DQ for Watkins 412-21 (grad students: please read short Huband article on Shostakovich found on WebCT under “Week 13 – Materials – Links –
Please be prepared to respond in either seminar meeting or in "Comments" on the course blog. In all venues, you must be prepared to cite specific passages (by page, paragraph, line, and quotation) in support of your responses—and specific works.
Summary: This short chapter surveys the careers of Prokofiev and Shostakovich, whose lives, works, and socio-political experience form a reasonably good portrait of the interaction of musical context and musical content that impacted symphonic composition in the 20th century. Though both Russian composers’ experience reflects the specifics of the Soviet (and Socialist Realist) artistic environment, both composers’ priorities, catalog of works, relationship with both conservative and modernist trends, is consistent with that of symphonists in other places (notably Scandinavia and the USA).
[Two-part] general question for consideration: (1) What is the three-way relationship between symphonic form, programmaticism, and modernism? Is there a way to articulate the ways that composers have juggled these (potentially conflicting) ideas and influences? (2) What is the relationship between programmaticism and 20th-century composers’ (particularly political) experience? In other words, do 20th-century programmatic composers tend to be aware of, or oblivious to, the political contexts in which they find themselves? Conversely, is the political awareness or experience of “absolute” composers more or less visible? Influential?
(1) Note the range of influences and resonances Watkins cites for Prokofiev, on p412. As a younger contemporary of Stravinsky, Bartok, Debussy, Skriabin, and Diaghilev, and as something of an enfant prodigue (“child prodigy”), Prokofiev drew very widely on many extant influences and ideas in the years before the Bolshevik Revolution (1917). What does this catholicity reveal about Prokofiev’s compositional strengths? About his awareness of his own historical/artistic context?
(2) Also on p412, what/who are the influences upon the Scythian Suite (1915), in terms of both program and style? This orchestral work, along with the Toccata for piano (1912), were the principle works which made Prokofiev’s name in pre-Revolution
(3) On the top of p413, Watkins identifies both Neo-classical tendencies in Prokofiev’s music of this period, and also four traits which the composer himself claimed to identify in his own music. What are those four traits; how, and which, relate to Neo-classicism, and, crucially, with what other “Isms” of the period do these traits connect Prokofiev. In other words, in these four style characteristics, Prokofiev is linked to a number of other composers working in the same period—not only to Neo-classicists. What are those other styles and composers?
(4) p413, para 2, Watkins says that the “peasant setting” of On the Dnieper “failed to move” Prokofiev, and that this “suggests a fundamental distinction” b/w him and Stravinsky. Be prepared to explain this distinction, citing specific works as evidence in support of your explanation.
(5) p413, para 3, Watkins describes very briefly Prokofiev’s experience in the West 1918-36; in class, I will considerably amplify this description—not because I believe Watkins is in error, but because a more complete description of the 1918-36 experience helps explain Prokofiev’s return to the Soviet Union, and subsequent experience, more fully.
(6) p413 (last para)-414 (top) contain a brief description of the complex and often conflicting imperatives that were imposed upon composers (and other artists) in Stalinist Russia. These imperatives came under the general heading of “Socialist Realism,” a term we will unpack and discuss in class (grad students, please read short Huband article on Shostakovich found on WebCT under “Week 13 – Materials – Links – Readings”; pay particular attention to pp3-5). However, in advance of that discussion, read this section closely, and consider the time period: the 1930s. In what other places were what other composers experiencing (internal or external) demands that their music be “socially relevant”? Thus, be prepared to relate “Socialist Realism” with other politically-informed musics of the 1930s.
(7) p415 (middle) discusses Prokofiev’s score for the Sergei Eistenstein film Alexander Nevsky, which relates the events of the German invasion of Russia in 1242 and Germany’s defeat at the climactic battle of Novgorod, when an entire army of German Knights Templar were halted on a frozen lake, whose surface shattered and in which the Germans were drowned. Nevsky was made in 1938, prior to the German invasion of Poland which formally precipitated World War II, but clearly this Eisenstein/Prokofiev collaboration was intended to anticipate—and muster support—for resistance to a Nazi invasion. Please view this YouTube excerpt, and be prepared to relate visual imagery and musical style in it to the principles of Socialist Realism. [Grad students: for more on Eisenstein as a model for both composers and film-makers, see the discussion of his seminal Battleship Potemkin, a mythographic rendering of an abortive 1905 anti-Tsarist rebellion led by Russian sailors]
(8) The discussion of Shostakovich follows logically from that of Prokofiev: he was both younger than Prokofiev, more shaped by post-Bolshevik experience than Prokofiev, and much more emblematic of Russian symphonism (and suffered at least as much at the hands of Socialist Realist critics). On p416, para 4, Watkins has a wonderful phrase to describe Socialist Realist goals: “the proper nuancing of social ideologies” (specifically in art). Be prepared to unpack and explain this phrase, citing specific events and compositions from Shostakovich’s own career.
(9) In this same paragraph, please note the astonishing contrast between 1920s
(10) Note the discussion (p417) of Lady Macbeth and the Symphony No. 5. Both works were roundly criticized by Socialist Realist critics (most notably, Tichon Krennikov, the notoriously repressive head of the Union of Soviet Composers); the former was withdrawn, and the latter was alleged to be Shostakovich’s “apology” for his previous “artistic errors.” What was the nature of these “errors”, from whom and for what reasons did the criticism come, and what are the “problems” in our attempts to understand Shostakovich’s artistic motivations in these works?
