Symphony No. 11, “The Year 1905”

Discussions of Dmitri Shostakovich and his music have always revolved around politics. The Soviets used to maintain that the composer was loyal to the regime, while more recent literature suggests that he was deeply disillusioned with communism.

Yet if we ask whether Shostakovich was for or against the Soviet government, we must also voice the opposite question: Was the regime for or against Shostakovich? Surely, their treatment of the country’s greatest composer — with a seesaw of denunciations and rehabilitations, criticisms and honors — is no less ambiguous than Shostakovich’s own highly contradictory attitudes toward communism.

The central question to ask about Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11 is not whether it is an homage to officialdom or a work with a hidden dissident message. It has been called both, allowing the symphony to be exploited by exponents of both pro- and anti-Soviet political agendas. The real questions are how Shostakovich treated his ostensible theme — the failed Russian Revolution of 1905 — and which elements of the music seem to cry out for an interpretation along political lines.

On the morning of January 9, 1905 (January 22 according to the current Gregorian calendar), a peaceful demonstration of workers and peasants, led by Father Georgy Gapon, appeared in front of the Winter Palace, the Czar’s residence in St. Petersburg. They wished to hand Nicholas II a petition requesting his help in alleviating their unbearable economic conditions.

Instead of accepting the petition, the Czar’s guards began to shoot at the crowd, killing hundreds of people. The event, which became known as “Bloody Sunday,” set off widespread strikes and protests all over the country (including a mutiny aboard the Potemkin, which was immortalized in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin). The massive unrest led to some liberalization under Czarist rule, bringing the empire several steps closer to a constitutional monarchy during its last decade.

Because the events of 1905 were widely regarded as a prelude to the two revolutions of 1917 — which ultimately saw the rise of the Soviet Union — it can seem politically convenient that Shostakovich would have composed a symphony on such a subject. But the brutality of Bloody Sunday also arouses deeply human sentiments, so that the symphony can express not merely Soviet propaganda but also a cry against injustice everywhere.

In this symphony, Shostakovich took special pains to make sure his message was clear to Soviet listeners. He adapted many of the principal themes from workers’ songs — which every resident of the Soviet Union would have learned in school — as well as from his own Ten Songs of Nineteenth-Century Revolutionary Poets (1951). He then weaves these themes together in a complex tapestry, creating what often resembles an opera without words. It portrays not just emotions and musical characters but definite places and actions.

The eerie first movement, where a slow-moving melody is played in five simultaneous octaves by muted strings, is a striking depiction of the motionless Palace Square on that ice-cold January morning. This aural image is punctured by a trumpet call, a hint of an Orthodox chant (“Lord have mercy on us”), and two prison songs. The stasis clearly represents the “calm before the storm.”

The storm indeed breaks out in the second movement (The 9th of January). Against an agitated accompaniment in the lower strings, we hear a defiant woodwind melody, first softly and then gradually rising in volume until a full orchestral fortissimo is reached. Eventually, 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, rapidly escalates into what must be seen as a graphic depiction of sheer horror — the entire orchestra pounding on a single, triplet rhythm at top volume. This, surely, is the moment where the Czarist guards open fire on the demonstrators. Then, all is silent and the sounds of the empty Palace Square return.

The title of the third movement (Eternal Memory) alludes to an Orthodox funeral chant, but its actual melodic basis is a workers’ funeral march, played by the violas to the sparsest of accompaniments. A second, less subdued section leads to an impassioned passage where the entire orchestra shrieks, as if recalling past atrocities.

The mood calms, but soon we hear the tocsin (alarm bell) that marks the start of the fourth movement. The relentless march rhythms grow more and more furious until they are swept aside by another memory of the horrors, played with great fervor by the full orchestra. The glacial string music of the first movement then returns, complemented by a long English horn solo, before the final upsurge that, with its musical material taken from the second movement, seems to suggest that the struggle is not over.

In this work, Shostakovich conceded to Soviet tastes — a large-scale symphony on an official theme, using plenty of regime-sanctioned songs. But there were enough disturbing overtones in the work for others to perceive a hidden meaning. According to one report, Shostakovich’s son Maxim, aged 19 at the time of the premiere, 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 the song quotations: “They were like white birds flying against a terrible black sky.”

However one might interpret the work, it is clear that Shostakovich created neither a mere communist propaganda piece nor a coded anti-communist tract but a complex, dark score of exceptional dramatic power.

— adapted from a note by Peter Laki

Peter Laki is a musicologist and frequent lecturer on classical music. He is a visiting associate professor of music, emeritus, at Bard College and was The Cleveland Orchestra’s program annotator from 1990 to 2007.