SHOSTAKOVICH SYMPHONY NO.10 Of Shostakovich’s fifteen symphonies, the Tenth occupies a central position, emotionally and stylistically, if not numerically. He composed it in 1953, a crucial year for Soviet art, and indeed for Soviet life in general. Stalin’s death in March 1953 heralded an end to a period of extreme artistic repression, during which Shostakovich himself had suffered severe rebukes from the Party authorities. In 1936 his second opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, had been pilloried in a notorious Pravda editorial entitled ‘Chaos instead of Music’; and then in 1948, along with most other Soviet composers of worth, he had been condemned by Stalin’s aide Andrey Zhdanov for alleged ‘formalistic’ and ‘anti-democratic’ tendencies in his music. Just as the former incident caused Shostakovich to withhold from performance his bold, rhetorical Fourth Symphony (composed in 1935-6, but not performed until 1961), so the Zhdanov censures encouraged him to concentrate for the time being on potentially uncontroversial works - film scores, cantatas - and to keep to himself a handful of works which, in such an adverse political climate, would almost certainly have caused a stir: the song cycle From Hebrew Folk-Poetry (1948), the Fourth String Quartet (1949) and the First Violin Concerto (1947-8). All were eventually performed in the mid-
1950s, by which time conditions were more favourable: in fact, only months after Stalin’s death Pravda was already asserting the composer’s right to ‘independence, courage and experimentation’. In a famous resolution (passed on 28 May 1958) the Party, while claiming that the criticisms of 1948 had ‘played, on the whole, a positive role in the subsequent development of Soviet music’, also acknowledged that ‘Shostakovich... and others, whose works at times revealed the wrong tendencies, were indiscriminately denounced as the representatives of a formalist, anti-people trend’. Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony was the first significant orchestral piece to emerge in the post-Stalin era, and it was also the first symphony that Shostakovich had attempted for about eight years (his Ninth was written in 1945, at the end of the war). As such, the Tenth was the subject of a fevered three day debate (on 29 and 30 March, and 5 April 1954) at the Moscow branch of the Union of Soviet Composers. Some commentators, regarding the symphony as a ‘non-realistic’ work, condemned its pessimism: others emphasised the composer’s right to be guided by his own artistic integrity. And the young composer Andrey Volkonsky found a neat description for it: an ‘optimistic tragedy’.