“Shall I take no memory with me from here? When all pain is silent, who will tell me of her?” So it says in “Winterreise”, in the verses by Wilhelm Müller, and the music lies hotly over it, the glow of Schubert’s music against the chilling coldness of the soul in this song, called “Erstarrung”. What would be stuck in frosty suffering is released by the music. It expresses pain that should be silent. And where the desolate nothingness of oblivion threatens, it creates a remembrance. It is a beautiful old word that has come down to us with Müller and Schubert: remembrance – remembrance is merged with remembrance; the space opens up for soulful pausing and thoughtful internalization of a past that continues to have an effect in the here and now. Igor Levit has this broad dimension in mind when he creates a Shostakovich focus for the Musikverein in the Shostakovich Year 2025. The commemorative year can only be an outward occasion for a programme dedicated to remembrance in a more profound sense. The music of Shostakovich evokes strong resonances: Beethoven and Liszt resound, Rachmaninov and Ravel – and Franz Schubert with his art of breaking the “torpor”.
In a time bestially bent on destroying humanity, Shostakovich wrote music of remembrance: the most tender, fragile music in his Second Piano Sonata, which he dedicated to his late piano teacher in 1943. Millions of people were killed in those years, and one million civilians starved to death in besieged Leningrad alone. The mass deaths, however, did not obscure the view of the single, individually lived life; indeed, even more so: in the suffering of the many, the irretrievable preciousness of the individual emerged all the more clearly, the miracle of a single lifeline – as fragile as the lineament in this sonata, with which Shostakovich commemorated his teacher Leonid Nikolayev. A year later, in 1944, Ivan Sollertinsky was laid to rest. “He was my closest and dearest friend,” the grieving composer confessed. “I owe my entire development to him.” Shostakovich wrote his Piano Trio No. 2, op. 67 in his memory, which Igor Levit combined with Sergei Rachmaninov’s “Trio élégiaque” – also a work of remembrance. In it, Rachmaninov paid tribute to Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who died in 1893. The Second Piano Sonata by Shostakovich again meets music by Franz Schubert, Liszt transcriptions of Schubert songs, including the “Erstarrung” from the “Winterreise”.
