Symphony 10 - Shostakovich (1906-1975)

Moderato: Allegro: Allegretto: Andante

"I have thought that my life was replete with sorrow and that it would be hard to find a more miserable man. But when I started going over the life stories of my friends and acquaintances I was horrified. Not one of them had an easy or a happy life. Some came to a terrible end, some died in miserable suffering and the lives of many of them could easily be called more miserable than mine. And that made me even sadder. I was remembering my friends and all I saw was corpses, mountains of corpses. And the picture filled me with a horrible depression. I'm sad, I'm grieving all the time".

Testimony, Shostakovich's memoirs as dictated to Solomon Volkov, was published in America in 1979, four years after Shostakovich's death. The book changed perceptions of Shostakovich at a stroke, revealing the innermost thoughts of the composer in an intimate, sometimes shocking, sometimes mocking manner. The chilling words quoted above were Shostakovich's own summary of his life and times. From a western point of view, it is impossible to understand what life was like under Communism and Stalin. Shostakovich with so many other musicians, artists and poets was in constant fear for his life but he somehow managed to thread a way through the minefield of suspicion, innuendo, denunciation and disloyalty - many didn't and simply disappeared. Prior to 1936 Shostakovich described himself as "a boy who might be spanked" for his indiscretions. Life was probably at its happiest for him, with the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in production in both Leningrad and Moscow, when a hammer-blow fell. Under the heading "Muddle Instead of Music" the state newspaper Pravda published a denouncement of Shostakovich which stemmed directly from Stalin. Immediately the opera was taken off the stage, meetings were organised to explain the new State opinion of Shostakovich, and performances and friends melted away. The phrase in the article saying that all of this "could end very badly" was frightening enough but worse was to come. Within a few days, Stalin attended a ballet with music by Shostakovich, found the music distasteful and launched a further denouncement in Pravda. These attacks almost destroyed Shostakovich: he was branded "enemy of the people" giving self-righteous fellow-travellers every excuse to publicly denigrate him. The only thing in his favour was his international reputation which Stalin was keen to foster. At the same time as bringing the "misguided" composer to heel, he must be shown to the West as a product of the great Soviet State. The dilemma for Shostakovich was how to escape his own "final solution" yet retain his integrity. That he did this is proved over and again in his music.

Symphony 10 was written just after Stalin's death. The sombre opening leads to a clarinet melody of almost naïve simplicity and then to a second, waltzing theme. It is fascinating to discover how the composer builds, from these innocent ideas, to a central section of incredible, menacing power (one of our young violinists described this as the "loudest music he had ever heard") and back to a quiet ending. The savage second movement is a savage portrait of a savage man - Stalin. It is as well that it lasts less than five minutes as the music is almost unbearable in its intensity. TheSymphony's third movement gains substance from the interaction of two musical motifs: one derived from Shostakovich's own name and the other from the first name of a young Azerbaijani student, Elmira Nazirova, who was highly regarded by the composer. The composer's initials D(imitri) SCH(ostakovich), with the help of the German note names H for our B and Es for E flat, gives a signature of the musical notes D, E flat, C and B: using a mixture of note names and tonic sol-fa, Elmira is E, La, Mi, Re and A. The importance of Elmira Nazirova to Shostakovich can hardly be overstated; he was writing to her every day as he composed the Tenth Symphony and the introduction of her theme, played by a solo horn, is an unmistakably seminal moment assuming more and more importance as the music progresses.

The last movement starts, as the first, with cellos and basses and with almost identical music before, after several broad hints, Shostakovich introduces a perky almost inconsequential theme. It is this juxtaposition of a trite melody with the overwhelming music that follows that makes Shostakovich's music so extraordinary. To crown it all, the DSCH motif is blasted out by the horns, the brass and finally by the timpani. I like timpanist Sheri Rutland's idea that these final DSCH hammer blows say "You (Stalin) are dead but I'm alive"! The Russian conductor Kirill Kondrashin knew Shostakovich, lived under the same conditions and has conducted all of Shostakovich’s symphonies. Here are his thoughts on the Tenth Symphony: “At nineteen, Shostakovich was creatively mature, open and enthusiastic and he remained like that until his death - so much so that even the illnesses, injustices and persecutions he suffered could be absorbed into his major works. The Tenth Symphony is like that - reflecting those problems, protesting against them and in the end transcending them”.

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