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From: sdo@brunix.UUCP (Scott Oaks)
Newsgroups: net.music.classical
Subject: Re: Out-of-place Codas
Message-ID: <10435@brunix.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 29-Apr-85 00:41:27 EDT
Article-I.D.: brunix.10435
Posted: Mon Apr 29 00:41:27 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 30-Apr-85 03:12:02 EDT
References: <2429@randvax.UUCP> <1219@cornell.UUCP>
Reply-To: sdo@nancy.UUCP (Scott Oaks)
Organization: Brown University Computer Science
Lines: 28

>In article <2429@randvax.UUCP> Ed Hall says of the coda of
>Shostakovitch's 5th: ``as part of the work as a whole, the coda seems
>strangly out of place, although it satisfied the Soviet officialdom as
>demonstrating "Socialist Realism" (where all struggles have happy
>endings).''
>

I really don't agree with this:  to argue that the coda is out-of-place is
to miss an essential point of this piece.  All struggles don't have happy
endings, and Shostakovich is quoted in the liner notes of the recording I
have as saying something along the lines of "I'm not fooling anyone with
this coda"--meaning that yes, he bowed to the official Soviet music czar and
wrote in a happy ending, but it is an ending that--simply because it
"shouldn't" be there--makes his point all the more poignant.

What I really hate about this is that many (most?) conductors think that
since the coda is written this way, they must interpret the piece as
"happy"--which they thus interpret to mean fast--and lose everything that
the piece contains.  I even heard one conductor (whose name escapes me at
the moment) argue that the marking of the first movement (which is 
quarter-note = something) must have been a mistake and that
Shostakovich "must have meant" to make it eighth-note = something; ie twice as
fast.  This is despite the fact that he had asked Maxim Shostakovich about
it and was told that the original marking was probably correct and that
Shostakovich would have had some 50 years to rectify the error if it in
fact had been an error.

Scott Oaks {decvax, allegra, ihnp4}!brunix!sdo