In the same conversation with the conductor, Stravinsky noted that he heard Malko conducting Shostakovich on the radio: “I liked him—you can see tradition in him. I like being able to see where a person has come from.”40 He was undoubtedly speaking of Shostakovich’s First Symphony, which was first played under Malko’s baton on May 12,1926, in Leningrad. Shostakovich began composing the symphony in 1923, when he was sixteen. Malko, who was then the chief conductor of the orchestra of the Leningrad Philharmonic, decided to perform it even though some conservative musicians felt Shostakovich could wait another year.
Before the concert Shostakovich was consumed with anxiety, nervously enumerating the possible complications in a letter to a friend in Moscow:
What if it doesn’t sound right? That would be a humiliating scandal. I mean, if they boo the symphony, that would hurt. So, there are lots of worries, I can’t list them all. Besides worries like this, there are even more unpleasant ones. What if they cancel the concert? What if Malko gets sick or misses the train and doesn’t get back in time? It’s all very unpleasant. And very tiring and enervating.41
The premiere in the acoustically marvelous hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic (the former Assembly of the Nobility) was a triumph. The nineteen-year-old composer, thin, wearing glasses, still a boy, with a forelock that would become famous, awkwardly took his bows. The audience kept looking over at Glazunov, who sat in his usual sixth-row-aisle seat. He had no intention of quitting the hall (as he had with Prokofiev); on the contrary, he smiled and applauded, even though the young composer had not followed his persistent recommendation to change a bad-sounding (to the maestro) part in the introduction.
This was a significant moment in the history of the Petersburg school of composition. Forty-four years earlier in the same hall, Glazunov’s First Symphony had been performed, and ever since he had been the leading composer of his generation, the “Russian Brahms.” Shostakovich’s symphony had an even more brilliant future; just a year later it was conducted in Berlin by Bruno Walter, and soon after it was included in the repertory of Leopold Stokowski and Arturo Toscanini. Shostakovich had no intention of remaining a model student of the Petersburg school. But at that moment very few people guessed that.
In Shostakovich’s symphony, the first audiences heard the influence of the later Rimsky-Korsakov and his students, Stravinsky and Prokofiev. The more attentive could have pointed out traces of Scriabin, Richard Strauss, and some Mahler. The accent in the symphony was on continuing tradition rather than breaking with it. In that city musicians did not merely value tradition—they worshipped it. It seemed particularly important to preserve it in an era of unprecedented social upheaval. The fact that talented young people respected tradition was a comfort.
As it was, the Petersburg school of composition had just entered a period of convulsions. Its time as a school exclusively of the Rimsky-Korsakov-Glazunov line had ended. Once Rimsky-Korsakov had managed to supersede Tchaikovsky in Petersburg. Now Tchaikovsky’s music was coming back with a vengeance.
Beginning composers were also becoming more and more influenced by the musical world of Mussorgsky. In his day Rimsky-Korsakov had done more than anyone to preserve the heritage of his late comrade from the Mighty Five. He completed and orchestrated his opera
Rimsky-Korsakov had not foreseen that Mussorgsky’s acclaim and influence would exceed his own. Nor would he have imagined that Mussorgsky, whom he considered a technically helpless dilettante who tossed snatches of confused ideas onto paper, would become a model for several generations of Russian composers. For Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich, the works of Tchaikovsky and especially Mussorgsky occupied an incomparably higher place in the pantheon of Russian music than Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov. Shostakovich even repeated Rimsky-Korsakov’s enormous labor and redid the orchestration of
