Born on September 25, 1906, in Saint Petersburg, Russia; Died on August 9, 1975, in Moscow, Russia
Symphony No. 10 in E minor, Opus 93
Moderato
Allegro
Allegretto
Andante - Allegro
Composed: 1946-53
Estimated length: 57 minutes
First performance: December 17, 1953, with Yevgeny Mravinsky leading the Leningrad Philharmonic.
First Nashville Symphony performance: February 28, 2008, with David Alan Miller conducting at Laura Turner Hall, Schermerhorn Symphony Center.
Dmitri Shostakovich’s career had been on a fast track since his teenage years. But in January 1936, an ominous attack by the Soviet officials on his runaway hit opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk—believed to voice Josef Stalin’s own opinion—caused the composer to fall from grace. One false step might easily have resulted in a trip to the gulag, if not a death sentence. Shostakovich managed to reinstate himself with the reception of his Fifth Symphony (which remains the most popular of his fifteen works in the genre).
But writing a symphony in general remained a potentially dangerous undertaking. That’s because the symphony was equated with making a large public statement—the musical equivalent of an ambitious mural commissioned, say, for a library or government building. Shostakovich had received a further boost in status with the overwhelming success of his Seventh Symphony (Leningrad) during the Second World War, but a second denunciation followed after the war, in 1948. The stakes for the Tenth, the composer’s first symphony since that humiliating event, thus resembled those for the Fifth.
Once again, Shostakovich was vindicated by a successful reception. But the ambiguity of the overall journey traced by the Tenth—which is regarded by many Shostakovich aficionados to be his greatest symphonic achievement—elicited official consternation in some quarters, even leading to a debate held at the Union of Composers several months after the premiere.
A key factor that would have made Shostakovich’s daring new symphony relatively more acceptable to Soviet officialdom was the death of Stalin earlier that year, on March 5, 1953. Although Shostakovich drew on musical ideas going back to 1946, the dictator’s death became a creative catalyst and liberated his imagination; he wrote much of the piece in the summer of 1953.
Some Soviet officials at the time tried to make the Tenth conform to the old codes of Socialist Realism (according to which “pessimism” was discouraged). They proclaimed the notion that the new work represented “an optimistic tragedy, infused with a firm belief in the victory of bright, life-affirming forces.”
More than 70 years later, and in a different political climate, the Tenth’s urgent yet ambiguous vision remains as compelling as ever. It transcends the political factors that were involved in its conception.
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR
The first movement is nearly the length of the last two movements combined. An air of uncertainty, even dislocation, slowly builds from a quiet beginning low in the strings. Shostakovich uses dramatic contrasts between the full ensemble and solo passages (the two main themes first appear in solo clarinet and flute, respectively). As the movement progresses toward a massive climax, the beginning hesitations are swept away, only to return in a deeply moving coda. Echoes of late Mahler—an idol of Shostakovich—pervade the score, as in the duetting piccolos that drift into silence.
The savage, brief Scherzo is often cited as an instance of Shostakovich attacking Stalin head on in a portrait of brutal vulgarity. Whether such dissident messages were actually intended by the composer—and the debate still rages—the sense of a merciless chase is evoked by the movement’s furiously repeated rhythms.
In the brooding third movement, Shostakovich demonstrably does encode an extramusical reference by introducing a motive first stated by flutes and clarinets: they play D-E-flat-C-B, a sequence of notes which spells out the composer’s own initials (DSCH for D. Schostakowitsch in the German convention). The motive occurs in several other key works by Shostakovich as well. Another signature appears in a new motive played by the horn, which has been decoded as an inscription of the name of one of Shostakovich’s students (Elmira Nazirova), a muse-like symbol of youth and hope for the composer at this time. The motive recurs a dozen times throughout the movement.
The fourth movement rouses from a state of haunted introspection in a lengthy introduction highlighting various woodwind solos. The tempo accelerate in a headlong rush that seems to brush aside weightier concerns. Reappearing and persisting as an aggressive presence, the DSCH motif achieves apparent “victory” in the final climax, with furious, rapid-fire passages that seem to sardonically echo the symphonic Tchaikovsky. But Shostakovich’s tone raises questions. Could it be that, instead of a portrait of Stalin, the Tenth ultimately presents a self-portrait of a composer railing against the ways in which he had been manipulated by an authoritarian regime?
Scored for 2 flutes (2nd doubling piccolo), piccolo, 3 oboes (3rd doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (3rd doubling E-flat clarinet), 3 bassoons (3rd doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum, cymbals, military drum, snare drum, tam-tam, triangle and xylophone), and strings
− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.
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