Schostakowitsch Preludes And Fugues

[Nickie Koskinen]

The24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87 by Dmitri Shostakovich are a set of 24 musical pieces for solo piano, one in each of the major and minor keys of the chromatic scale. The cycle was composed in 1950 and 1951 while Shostakovich was in Moscow, and premiered by pianist Tatiana Nikolayeva in Leningrad in December 1952;[1] it was published the same year. A complete performance takes approximately 2 hours and 32 minutes.[2] It is one of several examples of music written in all major and/or minor keys.

J.S. Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, an earlier set of 48 preludes and fugues, are widely held to be the direct inspiration for Shostakovich's cycle, largely based on the work's composition history.

After the Second World War, Dmitri Shostakovich was Russia's most prominent composer.[6] Although out of favour with the Soviet Communist Party, he was still sent abroad as a cultural ambassador. One such trip was to Leipzig in 1950 for a music festival marking the bicentennial of J. S. Bach's death. As part of the festival, Shostakovich was asked to sit on the judging panel for the first International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition. One of the entrants in the competition was the 26-year-old Tatiana Nikolayeva from Moscow. Though not required by competition regulations, she had come prepared to play any of the 48 preludes and fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier on request. She won the gold medal.[7]

Following the prelude, Shostakovich proceeds directly to the fugue without pause. It is a double fugue in four voices with two distinct subjects developed in separate expositions. The first subject is a slow stepwise melody consisting mostly of half notes and quarter notes, while the second subject is a partial diminution or variation on the first subject (eighth notes instead of quarter notes). About two-thirds into the fugue, Shostakovich brings back the original subject in the bass combined with the second subject in the soprano. The E minor fugue is one of progressive complexity. The composition begins with a quiet, conservative exposition, but it ends with nearly every possible fugal device (invertible counterpoint, stretto, double stretto, diminution, augmentation, retrograde) exploited in the final bars.

The fugue, marked allegretto, contrasts with the legato feel of the prelude with repeated staccato notes forming the basis of the fugal subject. Three voices develop with contrasting legato passages against the staccato. To further add to the quaint color of the movement, subito forte and piano are mixed in giving the fugue a frankly chipper tone.

The three-voice fugue begins with a statement of the main theme, or subject, in the soprano voice. While fugal subjects usually use stepwise motion, this subject uses only the notes of the A-major triad. This subject is then stated a fourth below in the alto, as would be expected in a Baroque fugue. After a brief interplay between the soprano and alto, the bass is introduced with a statement of the subject, completing the exposition. The modulatory section begins in the minor key; a brief return to the tonic key provides a breath of calm before an increasingly rapid series of modulations. These lead to a climax in A major, signaled by a dominant pedal, but this lasts just four bars before the music plunges into C major. The music then settles down, gently leading to the recapitulation, where a single statement of the subject in the tonic key brings the piece to a close.

The fugue in 3

4 time is a frantic scurry with fast notes and staccato markings. Only two voices develop with increasing stretto in the middle culminating at the end when the two voices join in unison as before in the prelude though only with an octave separation.

Before premiering the work, Shostakovich privately performed the first half of the cycle before the Union of Composers (as was typical with new compositions during the Soviet Era) on 31 March 1951.[13] The panel expressed great displeasure at the dissonance in some of the fugues, labelling the work as an example of formalism.[14]

This work is considered by many (e.g. music critic Alex Ross, musicologist Tanya Ursova, etc.) to be produced by the "other Shostakovich," or as a composition "for the desk drawer."[15][16] According to Ross, the composer used chamber forms in the period to channel his most personal compositions, those that would not be suitable for use or approval by the Soviet government. This work is included in that group along with several string quartets.

Roger Woodward made the first complete recording available in the West in 1975; it was reissued on CD in September 2010 by Celestial Harmonies.[5][18] Other notable complete recordings include those by Keith Jarrett, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Craig Sheppard, Konstantin Scherbakov, David Jalbert, Jenny Lin, Olli Mustonen, Peter Donohoe, and Igor Levit.[19][10] Mustonen recorded the Shostakovich preludes and fugues in conjunction with those by Bach in sequences that contrast these works. His first recording was issued by RCA Victor Red Seal in 1996 and the second by Ondine Records in 2002. Levit's recording, paired with Ronald Stevenson's Passacaglia on DSCH, was issued by Sony in 2021.[10]

Some thirty years after Stalin's Minister of Culture Andrey Zhdanov ushered in the era of Socialist Realism in the Soviet arts by pronouncing, at the Writer's Congress of 1934, that "the present state of bourgeois literature is such that it is unable to create great works of art,"2 Aleksandr Dolzhanskii concluded his monograph on Dmitri Shostakovich's cycle of twenty-four Preludes and Fugues for piano with a by-then familiar echo:

The compositional peculiarities of Shostakovich's fugues emerged as the result of the innovative application of some of the most progressive contemporary ideas. For many years, the theme of peace and war was the predominant theme in Shostakovich's music. In representing it, the remarkable master of socialist realism appears as a passionate champion of peace and social justice, as the angry denouncer of evil and violence, the daring fighter "for the best ideals in the history of mankind." And therefore in creating the Collection of preludes and fugues, Shostakovich achieved what not a single composer from the bourgeois countries had been able to achieve for two-hundred years since the death of Bach.3

With such comments, Dolzhanskii's analysis faces off squarely against contemporary commentators on the cycle who, in the continuing and regrettably distracting wake of Solomon Volkov's infamous pseudo-memoir Testimony, have stressed the composer's supposed personal desire, especially after his denunciation at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Composers in April 1948, to imbue his works with secret subtexts that mask a deeper, dissident content.4

Insofar as it emanates from and reinforces the problematic discourse system of Soviet aesthetic ideology, Dolzhanskii's work is not likely to gain broad favor as an interpretive commentary on this cycle. The Preludes and Fugues, Shostakovich's largest and most ambitious work for his own instrument, constitute some of the composer's most serious work of the immediate post-1948 period. Yet for those interested in understanding the full complexity of these works something about Dolzhanskii's approach carries the ring of truth. Consider, for instance, another passage, quoted here at length, in which he describes the expressive peculiarities of this music using narrativistic imagery reminiscent of the discourse surrounding Beethoven's music in the 19th century:

In many fugues the slow tempo of the composition, a certain strain of its elements, creates the impression of significant difficulties that the hero of the work has to overcome. Furthermore, there is a stubbornness in claiming victory over these obstacles, an image of steadfast determination and strength.

The composer discovered and was a virtuoso at devising a variety of means for broad melodiousness, for the primordial slowness that characterizes Russian peasant singing. The fugues of Shostakovich are substantially different from those of Bach in the slowness of the individual elements and the composition as a whole.

Recent trends in Shostakovich scholarship invite us to place such ideas in a more constructive light than may at first glance seem desirable. In what might be understood as a corrective to the multitude of "secret subtext" readings spawned by Volkov's work, several prominent English-language Shostakovich scholars have been producing interpretations of key works that aim to deconstruct elements of the polarizing discourse surrounding the composer. Amidst this contentious landscape, one comment by Richard Taruskin has stood out as the most provocative, and therefore the most prone to attacks by opposing ideological camps. In his confrontational analysis of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Taruskin characterizes Shostakovich in the 1920s and early 1930s with the phrase "Soviet Russia's most loyal musical son."6 In brief, Taruskin's argument is that all of the characters in the opera except for the murderess Katerina Izmailova are portrayed as soulless caricatures, and in condoning her wicked behavior by giving her the only truly lyric writing in the opera, Shostakovich himself may have been guilty of perpetuating totalitarian patterns of degrading human subjectivity. The challenge for Shostakovich devotees is to face at least two essential issues: whether or not one wants to regard one of the composer's most widely beloved works from such a critical perspective and, even more uncomfortably, whether or not one is willing to grant the fact that Shostakovich may have been just human enough to produce art that conformed, at least in part, to the dominant ideologies and modes of representation of his unique time and place.

Laurel Fay, too, reminds us of the extreme conflicts of meaning inherent in such works as the song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry, composed, like the Preludes and Fugues, in the period immediately following the 1948 denunciations, a time of strident Soviet anti-Semitism. While by all accounts Shostakovich was appalled by such intolerance, we must remember that his interest in Jewish folklore and music was as much rooted in aesthetics as it was in politics, perhaps even more purely so: "The inflected modes of Jewish music went hand in hand with his own natural gravitation towards modes with flattened scale degrees. Shostakovich was attracted by the ambiguities of Jewish music, its ability to project radically different emotions simultaneously."9 As Fay suggests, contrary to the tendency to treat this cycle as a work of protest, Shostakovich "was in all likelihood approaching the project in a constructive attempt to satisfy the 'public' promises he had just made" at the Composers' Congress of April 1948 to write tuneful, accessible music for the Soviet people.10

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