Written by Joseph Horowitz
Born
September 25, 1906, Saint Petersburg, Russia
Died
August 9, 1975, Moscow, Russia
Instrumentation
four flutes (3rd and 4th = piccolo), two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, E-flat clarinet, three bassoons (3rd = contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, (bass drum, cymbals, snare drum, tam-tam, tambourine, triangle, xylophone), and strings
Duration
65 minutes
Composed
1943
World Premiere
November 4, 1943, in Moscow by the USSR Symphony Orchestra
Program Notes
In his Preface to Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitiri Shostakovich (1970), Solomon Volkov writes:
In September 1958, Yevgeny Mravinsky conducted Shostakovich's Eleventh Symphony at the Leningrad Philharmonic. The symphony (written after the 1956 Hungarian uprising [against Soviet authority] is about the people, and rulers, and their juxtaposition; the second movement harshly depicts the execution of defenseless people with naturalistic authenticity. The poetics of shock. For the first time in my life, I left a concert thinking about others instead of myself. To this day, this is the main strength of Shostakovich's music for me.
All his life, Shostakovich was a "people's artist." No other great composer so consistently identified with - and composed for - a great public, bearing witness to the fate of the nation. And over a period of seven tumultuous decades, the fate of the Soviet nation proved turbulent - and tragic. A child of the Russian Revolution, Shostakovich became a true people's artist not by serving an autocratic state, but by serving more profound human needs, groping for a common humanity more fundamental than any ideology.
Shostakovich bore witness acutely, consciously and subversively. In 1941, he endured the first months of the Nazi siege of Leningrad before being evacuated. By then, he had finished the first three movements of his 75-minute Seventh Symphony - a work memorably performed by the South Dakota Symphony two seasons ago. The siege eventually lasted 872 days. Two and a half million people were ensnared. One and a half million soldiers and civilians lost their lives. At the first Leningrad performance, on August 9, 1942, the standing ovation lasted more than an hour. The symphony was broadcast throughout the Soviet Union - and also to the front. A German solider later testified: "It had a slow but powerful effect on us. The realization began to dawn that we would never take Leningrad. We began to see that there was something stronger than starvation, fear and weather - the will to remain human."
A year later, in September 1943, Shostakovich completed his 70-minute Eighth Symphony. It is another wartime testament - but the tide of battle had changed. The Seventh had ended on a note of stoic resolve. The ending of No. 8 is completely different - and unexpected. For me, it is one of the most gently humanizing moments in the symphonic literature, and never more so than today when such inspiration is widely sought. The third of the symphony's five movements, a march punctuated by screams, is experiences by many as a picture of Stalin's brutal juggernaut.
Shostakovich's Cold War critics lampooned his wartime symphonies as simplistic. Serge Koussevitzky, who with his Boston Symphony Orchestra made a cause of Shostakovich's Seventh and Eighth, retorted that they would "strongly regret [their words] in the future." He called Shostakovich "without a doubt a genius" and added: "It is my deepest feeling that there never has been a composer since Beethoven with such tremendous appeal to the masses...His language is as rich as the world; his emotion is absolutely universal." Koussevitzky said of the Adagio first movement of the Eighth: "By the power of its human emotion, [it] surpasses everything else created in our time."
Because music is more ambiguous than words, it may serve as an instrument for subversion. In Shostakovich's wartime Seventh and Eighth symphonies, the violence and darkness deliver messages in a bottle. Shostakovich later testified:
Even before the war, in Leningrad there probably wasn't a single family that hadn't lost someone, a father, a brother, or if not a relative, then a close friend. Everyone had someone to cry over. But you had a to cry silently, under your blanket, so that no one would see. Everyone feared everyone else, and the sorrow oppressed and suffocated us. I had to write a requiem for all those who died. I had to describe Stalin's extermination machine and protest against it. But how could I do it? And then the war came and the sorrow became a common sorrow. We could talk about it, we could cry openly, cry for our lost ones. I wasn't the only one who had an opportunity to express himself - to grieve - because of the war. Everyone felt it. Spiritual life, which had been almost completely squelched before the war, became saturated and tense.
With the end of World War II, Russian artists hoped that Stalin would relax his grip. Nothing of the kind occurred. In fact, Shostakovich, long an object of alternating praise and denigration, had to endure fresh denunciations - and the Eighth Symphony, dismissed as "not a musical work at all," was dropped from the repertoire. In 1956 - three years after Stalin's death - Shostakovich publicly lamented "that the Eighth Symphony has remained unperformed for many years. In this work there was an attempt to express the emotional experience of the People, to reflect the terrible tragedy of war. Composed in the summer of 1943, the Eighth Symphony is an echo of that difficult time, and in my opinion quite in the order of things."
Only in 1958, five years into Nikita Khrushchev's reformist tenure as First Secretary of the Communist Party, was Shostakovich's Eighth rehabilitated. Today, it stands in high esteem as one of the last 20th century symphonies to secure a proud foothold in the international repertoire.
