The approach had pluses and minuses, creating as it did a certain distance between the horrible events of daily life and their musical reflection in Shostakovich’s music. This Petersburg classicism worked until the late 1950s, when editorial tendencies began to predominate in the composer’s work (he was by then living in Moscow). A mutual dissatisfaction developed between composer and conductor; though suppressed at first, it surfaced after Mravinsky’s refusal to conduct the premiere of Shostakovich’s Thirteenth (“Babi Yar”) Symphony.
Mravinsky was accused of cowardice: the Thirteenth Symphony, which set the topical poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, dealt with politically touchy themes, including anti-Semitism. But the conductor had not been fainthearted in even grimmer times. Mravinsky, a firm anti-Soviet, considered Shostakovich’s music important. “Shostakovich’s greatness is defined for me first of all by the significance of the public and moral idea that runs through his entire work. It is the thought that things should not be bad for people, that they not suffer because of wars and social catastrophes, injustice, and oppression.”
In 1948, when Shostakovich’s music was denounced and banned, Mravinsky put the disgraced composer’s Fifth Symphony on the program of the Leningrad Philharmonic. The performance was a great success; the curtain calls would not stop. In response to the applause, Mravinsky held the score high over his head. The audience stood, realizing that this was a challenge, a desperately brave act. Mravinsky was risking a lot, perhaps even his life. His defiant gesture became part of the history of Petersburg culture.
The differences between Mravinsky and Shostakovich in the mid-1960s were thus less political than aesthetic. When, late in life, Shostakovich composed the introspective and textless Fifteenth Symphony, Mravinsky immediately added it to his repertoire.
Mravinsky was a religious man and did not hide the fact, which in the officially atheist state strongly complicated his relations with the authorities, who were forced to disregard this “eccentric” behavior because of the conductor’s international fame. He took to his heart Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and Bruckner’s symphonies, music through which he could express his spiritual ideas. Mravinsky also became a zealous exponent of Stravinsky’s works. He gave the first Soviet performance of
Mravinsky stressed the Petersburg roots of these Stravinsky works. Was the conductor thus shielding himself from reality, losing himself in the realm of the Petersburg mythos? His search for the ideal was tortuous. Mravinsky was often mired in despair (a fact few people knew); he would go off to his dacha and drink heavily.
One such time, his wife played a recording of
“That’s you,” Mravinsky’s wife told him. “That’s your orchestra.”
Mravinsky broke down and sobbed like a baby.
When Mravinsky died, the score of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony lay on his desk. He had first performed it in 1937; fifty years later the conductor was still working on it. This attitude was typical for Mravinsky, who expanded his core repertoire with caution.
He rarely performed works by the Leningrad composers of the generation that followed Shostakovich. Among the few exceptions were the works of Galina Ustvolskaya, Shostakovich’s favorite student at the Leningrad Conservatory. From the very beginning Ustvolskaya stood out for her uncompromising nature and indifference toward success. She worked for years over her compositions, keeping them hidden and destroying many of them. Her music did not imitate Shostakovich’s, but spoke in its own voice: ascetic, unornamented, built on strong contrasts.
Ustvolskaya’s chamber works are as monumental as a symphony, and her symphonies are as translucent as chamber music. Though partial to titles like
