
The Harbor, c. 1943 (oil on wood) by Josef Presser. Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of the Pennsylvania Works Progress Administration.
Leonard Bernstein
Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety, after W. H. Auden
Leonard Louis Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on August 25, 1918, and died in New York on December 2, 1990. He composed The Age of Anxiety during a busy period of travels as a guest conductor in 1948–49, completing the full score on March 20, 1949. He revised the work—particularly the conclusion—in 1965. Serge Koussevitzky led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the first performance on April 8, 1949, with the composer at the piano. In addition to the solo piano, the score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, percussion, piano, celesta, harp (two if possible), and strings.
Between July 1944 and November 1946
W. H. Auden wrote an extended poem entitled The Age of Anxiety, subtitled “A Baroque Eclogue.” In it three men and a woman—Quant, Malin, Emble, and Rosetta—meet in a New York bar, where each has come seeking a cure for boredom, loneliness, lack of purpose—or if not a cure, at least a means of forgetting them. As the poem follows their thoughts and conversation through the long night, the four individual participants become more and more isolated even as they seek to end their rootlessness. At dawn, after the group has moved from the bar to Rosetta’s place, Rosetta finds Emble passed out on her bed, while Quant and Malin say their goodbyes and promptly forget one another’s existence. The very title of Auden’s poem has become an emblem to describe mid-twentieth-century life.
Leonard Bernstein was clearly taken with Auden’s poem, and the published score contains an extended note in which the composer describes his astonishment at realizing after the fact how closely the music echoed the poem, which had been intended as no more than a general guide to its structure and expression.
Bernstein ultimately chose to rewrite the ending in a way that broke away from the letter of Auden’s text, however. Throughout the work there is an elaborate solo piano part that makes the Symphony a kind of piano concerto. In the original version the piano was silent in the last section except for a single final chord. Bernstein had conceived this ending as the “phony faith” that the characters sought out; the pianist was to remain aloof from that self-serving search, except for “a final chord of affirmation at the end.” But the more he considered his composition as a work of music rather than as the expression of a poem, Bernstein came to realize that the ending simply didn’t work. So the program went out the window in recognition of the musical requirements.
Despite this change of heart Bernstein has effectively projected much of the poetic “narrative” of The Age of Anxiety in musical terms. After a prologue the first half of the score consists of two sets of seven variations each, corresponding to Auden’s “Seven Ages” and “Seven Stages.” These never take a simple theme as the basis of the variations; they instead consist of fourteen brief, contrasting sections, each of which grows out of an idea in the preceding passage that itself generates a new idea that will lead to the next section. The rhythms and melodic character of many of these ideas are closely related to the sounds of 1940s Swing and Jazz, precisely the music that would best symbolize the spirit of the age, for they mirror the nervous and hectic pace of modern urban life. There is, however, a striking exception in Variation 8, the first of the “Seven Stages,” where the poem speaks of remoteness and hints of distant times and places. Here Bernstein casts the section in a broad with a flowing melody in quarters and eighths over a stately bass line moving in half notes. One can scarcely avoid hearing in this passage the echo of a Baroque sarabande, a remote dance style from a distant time and place.
The second part of the work, dealing with the four characters’ departure from the bar and their increasingly pointless party at Rosetta’s place, combines elements of a twelve-tone row (from which the theme of The Dirge evolves), hectic and varied Jazz figures in different moods (The Masque), and the final breaking-up of the party at dawn in a renewed search for positive values. — © Luke Howard

Photo from the 1934 production of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District at the Nemirovich-Danchenko Theater in Moscow. Nemirovich-Danchenko Theater via the New York Times.
Dmitri Shostakovich/James Conlon
Suite from Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, op. 29 (1932)
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was born on September 25, 1906, in Saint Petersburg and died on August 9, 1975, in Moscow. This summer marks the fiftieth anniversary of his death. His opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was premiered in 1934 and spawned an infamous controversy that left the composer in fear for his life. James Conlon (born March 18, 1950) is an American conductor who has conducted Shostakovich’s opera numerous times. He arranged his orchestral suite of the opera’s music in 1991. Conlon’s arrangement is scored for two flutes, one piccolo, two oboes, one English horn, two clarinets, one E-flat clarinet, one bass clarinet, two bassoons, one contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, two trombones, bass trombone, tuba, celesta, two harps, timpani, percussion, and strings.
hough fifty years have passed since the death of Dmitri Shostakovich on August 9, 1975, his musical stature and personal legacy only to continue to grow. That Shostakovich stands as the most important and influential Russian composer of the twentieth century (Stravinsky was American, after all, and Prokofiev spent much of his career in Europe) is for most a settled fact. Since his death Shostakovich’s vast and influential body of work in many genres—operas, ballets, symphonies, concertos, oratorios, film scores, incidental music, chamber music, and piano sonatas—has gradually moved from the periphery to the center of the repertoire around the world. In the post-Cold War era we have come to hear Shostakovich’s music with post-ideological ears, appreciating more than ever its craftsmanship, emotional power, fearlessness, and philosophical depth.
For maestro James Conlon, who has conducted performances of Shostakovich’s works all around the world, Shostakovich represents a crucial link with Russian tradition. He has described Shostakovich’s music as the twentieth-century continuation of Tchaikovsky’s late Romanticism. Conlon has developed an especially close relationship with Shostakovich’s incendiary, star-crossed, and controversial 1932 “tragedy-satire” Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which he has conducted at the Metropolitan Opera and elsewhere.
“Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is the most important Russian opera of the twentieth century,” Conlon wrote in 1994 when he conducted the premiere of a new Met production that updated the action from the late nineteenth century to the Soviet 1960s. “Shostakovich’s achievement is staggering. He realistically depicted the lowly status of Russian women and laid bare the hypocrisy and brutality of Soviet society; and in one great gesture he created a musical vocabulary all his own, using the orchestra with novel mastery and virtuosity.”
Shostakovich’s innovative and dramatic orchestration so impressed Conlon that he decided not long after conducting a production in Cologne in 1988 to create an orchestral suite “designed to render a part of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk more easily accessible to the non-operatic-music-loving public. It has been expanded from the five existing interludes to include both brilliant and expressive passages which simultaneously display the richness of the orchestration, reveal the extraordinary variety of dramatic moods, and weave it together in a linear fashion to ‘recount’ the story.”
Like Shakespeare’s original Macbeth, the story is lurid and bloody. Written by Shostakovich and Alexander Preis (1906–1942), the libretto adapts an 1865 novella by Russian writer Nikolai Leskov (1831–1895), a story of sexual passion and crime set in the remote Russian provinces. The title character is 24-year-old Katerina Lvovna Izmailova, who is trapped in a loveless marriage to an older merchant. Desperately bored, she falls hard for the handsome young laborer Sergei even after he forces himself on her. Together, they murder her tyrannical father-in-law and her husband, who both stand in the way of their passion and ambition. A drunken peasant happens upon the cellar where Katerina’s husband is buried and she confesses. An investigation by crooked and lascivious police leads to a life sentence in Siberian exile, where Katerina murders again, this time killing a rival for Sergei’s affections who drags her down with her into the icy Volga River, where they both drown.
Written for a dramatic soprano, Katerina’s folksy and lyrical music never descends into sentimentality. Shostakovich gave her several tender set-pieces expressing her sexual longing, her yearning for freedom, and her final resignation in Siberia. Her various abusers (husband, father-in-law, police chief) are portrayed in a style Shostakovich called “musical denunciation,” heavy with sarcasm and vulgarity. In the final act the prisoners sing a doleful march modeled on authentic songs of the era in a scene reminiscent of the finale to Khovanshchina, an opera by Shostakovich’s idol Modest Mussorgsky.
The large orchestra, equipped with an expanded percussion section including whip and flexatone, acts as narrator and commentator. Five orchestral interludes link the scenes. A passacaglia (a repeating bass line) anchors the interlude between scenes four and five of Act II, gradually rising to ferocious intensity as it symbolizes Katerina’s passage from innocence to guilt following her first murder. An antic galop erupts between scenes six and seven, illustrating the shabby peasant’s sprint to the police station; it displays the tricks Shostakovich had learned from playing piano for silent films and from his recent work in film scoring.
But the most daring use of the orchestra as commentator comes during Katerina’s first violent and frantic sexual encounter with Sergei—the opera’s most notorious, controversial, graphic, and lurid episode. Against the background of a pounding can-can, thrusting trombones depict the act of penetration, then slide suggestively downward (this almost always gets a nervous laugh) after the end of sexual intercourse.
Conlon’s suite includes all the orchestral interludes, plus other sections of the opera crucial to the narrative. Vocal lines are given to instruments: the oboe, for example, “sings” fragments of several of Katerina’s arias. But Conlon stresses that “the music is all original, I haven’t changed a note.” “In the Izmailovs’ Yard” opens the Suite with a quotation from the icy and lugubrious music at the opening of the final act in Siberia, a foreshadowing of what is to come.
“Dangerous Tension” sets the scene of dreary provincial life in somber and heavy colors from the low strings and brass, with a few glimmers of tenderness in fragments from Katerina’s first aria played by the oboe. “Katerina and Sergei I” depicts their first furtive meeting followed by the violent rape in a frantic scherzo boiling with a potent mixture of anticipation, fear, and sexual desire, rising in pitch and speed to a musical climax. A lyrical episode for solo violin conveys Katerina’s newfound love for Sergei.
The following pensive Passacaglia links the two scenes of murder, combining surges of romantic passion with ominous marching rhythms. “Katerina and Sergei II” is an interlude of serenity for the lovers as they enjoy a brief period of happiness. In the raucous and comic “The Drunkard,” the body of Katerina’s husband is discovered by a deeply inebriated peasant who resembles characters in Mussorgsky’s songs and operas. In “The Advance of the Police” Shostakovich denounces the inflated self-importance of the chief in a grotesquely incongruous waltz whose bizarreness suggests the Keystone Kops. “In Exile” brings us to the dismal end of Katerina’s life of passion and pain as the music swells with despair and compassion rather than mocking sarcasm.
Like Katerina, Shostakovich’s opera suffered greatly at the hands of oppressive political and social forces. Initially staged in 1934 to huge success in the USSR and abroad, Lady Macbeth incited the wrath of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin two years later when he saw a performance at the Bolshoi Theater. Offended by its frank depiction of sexual acts (especially the rape scene) and its unrelenting pessimism, he authorized publication of an article in the Communist newspaper Pravda denouncing the opera as “coarse, primitive, and vulgar” and the score as “a deliberately dissonant, confused stream of sound.” Lady Macbeth was immediately banned. The former golden boy of Soviet music had become a pariah. Many believed that he, like so many others in the cultural community at the time, could be arrested at any moment. Miraculously he survived and kept on composing, but never wrote another opera—a sad loss to modern theatrical and musical history.
— © Harlow Robinson
A note from James Conlon on his Suite from Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
Having fallen under the spell of Dimitri Shostakovich’s titanic opera, I made this symphonic suite in the early 1990s. Its purpose was to provide classical music lovers the opportunity to hear some of Shostakovich’s most revolutionary music from the 1930s in concert, particularly those who might never hear the full opera in person.
It is also intended for symphonic musicians who might never become acquainted with this music, which is as daring and avant-garde as the Fourth Symphony. Finally, I wrote it for myself, fearing that I might never conduct the opera again—a fear that was fortunately misplaced.
The Suite is constructed along dramatic and musical parallel lines, simultaneously recounting the stage events in massive gestures and building a large symphony-like form within which the “movements” are meant to be played without pause. They include the opera’s five original interludes, which are then connected by orchestral passages conveying the story’s dramatic import.
The Suite begins with an enormous howl of anguish and tragedy (evoking Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream) from the final Act. It is taken from the moment in which Katerina, the protagonist, realizes that her actions and crimes were based on an illusory love of an unworthy partner. Her journey to become Lady Macbeth ends as it does in Shakespeare, with bitterness and insanity.
From this moment on the suite becomes a flashback arranged in strict chronological order. The names of the movements are mine; they were not written by the composer.
This quasi-symphony is divided up loosely into four parts (or movements) of unequal length. The first part—Adagio, Lento, three successive Allegros, and an Andante—tells the story of Act I, exposing the dark, emotionally sterile tedium of a passionate young woman’s life in rural Tsarist Russia. Its highlight is the first erotic encounter between Katerina and Sergei, the handsome itinerant farm worker.
The second part contains three nocturnal slow movements tracing the events of Act II in which, under the moon’s watchful eye, Katerina poisons her father-in-law. He is eulogized by a funeral Passacaglia, disproportionately large for this heinous and cruel character but better understood as a larger expression of grief for humanity.
With the father-in-law out of the way, the night continues with a second and quite different love scene. That very night ends with the murder of Katerina’s husband, which is not depicted in the Suite.
The third part, the scherzo, is in three sections. First a drunken peasant discovers the husband’s body in the basement, exacting society’s punishment. Galina Vishnevskaya claimed that the second section, a raucous and infectiously joyous Circus Polka, was nicknamed by the composer a “Hymn to the Dynamo of Soviet Society: the Informer.” A wildly satiric section depicts the drunken and corrupt police station.
The fourth section, relatively short but toweringly powerful, depicts Katerina and Sergei in a column of prisoners on their final march to internment in Siberia. Katerina will commit one more murder, and Sergei will remain indifferent to her and to his own fate.
An extended horn solo represents an old prisoner who expresses the universality of human tragedy, giving voice to those indiscriminately condemned to perish in prisons, gulags, and concentration camps.
This finale is a lament for the Russian people. Shostakovich, inspired by his hero and model Modest Mussorgsky, delivers a message transcending nationality, religion, race, and social status: a message about and for all peoples and all times. — © James Conlon

A multifaceted musician, Inon Barnatan is equally celebrated as soloist, curator, and collaborator. As a soloist Inon has performed with the world’s foremost orchestras and conductors including the New York, Los Angeles, London, Helsinki, Hong Kong, and Royal Stockholm philharmonics; the BBC, Chicago, Cleveland, and Boston symphonies; the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra; and the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra. Inon’s 2024–25 season highlights have included performances with the Naples Philharmonic and the San Diego, New Jersey, Pasadena, Boston, Tokyo, Israel, and Atlanta symphonies. He continues his collaboration with cellist Alisa Weilerstein with performances at Stanford Live and Celebrity Series of Boston and alongside James Ehnes at Wigmore Hall. Inon and Alisa released their highly anticipated album of Brahms’s Cello Sonatas with Pentatone in November 2024. Equally at home as a curator and chamber musician, Inon is Music Director of La Jolla Music Society Summerfest. He regularly collaborates with world-class partners such as Renée Fleming and Alisa Weilerstein and plays at major chamber music festivals including Seattle, Santa Fe, and Spoleto USA. Inon was a member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Bowers Program from 2006 to 2009 and continues to perform with CMS in New York and on tour.

James Conlon is one of the most esteemed and influential conductors of our time—a rare figure whose work has defined and enriched the classical music traditions of the U.S. and Europe for over fifty years. Since his New York Philharmonic debut in 1974 he has led nearly every major American and European orchestra, and has conducted at many of the world’s most prestigious opera houses. Uniquely versatile, he is among the few conductors equally accomplished in symphonic, operatic, and choral repertoire. Through his extensive touring, acclaimed recordings, published writings, and widely recognized public presence, he stands as one of classical music’s most visible and enduring artistic leaders. Conlon will serve as music director of LA Opera until his twentieth season in 2026, at which time he becomes conductor laureate. He has served as music director of the Ravinia Festival, artistic advisor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and music director of the Cincinnati May Festival. He has led more than 270 performances at the Metropolitan Opera since his 1976 debut. He is a noted advocate for composers suppressed by the Nazi regime and an enthusiastic supporter of scholarly inquiry into the role music plays in humanity and our shared civic life. His appearances throughout the country as a speaker have been widely praised. His accolades include four Grammy Awards for recordings with LA Opera, a 2002 Légion d’Honneur, a 2018 Commendatore Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana, and a 2023 Cross of Honor for Science and Art from Austria.