ABSTRACT
Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony in E minor op. 93, in four movements, was composed at the very dawn of the post-Stalin era, between June and October 1953, and premiered in Leningrad on 17 December of the same year under Yevgeniy Mravinsky. In 1953, Shostakovich actively corresponded with Nazirova; the key to the understanding of the EAEDA motif is found in his letter of 29 August. The success of the Tenth Symphony seemed to open before Shostakovich bright new prospects. In his youth, Shostakovich treated the work of ‘proletarian’ musicians with scornful irony. Lebedinsky also contributed to the text of Shostakovich’s pasticcio-like cantata Anti-Formalist Gallery, satirizing Stalin’s and Zhdanov’s style of managing the arts and artists. In the spring and summer of 1960, Shostakovich wrote two string quartets, both having an autobiographical tenor. The Fourteenth Symphony can be regarded as a gesture of Shostakovich’s utmost relentlessness towards himself, reminiscent of the similar gesture of Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov’s ‘returning his ticket’ to God.
