Overture Magazine - 2018-19 Season FINAL_BSO_Overture_May_June | Page 20
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OV E R T U R E / BSOmusic.org
by a Russian orthodox priest and carrying
icons and a respectful petition to the Tsar,
converged on the Winter Palace in St.
Petersburg to beg for improvements in their
hard lives. Despite their intimidating
numbers, they were a peaceful assembly
singing hymns and Russian patriotic
songs. Tsar Nicholas II was not at the
palace to receive their petition. The
Tsar’s soldiers, perhaps reacting in
panic, fired repeatedly on the crowd,
killing 130 people, by conservative
estimates, but some said upwards of
one thousand. “Bloody Sunday,” as
it became known, sparked a series of
protests and strikes across Russia against
the corrupt and oppressive regime and
went down in history as the prelude to
the Russian Revolution of 1917.
As the U.S.S.R. celebrated the
Revolution’s 40 th anniversary in 1957,
Dmitri Shostakovich turned to that
fateful day as the basis of his Eleventh
Symphony. Premiered on October 30,
1957 in Moscow, it pleased the Soviet
authorities and won Shostakovich
the Lenin Prize the following year.
But it also kicked off a controversy in
musical circles both inside the Soviet
Union and internationally. Many
accused Shostakovich of playing politics
rather than being true to his artistic
conscience, of writing a swollen example
of “Socialist Realism” to improve
his standing with the regime. They
suggested the Eleventh was program
music depicting historical events and
not a real symphony at all.
However, the Eleventh is a much
greater work than its detractors claimed
and, though programmatic in its first
two movements, is indeed a symphony
in its construction. Its most unusual
feature is that its thematic material is
primarily composed of quotations from
prison and revolutionary songs of the
1905 era, woven together and developed
according to symphonic principles.
Played without pause, the symphony’s
four massive movements are linked by
recurring motives and reprises of the
song melodies.
Perhaps Shostakovich also intended
this work to have a more universal
and timeless message beyond the
commemoration of this particular
historical moment. Many Russian
listeners — even the composer’s son,
Maxim—believed the Eleventh
also referred to the bloody Soviet
suppression of the Hungarian
Revolution one year earlier in 1956.
In any case, this symphony can be
heard as a musical response to mindless
violence and the oppression of the
innocent in any time and place.
Shostakovich called the first
movement, “The Palace Square.” It
opens with very soft music of widely
spaced chords for strings and two harps
evoking the cold and bleakness of that
long-ago winter morning; this music
will return throughout the work. We
also hear two other important elements:
a rumbling motive in the timpani
and a distant military call on muted
trumpets — both of which oscillate
uneasily between the major and minor
modes. Eventually, a pair of flutes sing
the first of the revolutionary songs:
“Listen” (“Like a treasonous deed, like
a tyrant’s conscience, the autumn night
is black …”); snare drum and muted
trumpets build it aggressively. After this
dies down, low strings intone a grim
ascending melody: “The Prisoner.” The
movement’s closing moments mix all
these thematic elements as the music
hovers expectantly.
Movement two, “The 9 th of January,”
describes the events of that day
with shocking power. Rushing low
strings depict the crowd converging
on the square before the Winter
Palace. Clarinets and bassoons sing
another revolutionary song: “Oh
Tsar, our little father” (“look around
you; life is impossible because of the
Tsar’s servants, against whom we are
helpless”). This theme grows louder and
more urgent until the whole orchestra
shouts it out. Then we hear the stark
melody of “Bare your heads” with its
many repeated notes rising upward
in the brass. A quiet development of
“Oh Tsar” follows as the crowd waits
patiently. After another forceful climax,
the timpani motive and the bleak string