Shostakovich: a Guide to the Symphonies

It is hard not to map biographical meaning onto Shostakovich’s music. His extraordinary life invites it. As do his own (often conflicting) comments.

The symphonies in particular offer us a tantalising glimpse into his psyche – his complex relationship with the Soviet regime, his life as a member of a very precarious elite. Wavering between wild energy, wry humor and haunting desolation, they are a rich source of inference and contradiction. But, more than any of that, they demonstrate his utter devotion to music. He simply had to compose, even when the world around him was falling to pieces.

If they cut off both of my hands, I will compose music anyway holding the pen in my teeth.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Symphony No 1

For the rest of his life Shostakovich would call the premiere of his First Symphony, on 12 May 1926, his musical ‘birthday’. It was a thumping success, and announced him as the first great Soviet composer. Particularly striking is the musical language – immediately recognisable as mature Shostakovich. Keeping (mostly) within the confines of Classical symphonic form, he packs the music with startling juxtapositions, a ‘montage’ style possibly borrowed from his work as a silent-movie pianist. The emotional depth expands as it progresses, from the ‘grotesquery’ of the first two movements (much disliked by his teacher Maximilian Steinberg) to the profound tragedy of the third. We also taste that assertive ambiguity fundamental to Shostakovich’s music, the final dash to the finish line maintaining a tension that never truly resolves. It’s a trait borrowed from his hero, Mahler – and one which likely contributed to his survival in years to come.

Symphony Nos 2 & 3

See Symphony No 2 live: Sunday 13 April 7pm, Barbican

The next two symphonies are not really symphonies at all. Each is written for chorus and orchestra and unfolds across a single movement, culminating in a blazing choral finale. Both are unambiguous in their conception: No 2, ‘To October’, commissioned by a government propaganda department, sets Aleksandr Bezymensky’s ode to the Bolshevik Revolution; No 3, ‘The First of May’, was written without a commission but has the same leftist bent, Semyon Kirsanov’s text compelling workers to ‘burn down what is old and kindle the fire of a new life’. Still, taking advantage of the period’s relative artistic freedom, and perhaps railing against the political trappings, Shostakovich experimented gleefully. No 2 is wildly dissonant, with multi-layered textures and crude, uncomfortable vocal writing (he called Bezymensky’s poem ‘quite disgusting’). No 3, meanwhile, is a parade of melodies deliberately designed to be forgettable (‘It would be interesting to write a symphony in which no theme is ever repeated’). But, despite their modernisms, both symphonies were a hit.

Symphony No 4

By 1935 Stalin had consolidated power in the Soviet Union. Many of Shostakovich’s network would soon be ‘disappeared’ in the Great Purge. His Fourth Symphony suffered the same fate. It was due to be premiered in 1936 but, following his denunciation in the Soviet press, in which his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was pilloried as ‘a din of screeching and screaming’, the performance was abandoned. Despite its phenomenal musical invention, all agreed the symphony’s bleak, minor-key ending was at odds with current ideals of Socialist Realism – art which affirms ‘the ultimate rightness of reality’. It wasn’t heard until 1961, eight years after Stalin’s death.

Symphony No 5

‘A Soviet artist’s practical creative reply to just criticism’, is the subtitle Shostakovich gave his Fifth Symphony. After the Lady Macbeth debacle it was clear this new work would need to tick the correct propaganda boxes. Accordingly, its finale features a triumphant, major-key ending – a paean to the glory of socialism. Or is it? The Fifth is an early example of what later became known as the ‘Two Shostakoviches’ phenomenon. Disguised within a typical, four-movement skeleton – representing the ‘official’ Shostakovich – its musical flesh and blood is, in many ways, a continuation of what he achieved in the Fourth – the ‘real’ Shostakovich. Here, twisted waltzes and aggressive military marches reflect the fear and hysteria of the times. In the finale, a quotation from his own earlier setting of Pushkin’s poem Rebirth suggests that the symphony is, in fact, a document of creative survival.

Symphony No 6

Written during the most intense period of Stalinist repression, the Sixth Symphony is frantic, semi-deranged – manically unpredictable. The haunting despair of the opening Largo is never fully addressed. Instead, we are given two hot-footed scherzos, the first allusive, the second a comedy circus romp. The lack of a traditional first movement led critics to call it a ‘symphony without a head’, while some have read the outrageous finale as a satire on Stalin’s infamous slogan ‘Life has become more joyful’. This would make sense: Shostakovich was a great operetta fan, particularly the work of master satirist Jacques Offenbach. As his friend Ivan Sollertinsky said: ‘The more convincing the comedy, the more effective the satire.’

Symphony No 7

Subtitled ‘Leningrad’, the Seventh was a major propaganda coup for the Soviets. Shostakovich began writing it during the Nazi siege of his home city and finished it in Samara, where it was premiered in 1942. Later that year a score was airlifted into the city so that a performance could be given by the half-starved remnants of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra, bolstered by retired players and army musicians. Broadcast across the front line via loudspeaker, it became a sonic middle finger to the Wehrmacht. The war-like atmosphere of the first three movements mirrored the dire circumstances; the triumphant return of the opening theme in the finale presaged a Nazi retreat, which eventually came in January 1944.

Symphony Nos 8 & 9

After the rousing success of ‘Leningrad’ there were high expectations for Shostakovich’s next two symphonies. After all, the Eighth followed victory in Stalingrad, while the Ninth was finished not long after the fall of Berlin. Both proved a disappointment. The Eighth is a memorial rather than a battle cry. Violent eruptions pockmark long passages of deep anguish, the horror barely mitigated by a serene finale and reluctant turn to C-major (‘If only you knew how much blood that C-major cost me,’ he said to a friend). The Ninth goes in the opposite direction. Surprisingly short, it has no triumphant ending and is mostly joking in character. The opening Allegro felt particularly misjudged: a pompous, two-note trombone fanfare and whistling piccolo tune seem to mock Soviet pageantry. Composer Marian Koval summed up the reaction at the premiere: ‘The listeners parted feeling very uncomfortable, as if embarrassed by the musical mischief Shostakovich had committed … and at a time like that!’

Symphony No 10

The Tenth was written at a low point in Shostakovich’s career. It followed an eight-year break from symphonic composition, one that had seen him denounced (yet again) by the authorities and stripped of his teaching positions. Premiered nine months after Stalin’s death, this new work represented an extraordinary release of pent-up feeling. It’s opening Moderato – one of the most sophisticated and beautiful movements he ever wrote – swells with unbearable grief and rage, while the second-movement scherzo is a brittle outpouring of venom surely directed at the recently deceased dictator. This is also the first symphony to include clear references to Shostakovich’s musical monogram. In the third movement a stabbing woodwind passage spells out his initials (‘D Sch.’) in German notation. Its return at the close of the finale, sweeping aside a repeat of the ‘Stalin’ scherzo theme, driven home by horns and timpani, suggests a very personal statement of defiance.

Symphony Nos 11 & 12

See Symphony No 12 live: Thursday 3 April 7pm, Barbican

If the Eighth and Ninth symphonies disappointed the politburo, the Eleventh and Twelfth had the same effect but on Shostakovich’s musical admirers. ‘The Year 1905’ (No 11) is a detailed, filmic retelling of the Bloody Sunday massacre in St Petersburg, complete with revolutionary song quotations. ‘The Year 1917’ (No 12) is a tribute to Lenin, something Shostakovich had first floated in 1924. Many felt their hero, in choosing such propagandist topics, had sold out. With its traditional structure and themes reminiscent of 19th-century nationalists Alexander Borodin and Modest Mussorgsky – not to mention its finale, a model of Soviet optimism – No 12 is certainly the most orthodox of his symphonies. Some have even suggested (without evidence) that it was written as a last-minute replacement for something more subversive.

Symphony No 13

Across two days in September 1941, 33,771 Jewish Ukrainians were murdered by Nazi SS troops in a ravine outside Kyiv. For decades, Soviet authorities tried to suppress any mention of the atrocity, and in 1961 Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote a poem, Babi Yar, protesting the erasure. Shostakovich set the poem, along with several other texts by Yevtushenko, for his Thirteenth Symphony – his most unequivocal condemnation of tyranny yet. The elegiac first movement laments Jewish suffering; the second salutes the strength that humour gives to the politically oppressed; the fourth depicts the atmosphere under Stalin’s Terror – risky themes indeed. Players withdrew from the premiere and government agents were sent to monitor rehearsals. But it went ahead, and this hugely powerful, emotionally direct symphony helped rehabilitate Shostakovich’s artistic reputation. ‘He has become ‘one of us’ again,’ wrote the pianist Maria Yudina.

Symphony No 14

Shostakovich wrote much of his Fourteenth Symphony in hospital. Doctors had been trying to discover the cause of his increasing frailty (we now know he had a form of polio) and so, unsurprisingly, his focus turned towards mortality. Written for orchestra with soprano and bass soloists, the Fourteenth sets poems rich in macabre imagery. This was a tricky subject for a Soviet – after all, pondering one’s own transience distracts from the revolutionary task at hand. But worse, Shostakovich had cut and patterned his texts to create a disturbing dramatic revelation. After a series of poems featuring oppressed characters, in the eighth movement he sets Guillaume Apollinaire’s The Zaporozhian Cossacks’ Reply to the Sultan of Constantinople, in doing so taking on the role of Cossack, chastising – in the most impudent and scatological terms – those who would seek to oppress. It was a clear rebuke to authority. The Fourteenth is also the first Shostakovich symphony to incorporate 12-note tone rows. Though he doesn’t adhere to strict ‘serialist’ procedures, this offers a rare glimpse of stylistic evolution in his music, and further reflects the artistic leeway he was by now being shown.

Symphony No 15

Shostakovich’s final symphony is also his most mysterious. It sums up the paradox at the heart of his music. Again, it is outwardly conventional: four standard movements with clearly presented musical ideas. But the ideas themselves, and their use in sequence, had never been stranger: one minute playful, the next tragic, assertive then resigned, sparsely then fully orchestrated. Then there are the quotations. The theme from Rossini’s overture William Tell, for example, which repeatedly photo bombs the opening Allegretto; or the doom-laden ‘fate’ motif from Wagner’s Ring, heard multiple times in the finale. Shostakovich’s ‘D Sch’ monogram also makes an appearance, as does a theme from his ‘Leningrad’ Symphony. What these apparitions mean we will never know. Still, he reserves the eeriest music for the final bars, as the cold ticking of percussion flanks an icy A-major chord in the strings. This was no valedictory coda, rather a timid retreat into the shadows.

From J S Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven to Betsy Jolas and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the LSO performs works by hundreds of composers every year at the Barbican, LSO St Luke’s and on tour. Discover more about the people who have shaped our musical world.