On January 9, 1905 (January 22 by the Gregorian calendar), a peaceful demonstration of workers and peasants appeared in front of the Winter Palace, the Czar’s residence in St. Petersburg. They wished to hand Nicholas II a petition, asking the monarch to alleviate their economic conditions, which had become unbearable. The Czar’s guards began to shoot at the crowd, killing hundreds. The event, which became known as “Bloody Sunday,” set off widespread strikes and protests all over the country.
The Soviet regime regarded these atrocities as a prelude to the two revolutions of 1917 (February and October), the first of which overthrew the Czarist regime and the second brought the Bolsheviks to power. The year 1905, therefore, played an important part in the Communist narrative. Yet, regardless of any Party ideology, the brutality of those shootings had to arouse the deepest revulsion in any sensitive human being, and the program of Shostakovich’s symphony carries a deeper message. Some writers have alleged that, while the composer was ostensibly concerned with the events of 1905 (in which his own grandfather had taken part), what he may really have been thinking about was the Hungarian revolution of 1956, crushed by Soviet tanks shortly before the symphony was written. In the end, the music is a denunciation of all tyrants, and a requiem for victims of violence everywhere.
In this symphony, Shostakovich took special pains to make sure his message was clear to every listener. He adapted many of the symphony’s principal themes from songs of the workers’ movement–songs that every resident of the Soviet Union learned to sing in school, as well as from his own work for mixed chorus, Ten Poems on Texts by Revolutionary Poets, Op. 88 (1951). He wove these themes together in a complex tapestry, subjecting them to substantial transformations, and bringing them back repeatedly, sometimes in their original form and sometimes with changes, in the course of the symphony’s four movements, which are played without pause.
Here is a partial list of the quotations Shostakovich used in the symphony:
.
With these diverse building blocks, Shostakovich created a veritable opera without words. The symphony portrays not just emotions and musical characters but definite places and actions. (It is no coincidence that the symphony was later choreographed with great success in Russia.) The eerie opening, where the slow-moving melody is played in five parallel octaves by muted strings, is a striking depiction of the motionless Palace Square on an ice-cold January day. This frozen image will return several times as a powerful contrast to the intense drama unfolding in the second movement. The contrast between motion and immobility is one of Shostakovich’s main dramatic strategies in this work: the delirious activity in the second and fourth movements is offset by the calm, yet extremely tense music in the first and third.
The slow first movement (“The Palace Square”) sets the stage for the drama, with the glacial string theme, a trumpet call that turns into a wail, a hint at the Orthodox response “Lord have mercy on us,” and the two prison songs (Nos. 1-2 in the above list). It clearly represents “silence before the storm,” and the storm indeed breaks out in the second movement (“The Ninth of January”). Against an agitated accompaniment in the lower strings, we hear a new theme, played softly at first and then rising in volume until a full orchestral fortissimo is reached. During a momentary respite, the “Bare your heads” theme is heard briefly, played by the first trumpet, before the earlier melody returns, building to an even more powerful climax than before. All this is, however, only a prelude to what follows. After a brief recall of the “frozen” opening of the first movement, the most violent section of the symphony begins: a ferocious fugue, started by cellos and basses, and rapidly escalating into a graphic depiction of sheer horror, with the entire orchestra pounding on a single rhythm of equal notes, at top volume and (for most instruments) in a high register. This is certainly the moment where the Czarist guards open fire. The first-movement image of the empty Palace Square then returns, as an image of “silence after the storm.”
The Russian title of the third movement, “Vechnaia pamiat” (“Eternal Memory”), alludes to a funeral chant of the Orthodox church. But its actual melodic basis is the Worker’s Funeral March (No. 3), played by the violas to the sparsest of accompaniments. A second, less subdued section and leads to an impassioned passage where the entire orchestra shrieks out the “Bare your heads” theme in what seems a flashback of the past atrocities. No. 3 returns and the mood becomes calmer, but soon we hear the “tocsin” (the alarm bells) with a new call to battle as the fourth and last movement begins. The relentless march rhythms of Nos. 4 and 5 grow more and more furious until, finally, they are swept aside by another memory of the horrors, played powerfully by the whole orchestra. The glacial string music of the first movement returns, complemented by a long English-horn solo based on “Bare your heads,” before the final upsurge that, with its musical material taken from the second movement, seems to suggest that the struggle is not over.
It is hardly the optimistic conclusion that one would associate with a piece celebrating Soviet political ideas. For all the revolutionary songs Shostakovich used, there were enough disturbing overtones in the work for some to perceive, or at least suspect, a hidden underground meaning. According to one story, Shostakovich’s son Maxim, the future conductor who was nineteen at the time, whispered into his father’s ear during the dress rehearsal: “Papa, what if they hang you for this?” And the great Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova, said, when asked what she thought of all those revolutionary quotations: “[They] were like white birds flying against a terrible black sky.” The Eleventh Symphony has been called both a piece of Communist propaganda and a coded anti-Communist tract. It is neither: it is a complex, dark score of exceptional dramatic power that is about struggle and suffering in a universal sense.
~ Peter Laki (Copyright 2026)