Subscription Concerts 2022-2023Program C
No. 1987 Subscription (Program C)

Shostakovich lived mostly as a Soviet citizen. On his native soil, especially during the era of Joseph Stalin from 1924 to 1953, the authorities utilized every art form as a vehicle for their propaganda. Many of artists who didn’t meet the official Soviet style called “Socialist realism”were destined for purge, labor camp, torture or execution.
As for Shostakovich, the regime condemned his opera in 1936 so he rehabilitated himself writing the “exemplary” Fifth Symphony (1937). Four years later, his Seventh penned in the midst of the Great Patriotic War (Eastern Front) received worldwide recognition as a masterpiece prefiguring the triumph against the Nazism. He then set to work on the Eighth in the summer of 1943 immediately after the Red Army’s victory at Stalingrad. However, contrary to the Party’s expectation, it didn’t turn out to be another patriotically exultant symphony with a triumphal finish. Enraged, the Party banned it from performance.
Like Beethoven’s Fifth (Destiny), Shostakovich’s Eighth begins in C minor and ends in C major, provided their conclusions are miles apart. The latter is cast unconventionally in five movements of which the last three are played without pause. Moreover, the anguished first movement in modified sonata form takes up approximately half of the whole symphony. At the beginning, low strings declare a dreadful three-note motif (C-B flat-C) which would play, in slightly different shapes, important roles in all other movements. After the next sarcastic scherzo movement, the machinelike third movement is shackled by a remorseless ostinato (persistently repeated phrase). The slow fourth movement in G-sharp minor, a passacaglia (continuous variation on a bass theme), is also haunted by a relentless repeat: tam-tam (gong) leads to the forceful statement of the theme followed by its eleven variations. The work attains C major at the opening of the finale in rondo sonata form where the inverted three-note motif (C–D–C) is the base of the idyllic main theme given by bassoon. The momentary optimism makes way for a most dispirited C-major close in symphonic history.
[Kumiko Nishi]