Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony is 55 minutes of tragedy, despair, terror, and violence and two minutes of triumph. Since the end of the 1970s, the most widely accepted interpretation of the work has seen it as a depiction of the Stalin years in Russia, when between 8 million and 20 million people died as a direct or indirect result of Stalin’s regime and those who didn’t lived in constant fear. Shostakovich certainly felt the capriciousness of Stalin’s rule firsthand—he was publicly denounced, his works proscribed, and his status reduced to that of a nonperson. Friends and colleagues disappeared, many of them never to return. The horror of those years—and the collective sigh of relief that doubtlessly followed when Stalin died on March 5, 1953—certainly make a plausible program for Shostakovich’s Tenth. 

Testimony, a collection of the composer’s memoirs edited by Solomon Volkov and published in English in 1979 (a book that has been called into question by scholars while affirmed by those who knew Shostakovich well), provided an introduction to this piece: “But I did depict Stalin in music in my next Symphony, 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 book appeared at a time when Shostakovich’s reputation in the West was at a low and painting his Tenth as an indictment of Stalin could only help improve his standing. 

Now, Shostakovich is among the most important Soviet composers of the 20th century. And while the Stalin story may be a helpful entry point, there’s much more to the symphony.  

Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony has been dated to the summer of 1953, after Stalin’s death; the composer hadn’t written a symphony since the 1948 Zhdanov Decree crackdown on “formalist” music. Scholarship has shown that the first movement’s two opening themes rework ideas from an abandoned 1946 violin sonata; the pianist Tatiana Nikolayeva asserted that Shostakovich composed the movement in the early part of 1951 and completed an early version of the symphony that year. Shostakovich’s own letters date much of his work to summer 1953, but the work had definitely been stirring in the composer’s imagination for several years. 

It opens with an extended Moderato that comprises nearly half of the work’s total length. The movement revolves around two extended groups of thematic material. The first contrasts a steady tread that begins in the cellos and basses with longer notes held initially by violins and violas. Out of this, a wistful motif emerges in the clarinet, from which Shostakovich intensifies to an impassioned, wrenching climax. After a grave brass chorale and an extended reiteration of the clarinet motif, the solo flute starts the second group of material, which Shostakovich slyly works into an insinuating, almost predatory waltz. The bassoon takes up the clarinet motif to launch the movement’s nightmarish central section, as Shostakovich quickly builds to a sustained emotional outpouring, complete with shrieking piccolos and ominous military drum. 

As Tchaikovsky used marches and waltzes for the interior movements of a symphony, it comes as no surprise that Shostakovich wrote a march for the second movement and a waltz for the third in the Tenth. The march—Testimony calls it “a musical portrait of Stalin”—is music of unremitting terror and frenzied violence, the military drum again making its presence keenly felt. 

In the third-movement waltz, the composer introduces himself into the music with a musical signature—D, E-flat, C, and B, the D-S-C-H motif—from his first initial and the first three letters of a variant of his last name. (In German, E flat is known as “Es” and B natural as “H.”) It is first introduced by flutes and clarinets about a minute into the movement. Another motif, played repeatedly by the solo horn, comes from the name of one of his pupils, Elmira Nazirova (E-A-E-D-A or E-La-Mi-Re-A, with solfège mixed in), a code cracked by Shostakovich scholar Nelly Kravetz. At the movement’s close, the horn obsesses on the Elmira motive while the piccolo and the flute play the D-S-C-H signature, its sardonic, bitter tone arising from unfulfilled longing for an unattainable muse. 

The finale begins with an extended dialogue dominated by solo winds, an effective counterbalance to the symphony’s opening. The clarinet launches the manic Allegro, which soon ventures into the nightmare territory of the opening movement. A massive eruption of the D-S-C-H motif, hammered out by the full orchestra triple forte, stops the madness. The motif hovers in the background during the ensuing passage, played three times by trumpet and trombone, before a return to the Allegro material. It starts as a jaunty bassoon solo, finally untroubled by the shadows that have haunted the rest of the symphony. The music builds to a massive climax, fortified by the D-S-C-H motif (in horns and trumpets), a resolute assertion of the individual’s triumph over a soulless, dehumanizing regime.

- John Mangum