again:

The Leningrad is not about Leningrad under siege, it’s about the Leningrad that Stalin destroyed and that Hitler merely finished off.18

Shostakovich himself, following Volkov, therefore considered his Seventh Symphony in the very first place as a requiem, one that did not commemorate specific persons, but rather all victims of political oppression.19 “The majority of my symphonies are tombstones”, Shostakovich said in one of his conversations with Volkov.20 By consequence, the Fifteenth Symphony can easily be understood as the final keystone of that series. In any case, the idea of the requiem strengthens the death-permeated atmosphere of the final movement, and hence also the funeral connotations that may surround its central passacaglia passage.

Structural analogiesThe third element is of a more structural nature and relates to the formal

analogy between the march in the second movement of the symphony, and the ‘march analogy’ in the last one. As shown in Figure 1, Shostakovich’s symphony consists of four movements, that can further be subdivided into two parts (2+2). This subdivision is cemented primarily by the many motivic, textural, gestural, stylistic and topical characteristics between movements 1 and 3 on the one hand, and movements 2 and 4 on the other. As becomes obvious from Figure 1, movements 1 and 3, and movements 2 and 4 have very similar tempo and character titles. On top of that, movements 1 and 3 are much shorter than the two other movements, in such a distinctive way that the compositional weight of Shostakovich’s symphony automatically falls on the even movements rather than the odd ones.

Figure 1: Structural analogies in Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15

18. Ibid., 155-5619. Ibid., 13620. Ibid., 156

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The formal analogy between the first and third movement is a further characteristic that reinforces the impression of a parallelism. Not only do the two Allegretto’s display clear ABA’ patterns, but, on top of that, their dominating character is that of a burlesque, with clear references to the “danse macabre” type.21 This is especially clear in the third movement, in which the solo role of the violin and the clarinet almost directly resonate the style and sonority of Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat, written in 1918 and one of the most influential pieces in the history of 20th-century classical music. In the opening movement this allusion is less prominent, although the playful march character and the returning quotes from Rossini’s Guillaume Tell in the trumpets – another quintessential instrument in traditional “danse macabre” scenes – certainly contributes to the typical atmosphere.22 From this perspective, it is also telling that Shostakovich’s earlier quoted reference to the toy store was quickly countered by some of his contemporaries who claimed that “if this was a toy store, at the very least it was one that had been locked up for the night and whose toys were clearly inclined to mutiny against the tyranny of the evil storeowner.”23 This interpretation, attributed to the Russian composer Tikhon Khrennikov (who was also a representative in the Supreme Soviet of the USSR when the Fifteenth Symphony was premiered in 1972), is certainly a telling example of an over-explicit hermeneutical reading of Shostakovich’s music, as criticized above. At the same time, however, it also indicates that the “playfulness” of the opening movement is less innocent than it may present itself in the very opening bars of the composition. This becomes especially manifest in the recapitulation (the A’-part) of the movement, in which the march reaches an almost outrageous shape. The brass section here takes over from the much more refined solo versions in the earlier parts of the score, giving the march a sonority that comes very close to the so-called March for the Soviet Militia (op. 139), which Shostakovich composed (on command!) in the same year. Krzysztof Meyer rightly characterizes this composition as a “ludicrous caricature of the genre”, and even mocks the fact that it was nevertheless awarded by the authorities.24

Another element which connects the first and third movements is the use of the so-called Rossini rhythm. In the first movement, the very famous gallop theme from Rossini’s Overture to Guillaume Tell is repeated five times, each time using the same pitches and an (almost) identical orchestration. As such, this quotation structures the movement as a whole, all the more so since some of the motives that precede and follow it easily can be considered as prefigurations and/or variants of the Rossini theme, and especially of its rhythmic contours – hence the label “Rossini rhythm”. Taking into account the overall lay-out of the symphony, it can hardly be considered a coincidence that this rhythm returns prominently in the central part (B) of the third movement. Rather this return further articulates the parallelism between the two parts, and, by consequence, the parallelism between the first and second half of the symphony.

21. See, for instance: https://www.markwigglesworth.com/notes/mark-on-shostakovich-symphonies-nos-1-15/ (November 13, 2017).

22. The quotation from Rossini is briefly discussed below.23. Quoted by Laurel E. Fay, Shostakovitch: A Life, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005,

272.24. Krzysztof meyer, Schostakowitch. Sein Leben, sein Werk, seine Zeit: Chapter 26.

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The analogy between the second and fourth movement was already discussed above, but an extra element should be added here. In fact, after having experienced the awkward opening of the final movement with its extensive Wagner quote, the opening part (A) of the second movement can be understood retrospectively as its anticipation. There is, of course, no literal Wagner quote in the earlier movement, but the Wagnerian style of its vast opening gestures hardly can be denied: the choral setting, combined with the deep brass timbres and chromatic harmonies, and finally resolving in a solemn perfect authentic cadence generates an almost undeniable anticipative power towards the final movement of the symphony. But the analogy has further consequences as well: for since this A-part precedes the long funeral march in the movement’s B-part, the anticipation creates similar expectations for the final movement. In other words, purely for reasons of formal analogy, the listener is invited to hear the B-part of the final movement as a funeral march as well. As such, the external analogy between the Wagner quote and the framing of the funeral march in Götterdämmerung is reinforced by an internal analogy between the second and fourth movements of Shostakovitch’s symphony.

ConclusionEven if each of the three elements discussed above is not decisive in itself,

they amplify each other in such a way as to make the funeral-march reading of the final movement quite convincing. But even without taking this interpretation for granted, in any case Shostakovitch’s symphony is permeated by the spirit of marches and funeral marches, and therefore by connotations of heroism and anti-heroism. As such, this symphony also connects with a tradition that emerged at the beginning of the 19th century, more precisely in Beethoven’s Third Symphony, also known as the Eroica Symphony. In this work, the funeral march – hitherto an exclusively ceremonial and military genre – was shockingly transferred to the rather ‘abstract’ realm of symphony. As is well known, this groundbreaking symphony was originally entitled Sinfonia Grande, and conceived “in onore di Bonaparte”. However, as soon as Beethoven heard of the general’s intention to crown himself emperor, he erased Napoleon’s name from the title page and gave his work a new title: Sinfonia Eroica, composta per festeggiare il sovvenire di un grand Uomo (Heroic Symphony, composed to celebrate the memory of a great Man). It is not necessary here to unravel the details of the story behind this renaming.25 What matters, however, is the fact that, ever since Beethoven’s symphony was premiered, it attained strong associations with the notion of a “fallen hero”, a failed or even “anti-hero”, a hero who turned into a tyrant and an enemy of the people. Therefore, the Symphony as a whole – however magnificent its finale may be – exudes an undeniable atmosphere of defeat. Its external triumph conceals its internal feeling of loss.

After Beethoven, many composers have integrated funeral marches into their symphonies, often with a similar atmosphere of ambiguity. In the case of Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony it also seems to be more than plausible to suppose a connection with Beethoven’s master piece. From this perspective, it is also puzzling that Shostakovich, in a letter from 1971 to his later biographer Krzysztof Meyer, mentioned that he included some Beethoven quotes in his latest symphony.

25. For a concise discussion, see: Thomas siPe, Beethoven: Eroica Symphony, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

So far, relevant literal references to Beethoven have never been discovered in the score, but a more symbolic one – such as the reference to “the birthplace” of the funeral march in symphonic music – may be at least as significant. It adds a supplementary trace of heroism and anti-heroism to Shostakovich’s work, one that even transcends the limited scope of Shostakovitch’s autobiographical boundaries.

Pieter Bergé,

KU Leuven