About Alexei Ratmansky’s Shostakovich Trilogy

In creating Symphony #9, Raffa says, Ratmansky considered “the time the piece was written and the emotions behind what was happening in Shostakovich’s life.” The first principal couple represents Shostakovich and his wife, supporting each other in a time of great danger; the other couple represents “the regime, the communist party, the whole Stalin mentality,” Raffa says. “He wanted them to be almost a caricature, expressing the sarcasm in parts of the score. But everything is abstract. He kept saying, ‘There’s no story, but there’s a lot of meaning.’”

West calls Shostakovich’s ninth symphony “so much fun—it goes by like the wind.” Fun and flashy it is, but it was also was one of the composer’s acts of rebellion. West explains: “When the war was finished, it was agreed that he would write a Beethoven’s Ninth type of thing, to celebrate the beating of the Nazis. He started writing it and scrapped it.” What he wrote instead—this funny, acerbic symphony—was interpreted as thumbing his nose at Stalin. “He was in big trouble,” West says. “They were expecting something triumphal and this is just a bit of fun. [In places] it’s like he’s mocking Stalin. I don’t know if he was, but that’s the feeling you get.”

In Ratmansky’s hands, tension underlies the fun, giving the ballet an edge of fear. The subtext is clear: no one is safe. Raffa tells one couple, “You’re running away from something. The arm is like a window—lookthrough it.” Yet the ballet is buoyed by hope, manifested by a solo principal man Ratmansky calls the Angel. “He’s symbolic of something beyond our tangible, physical world,” Raffa says. “He’s a guide. Despite the turmoil that somebody could live [through], there’s always a way through it. That dancer is symbolic of this.” She tells the Angel dancer to “come out like you’re attacking all the evil. That means you can’t touch the ground. Come out like fire.”

There is always, Raffa says, the “guidance of your own integrity, your value system. Of hope, where there’s perhaps no hope; light where there’s only darkness.”

Chamber Symphony is as close to a narrative ballet as the trilogy gets. The lead man is Shostakovich and the three principal women are his loves—the girl he was infatuated with but never made time for, the wife (and mother of his children) whose death undid him, and the young wife who shared his later years. The ballet takes the form of a retrospective—again with the constancy of fear, this time referencing the persecution of the Jews. (Note the Jewish theme in the music, and the fragments of folk dancing.) Loss weighs heavily in this ballet—of loved ones and what Shostakovich risked to be the artist he wanted to be.

In making this ballet, Ratmansky was responding to the well-documented fact that Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony, an orchestration of his Quartet No. 8, was intensely personal to the composer. He quotes his own music here more than anywhere else, and each movement bears an insistent theme—his signature, “DSCH (D.Sch.),” letters in his name (written in German) that can be played as musical notes. The piece, which includes part of an old Russian prison song, was Shostakovich’s personal protest (the dedication reads, “In Memory of Victims of Fascism and War”), he said. Various sources claim that he said this music could serve as his epitaph.

The way Principal Dancer Mathilde Froustey sees it, “we are what Shostakovich wanted to create. There is a kind of double sense—we are the instruments of Alexei and Shostakovich. There is the choreography, and there is the music. There is the context of the creation of this music.” There’s a moment in this ballet when the Shostakovich character raises a finger in a moment of recognition. Raffa says it’s as if he’s thinking, “Everything I’ve lived through had a purpose, a meaning. I can pass peacefully now because I’ve left something.” In the final tableau, she says, Ratmansky builds an image that pulls the viewers’ eyes up, to a single woman held high, as if to say “what he left is monumental. The scene is like a monument to Shostakovich’s thoughts and ideas, his humanness.”