Dmitry Shostakovich’s Orchestral Dialogues: The Symphony as an Opera

Abstract

The article is devoted to the orchestral technique in Dmitry Shostakovich’s symphonies. Of all the important issues connected with the analysis of this most important component of Shostakovich’s style, accentuation is made on the functions of orchestration as a dramaturgical and form-generating means, on those opportunities that orchestral writing is provided with in the process of construction of musical composition. At the center of our attention is the second movement of the Fifteenth Symphony (1972), written, similar to many of the slow movements of Shostakovich’s symphonies, in a freely and original quasi-rondo form, based on juxtapositions of musical themes and the contrasts resulting thereby. The demonstrated dialogic effect induces us to remember a number of compositions in which the antithesis of musical ideas contrasting in terms of imagery and timbre provide the impulse for their purposeful development and interaction. In the Andante movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 opus 58 (1806), such an antithesis has for a long time evoked associations with the famous scene of the furies from Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (1762). A special type of interpretation of this narrative without any direct correspondence to the mythopoetic plotline of Gluck’s opera, but with a clearly visible antithesis between life and death is suggested by Shostakovich in his Fifteenth Symphony.

Keywords: Dmitry Shostakovich, Fifteenth Symphony, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Orfeo ed Euridice, orchestral writing, formative functions of orchestration, musical and thematic dramaturgy