Symphony No. 10 in E minor, Op. 93 Dmitri Shostakovich
D
mitri Shostakovich spent most of his career falling in and out of favor with the Communist authorities in a game of totalitarian badminton that left the shuttlecock in shambles. His sassy Symphony Sym phony No. 1 launched launc hed him on a promising career upon his graduation, in 1926, from the conservatory in his native Saint Petersburg, but within a few years of this auspicious debut, his satirical opera The Nose (staged Nose (staged in 1930) ran afoul of Soviet politicos, and the powerful Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians denounced its “bourgeois decadence.” He redeemed himself with his charming, often brash Concerto for Piano with the Accompaniment of String Str ing Orchestra and Trumpet (a.k.a. Piano Concerto No. 1 in C minor) of 1933, but things turned sour again in early ear ly 1936, when Stalin decided dec ided to see the Shostakovich opera everyone was talking about, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Mtsensk. Denunciation Denunciation in the press ensued, and Shostakovich contritely offered his Fifth Symphony (1937) as “the creative reply of a Soviet artist to justified criticism” (not really his words, though often attributed attr ibuted to him). The regime accepted his apology, apology, and awarded him the Stalin Prize Pr ize twice in succession, in 1940 for his Piano Quintet and in 1941 for his Symphony No. 7 (the Leningrad , which memorialized memor ialized that city’s city’s suffering under Hitler’s siege). Then, in 1945, his star fell again when his Ninth Symphony struck the bureaucrats as insufficiently reflecting the glory of Russia’s victory over the Nazis (not a single-handed war effort, to be sure, but the Soviet government preferred not to complicate the t he issue). By 1948 Shostakovich Shosta kovich found himself condemned along with a passel of his composer colleagues for “formalist perversions and antidemocratic tendencies in 30 |
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music, alien to the Soviet people and its artistic a rtistic tastes.” He responded with a pathetic acknowledgement of guilt and the next year redeemed himself with The Song of the the Forests Forests,, a nationalistic oratorio orator io that gained him yet another Stalin Prize, Pr ize, this time backed by 100,000 rubles. r ubles. After Stalin’ Stalin’ss death, death , in 1953, the Soviet government stopped bullying artists quite so much, but by then Shostakovich had grown indelibly traumatized and paranoid. He retreated to a somewhat conservative creative stance and until 1960 contented himself with writing generally lighter fare, keeping his musical behavior in check as if he suspected the Soviet cultural thaw were simply an illusion that might reverse itself at any moment. In 1960, however, his Seventh and Eighth String Quartets launched a “late period” of productivity that would include many notable works of sear searing ing honesty hon esty..
IN SHORT Born: September 25, 1906, in Saint Petersburg, Russia Died: August 9, 1975, in Moscow Work composed: Summer and fall of 1953 World premiere: December 17 17,, 1953, in Leningrad, Leningrad Philharmonic, Yevgeny Mravinsky, conductor New York Philharmonic premiere: October 14, 1954, Dimitri Mitropoulos, conductor, U.S. premiere Most recent New York Philharmonic performance: April 22, 2006, Mstislav Rostropovich,, conductor Rostropovich Estimated duration: ca. 53 minutes
Shostakovich began his Symphony No. 10 only a few months after Stalin’s death. Or perhaps earlier; the pianist Tatyana Nikolaeva, one of his confidants, insisted that the symphony was withheld until after Stalin’s passing. The symphony scored a notable success at its premiere as well as at follow-up performances in Moscow. It was perhaps inevitable that so prominent a new work should come under the close scrutiny of the Composer’s Union, which pondered it over the course of three days in April 1954. Shostakovich, by then adept at apologizing publicly for his music, diplomatically acknowledged that, at the distance of a year, he did sense certain shortcomings in the piece, and that he might write some things differently if he had it to do over. But he didn’t go so far as to volunteer to actually rewrite his symphony. He said: As soon as a work is written the creative spark dies. When you see its defects, sometimes
large and substantial, you begin to think that it wouldn’t be a bad thing to avoid them in your next work, but as far as the one just written, well, that’s done with, thank goodness. The hard-line types lambasted it for being “non-realistic” and ultimately pessimistic, hardly the thing for hopeful Soviet society. A more liberal faction pervaded, managing to fashion a compromise position to which the Union’s members could agree, defining the piece as “an optimistic tragedy.” two flutes (one doubling piccolo) and piccolo, three oboes (one doubling English horn), three clarinets (one doubling E-flat clarinet), three bassoons (one doubling contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, military drum, snare drum, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, xylophone, and strings. Instrumentation:
A Portrait of Stalin? In 1979 the musicologist Solomon Volkov published the much-discussed book Testimony , which he presented as Shostakovich’s “as-related-to” memoirs (although many scholars have since questioned whether Shostakovich’s scores are really filled with as many covert anti-Stalin protests as Volkov’s book maintains). Regarding the Tenth Symphony, Volkov has Shostakovich relating: I did depict Stalin in … the Tenth. I wrote it right after Stalin’s death, and no one has yet guessed what the symphony is about. It’s about Stalin and the Stalin years. The second part, the scherzo, is a musical portrait of Stalin, roughly speaking. Of course, there are many other things in it, but that’s the basis. Among those who agreed with this reading was the conductor Kurt Sanderling, who attended the preparations and premiere of the work and met with the composer while the piece was being created. In 1995, responding to a query about the Tenth Symphony as a Stalin portrait, he said: I think this is quite true. And it was indeed a portrait of Stalin for all of us who had lived through the horrors of that time. But for the listener of today, it is perhaps more like a portrait of a dictatorship in general, of a system of oppression. Stalin-era Soviet propaganda poster
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