Chronicle of the Destruction of the Time Period (Nikolai Myaskovsky’s Fifth and Sixth Symphony)
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Abstract
The Fifth Symphony by Nikolai Myaskovsky became for Russian music the most significant generalization of the
exclusively varied reality, characteristic for the first decades of the 20th century. Here the stratification into attributes
of the receding epoch and those of the arising epoch is presented here most distinctly, moreover, the directedness
from the old to the new is traced with sufficient apparency. The interaction of the given entities is built according
to the principle of juxtaposition, at that, the contrasts are so significant, and there are so many of them, that a very
heterogeneous conglomerate is formed, which is accompanied by distinctly polarized superpositions of images.
Thereby it becomes possible to note the apparent contradiction in the image of the symphony, which must be evaluated
not as a compositional and structural miscalculation, but a reflection of the contradiction and maladjustment of life
itself during that time period. In Myaskovsky’s music one can hear the pulse of the epoch of frightening cataclysms
convulsing Russia at that time. Amidst this chaos the life of the human soul, sharply reacting to what occurred around
it, continued its existence. Hence arises the perturbation of the attitudes of mind, the condensed dramatic perception of
the impulses arising from without. All of this received completed expression in the Sixth Symphony, which depicted
the atmosphere of the turn of the 1920s. It records not only the contradiction between the departing and the arising
epochs, but their open conflict, which generates a qualitatively new conception: the tragic break up of existence (the
expansion of the revolutionary element – the deposition of the old world) and the search for spiritual anchorage in the
whirlwind of historical cataclysms. Taken as a whole, the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies by Myaskovsky, which have
formed a unified monumental diptych in the chronology of their composition (the decade of 1914–1923) and in the
problem range touched upon them, have come to present a unique musical-artistic chronicle of the break-up of history
taking place in Russia at that time.
Keywords: the music of Russia, the symphonies of Nikolai Myaskovsky, social conflicts in music.
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