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A Soviet Credo: Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony.

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A Soviet Credo: Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony. By Pauline Fairclough. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. [xxx, 261 p. ISBN 0-754-65016-2. $99.95.] Music examples, bibliography, index.

Few twentieth-century compositions raise as many interpretative and analytical challenges as Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony. Started before and completed after the official denunciation of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and therefore preceding his work of "contrition," the Fifth Symphony, for many the Fourth Symphony has traditionally marked the course that Shostakovich's creative development might have taken, a missed path cruelly aborted by malevolent government intervention. Pauline Fairclough's study tackles head-on the work's analytical and hermeneutic challenges and offers a stimulating, albeit inconclusive, guide to the Fourth Symphony's complexities. Fairclough provides a promising step in approaching Shostakovich after the blistering battles of the late 1990s that surrounded the composer and interpretations of his music. In fact, many of the frustrations of the book, chief among them its overly tentative, almost apologetic tone, are testament more to the deep scars left by the "Shostakovich wars" than to any faults of the author.

The avoidance of conclusions is fundamental to Fairclough's central argument, which, in her words, "is to present an analysis which avoids drawing direct (and potentially unreliable) associations between historical events and music, but which is nevertheless shaped and informed by awareness of historical context." (p. xxv). In other words, in the detailed thematic and harmonic examination of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony that comprises the bulk of her book, Fairclough tries to avoid the literal linking of music and biography that has so frequently plagued Shostakovich studies. Borrowing from Theodor Adorno's characterization of Mahler's work, she maintains the Fourth Symphony to be a...

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