Symphony No. 8

The German army’s siege of Leningrad began in August 1941. In October, before the worst privations overtook the city, Dmitri Shostakovich and his family, along with other artists and musicians, were evacuated to Kyubyshev, deep in the heart of central Russia, where life was uncomfortable but free from danger. Here, Shostakovich was able to complete his Seventh Symphony (nicknamed “Leningrad”) and witness from afar its worldwide success. It quickly became a symbol of Russia’s heroic defiance at a time when the outcome of the struggle against Nazi Germany was anything but clear.

In summer 1943, Shostakovich spent a few months at a special musicians’ retreat in Ivanovo, near Moscow. These “Houses of Rest and Creativity,” set up by the Soviet government, offered composers a comfortable environment and ample time to work. Here, in the space of little more than two months, he composed his next symphony, the immense Eighth, and had it ready for performance in Moscow by November.

Interpreting Shostakovich’s music is like walking on thin ice, yet critics and admirers, both past and present, have confidently proclaimed various interpretations of the Eighth Symphony. In 1943, the authorities were clear that the symphony was a pessimistic work, full of “unhealthy individualism,” at a time when — after the Battle of Stalingrad — the Germans were in retreat and the prospect of victory was finally at hand. Shostakovich’s symphony was therefore relegated to the list of works “not recommended” for performance — in effect, banned.

For some later critics, free of Soviet ideology, the Eighth is a tragic work, lamenting the millions of lives destroyed by the war. For others, its meaning is hidden beneath a veneer of irony, since Shostakovich’s ambiguous position as a Soviet artist (fettered by the unpredictable responses of his masters) bred in him a highly developed skill at dissimulation: he became good at saying one thing and meaning another, of making declarations in public that he might contradict in private. If that same irony informs his music, how do we know whether his merriment is real or his misery feigned?

The short answer is: we can never know. Shostakovich was a very private, if not inscrutable, individual, leaving us free to adopt almost any view of his work without any certainty. He himself never provided any programmatic description of the Eighth Symphony, nor did he connect it with the traumatic times in which it was composed. We are simply left with a symphony in five movements, which encompasses long, thoughtful passages, explosions of untamed force, meditations on easy-going material, bursts of comic humor, pages of intense musical argument, and much else.

Like Shostakovich’s popular Fifth Symphony, the Eighth has an opening movement that grows gradually from a slow, pithy start to a climax of cataclysmic force. It passes through a section of blatant crudity to a second climax, before returning to the isolated emptiness of the beginning. This huge, 25-minute movement displays Shostakovich in all his various humors — in long wandering solos, frantic bursts of energy, whooping horns, furious percussion, and eerily calm low strings.

The same variety of mood characterizes the following four movements. The second has a certain burlesque flavor and a memorable solo for the piccolo. The third is even more lively, a scherzo in 2/4 time set off by the violas. This movement drips with humor. How could critics have ever thought it was pessimistic? It’s fun to watch, too. When the trombones take on the violas’ figuration, they present a splendid sight with their slides darting back and forth. And the timpani, too, takes a turn, a pair of sticks flying over the three drums.

The fourth movement is intensely serious. Shostakovich builds a passacaglia on a 10-measure theme that gradually disintegrates from a full-orchestra unison until the violins alone remain. This theme is repeated a dozen times with different counterthemes — notably in the horn, then the piccolo, then four fluttering flutes, then the clarinet — and then passes almost imperceptibly into the fifth-movement finale.

The final movement is heralded by the bassoons, going their merry way. The music remains carefree even when the tempo increases. But there is tension in the air, and catastrophe soon strikes with the forceful, climactic music from the first movement. A long solo for the bass clarinet finally restores calm, and the end has a seraphic quality, offering deep repose.

The symphony traces the complete gamut of human feeling, but does it have a precise meaning? Let those of us listening decide for ourselves.

— Hugh Macdonald

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.