The first movement is titled, “The Palace Square.” It begins with a mournful evocation of Russian liturgical chant. All revolutions, after all, are tragic events. It is unremittingly tragic, and not so much about 1905 or 1956, perhaps, as about the persistently tragic pattern in human events. The conductor, Mstislav Rostropovich, a friend of the composer, summed it up when he called the EleventhĪ symphony written in blood, a truly tragic work. It is also a haunting requiem for the dead. At the premiere an elderly woman was overheard saying, “Those aren’t guns firing, they are tanks roaring, and people being squashed.” The composer’s son asked, “Papa, what if they hang you for this?”Allegedly, Shostakovich once told the musicologist Solomon Volkov that the Eleventh Symphony was “about the people, who have stopped believing because the cup of evil has run over.” Symphony No. Striking and obvious comparisons could have been made between “Bloody Sunday” and the 600 Hungarians who, on October 25, 1956, were machine-gunned in Budapest’s Parliament Square. The brutal Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was fresh in everyone’s memory. Yet, on a deeper level, Shostakovich may have been sending a veiled and defiant message to the Party. On the surface, the Symphony may appear to be little more than a capitulation to Soviet oppression. 11 earned Shostakovich the Lenin Prize in 1958. When we came home afterwards, he asked us, “Well, how was it?” And Anna Andreyevna answered, “Those songs were like white birds flying against a terrible black sky.” For some reason, my father couldn’t attend the concert. Nothing but quotations and revolutionary songs.” Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova kept her silence. All around one heard such remarks as: “He has sold himself down the river. The music-loving connoisseurs alleged that the symphony was devoid of interest. Tomashevskaya recalled,Īt the premiere of the Eleventh Symphony, there was a lot of discontented muttering. Zoya Tomashevskaya, the daughter of a prominent literary critic, attended the premiere with the poet, Anna Akhmatova. The words spoke passionately of freedom from tyrants. While these references mean little to modern listeners, they were instantly recognizable to Soviet audiences in the 1950s. There are echoes of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, an opera which explores similar subject matter. Folk songs and revolutionary songs from the nineteenth century take centerstage throughout the Symphony. It is haunted by the ghosts of earlier Russian composers, from Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov to Mussorgsky. It unfolds like a film score accompanying a vast, epic societal drama. In contrast to the monumental Tenth Symphony, released after the death of Stalin, the Eleventh is unrelentingly programmatic and cinematic. The music which emerged remains one of Shostakovich’s most controversial symphonies. 11 was still subtitled, “The Year 1905,” but now it would also commemorate the 40th anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution. In 1955, Dmitri Shostakovich announced that he had accepted a commission from the Soviet authorities to write a symphony in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday.” Personal struggles, which included the death of the composer’s mother and the failure of his second marriage, intervened. Shostakovich did not produce the work until the summer of 1957. As a child, he was deeply affected by stories of the massacre, which included “a mound of murdered children on a sleigh” whom the soldiers shot “for fun.” The Russian Revolution of 1905 set the stage for the rise of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the birth of the Soviet Union. The composer was born the following year. Among the survivors was Dmitri Shostakovich’s father. Inexplicably, the Imperial Guard opened fire, killing around 1,000 protesters and turning the snow red with blood. Assembled in the square, they sang God Save the Tsar but a frightened Nicholas II had fled the palace. Many supported the Tsar and believed that he would help to address their economic, political, and social grievances. Petersburg’s Winter Palace. They intended to present a petition to Tsar Nicholas II. On January 22, 1905, a date which is remembered as “Bloody Sunday,” thousands of peaceful, unarmed demonstrators marched to St.