Symphony No.10, Op.93

Shostakovich: symphony no.10

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)

Symphony No.10, Op.93

Moderato

Allegro

Allegretto

Andante - allegro

Shostakovich wrote his Tenth Symphony, he is quoted as saying in Solomon Volkov’s Testimony, “right after Stalin’s death”- an event which simultaneously relieved the Soviet Union of a murderous dictator and Shostakovich of his most powerful enemy. While it is by no means inconceivable that a symphony lasting nearly fifty minutes could have been written, copied and rehearsed in the nine months between 5 March and its first performance in Leningrad on 17 December 1953, the character of some of the music itself seems to contradict the composer’s alleged statement: the first two movements are far less likely to have been written after the death of his old adversary and tormentor than when he was still alive and frighteningly active.

New evidence supplied by the pianist Tatyana Nicolayeva for Elizabeth Wilson’s Shostakovich, A Life Remembered indicates that the exposition of the first movement of the Tenth Symphony actually dates from the early months of 1951, when the composer played it to her. This is surely true. What is difficult to accept is Nicolayeva’s assertion that the symphony was finished before the end of the year. An early version might well have been completed in 1951 but, if so, Shostakovich returned to the work after Stalin’s death in March 1953 and went on revising it until the end of October, as is clear from letters he wrote at the time. In the third movement, moreover, there is a musical event which could have been conceived only in the summer of 1953, when the composer was infatuated by another pianist and former pupil, Elmira Nazirova.

That the Tenth Symphony is at least in part “about Stalin and the Stalin years,” as Shostakovich is quoted as saying in Testimony, is clear enough from the musical evidence of the first two movements. The exposed bleakness of the opening Moderato - which is so unlike the expression of subjective grief at the equivalent point in, say, Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony - suggests desolation on an epic scale. It is not just a matter of the E minor tonality and the dark and lean orchestration. It is also in the imprisoned stepwise motion of the theme which opens the work and which persists throughout as a melodic and emotional influence. The first subject, introduced at length by clarinet, is less cramped in its melodic intervals but no more cheerful. Its treatment at the hands of the orchestra, before it returns in its original form on clarinet, is not encouraging. There is not much consolation either in the second subject, introduced by flute, in spite of its leanings towards G major and its waltz-like rhythmic character. Indeed, the waltz is comprehensively violated in the development section and, to add irony to injury, Shostakovich disingenuously recapitulates it in E major only to confront it with the opening of the work in its inescapably bleak E minor.

The second movement - in B flat minor and in the ternary form of the conventional scherzo - is, again according to the composer’s confession in Testimony, “a portrait of Stalin.” Certainly, as Thomas Hobbes observed of life in the continual fear and danger of violent death, it is “nasty, brutish, and short.”

There seems no hope at this point and yet, in the third movement, hope emerges. It is obviously not there at first because the opening theme of the Allegretto, though in a playful disguise, is a C minor version of the E minor opening theme of the work. And then a new character enters on staccato woodwind - Dmitri Shostakovich himself, identified by the four notes D, E flat, C and B, the musical monogram used in several other of his more significant works . Not that the monogram theme can achieve anything by itself. What is needed is some miracle, some musical event equivalent to the death of Stalin, perhaps, or a new love affair, or both. It duly appears in the form of a radiant horn call, derived (in much the same way as the Shostakovich monogram) from the letters of Elmira’s name: quite unprepared for in its wide intervals of the fourth and fifth, it is full of light and air. There is no resolution at this point, however. The horn call is just another melodic idea to be taken into consideration with all the others, including the imprisoned opening motif which makes an immediate re-entry in its original shape. But, the horn call becomes ever more prominent and, in spite of the lingering doubts of the monogram motif on flute and piccolo, finally contrives to bring about a more C major than C minor ending to the movement.

It would be too easy and to early to break into a celebration at this stage. The last movement begins with an extended Andante introduction in B minor. Two or three themes of the following Allegro are anticipated here but it is only very hesitantly that solo clarinet and flute take the liberating hint of the rising fifth from the horn call of the previous movement. Once the clarinet gets it in tempo, however, the first violins seize on it and incorporate it in the delightfully fresh E major melody which marks both the beginning of the Allegro and a vision of the end of the problems so grimly postulated in the first movement. The second subject, introduced by violins, also rejoices in the rising fourths and fifths. Although, with the entry of joyous echoes of Bizet’s L’Arlésienne on the one hand and reminders of the drumming brutality of the second movement on the other, the symbolism becomes confused, the massive fff unison climax on the monogram theme cannot be bad news for Dmitri Shostakovich. If confirmation were needed, it is in the recapitulation, peacefully initiated in E major, and in the riotously conclusive coda.

Gerald Larner©

Gerald Larner, whose Maurice Ravel was recently published by Phaidon Press, is a writer and critic associated mainly with The Times