Revolution and Rebirth Symphony

Vienna, 1912.

The certainties of Empire were falling away

and cataclysmic wars were looming.

Through the course of the 20th century

the world would change faster than ever before.

MUSIC: "Symphony No.9" by Gustav Mahler

And composers responded to those changes, too.

The symphony now connected continents,

reached vast new audiences

and inevitably ended up in the front line.

MUSIC: "Symphony No.9" by Gustav Mahler

Mahler's 9th Symphony, his last, was given its first performance

here in Vienna in 1912, a year after the composer's death.

In part, a radical new musical vision,

in part, a nostalgic yearning for the past.

the last bars of the piece fade away gently into silence.

The time for the triumphant apotheosis at the end of symphony,

as in Beethoven's 9th, was over.

But for how long?

BELL TOLLS

MUSIC: "Symphony No.1" by Dmitri Shostakovich

In the first decades of the 20th century,

Russia was in turmoil.

Here in St Petersburg, then called Petrograd,

revolutionaries deposed the Tsar

with the hope of creating a new world.

The composer Dmitri Shostakovich

claimed that as a boy he was here at the Finland railway station

when Lenin returned to Russia in 1917 to lead the revolution.

MUSIC: "Symphony No.1" by Dmitri Shostakovich

Shostakovich remembered walking on Nevsky Prospekt

in a funeral procession for victims of the revolution

and he composed a funeral march for them.

He was a musical prodigy,

enrolling at the music conservatoire aged only 13 in 1919.

His 1st Symphony was his graduation piece

and the first significant music of the Soviet regime.

MUSIC: "Symphony No.1" by Dmitri Shostakovich

At Shostakovich's old apartment in St Petersburg

I met Olga Digonskaya, who looks after the archive of his music.

IN DIALECT

MUSIC: "Symphony No.1" by Dmitri Shostakovich

When Shostakovich was 16 his father died,

and to earn money for the family

he started playing the piano for silent movies

at this cinema just around the corner

from the Shostakovich apartment.

MUSIC: "Symphony No.1" by Dmitri Shostakovich

IN DIALECT

Gareth, try a little softer at the beginning, sweeter,

and then as we go, I broaden out

in the second bar for you so you fill out the sound.

Mark Elder is working with the BBC Symphony Orchestra on the highly

contrasted music of this symphony.

OK? Let's have another go. Just play four, everybody.

STRINGS PLAY SWEEPING MELODY

This first symphony seems to me

to be the soundtrack for a silent movie.

I don't know what the story is,

but he uses the orchestra as a cast of characters.

It's very funny. He had such a wicked sense of humour,

something, of course, Stalin knocked out of him completely

later on in his life.

Just once again. Two, three, four, one.

'And a man so influenced by the other art forms,

'in the theatre and in cinema.'

And all that comes together in this first symphony.

BRASS AND WOODWIND PLAY LOUDLY

STRINGS PLAY TOGETHER DISCORDANTLY

In these early years of the revolution,

art was integral to the message.

Agit-prop poster art took propaganda to the villages.

STRINGS BOW QUICKLY IN UNISON

And in Petrograd,

the concert halls, music halls and cinemas played

to a new proletarian audience.

I think it's easy to forget now that the avant-garde was

an international phenomenon in the 1920s

that also reached the Soviet Union.

People in the theatre were still doing radical things

in Moscow and St Petersburg.

There was also a feeling that the 1920s were

the beginning and the end of an era,

so there was this kind of dark cloud

hanging over the era as well.

So you have in Shostakovich's 1st Symphony

both of these things together.

VIOLIN PLAYS MOURNFUL MELODY

Artists in Russia during the 1920s were experimenting

with the radical and the innovative.

But it wasn't to last.

Under Stalin, Socialist Realism became state policy in 1932,

and composers were expected to serve society

and reflect the life around them in the most optimistic light.

It was a requirement that was to cause Shostakovich problems

on several occasions.

MUSIC: "Symphony No.1" by Dmitri Shostakovich

'In the fourth movement, Shostakovich shows himself

'to be the master of, already at the age of 19,

'the portrayal of terror.'

'More than any other 20th-century composer in my view,'

'he is able to put into sound'

the feelings that we all have after a nightmare,

after being frightened by some unexpected event in our lives.

And let's face it,

the Soviets knew a lot about living under terror.

BRASS PLAY ENERGETIC MELODY IN UNISON

STRINGS JOIN THE MELODY

WHOLE ORCHESTRA JOINS TOGETHER FOR FINAL CLIMAX

Although it was a 19-year-old's graduation piece,

Shostakovich's First Symphony was a huge success.

Within a year it was performed in Berlin, Vienna, Philadelphia

and Buenos Aires.

Nikolai Malko, who conducted the premiere, wrote in his diary,

"I feel as if we have started a new page

"in the history of symphonic music."

MUSIC: "Washington's Birthday" from Holiday Symphony by Charles Ives

Whilst Shostakovich was quickly picked up

as the musical face of Communist Russia,

Charles Ives, a composer in capitalist America,

was so ahead of his time, his music still isn't well-known today.

MUSIC: "Washington's Birthday" from Holiday Symphony by Charles Ives

Born in New England,

Ives drew on the folk, popular and church music he heard around him,

putting them together in a new way in pieces like his Holiday Symphony.

MUSIC: "Holiday Symphony" by Charles Ives

This is the house in Danbury, Connecticut,

where Charles Ives was born in 1874.

Ives is one of history's more eccentric composers.

A true American original.

While Shostakovich, as a boy, composed a funeral elegy

for victims of the revolution,

Ives composed a funeral elegy for his pet cat,

and after popular acclamation, wrote other elegies

for his neighbours' animals.

This is the bed where Charles Ives was born

October 20th, 1874.

That rocking chair I know is original.

And this is very special.

This is the cradle, and he was laid in that cradle.

And that was the beginning of the Charles Ives that we all know

and many of us love.

TRUMPETS PLAY A FANFARE

Charles Ives received an impeccable musical education.

His father, George Ives, was a music teacher and band leader.

George's Ives' band would play for marches and for holidays,

memorial services.

He was considered Danbury's brass band.

We're sitting in the parlour and surrounding us is Main Street.

And Charles Ives' father, George,

who had been the youngest band director in the Union Army

in the Civil War,

he used to rehearse the kids and the adults who played

in these community bands,

and they would march back and forth up and down the hill.

And Charles Ives absolutely absorbed

everything that happened on Main Street.

MUSIC: "Holiday Quickstep" by Charles Ives

The piece we're playing tonight is called Holiday Quickstep,

one of the very first things that Charles Ives wrote.

He was 17 years-old when he wrote it.

MUSIC: "Holiday Quickstep" by Charles Ives

It's quite well constructed

for somebody that young. It's a nice piece of music.

Charles Ives was in his mid-30s when he composed his Second Symphony,

a decade before his more radical Holiday Symphony.

Completed in 1909,

it didn't get its first performance until 1951,

with Leonard Bernstein conducting.

FRENCH HORNS PLAY IN UNISON

STRINGS PLAY SWEEPING MELODY

'He was an incredible visionary.

'He wanted to try and find a sort of American beauty,

'one that would represent to him the voice of his people and his land.

'He wanted to write a European symphony

'with the movements corresponding roughly'

to the scale and proportions and colours of a European model,

but he wanted all the material to be American tunes...

TROMBONES PLAY MAIN THEME

'..to prove that America could hold its head high and do something

'worthy of Beethoven and Brahms and all the others that had come before.'

MUSIC: "Symphony No.2" by Charles Ives

Although he took the European symphony as his starting point,

Ives certainly wasn't slavish in his admiration for that tradition.

"You can learn more from a day in a Kansas wheat field," he once said,

"than three years in Europe."

And when told by his father

that a symphony generally finished in the same key it started in,

he replied that was just as silly as having to die in the same house

you were born in.

He didn't want to make his living with music because

if he had to make a living in music,

he had to be able to sell what he wrote.

And he had no intention of having to write to cater to your taste

or to my taste or anybody's taste.

It was more important to him

to write music that maybe people would like someday.

Sure, everybody likes to be liked. But he didn't really care.

So what did he do instead? He went and he sold insurance.

As a matter of fact, he became a millionaire selling insurance,

and in doing that, he didn't have to worry about selling his music.

Much of Ives' experimentalism came directly from his father,

who, amongst other things, got him to sing and play the piano

in two different keys at the same time.

One of his father's experiments

that I know Charles Ives was really interested in,

because it's well documented.

His dad had one band march out of St Peter Church on Main Street...

..and then he had another band coming from Richfield

and they were marching the opposite direction

playing two different pieces of music.

And the effect of the two different pieces of music,

you can hear it in almost everything Charles Ives later wrote.

BANDS PLAY TWO DIFFERENT PIECES

He was the first person, certainly in America,

to write two different things going on at the same time.

One or two of his pieces,

I find, work best when you have two conductors and you say

to part of the orchestra, "Follow the other guy."

And you somehow try and meet in the middle.

Because he had this idea of overlapping musical events

then finally coming together.

'Some of his favourite march tunes, popular songs

'and above all, one of his favourites,

Columbia Gem Of The Ocean.

'which comes at the end of the symphony

'roaring out on all the trombones.'

'So he needs to bring all this to a finale'

and there's this great moment when three or four tunes

are played by different parts of the orchestra all at the same time.

The farewell gesture is a raspberry.

Now the thing about this is that he wrote a short note "bah"

as if it was a slap across the face, with this strange dissonant chord.

And then I listened to Lennie Bernstein's performance which

is so wonderful and so inspiring and, blow me down, he extended it.

It was like a "bluurgh" rather than a "bah"

and I think it works best that way.

That's great!

Back in Europe, the Austro-Hungarian empire had imploded

in the First World War and Vienna

was no longer the musical centre it had been.

The symphony had been taken up by new national voices.

In Britain, the "land without music" as the Germans dubbed it,

the musical world received a new lease of life through

the work of Edward Elgar,

whose First Symphony was extremely well received, even in Germany.

A new generation of composers sprang up, among them

Ralph Vaughan Williams, who studied here at the Royal College of Music.

He felt strongly the need to create a "national style",

whatever that might mean.

"We English composers,"

he said, "are always saying, Here are Wagner and Brahms,

"and Grieg and Tchaikovsky, what fine fellows they are.

"Let us try and do something like this at home. Always forgetting

"that it will not sound at all

"like this when transplanted from its native soil."

He was passionately interested in folk song, of course,

and this permeates his music.

Although it also, of course, led to accusations of parochialism

in some of his pieces like the Pastoral Symphony.

'Many people dismiss a lot of the romantic English music

'written in the first half of the 20th century'

with the unfortunate label of "cow-pat music".

'And I think one has to find the strength

'and the spine in this music and not allow it to meander

'just like a little stream drifting through a landscape.'

'And of course the countryside in this symphony doesn't mean

'sheep and shepherds and Arcadia at all.

'It means the countryside of the First World War, the Somme,

'northern France,'

where Vaughan Williams went as a stretcher-bearer

working with the ambulance corps.

You have this feeling of something never sitting, always shifting.

Many of the melodies being in modes rather than in keys.

The modes that came from originally religious music or folk songs.

And it's not at all the landscape

of cherished abundancy.

It's the landscape of death.

'And in the middle of this desecrated landscape, he heard

'somebody practising the bugle, distantly, in a trench.'

'It was a haunting sound.'

'And he's put it into this

'landscape of the second movement. Which is very, very sad music.'

'You have to play it on a special instrument which won't have

'all the notes necessarily in tune, like a natural horn or

'a natural trumpet, so it sounds a bit bitter-sweet.'

Because many modernist composers in the 1920s rejected the symphony

as a 19th century form, composers like Vaughan Williams who wrote

nine in total were often dismissed as old-fashioned and conservative.

'The symphony has always been a public genre'

where you have to talk to a lot of people through music in a big space.

People like Vaughan Williams, Elgar and Sibelius,

they are not necessarily not modern.

In my view they are actually more important than the avant garde

in many ways, because they are saying very important things about

modernity to this large audience, sometimes very disconcerting things.

Since the 19th century, there had been a continuing debate

about whether symphonies needed to say anything at all.

Whilst Ives was kicking up a storm with his popular American marches,

and Shostakovich was celebrating the October Revolution and May 1st,

in his second and third symphonies,

in Finland, Sibelius was pursuing

the old classical idea of pure music.

In 1904 he moved here to a specially built house where he could

work in peace in the landscape that he loved so much.

And it was here, in 1924, that he produced his seventh symphony.

A symphony distilled into one continuous movement.

After the vast canvases of Bruckner and Mahler,

here was Sibelius paring things down, and producing a symphony

that was just 20 minutes long.

Ainola, Sibelius' house is just 40km from Helsinki...

..but feels a world away.

He lived here for the last 50 years of his life.

Let's have a look at Sibelius' last study and bedroom

and Sibelius wrote most of his pieces on this desk, not on the piano.

-It's quite simple, isn't it? Ah, there's his cigars.

-Yes.

Everywhere in this house...

-He loved smoking.

-Cigar boxes.

-There's his tuning fork.

-Yes, yes.

So this is where he composed all his symphonies?

He made long day walks around here, many hours thinking

and composing in his head and when he had something...

He came back here.

-Yes.

-Marvellous.

This is the autographed score of Sibelius' last symphony,

Symphony Number 7.

Here you can see the original title of the work,

Fantasia Symphonica, Number One.

And later Sibelius changed the title.

He wanted it to be one of his numbered symphonies.

-It's quite wild, the writing, isn't it?

-Yes.

-Angry?

-Yes.

And of course he was, as usual, in haste when writing this score.

Now what's intriguing about this is its length, it's short,

-and one movement?

-Mm.

He was very consciously trying to find a new kind of symphonic form

and the 7th Symphony is, of course,

the final product of this development.

The progress through the seven symphonies

is a very clear line to me.

For him the compositional process was paring back, paring down.

The beauty of the 7th Symphony is in this crystallisation.

'His processes are not like those of Beethoven and Brahms.

'Sibelius' way is to make things organically develop, all the time.'

'It goes from one mood it might be a light hearted,

'vivacious gaiety and he builds it up'

and up into something more epic and more austere perhaps, grander.

'And his ability to do that was second to none.'

Despite its organic sound,

writing music was often a struggle for Sibelius.

He had periods of depression and a fondness for cigars and drink.

He called alcohol his most faithful companion...

..that is alongside his wife Aino, who persuaded him

to move to this more isolated life in the country.

They were married over 65 years.

And Sibelius said that

"Without Aino, I couldn't make any of my symphonies".

Aino was his supporter, understanding.

-So this is the famous portrait of Sibelius by Gallen-Kallela?

-Yes.

Beautifully dressed.

Yes he was always very well dressed, but the hair!

-He never combed his hair!

-Yes.

-How old was he here?

30.

-He was good looking.

-Yes.

He was very handsome, he had extremely blue eyes.

-Piercing eyes.

-Yes.

After finishing his seventh symphony in 1924,

Sibelius lived another 30 years, but never completed another symphony.

He worked for years on an eighth, promising it to Koussevitzky

and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but it was never finished.

He destroyed the manuscript before anyone could hear it.

-So he burnt his eighth symphony?

-Yes.

-The manuscript in this stove in 1945?

-Yes.

He was very, very depressed with his eighth symphony.

People was waiting, waiting always.

-Expectation for it?

-Yes.

Because after, after the burning, and destroying,

he was very happy and relaxed.

It's odd it still feels warm.

Yes, Sibelius is still at home.

Sibelius can step in from the garden.

-That's a scary idea.

-Yes.

'I would say that his symphonies are, in a way, timeless.'

They continue the classic, romantic symphonic tradition

without being conservative.

And they look ahead without being modernist.

It's impossible to know whether it was

because of his acute self criticism,

whether he came to feel outside the mainstream

of 20th century symphonic music,

or whether he simply wanted to take it easy in his sauna.

But for whatever reason,

Sibelius' 7th Symphony represents a kind of conclusion.

And for the remaining 30-years of his life,

he effectively lapsed into silence.

But by the time the 7th Symphony had been completed,

new technological developments meant that symphonic music

would be heard by far more people than ever before.

The first revolution was the gramophone,

introduced around the turn of the century,

which meant that recorded music could be consumed at home.

MUSIC PLAYS

But the recording process wasn't well suited to orchestral music.

This is the first recording

of Beethoven's 5th made in Berlin in 1910.

MUFFLED, SCRATCHY RECORDING

For symphonic music, the real revolution came in 1925

with the introduction of the electric microphone.

A wider range of instruments could now be recorded

and in larger groups.

MUSIC: "Symphony No. 5" by Beethoven

This is Richard Strauss conducting Beethoven's 5th in 1928.

Decent orchestral recordings could now be made for the first time.

All ready? Right.

MUSIC: "Pomp And Circumstance March No. 1" by Elgar

Sir Edward Elgar inaugurating the new Abbey Road

recording studios in 1931.

A veteran composer ushering in a new age.

Although he was conservative in his compositions,

Elgar was forward-looking in one way.

He was the first great composer to record his own symphonies.

Although he was in his 70s

and hadn't written anything significant for a decade,

he made an effort to create a recorded legacy of his work,

much of it done here in the new Abbey Road studios.

He made the first recording of his 2nd Symphony in 1927.

Elgar's 2nd symphony had been written back in 1911

and while he was writing it King Edward VII died.

As the Master of the King's Music, Elgar dedicated the symphony

to his memory with the heavy tread of its stately funeral march.

MUSIC: "Symphony No. 2" by Elgar

Behind the pomp of that formidable moustache

and the circumstance of being the Master of the King's Music,

there was a very shy, introverted, insecure man.

Now in the 2nd Symphony, we see a man pouring out his heart

in a way that he, as a man in society,

found very difficult to do.

The work is dedicated to the memory of the king

who died while he was writing the piece.

But the truth is that this slow movement,

which is such a great epitaph,

is not a movement of national mourning,

because it had already been written before the king died.

It was his personal epitaph

for a very surprising death of a very dear friend.

His name was Rodewald,

a man who had supported him before he was at all known.

And really believed in him and really gave him confidence.

'The main melody is, of course, the melody of a funeral march

'and it has the trudge of a funeral march.

'But over and above the tune you hear the oboe...'

..completely free, keening for this lost friendship.

And that's so bold and unmistakable.

'And when the orchestra cries out, screams out about that loss,'

it's one of the most moving things that I think exist

in our nation's musical life.

The arrival of electric recording in the 1920s meant the rapid growth

of the recording industry and broadcasting,

which began around the same time.

Symphonies were no longer confined to the concert hall,

but could now be heard by millions.

The BBC Symphony Orchestra, which plays the music for this film,

was founded in 1930.

And these developments in the musical world led also

to the rise of conductors

as transmitters of music to a much wider world.

And as Elgar was quick to recognise, to the establishing

of a musical canon, old as opposed to new music.

These great works of the past took on more and more weight

as superstar conductors travelled the world

with a vast symphonic repertoire at the tip of their batons.

Bruno Walter was a protege of Mahler's

and it was he who had conducted the premiere

of his 9th Symphony in Vienna.

He also conducted the Berlin premiere

of Shostakovich's First Symphony.

Leopold Stokowski, was born in Britain,

but made his name in the US.

And the Italian Arturo Toscanini was described by Mussolini as

the greatest conductor in the world.

But Toscanini was no supporter of Mussolini

and he went to America in 1939.

One of the biggest conducting stars of the time was Wilhelm Furtwangler,

seen here conducting for Hitler's birthday in 1942.

Hitler wasn't present, but Goebbels, the Nazi's propaganda minister was,

and made a point of congratulating Furtwangler at the end.

As conductors got caught up in the politics of the time,

composers too were conscripted.

The outbreak of World War II increased the pressure on composers

to make public statements with their work.

The symphony inevitably became a propaganda tool.

Never was this a more urgent requirement

than during one of the most painful periods of Russian history,

the siege of Leningrad, which is commemorated here at this museum.

The city was blockaded by Nazi forces

for two-and-a-half years. 872 days.

A third of the population died, from enemy bombardment,

cold and starvation.

People received information from the radio,

which, in this city of musicians,

was reduced to broadcasting

the sound of a ticking metronome to reassure people that

despite everything Leningrad was still alive.

Shostakovich, in the besieged city,

was composing and also working as a fireman.

It was under these extraordinary circumstances

that Shostakovich wrote his Leningrad Symphony

which was performed here in the city in August 1942.

Propaganda aside, it was an act of heroism

with an orchestra assembled

by bringing musicians back from the front line,

granted extra rations,

and the music defiantly relayed on speakers in the street.

And into that world tiptoes this distant strange little drum.

'Taking my cue from Mravinsky, Shostakovich's favourite conductor,

'it's a side drum without snares, not the sound of a military drum.'

It's easier for it to be very quiet if it's played without the snare

and it sounds more ominous and ghostly.

And on top of this endlessly repeating little drum,

the orchestra one by one join in and play this silly little tune.

IN DIALECT

'This silly little tune goes on and on and gets nearer and nearer.'

And changes from being trivial into something so threatening

and overpowering and vulgar and hard,

that one wonders who is being referred to.

At the climax of this march, not content with his large orchestra,

He adds ten extra brass players just to roar,

'to scream in repetition,

'in fierce, uncompromising violence.'

Unusually, Shostakovich wrote a programme note for this symphony

saying he didn't want to write battle music,

but to depict the ominous force of war.

Nevertheless debate is raised whether the unstoppable march

represents the Nazi invader or an evil closer to home.

IN DIALECT

'Throughout his life, however weak he was physically,

'his will to compose what he wanted to compose never left him.

'On the one hand, he had to speak to his people

'and make sure he said something they would be moved by.

'But on the other hand,

'he had to do it without offending too much,

'the apparatchiks, the KGB,

'the cultural bureau that surrounded them all.

'When people would ask, "What's it about, we didn't quite understand?"'

He would say, "Oh, just listen, you'll hear it",

or "For those who can hear, I think it's clear."

Whatever Shostakovich's intention,

the Leningrad Symphony had an astonishing impact,

and not just in Russia.

As war raged on, the Soviets microfilmed the score

and sent it via Tehran and an American naval ship

to the US, their ally.

It was conducted by Toscanini at Radio City in New York,

the first of 60 performances in America in 1942.

It was just the sort of public gesture the allies wanted.

This is a presentation for soldiers at a desert airbase in California.

ARCHIVE VOICEOVER: 'Guest of honour is Madame Ivy Litvinoff,

'wife of the Russian ambassador to the United States.'

CHEERING

I understand that you give me this wonderful welcome

because you greet the brave and gallant men and women

and soldiers of the Red Army in the Soviet Union.

'Also on hand is Edward G Robinson.'

Now this music was written by a soldier, a Russian soldier,

one who fought the Siege of Leningrad.

And Dmitri Shostakovich is still in it.

CHEERING

ANNOUNCEMENTS IN RUSSIAN

This is the annual veterans parade

along Nevsky Prospekt in St Petersburg,

when people gather to remember and celebrate

the heroism and sacrifice of those who died in the Second World War.

ANNOUNCEMENTS IN RUSSIAN

Shostakovich's Leningrad symphony ended, of course,

with a triumphant finale depicting the victory of the people of Russia

in the great patriotic war.

"As at no time before, I realised the public significance of my work",

wrote Shostakovich, "and my work was not in vain.

"The music helped the struggle for justice."

PEOPLE CHANT: Leningrad!

In the US, America's leading composer, Aaron Copland,

had been impressed by the mass appeal of the Leningrad Symphony,

and wrote a symphony of his own to celebrate the Allied victory.

Copland's Third Symphony

incorporates his Fanfare For The Common Man

which had been commissioned

when America first became involved in the war.

Here is the first page of Copland's

Fanfare For The Common Man.

Even if you can't read music you see there aren't very many notes

on the page at all.

And the thing that I love about it is this real juxtaposition,

kind of magic, between the austerity on the one hand

and the magnificence of the music.

Why the title? Why Fanfare For The Common Man?

'Fanfare For The Common Man

'is so reflective of his innate egalitarianism.

'He really felt it was the foot soldiers

'that were going to be carrying the burden of the war.'

This is the house outside New York that Copland bought in 1960

and where he spent the last 30 years of his life.

He was a man who lived very frugally

and he spent much of his life

moving from apartment to apartment back in the big city.

But he was also someone who appreciated the serenity,

isolation and closeness to nature that he found here.

As comfortable as this house is,

it's very unassuming and unpretentious.

It's completely unostentatious.

It has certain modernist touches,

kind of frugal, simple, practical.

We have his work desk off to the side which is just

wide plank barn wood made by a local farmer.

And that's where Copland worked.

He was looking for simplicity and practicality

and I think I this was it.

Copland's Third Symphony has become

the most performed of all American symphonies.

Perhaps because, like his ballets Appalachian Spring and Rodeo,

it has a distinctly American sound.

'It's something Copland really started out to do,'

quite intentionally, back in the mid-1920s,

when he felt that there was no such thing

as a recognisably American musical idiom.

There is something very open and spare about his textures.

His chords seem to have a lot of air in them...

..which does convey something of the size and scope of the country.

'I often feel that last movement'

is really about not just the landscape,

but what you build on the landscape.

It's like building a frontier town.

Like Once Upon A Time In The West.

It's what you build on the landscape that matters.

And it's also about democracy,

it's the old Dvorak idea of bringing the symphony to the common man.

So it's not for nothing that this Fanfare,

which has this ruggedness about it,

should be built into the last movement.

'He translated this notion of egalitarianism into his art'

by consciously trying to reach a wider audience

with works that might be more popular on the one hand,

more accessible on the one hand, but on the other would still allow him

to do the kinds of things he wanted to do artistically.

This is the monument to the Defenders of Leningrad

in Victory Square in St Petersburg.

Of course, it was in Soviet Russia

that a big victory symphony was expected, indeed required.

Many people awaited Shostakovich's

Ninth Symphony with eager anticipation

and with the fearsome precedent of Beethoven's 9th in their minds,

they must have been looking

for something equally ground-breaking and heroic.

But Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony

wasn't what the authorities wanted at all.

IN DIALECT

It was part of Shostakovich's personality, I get the feeling,

that he was a clown for his people.

Or that he was the person who could open up truths

like the fool in King Lear.

That he saw himself in a way, crying and joking at the same time.

Now the bassoon is the instrument, better than any other,

that can express satire and pathos.

No other wind instrument has the ability to change so quickly.

'Now what this says or speaks, I can't possibly say,

'but I know that it is keening, it is crying out.'

And when this has been exhausted and said,

there is a moment of suspension and we suddenly start the last movement.

It's in a completely different mood,

in a completely different tempo, as if to say,

"I was only joking. Actually, everything's fine!"

And the sardonic, ironic character of the bassoon little tune,

which seems so trivial and so like

trying to banish all the tragedy that we've just shared,

is very remarkable.

And of course it's nothing like the spectacular, grandiose finale

of Beethoven's Ninth.

He did something quite different which was to really go back to Haydn.

He wanted to write something that is seemingly light-hearted,

but really very tragic underneath.

And what was he trying to say both to his audience and the authorities?

I think it's in a way a goodbye

to the great musical symphonic tradition in Germany

and the feeling that this has now come to an end.

At the end of the Second World War,

Germany, the country which had seen itself as the guardian

of the symphonic tradition, was in ruins.

And here was Shostakovich looking back at it in a sardonic farewell.

Certainly the war is virtually the last event

that seems to have demanded a symphonic response.

It was here, in the heart of the old imperial city of Vienna,

that the notion of a cycle of symphonies,

often ending with that fateful number 9, was born.

But after the Second World War, Vienna,

like Berlin, was divided into four zones of military occupation.

This is the memorial in the city to the Red Army

and this perhaps foreshadows

the subsequent democratisation of music

and its diversification into many new forms.

Over 250 years, we've made an incredible journey,

from small groups of musicians

in the palaces of princes to orchestras more than 100 strong,

through works that are both personal and public.

And the symphony has become to music what Shakespeare is to literature,

a cultural monument

that is continually redeveloped through new interpretations.

It still has the power to enchant, challenge, move me,

and, in the 21st century, a larger and wider audience than ever before.

To go deeper into the music and unravel the secrets of the symphony,

follow the links to the Open University at bbc.co.uk/symphony.

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