Symphony No. 10 in E minor, Op. 93

Program notes

About the Work

Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony is one of the towering symphonies of the twentieth century, and one of the most personal. Its timing is everything: Stalin died in March 1953, and Shostakovich, who had twice been publicly denounced by the Soviet regime and who lived for years in fear of arrest, completed the symphony (by his own account) that summer and autumn, his first symphony in eight years. Whether or not he consciously intended it, many have heard the work as a response to the dictator’s death and to the years of terror: a vast drama moving from oppression and grief toward a hard-won, defiant assertion of the self.

That ‘self’ is literally inscribed in the music. Shostakovich signs the symphony with his personal musical monogram, the DSCH motif: the notes D, E-flat, C, B, which in German notation spell D-S-C-H, the initials of his name (D. Schostakowitsch). This four-note cell saturates the later movements, the composer stamping his own identity onto the work again and again. The symphony’s most notorious movement is its brutal, hurtling second-movement scherzo, often interpreted as a savage musical portrait of Stalin himself, a whirlwind of violence over in a few terrifying minutes. The symphony was premiered by the Leningrad Philharmonic under Yevgeny Mravinsky on 17 December 1953 and sparked fierce debate, but quickly took its place among Shostakovich’s greatest works.

What to Listen For

The symphony begins in darkness: a long, brooding first movement (Moderato) that grows from the low strings, gathering through anxious climaxes and desolate woodwind solos: music of enormous span and bleak intensity, the sound of years of fear.

Then comes the shock: the second movement, a ferociously fast and violent scherzo, hammering and relentless, over almost before you can catch your breath. This is the supposed ‘portrait of Stalin’, brutal and terrifying. The third movement is the most personal: listen here for the DSCH motif (a falling-and-rising four-note figure) emerging in the strings, and for a second code, a horn call repeated twelve times that spells the name ‘Elmira’ (for Elmira Nazirova, a young composer close to Shostakovich), the two themes circling each other in a strange, haunted nocturne.

The finale opens with a slow, mournful introduction before breaking into a fast, almost manic Allegro. Listen for how the DSCH motif fights its way to the foreground and finally rings out in triumph, the composer’s own signature blazoned across the close, hammered out by the timpani, asserting the survival of the individual voice over everything that tried to crush it.