When Russia was swallowed in communism, musical life was shackled to the state. Some got out, like Sergei Rachmaninoff. Some stayed and suffered, like Dmitri Shostakovich. Some chose to become functionaries of the regime, like Dmitri Kabalevsky (also a composer). But most were neither dissidents nor lackeys, neither collaborators nor saints. Instead, they did what was necessary to fulfill their musical destinies in the trying circumstances of a police state. And in this group were some of the titans of the age, among them the conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky.
Who? The question is pardonable, for Mravinsky is probably the least known of the great conductors. His life had the misfortune to coincide almost exactly with that of the Soviet Union: He was born in 1908; he died in 1988. For 50 of those years, he directed the Leningrad Philharmonic, in the longest association of conductor and orchestra in history. (Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra are in second place, at 42 years.) Mravinsky traveled little in the West, and his recordings were few and obscure. How can we be certain of his greatness?
The answer is to be found in two revelatory box sets of Mravinsky’s work, released by BMG Classics. BMG won the distribution rights to the archives of Melodiya, the old Soviet recording agency (still owned by the Russian government) rumored to house the largest collection of classical tapes in the world. The first set of ten discs appeared last year; the second set, also of ten discs, has just become available. These recordings run the gamut from Mozart to Glazunov, from Beethoven to Hindemith. They were made both live and in the studio, from the late 1940s to the early 1980s. And they document the mastery of a musician who might have been forgotten altogether.
The second set begins with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, a crucial test for any conductor and an excellent introduction to Mravinsky’s approach. The Fifth under his baton is brisk, no-nonsense, and tightly controlled. It is Toscanini-like in its fidelity to the score, but expansive enough to allow the music to breathe. Mravinsky gives us slashing, unadorned Beethoven, completely without pretension. Here, as always, he makes no attempt to dress the music up; he simply lets it speak.
It is like fresh air, this performance, as though the conductor has scraped the barnacles off the hull of an abused masterpiece, so that we can perceive it once again. Mravinsky refuses to “interpret”; he transmits the music as it emerged from the composer’s pen.
Equally impressive is his account of the Beethoven Seventh, described by Wagner as “the apotheosis of the dance.” And in Mravinsky’s hands, it is. It is beautiful in pacing, unfailing in rhythm. It is small and Mozartean in spots, grand and Brucknerian in others — like Beethoven, in other words. The last movement is a whirling dervish, not always cleanly articulated, but this performance is as convincing as any recorded.
Two symphonies of Brahms are offered — the Third and the Fourth — and in them, Mravinsky is similarly faithful to the composer’s intentions. Like all able conductors, he was a chameleon — a chameleon that clung to the bedrock principles undergirding all of music. The first movement of the Third is dark and impassioned, the woodwinds warm. Nothing is inappropriate; nothing is gratuitously spent. The second movement is well-timed, intelligent, relentless. Mravinsky knows the structure of the piece and holds back, mindful not to arrive too early. The third movement is plaintively sung, and the last a model of Romanticism tempered by Classicism, or Classicism unlocked by Romanticism — the synthesis of Brahms himself.
Of the Fourth, there are several immortal recordings — Wilhelm Furtwangler’s, Bruno Walter’s, Otto Klemperer’s — and Mravinsky’s must be placed among them. The playing is at times imprecise, but one forgives this, particularly in a live performance. Never does Mravinsky go for the showy gesture; never does he succumb to affectation. (He would have enjoyed knowing a kindred spirit, Maria Callas, who once upbraided a student for a histrionic note. “But Madame,” said the student, “it is a cry of despair” “It is not a cry of despair,” said Callas; “it is a B-flat.”) The slow movement is shockingly understated, almost like chamber music. It whispers, implores, and sighs. And a climax is a climax, because Mravinsky has not given away the store.
This sense of architecture is especially valuable in Bruckner, whose immensely long statements require above all conductorial management. Conducting a Bruckner symphony — and here we have the Eighth — is not dissimilar to conducting a Wagner opera: Every phrase must be conscious of all that has come before and of all that is to follow. Some conductors — good ones, even — do not have this gift, or, if they do, are incapable of conveying it to an orchestra. But nothing is beyond Mravinsky’s range. He was, his innate musicianship aside, a cerebral man — a student of philosophy and literature-and such conductors lick their chops over Bruckner.
If the West knows anything about Mravinsky, it is that he was a lifelong associate of Shostakovich. They met as teenagers at the Leningrad Conservatory, and for the next five decades Mravinsky would champion the composer ardently, premiering most of his fifteen symphonies, the eighth of which is dedicated to him. Shostakovich oversaw rehearsals in Leningrad and huddled with the conductor over every detail. “He subjected me to a real interrogation,” Shostakovich once said, “demanding an answer to any doubts that had arisen in him.”
The pivotal night in both their lives occurred on November 21, 1937, at the premiere of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. The composer feared for his life: He had infuriated Stalin with his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, and, to forestall a violent reaction, he had asked Mravinsky not to perform his Fourth Symphony. Instead, he would try to rehabilitate himself with a new one, disguised as socialist realist by dutiful rhetoric on the title page.
The ruse was successful, and the premiere was a signal event in 20th- century Russian musical life. One who attended recalls that, as the audience in Philharmonic Hall shouted and stomped, “Mravinsky held the score high above his head, so as to show that it was not he or the orchestra that deserved this storm of applause.” Said Mravinsky, in old age, “I cannot understand how I dared to accept [Shostakovich’s] proposal unhesitatingly, without giving it much thought. If it were put to me now, I would think it over for a long time, undergo many doubts, and finally perhaps refuse to undertake it.”
Mravinsky would disappoint his friend severely in 1962 when he declined to perform his “Babi Yar” Symphony, which used poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a writer Khrushchev detested. Mravinsky claimed that he was uncomfortable with choral music, but this was plainly a lie, as, for one thing, he had premiered Shostakovich’s own oratorio The Song of the Forests. So Shostakovich gave the symphony to the conductor Kirill Kondrashin in Moscow, who, to his credit, accepted it and withstood tremendous political pressure, applied right up until the lights dimmed. Observed the composer Isaak Schwartz, “Mravinsky, alas, was a man of his time,” whose “rejection of the symphony horrified his friends and admirers.” Said the cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich (who labeled Mravinsky an “unprincipled turncoat”), “Although Shostakovich later made his peace with Mravinsky, I believe that he despised him as a human being for his cowardice in the whole affair.” Nonetheless, Mravinsky was probably the world’s foremost exponent of Shostakovich, as demonstrated by the BMG releases. The reading of the Fifth is instructive. The opening movement is slow, tense with fear. It is also unpleasant where it needs to be: brutal, angular, exposed — less lush than in many accounts. The Seventh Symphony (the “Leningrad”) is saucily martial and unhurried, its second movement tipsy with circus-like foolery. And the Eighth — the one dedicated to Mravinsky — is clearly definitive. This is Shostakovich’s most otherworldly symphony, and the conductor plumbs its depths, in a psychologically complicated, technically immaculate performance.
It is natural to say that Mravinsky had special insight into this music, not only from knowing and conferring with the composer, but from the costly experience of being a citizen in Soviet Russia. An orchestra member reports that, in preparation of the finale of the Shostakovich Ninth, Mravinsky ” objected to the character of the sound in the celli and double basses.” “You have the wrong sound,” he said. “I need the trampling of steel-shod boots” — and “we knew that he wasn’t referring to the ordinary soldiers, but to the KGB forces.”
For all this, however, Mravinsky had something infinitely better than his life experience, something that took him to the heart of all the music he conducted: He had musicality. It is musicality that enables Leontyne Price, of Laurel, Mississippi, to sing Brahms’s Zigeunerlieder (gypsy songs) as though she had been born on the Austrian-Hungarian border, and musicality that enables Philippe Entremont, an icy Frenchman, to execute Rhapsody in Blue as though he had grown up in a Brooklyn apartment staring at a portrait of Gershwin. There is no substitute for musical understanding — not a personal relationship, not a knowledge of cultures or books — and Mravinsky had it, in spades.
So Yevgeny Mravinsky is now in from the cold. He was a rare musician who endeavored only to be the servant of music and not to stamp his own personality on it. In this way, he was the anti-Bernstein. He loved music with such ferocity that he could not bear to see it deformed by ego or hyperbole. He embodied all that is right about the “literal school,” all that is necessary in the “expressive school.”
His wife, a flautist, described him as “a man virtually condemned to music,” who “looked upon conducting as a calling.” She knew his purpose well: ” Whenever he studied a score, he sought to enter into the atmosphere of a composition and to penetrate the cornposer’s spiritual world, for he felt that his overriding task was to bring that world back to life.”
By Jay Nordlinger
