Soviet Union , conductor of the Fifteenth Symphony's premiere Upon hearing its first performance, Shostakovich remarked that he had composed a "wicked symphony". It was received with an ovation by the audience at its premiere.
Marietta Shaginyan was among the symphony's admirers. After the premiere, she met with Shostakovich at the hall's
green room and made the
sign of the cross over him. "You must not say, Dmitri Dmitrievich, that you are not well", she told him. "You
are well, because you have made us happy!" Nevertheless, despite the positive reception of the Fifteenth Symphony at its premiere, and the puzzlement it provoked, it generated a more muted response in the Soviet Union compared to the
Thirteenth and
Fourteenth symphonies. The American musicologist
Richard Taruskin, who was an exchange student at the Moscow Conservatory, attended the symphony's premiere. He recalled in a 2001 essay for
The New Republic: [The symphony] was not much liked, actually. But the outpouring of love that greeted the gray, stumbling, begoggled figure of the author, then sixty-five and beset by a multitude of infirmities, was not just an obeisance to the Soviet composer laureate. It was a grateful, emotional salute to a cherished life companion, a fellow citizen, and fellow sufferer, who had forged a mutually sustaining relationship with his public that was altogether outside the experience of any musician in [the West].
Tikhon Khrennikov, general secretary of the
Union of Soviet Composers, called the symphony one of Shostakovich's "most profound"; he added that it was "full of optimism [and] belief in man's inexhaustible strength".
Yevgeny Mravinsky, who conducted the symphony's Leningrad premiere, believed the work to be autobiographical. While studying the score, he told his wife that he was emotionally overwhelmed by the music. The earliest Soviet reviews of the symphony pointed to its perceived sense of surprise and crypticness. The first substantial analysis was published in the September 1972 issue of
Sovyetskaya Muzyka. Its author, the musicologist , sought to reconcile what he viewed as the symphony's incongruities with the context of Shostakovich's previous music, as well as the prevailing ideals of Soviet music. Another musicologist, , explored the symphony's metaphysical and semantic implications in an essay that is considered a pioneering text in Russian musicology.
In the West The first movement drew especial praise from
Norman Kay, who called it a "tour-de-force of concentration, self-dissolution, and musical economy". Eric Roseberry wrote that the symphony's instrumental timbres and use of passacaglia suggested that Shostakovich had been influenced by the late operas of his friend and fellow composer
Benjamin Britten. Bernard Jacobson wrote in 1972 that the symphony's lasting appeal was secured because it made use of "one of [Shostakovich's] greatest expressive assets—a teasing and often powerfully affective emotional ambivalence".
Speculation about the symphony's meaning The Fifteenth Symphony's use of musical quotations and allusions, as well as devices unusual in Shostakovich's output, has attracted speculation since its premiere. Shostakovich explained the music and its process of composition by saying that he continued to feel music the way he did as a child, and that he felt compelled to use quotations. To Glikman and
Krzysztof Meyer, Shostakovich said that he not only used exact quotations from Beethoven, Rossini, and Wagner, but had also been under the influence of Mahler while he composed the symphony. According to Maxim Shostakovich, he had been urged by his father not to reveal to the orchestra at the first rehearsal that there would be a quotation from Rossini in the first movement. "I want to see their faces when they come to it", the composer told him. During an interview in Chicago for
WFMT on June 15, 1973, the radio host
Norman Pellegrini asked Shostakovich if the symphony was conceived as
program music. The composer replied: In the Fifteenth Symphony, there is no defined program. I myself said, the first part is as if played in a toy store. I myself said that. But to consider this precise or exact, I myself said it, but maybe it did not come quite that way. As far as the quotations that I used from
The Ring cycle of Wagner, less known romances of Glinka... They ask me why, why did you do that? I don't know, I don't really know, it just seemed to be necessary, it seemed to be necessary... But much in a question of creativity is a phenomenon, inexplicable phenomena, and a very difficult thing to explain, including why [I have] taken those particular things, why these particular fragments. I can't explain very precisely or exactly why I did this. Maxim Shostakovich felt the symphony reflected "the great philosophical problems of a man's life cycle". Later he likened the work to a chamber symphony that describes human life through the "prison of existence". The conductor
Kurt Sanderling felt the music was about loneliness and death, and that no other work by Shostakovich seemed to him so "radically horrible and cruel".
Alfred Schnittke, whose own music was deeply influenced by Shostakovich, held that the Fifteenth was a "crossroads in time" where "the past enters into new relationships with the present, and, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, intrudes into the reality of the music and actually forms it". To
Alexander Ivashkin, Shostakovich's then unusual use of quotation signaled an awareness of the impossibility of composing a "pure" symphony, with the quotations creating a web of correspondences atop the "traditional skeleton of the symphony". The musicologist suggested that the
William Tell quotations in the symphony's first movement may relate to Shostakovich's identification with Rossini as a composer "who outlived his talent". During this period, Shostakovich repeatedly expressed concern that he had exhausted himself as a composer. To Shaginyan, he wrote on August 26 that the completion of the symphony he had "worked on day and night" left him feeling as if in a void. He wrote to
Krzysztof Meyer in a letter dated September 16, 1971, that he had doubts about whether to continue as a composer but could not bear to live without work. Shostakovich experienced a prolonged period of creative inactivity after completing the symphony. Aside from his arrangement of the "Serenade" by
Gaetano Braga, which was intended for an unrealized opera based on
Anton Chekhov's short story "
The Black Monk", Shostakovich did not resume composition until the
Fourteenth Quartet in March 1973.
Influence on David Lynch in 1990 During the production of the 1984 film
Dune, the film director
David Lynch told its composer,
David Paich, that he wanted a score that resembled Shostakovich. While working on the screenplay for his subsequent film,
Blue Velvet, Lynch repeatedly listened to Shostakovich's Fifteenth Symphony: I liked this Russian feel. I don't know where I got this thing that the Eastern Europe, Russian
air is different ... even the wood of the instruments ... it just makes a sound, and there's a depth that the air brings and the musicians bring... And so this particular symphony I listened to all the time when I was working on the script and it just became very important that this film had that feel. Lynch told
Angelo Badalementi, the composer for
Blue Velvet, that he wanted his score to evoke the sound of Shostakovich's symphony. Badalamenti had a master's degree in composition but only two film scores to his credit; before
Blue Velvet, most of his experience was in pop music. Nevertheless, Lynch was confident that Badalamenti could "play anything and tune into anything". The finished score has a number of cues influenced by Shostakovich's Fifteenth Symphony, particularly its second movement. Lynch also played the symphony on set during the filming of
Blue Velvet. ==References==