Music: Shostakovich & the Guns

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For a while it looked as if Conductor Koussevitzky had gained the prize. Without even waiting to see the score of the coveted Seventh Symphony, he rushed to the Am-Rus Music Corp., U.S. agent for Soviet music, nailed down the first concert-performance rights for the Western Hemisphere. Then with quiet triumph he announced that his student Berkshire Music Center Orchestra would play the Seventh Symphony on August 14. But the truth of the matter was that he had been nosed out by his 75-year-old rival, Arturo Toscanini, the old fire-&-ice Maestro himself. Toscanini would conduct the Seventh on July 19, a month before Koussevitzky.

Maestro Toscanini was very well connected. He was connected with National Broadcasting Co., and NBC, it seemed, had been exceedingly forehanded. Last January, before a note of the symphony had been heard in rehearsal in Kuibyshev, NBC started dickering, through its Moscow correspondent, for first Western Hemisphere performance rights. By April the rights to conduct the Seventh were tucked away in NBC's pocket.

NBC now had the Seventh Symphony and the orchestra to play it, but it was not sure it had the conductor. Both Toscanini and Stokowski are under contract to NBC next winter, but next winter is a long way off. Maestro Toscanini might conduct the musical scoop this summer, if he liked the score. (But four years ago he had been offered the first performance of Shostakovich's Fifth, and declined.) So the photostat pages of the score were rushed to Toscanini, and NBC held its breath. He looked, said: "Very interesting and most effective." He looked again, said: "Magnificent!"

Leopold Stokowski, who had hopefully dashed East from Hollywood, went crestfallen back to the West Coast; Rodzinski had not even had a lookin. Hurriedly NBC augmented its Symphony Orchestra to the extra-large size the performance required. Night after night, nearsighted Maestro Toscanini, who conducts from memory, never from notes, sat up with his nose buried in the score.

The Symphony. Written for a mammoth orchestra, Shostakovich's Seventh, though it is no blatant battle piece, is a musical interpretation of Russia at war. In the strict sense, it is less a symphony than a symphonic suite. Like a great wounded snake, dragging its slow length, it uncoils for 80 minutes from the orchestra. There is little development of its bold, bald, foursquare themes. There is no effort to reduce the symphony's loose, sometimes skeletal structures to the epic compression and economy of the classic symphony.

Yet this very musical amorphousness is expressive of the amorphous mass of Russia at war. Its themes are exultations, agonies. Death and suffering haunt it. But amid bombs bursting in Leningrad Shostakovich had also heard the chords of victory. In the symphony's last movement the triumphant brasses prophesy what Shostakovich describes as the "victory of light over darkness, of humanity over barbarism."

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