Dmitri Shostakovich
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 1 in A minor op. 77

For Dmitri Shostakovich, composing during Stalin’s lifetime – and even amidst the subsequent political thaw – amounted to a game of “Russian roulette”. His First Violin Concerto was written in 1947–48, at the height of Stalinism: an inauspicious moment. In February 1948, a Central Committee decree of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union outlawed all “formalist” music – i.e. any music that failed to conform to the doctrine of Socialist Realism. Shostakovich became one of the principal targets of the campaign. Summoned before a tribunal, he was accused of “expressionist convulsions” and “neurotic tendencies” in his music. Although he pledged “improvement” in order to survive, he was stripped of his professorships in Leningrad and Moscow. At the same time, barely a year later, Stalin himself dispatched Shostakovich as a delegate to a congress in the United States, claiming that no one could “better represent” Soviet music than he – a perverse game of cat and mouse. Accordingly, the First Violin Concerto was not premiered until October 1955, two years after the dictator’s death, in Leningrad, conducted by Yevgeny Mravinsky. From the outset, the work had been conceived for the great violinist David Oistrakh. Originally assigned Opus 77, it was renumbered Opus 99 when the score appeared in 1956 – an attempt not only to suggest a different chronology within the composer’s output, but also to create the impression that Shostakovich had subsequently “revised” the piece.

The lyrical opening movement (“Nocturne”) unfolds in a broad, melodic flow. After a dark passage for the lower strings, the solo violin enters with a wide-ranging, reflective melody. The orchestration remains restrained, as though the collective were listening attentively to the solitary voice of the soloist. Here Shostakovich weaves his name into the music as a musical cipher (D–E♭–C–B. or, in German notation, D-Es-C-H), inviting an identification of the melancholy dreamer with his own situation. The movement fades away morendo (dying). A sharp contrast is provided by the Scherzo, with its characteristically biting Shostakovich grotesque, propelled by driving motor rhythms and a breathless gallop. This movement has often been interpreted politically: due to a quotation from Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov as an allusion to tyrannical power; due to its Jewish-sounding dance idioms as a protest against the treatment of Jewish people in the Soviet state; even as a satirical portrait of the stammering cultural apparatchik Andrei Zhdanov, one of Stalin’s closest associates, who seems almost to be barking at the opening of the Scherzo. Yet amid these readings, one should not overlook the extreme virtuosity demanded of the soloist.

For the third movement, Shostakovich turns to the ancient form of the passacaglia. Above a majestic bass, ominous and inexorable, variations of great intensity and emotional depth unfold. The solo violin lends the music both sweetness and melancholy. In an immense cadenza, the soloist then holds the stage alone for several minutes, until the theme of the fourth movement suddenly bursts forth. This “Burlesque” appears to radiate festive, cheerful Russian folklorism, as though all tragedy had been swept aside. Yet the insistent percussion passages and garishly coloured orchestral interjections distort the smile into a grimace. In almost frenetic virtuosity, the violin leads the way through this deranged dance.

It was only through the efforts of an American concert agent that the work was ultimately brought to performance. Determined to forestall a premiere in the United States, the Soviet authorities scheduled the first performance in Leningrad. Two months later, Oistrakh also played the concerto at New York’s Carnegie Hall.