Symphony No. 8 in C minor, Opus 65
Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich was born in St. Petersburg on September 25, 1906, and died in Moscow on August 9, 1975. He began his Symphony No. 8 on July 2, 1943, completing it on September 9 that same summer and playing it on piano soon afterwards for an invited audience of composers and conductors. The first orchestral performance, for an invited audience of musicians, artists, critics, and journalists, took place on November 3, 1943, at the Moscow Conservatory with Evgeny Mravinsky, the symphony’s dedicatee, leading the State Symphony of the USSR; they also gave the first public performance the next night, both occasions being part of a Festival of Soviet Music celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Soviet Union.
The score of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 8 calls for two flutes and two piccolos (doubling third and fourth flutes), two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, E-flat clarinet, and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, three trumpets, four horns, three trombones, tuba, timpani, xylophone, snare drum, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, and strings.
The three symphonies (his symphonies 7, 8, and 9) composed by Dmitri Shostakovich during World War II are surprisingly varied in their emotional and musical character. They also constitute a sort of diary of the composer’s personal and artistic response to one of the darkest moments in modern history, progressing from patriotic outrage to inexpressible grief to ironic escapism. The first and most massive of the three was the celebrated Symphony No. 7 (Leningrad) begun in the summer of 1941, just as the Nazi army launched its terrifying assault upon the composer’s beloved native city. Completed in December 1941 in evacuation and performed for the first time in Kuibyshev, the Seventh (which weighs in at a hefty 80 minutes) quickly became an international symbol of the heroic defense of Leningrad during the 900-day Nazi blockade. After its highly publicized American premiere on the radio on July 19, 1942, the Seventh (with its raucous Bolero-like first-movement portrayal of triumphant, strutting militarism) rapidly became one of the best-known symphonies composed in the 20th century. Despite subsequent claims that the Seventh’s often sarcastic fury was directed as much against the horrors of Stalinism as against Nazism, the Leningrad became a shining emblem of Soviet patriotic feeling.
The Seventh’s unprecedented domestic and international success actually came to haunt Shostakovich. When judged against it, his two subsequent wartime symphonies were found emotionally and ideologically wanting by the ever-vigilant Communist Party bureaucrats and official critics. Completed in September 1943, the Eighth was widely criticized after its first public performance in Moscow on November 4 as excessively gloomy and despairing in light of the improving fortunes of the Red Army at Stalingrad (where the Nazi army had been defeated after a monumental battle in early 1943) and elsewhere. Shostakovich’s close friend Ivan Sollertinsky, a scholar and critic, wrote to his wife: “The symphony made an enormous impression, but the music is significantly more difficult and sharp than in the Fifth and Seventh symphonies, and therefore is highly unlikely to become popular. Its success owed more to Shostakovich’s name and popularity rather than to the symphony itself. And the work has gained some vociferous enemies.” Sollertinsky was right. Since most of the important reviews of the Eighth Symphony were critical (especially of the lyrical, unheroic finale), it disappeared from the repertoire for many years; it has only recently been returning to favor both in Russia and abroad.
Musicologists and critics have long considered the Symphony No. 8 one of the most complex, challenging, and ambitious of Shostakovich’s fifteen symphonies. Unlike the Leningrad and several other of the composer’s symphonies, the Eighth lacks a descriptive title or any obvious programmatic intent. Confused and disappointed by Shostakovich’s failure to provide a clear extra-musical “purpose” for the new work, and eager to find some justification for its mournful mood, some Soviet cultural apparatchiks attempted to persuade the public that the Eighth was actually intended to honor those who died at the Battle of Stalingrad. Even today, the symphony is occasionally referred to in Russia as the “Stalingrad Symphony,” though there is no evidence that Shostakovich ever approved of such a label. After the premiere, the Eighth also became known as the “Poem of Suffering.” In the words of distinguished Russian musicologist Marina Sabinina, whose book on Shostakovich’s symphonies (unfortunately still unavailable in English) remains one of the best sources, the symphony is “an epic song about war as the cruelest evil that could ever exist.”
And yet in one of the countless interviews he was forever granting, speaking in the bland language of Soviet officialese, Shostakovich claimed that the Eighth Symphony was really about beauty and affirmation, perhaps anticipating the criticism that it was excessively dark and despairing. “If I were to compare this symphony with my previous compositions, then I would say that in form it is closest to the Fifth Symphony and the quintet. And it seems to me that in the Eighth Symphony, certain ideas and thoughts present in my preceding works find further development. I could express the ideological-philosophical concept of my new work very briefly, with just two words: life is beautiful. All that is dark and depressing will disappear, depart, and the beautiful will reign.”
That the project particularly inspired Shostakovich seems to be confirmed by the remarkable speed of composition. Begun in Moscow in early July, the entire opus was completed by early September. It was at the rural retreat belonging to the Union of Composers in Ivanovo that Shostakovich did most of the work, surrounded by other leading Soviet composers, all intent on contributing to the war effort in music, with a few breaks for volleyball.
One of Shostakovich’s longer symphonies, the Eighth runs over an hour. It is also the first of the composer’s symphonies to have more than four movements. By far the longest of the five movements is the opening Adagio, constituting more than one-third of the entire work. In a gesture highly reminiscent of the famous opening bars of his Symphony No. 5 (to which the Symphony No. 8 is often compared), Shostakovich opens the Eighth with a dramatic—almost operatic—signature motive or motto in octaves in the strings, moving upward from the low strings and rising to the second violins. Full of foreboding and grief, this strongly punctuated phrase serves to unify the entire symphony, reappearing portentously in later movements, representing the evil power of militarism, and giving the work a greater structural coherence than the Fifth. To the barely repressed violence of the motto theme the other two themes of the first movement provide a strong contrast. The first—appearing in the first violins—is reflective and introspective; the second, lyrical and romantic, is set in 5/4 meter over a steadily beating irregular accompaniment in eighth-notes that Sabinina compares to the “nervous beating of a heart.” Of an intimate, emotional character, both themes are repeatedly interrupted through the development section by the intrusion of the aggressively military epigraph phrase. In an Allegro section, the reflective theme is utterly transformed into a horrible vision of mechanized force, a sadistic march leading into a shattering climax for full orchestra. The movement concludes with a coda of quiet resignation and the return of the epigraph, sounded on the trumpet dying away into nothingness. In this Adagio, one the great opening movements of any modern symphony, writes Shostakovich biographer Krzysztof Meyer, “the tragic element rises to an unprecedented level.”
The second (Allegretto) and third (Allegro non troppo) movements are both fast and of almost identical length, about six minutes each. They transport us to the world of full-blown self-important militarism, seen through the lens of grotesque caricature, a quality very familiar to us from other works of Shostakovich. The second movement provides music for marching—but a march devoid of humanity or natural physical movement. Of particular interest is a complex, densely polyphonic section of uncertain tonality just before the conclusion, where the music (like the world itself in 1943) seems to lose its center and bearings, only the insistent beat of the march remaining. Constructed over a pounding ostinato in quarter-notes, in the style of a toccata, the third movement is a dance of death, its “theme” a descending octave shriek.
After the false bravado and violence, the fourth movement (movements three, four, and five are played without pause) comes as a requiem for the countless dead, reprising some ideas from the first movement, over a passacaglia bass line heard first in the full orchestra, then repeated eleven times with a kind of hypnotic repetitive effect. The concluding Allegretto is less tightly constructed than the preceding movements and fails to offer the optimistic reassurance that resounds, for example, in the finale of the Symphony No. 5—a serious deficiency in the opinion of the Party critics, who were hoping for a bombastic, hopeful ending. Instead, Shostakovich gradually reduces the tension and drama, leading us into a hushed and transcendent world, scored sparely for strings and flute, not a public celebration but a private prayer. War is hell, but life is beautiful.
Harlow Robinson
Harlow Robinson is an author, lecturer, and Matthews Distinguished University Professor of History, Emeritus, at Northeastern University. His books include Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography and Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood’s Russians. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Boston Globe, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Cineaste, and Opera News, and he has written program notes for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, and Metropolitan Opera.
The first American performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 8 took place on April 2, 1944, with Artur Rodzinski conducting the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra (the Boston Symphony premiere under Koussevitzky taking place three weeks later).
The first Boston Symphony performances of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 8 were given by Serge Koussevitzky on April 21 and 22, 1944.
