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From: francois@yale.ARPA (Charles B. Francois)
Newsgroups: net.music.classical
Subject: Re: Out-of-place Codas
Message-ID: <381@yale.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 25-Apr-85 12:59:47 EDT
Article-I.D.: yale.381
Posted: Thu Apr 25 12:59:47 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 28-Apr-85 06:07:34 EDT
References: <2429@randvax.UUCP> <1219@cornell.UUCP>
Reply-To: francois@yale-comix.UUCP (Charles B. Francois)
Organization: Yale University CS Dept., New Haven CT
Lines: 27
Summary: Shosty 5 coda is NOT happy, ref. Haitink

Anyone who feels Shostakovich's 5th symphony has an inappropriate
"happy ending" owes it to themselves to listen to Haitink's recent
London recording of the piece, easily one of my three or four most
treasured CD's.  Haitink's contention, supported by the memoirs of DS
himself, is that the blazing D major coda is precisely an inversion of
the authorities' expectations of what Good Socialist Music should be
like.  Yes, it's big and bombastic.  It's supposed to be; but there is
an underlying hollowness and despair in the music that few conductors
ever bother to bring out.  The whole finale is bitterly sarcastic.  The
composer's conception of it goes something like this, and I paraphrase: 
"It's as though someone were beating you with a stick demanding that
you rejoice, and in a thoughtless slumber, you take up the cry:
'I'm rejoicing, I'm rejoicing....'".

Haitink, by avoiding the romanticisms that Bernstein and Ormandy heap
on this work in their recordings, and by keeping a steady rhythmic
pulse, allows the symphony to develop as if in a trance, building up
powerfully to the climaxes, as in the insistent march beat of the first
movement's blistering culmination.  But Haitink only lets go at the
coda, when, for about one mind-blowing second the entire orchestra
suddenly comes to a halt, long enough to allow the bass drum two
anguished gasps, before everything comes crashing down with the final
tutti chord.  Simply overwhelming...

As for the Mozart D min. Piano Concerto... Well, *that*, words can't
describe.
--Charles B. Francois   {...,decvax}!yale!francois