空: ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,’

2022年6月2日木曜日

‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,’

The finale of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony is a locus classicus for this. The music was long excoriated as a paean to Stalinist communism; what it really is is a bitter pretence of rejoicing.

philosophy of music an introduction 133

It’s all in the music: Decoding Shostakovich

“I think that it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth (Symphony),” says the composer Dmitri Shostakovich in his memoirs. “The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in ‘Boris Godunov.’ It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,’ and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering ‘Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.’ What kind of apotheosis is that? You have to be a complete oaf not to hear that.”