Over an hour in length, Myaskovsky's Symphony No. 6 in E-flat Minor is his longest work, and probably the one that has the deepest personal significance. Posterity nicknames it "The Revolution Symphony", and indeed it is about the October Revolution. But rather than glorifying the working class yada yada, it is a deeply tragic personal reminisce, a process of picking up a broken psyche, struggling to find the opportunity for mourning amidst the turmoil. Patrick Zuk calls it "a symphonic requiem meditating on personal and collective experience of upheaval and calamitous loss".
Contra what Stravinsky ostensibly claims, Myaskovsky thinks music
can express emotions; he just denies that he is doing so through his work. Myaskovsky rarely discloses the "hidden program" of his works, partly out of his temperament, and partly because of political pressure. The only sources of inspiration for this symphony he was willing to disclose was his hearing the speech by the Bolshevik leader Nicholay Kilenko, "Death, death, death to the enemies of the Revolution", which made an "indelible impression" on the composer. The "impression" was no doubt abject horror. Myaskovsky's father, Yakov Myaskovsky, a retired military engineer under the Tsarist regime, died in the early months of the Revolution under mysterious circumstances. Zuk's research drew up a blank: no material about Yakov's death could be found, and if the composer wrote about the tragedy to his family or friends, the letters have all been destroyed. The only account we have is from Olga Lamm, the daughter of Myaskovsky's close friend Pavel Lamm, who claim that Myaskovsky told Pavel that, sometime during 1919, Yakov was ripped apart by a mob when they saw he had his general's great coat on in the depth of winter.
Two years later, Myaskovsky's paternal aunt Yelikonia died of a sudden illness. Myaskovsky's mother died when he was 8, and the unmarried Yelikonia became the family's childcarer. She was strict and a bit of a religious nut, but she was loving caretaker, and the one who discovered and encouraged Myaskovsky's passion for music. When Myaskovsky visited his childhood home for Yelikonia funeral, he was struck by its dilapidated state.
Patrick Zuk guides us through the psychodrama of the work, likening it to the process of grieving. When an overwhelming, unbearable tragedy befalls a person, he develops coping mechanisms, trying to protect the psych, holding the pain at bay so he can carry on in life. But such psychological band-aids eventually falls out: only when the tragedy is properly dealt with, the overwhelming emotions brought back into consciousness to be properly experienced, the irrevocable loss properly mourned, then the psyche can really heal. In Myaskovsky 6, such psychodrama is played out through a long, tortuous journey towards the home key, E-flat minor.
Two motifs are the main players to the psychodrama. The first is a thunderous, tempestuous, tonally ambiguous theme announced at the outset. Zuk likens it to the "Death" oration of Kilenko.
The second is a gracefully arioso theme in Dorian mode (starting at
2'33" in the above video). The Dorian theme repeatedly attempts to establish itself, but is repeatedly undercut by the first theme.
In the second movement,
Presto tenebroso, tonal stability is likewise fleeting, and the tempest holds sway.
The Dorian theme in the first movement transmutes into something very interesting: a trio scored for strings and flute (
25:12 in the recording) which feels positively Elysian. Celesta icily announces the
Dies Irae theme, suggesting the idea of mourning. But it is, as Zuk observes, not a real mourning, because the music sounds so disembodied and unreal: it is "mourning as an idea" rather than a lived experience.
The struggle between turmoil and solace continues in the third movement.
At first it seems the music is on a secure tonal ground; the energy of the violent dissonant theme is transferred to the arioso theme of solace, and there are three beautiful passages of slow music in this long movement. Indeed to my untrained ears it seems a resolution has been reached and the symphony can end here. But no, the key established is not the home key E-flat minor: but the unrelated B major. True mourning remains elusive.
The final movement of the symphony is extremely peculiar and ultimately to a heart-breaking effect.
Myaskovsky's umbrage at Mahler notwithstanding, he opens the movement with two songs associated with the French Revolution, "Ça Ira" and "La carmagnole". The melodies are not distorted or rendered grotesque (as would be if Prokofiev or Shostakovich were to use them) but played very straight. Given the (false) solace that ends the previous movement, the effect is extremely jarring. Why these two songs? The lyrics are full of mob violence and sadistic glee at the fate of the disposed aristocrats, the "enemies of the people". One can imagine that, at this point of the grieving process, Myaskovsky is facing the horrible death of his father face on. The mobs are grotesque enough as they are, there being no need to cariature them, The lyrics of "Ça Ira", in addition, hold the false promise that "it will be all right". Musically, these "mob themes" twice try to impose E-flat major by fiat -- "I told you it will be all right!! I told you it will be all right!!" -- but are themselves rendered incoherent in the process; in the end they are wholesale rejected. What comes after is the heart of the symphony. After the stentorian restatement of
Dies Irae and its abatement, comes a choral passage of an Russian Old Believer chant (
58'50").
What have we seen?
Marvel of marvels
Marvel of marvels.
A dead body.
How that soul
Parted from the body,
Yea, bade it farewell.
You, soul, to go
To God's judgement
And you, body,
To damp mother earth.
The key is indeed E-flat minor. The text emphasizes how one must "see", to face the enormity of the tragedy head on, before one can find closure. The past is irrevocable, but one must move on, and one can only move on when he has the opportunity to piece up and organize the broken pieces of his soul. This is also why Myaskovsky could only afford to write this symphony in 1921, when his material situation improved after a long decade of deprivation and soul crushing work, when he got jobs in the music publishing press and the Moscow conservatory, was entitled to a "scholar provision" which is extremely sumptuous by contemporary standards, and -- perhaps most importantly -- was able to resume private music-making with a group of like-minded friends.
The Old Believer chorus is marked
ad libitum; my Svetlanov recording omits it and therefore puts itself out of the running. Zuk highly recommends the Kondrashin recording, and this is what I present here. Neeme Jarvi made a modern recording (with chorus) under DG that sounds great. I normally prefer modern sound, but as you can see below, Youtube is a jerk.
