Dating the Tenth Symphony

Ian MacDonald

The following article is adapted from a post sent to the DSCH e-mail list (DSCH-L) on 5th November. I had not then seen the passage on the Tenth Symphony in Laurel Fay's book; that section was sent to me on 13th November. In terms of bald facts, my account and hers are virtually identical, except for one or two new points added below as footnotes. - I.M.


When was Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony composed?

Until 1993, there seemed to be no doubt about the answer - which was: during the summer and autumn of 1953, following the death of Stalin in March of that year. In 1993, however, the late Tatiana Nikolaeva, speaking by phone to Elizabeth Wilson, elaborated a quite different chronology, placing the origin of the work over two years earlier. This, it seemed, was during the time in which Shostakovich was composing the 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op 87 (to wit: 10th October 1950 to 25th February 1951). Written in chronological order (their individual dates being given in Volume 40 of the Collected Works), these pieces were all "played over" by Nikolaeva on the day after each was completed, for the purpose of which she visited the composer in his apartment in Moscow. Nikolaeva's account of what she remembered, as reported by Wilson in pages 256-7 of Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (1994), is as follows:

One day I came to his house (in the early months of 1951), and saw a large score on the piano. He said to me, "Today I will play you something different." It was the exposition of the first movement of his Tenth Symphony. He started writing this wonderful work simultaneously with the composition of the Preludes and Fugues... Soon [he] went on to play me the other movements of the Tenth Symphony as it was being composed. I can't remember now the exact date when he completed it, but it was during 1951, and not in 1953, the date always given in programme notes and textbooks.

In her final interview, given to Philippe Vandenbroek in 1993 (DSCH 1 [Summer 1994], p. 14), Nikolaeva repeated her claim: "On one of my visits, he said to me: "Today no Preludes and Fugues. I will play you something of my Tenth Symphony.'" On this occasion, though, she made no mention of hearing Shostakovich play the Symphony's other movements in 1951, nor did she reiterate her belief that it was "completed" in that year rather than in 1953.

All the more curious that, in an interview with David Fanning published in Gramophone in March 1991 (p. 1627), Nikolaeva is quoted as follows: "Once I came and he said: "No Preludes and Fugues today - today I will start the Tenth Symphony." She spoke to Fanning in German, in which language there is no scope for confusing the words "start" and "play". What could she have meant - and how was it that "start" had become "play" by the time she spoke to Elizabeth Wilson two years later? Clearly Fanning took her to mean that Shostakovich was at least thinking about the Tenth Symphony in 1951. (He commented: "The last movement of the Symphony takes up the 1-5-6 melodic shape on which at least a quarter of the Preludes and Fugues are based.") What is still odder about this discrepancy in Nikolaeva's testimony is that, as the author of a book on the Tenth Symphony, Fanning would certainly have been careful to get her words down correctly, if not to ask her for more details. How was it that, speaking to someone she must have known to be an expert on the Symphony, she did not volunteer the further details she later gave to Wilson - that Shostakovich actually played part of the Tenth, that this was the first movement's exposition, and that, later, he played her enough of the rest of the work to give her the impression that it was "completed" two years earlier than everyone else believes it was written? (Perhaps D.F. can assist us here.)

As it happens, Nikolaeva's claims are squarely contradicted by Manashir Yakubov who, as the curator of Shostakovich's archive in Russia, must be regarded as the final authority on chronological issues. Specifically, Yakubov wrote as follows in his notes for the LSO's 1998 Shostakovich season held at The Barbican in London:

Eight long years separated Symphony No 10, written in 1953, from its predecessor... This interval was no accident... After the Party's Decree against formalism in 1948, the symphonic genre had become unpopular, to put it mildly. The situation remained unchanged until Stalin died on 5th March 1953. This was the beginning of the "thaw", a brief period of relaxation in the political climate, with expectations of change - a time of doubt and hope. In June, Shostakovich had already begun writing the score of the first movement of the Tenth Symphony, but composition was difficult and slow. On 27th June, the composer complained to one of his friends [his former pupil, the composer Kara Karayev]: "I am trying to write a symphony. Nobody is interfering with me but progress is very sluggish. When the muse is inspired, nothing can interfere with the process of composition, but when the muse is silent, neither the Artists' House nor any other privileges are of any use...

At the moment, I am in difficulties finishing off the first movement and I don't know how things will go after that." He only completed the first movement at the beginning of August, and work on the symphony continued to the end of October.

Yakubov is clear that the Tenth Symphony was composed - and with a certain difficulty arguing less than wholesale premeditation, if any prior consideration at all - between June and the end of October 1953.

Commenting on this chronology, Elizabeth Wilson (p. 262) finds it "far-fetched" to suggest that Shostakovich faked his schedule (established in letters between June and October 1953 "to various correspondents") as some sort of protective fiction: "If Shostakovich did deliberately withhold and 'mis-date' the Symphony, then one must assume that he was motivated by the fear that it would be subjected to the same kind of attacks inflicted on its two predecessors." Wilson is correct in saying that, if Shostakovich truly completed the Symphony when Nikolaeva claims he did, then he must have falsified the well-known alternative schedule (given in Derek Hulme's Dmitri Shostakovich: A Catalogue, Bibliography, and Discography [2nd edition, 1991] as "Summer - 25th October 1953; the first, second and third movements completed on 5th and 27th August and 8th September respectively at Komarovo village, Gulf of Finland"). However, it is exceedingly difficult to see how faking the dates of the Tenth Symphony's composition could have staved off the sort of hostility which the Soviet apparat displayed towards Shostakovich's Eighth and Ninth symphonies.

To compose such a brooding-to-scathing-to-triumphal work just after Stalin's death (rather than, say, a solemn "in memoriam") might just as easily have been seen by the apparat as provocatively inapt (the basic reason for which the Eighth and Ninth symphonies had been attacked) - in which case, backdating the Symphony to before Stalin's death might have been the smarter thing to do. As it happened, the apparat attacked as usual; thus, any deception as to dates, supposing such a peculiar thing to have occurred, would have been pointless. In any event, Shostakovich would have had to mount a tiresomely onerous and intricately sustained operation in order to deceive colleagues such as Karayev, Glikman, Mravinsky, Ustvolskaya, and Elmira Nazirova (not to mention his own family) that the Tenth was written in 1953 rather than in 1951. Elizabeth Wilson is right: to suggest as much is very far-fetched.

On the other hand, Yakubov adds that "the idea for the large instrumental work which finally turned out to be the Tenth Symphony had been conceived by Shostakovich back in the summer of 1945, [though] he took it no further at that time". Wilson amplifies this, observing that Yakubov's archival investigations have found thematic correspondences between the first movement of the Tenth Symphony and Shostakovich's sketches for a violin sonata movement, which he left unfinished in 1946. (Conceivably this attempt at a violin sonata was inspired by Prokofiev's First Violin Sonata, finished in that year). This confirms that the composer had the seeds of the Tenth's first movement seven years before the Symphony was officially composed - a fact which neither
supports nor contradicts Tatiana Nikolaeva's claim that the Symphony was completed as early as 1951 (although the credibility of her claim is to some extent strengthened hereby).
Can this be reconciled?

The hypothesis is that, as Nikolaeva claims, Shostakovich had, by 1951, developed the ideas he'd sketched in 1945-6 into the fully completed Tenth Symphony. The stoutest case against this is the orthodox chronology, given in Hulme, maintained by Yakubov, and endorsed by Wilson (and also by Laurel Fay in Shostakovich: A Life).

According to Glikman's book of letters from Shostakovich, the composer arrived in Komarovo for his summer working holiday on or about 24th June 1953, whereupon he wrote to Glikman informing him of this. Only three days later - on 27th June (Krzysztof Meyer gives the date as 25th June) - Shostakovich wrote the letter to Kara Karayev quoted by Yakubov: "I am trying to write a symphony... Progress is very sluggish... At the moment, I am in difficulties finishing off the first movement and I don't know how things will go after that." This seems to imply that work on the Tenth Symphony's first movement had been going on for some time before 27th June 1953 - although whether it means that Shostakovich had been considering it a month earlier whilst in Kislovodsk, or for far longer, is unclear. At the very least, we can say that it would have been uncharacteristic of his methods (to the point of uniqueness) had he been pondering the Tenth's first movement since "the early months of 1951" without reaching a conclusion. More damning to the 1951 hypothesis is that Shostakovich's work on the Tenth's first movement continued thereafter for six weeks. Since it used themes first sketched in 1945-6, it's difficult to see why Shostakovich would still have been having trouble "finishing off" this movement in late June 1953, let alone staggering on until 5th August before at last solving his problems... unless he'd been composing it (i.e., mentally arranging its constituents) for a relatively short period of time (say, since the death of Stalin on 5th March).

According to the accepted chronology, the Tenth Symphony was one of the hardest composing slogs on a symphony which Shostakovich ever experienced: a full 126 days. Only the Fourth (250 days?), Sixth (185 days?), and First (180 days?) took longer to write. (The Seventh may actually have taken longer than the Tenth, although interruptions for his evacuation to Kuibyshev need to be factored in.) Until Irina Antonovna publishes her promised day-to-day diary of her husband's career, only estimates are possible in certain cases. However, we can be sure that the Tenth was a long grind - longer than most of his other symphonies, including big works like the Eighth (67 days), the Thirteenth (40 days?), and the Eleventh (40 days). Of course, mere duration is no measure of the labour in writing out a full orchestral score (supposing it to have been mentally composed beforehand). Some passages will be tutti; others will consist of fast music - meaning that what takes little time to perform will take a long time to write down. (The Tenth's four-minute scherzo, for instance, occupies almost as many pages as the twenty-four minutes of slower music which precedes it.) As measured by pages of miniature score, the Tenth Symphony is Shostakovich's fourth longest (213 pages), as against the Fourth (224 pages), Thirteenth (224 pages), and Eleventh (232 pages). If numbers of pages are divided by days of composition - thereby arriving at a very rough-and-ready "work rate" - we find that only the Fourteenth, Fourth, Second, Sixth, and First were proportionally harder to write than the Tenth (1.7 pages per day). By contrast, Shostakovich romped through the Eleventh Symphony at a rate of around 6 pages of miniature score per day of its composition period, the Thirteenth and Twelfth being almost as rapid to write.

We're used to Shostakovich's composing feats - eg, the few hours it allegedly took him to dash off the full score of the Festive Overture from scratch - but even so the speed with which large symphonies like the Eleventh, Twelfth, and Thirteenth seem to have been written (and, in the case of the Twelfth Symphony, apparently rewritten at the last minute) indicate either that he had indeed thought them out to the last detail before taking time off to write them down, or that, when in the mood, he could compose at simply phenomenal velocity. By either measure, the Tenth Symphony was not one of these composing "feats"; far from it. It took a full eighteen weeks to complete from the moment Shostakovich arrived in Komarovo - as compared, for example, to its predecessor the Ninth, which, after a couple of false starts, took him a mere 29 days to dash off (i.e., nearly twice the Tenth's proportional "work-rate"). So unusually protracted, in fact, was work on the Tenth Symphony that he had to take it back to Moscow unfinished - a unique occurrence in terms of his usual summer schedule and one which left rehearsals for the work's Leningrad première to the last minute so far as Mravinsky was concerned. (Shostakovich, with Vainberg, made haste to prepare the usual 2-piano audition within hours of the ink drying on the final page of the finale.)

Did Shostakovich make a false start on the Tenth? Did the first movement he may have brought to Komarovo (to be "finished off") turn out to be no good, with the result that he had to start again? Was this movement actually a second false start, the first being the excerpt Nikolaeva claimed to have heard in 1951? For now, all we can say is that Yakubov's authority as an archivist, together with the details of the accepted schedule and some common sense, persuasively suggests that Nikolaeva was, at best, mistaken.

To judge from his letter to Kara Karayev in late June 1953, Shostakovich was then experiencing one of his periodic bouts of self-doubt, such as he suffered whilst composing the Fifteenth Symphony. This would go some way to explaining why the Tenth cost so much time and sweat. For example, in his Letters to a Friend, Glikman recalls that, early in the summer of 1953, Shostakovich told him that a sparrow had flown through an open window in his dacha at Komarovo and, frightened, had left a deposit on the ongoing score of the Symphony - an event which Glikman's wife and mother hastened to assure the composer was a sign presaging success. To this, Shostakovich nodded, smiling, "Let's hope it turns out that way". [1] Does this sound like a man carrying the whole of the Tenth Symphony safely in his head?

On 28th August, Shostakovich wrote to Glikman that the Symphony was proceeding slowly, the second movement having been finished the day before - but adding sombrely that he was not happy with it. The third movement, however, was about to break this troubled pattern. It also constitutes one of the chief arguments for accepting the Tenth Symphony's established chronology. Elizabeth Wilson (p. 263):

The person behind the inspiration [for the movement's EAEDA horn call] was the Azerbaijani pianist and composer Elmira Nazirova, who had studied with Shostakovich in the year prior to his dismissal from the Moscow Conservatoire. During the summer months of 1953 Shostakovich carried on an intense (and probably largely one-sided) correspondence with her.

Elmira's Allegretto was written in a mere eleven days; her effect on Shostakovich's inspiration seems to have been considerable. But a basis for speculation arises here: was this exchange - which seems to have got going properly only during August (while the second movement was under way) and to have peaked in intensity during work on the Allegretto - was this exchange deliberately sought by Shostakovich so as to kindle a passion that might enliven his creativity? [2] After all, according to Nelly Kravetz, who discovered the Elmira correspondence, these letters effectively ceased as soon as the Symphony was finished - indeed, to judge from Kravetz's description, they fell off sharply after the Allegretto (see DSCH 1 [Summer 1994], p. 24). It is as if, in need of a classic muse, Shostakovich had miscalculated the force of his suppressed emotions, allowing Elmira to enter his Tenth Symphony in the most direct way conceivable, rather than merely "inspiring" it, in a properly decorous manner, from behind the compositional scenes. It is interesting to note in this connection that, in his letter of 28th August to Glikman, Shostakovich goes on to ask his friend if he'd be so kind as to check up on Ustvolskaya, then in Leningrad. Shostakovich explains that he has sent her many letters and telegrams, but has had nothing in reply from her and wants to know if she's well. These communications must have been going on during the six weeks of work on the Symphony's first movement.

Had Shostakovich, desperate for some feedback from a muse-figure, been trying to manoeuvre his old flame into playing the part? And, when Ustvolskaya failed to respond, did he then turn to Nazirova, likewise a composer and hence similarly able to act both as ideal love-object and sounding-board? That Shostakovich was going through a rough patch is evident from his letter to Nazirova on 29th August in which he explains the subtle EAEDA code: "I have finished the second movement of the symphony and I am writing the third. I am not satisfied with the results. Probably my power as a composer is coming to an end. There is nothing to be done - such is the lot of life. Such is fate." This parallels Shostakovich's letters to Tatiana Glivenko during work on both his First and Second symphonies: similar self-doubts and dissatisfaction with what's done; even comparable suggestions of false starts and wrong turnings. (Like the Glivenko letters, the Nazirova letters are now owned by "a close member of the Shostakovich family" and we may therefore never learn their details. Nelly Kravetz's paper for the 1994 Michigan University conference "Shostakovich: The Man and His Age" will, however, appear in Shostakovich in Context, edited by Rosamund Bartlett for OUP, in 2000.)

Until more of Shostakovich's correspondence is available in the West, we must be cautious in assessing his fears of failure with respect to the Tenth Symphony while writing it. Similar self-doubts may turn out to apply to every symphony he wrote (even those he apparently sailed through at top speed). On the other hand, there are several reasons for supposing that his fears about the Tenth while it was in progress during 1953 were of a special kind and of particular intensity.

For one thing, his problems weren't solved by the Allegretto. The finale now loomed - and the whole Symphony would not be finished for another seven weeks! (Again, the idea that Shostakovich had the work complete in his head for years simply does not hold up.) As September slipped by, the need to have the score finished in time for the November concert-season became pressing. Returning to Moscow - where an anxious Mravinsky visited him to see how the Symphony was progressing, being shown the first two movements - Shostakovich laboured on the finale until 25th October. Possibly part of this last long stretch of work on the Tenth involved orchestration; but, if so, this would only serve to stress that he was having problems with the Symphony (perhaps even taking the unusual - for him - step of sketching experimentally in short score until he'd established the line he wanted).

Why the struggle? The simplest answer is: pressure. The deaths of Prokofiev and Myaskovsky had left him as the senior Soviet composer. Stalin's death, as he (like the rest of the intelligenty) knew well, was the most crucial event in the USSR since 1917. The country's artists understood that they would have to be to the fore in pressing for liberalisation (what became the "Thaw"). The literary initiative in this respect commenced towards the end of 1953 with Vladimir Pomerantsev's article "On Sincerity in Literature". Shostakovich cautiously followed suit early in 1954 with "The Pleasure of Finding New Ways". [3] In literature, the symbolic focus of conflict would be Ehrenburg's novel The Thaw. In music, it was Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony which proved to be the cause over which the battle between Socialist Realist rigidity and limited freedom of expression was fought. (The reaction against the work from the apparat was so fierce that the debate over whether it was a proper product of a socialist society was still going on in 1955.) After the debacle of the Composers' Union audition for the 24 Preludes and Fugues on 16 May 1951 (see Wilson, pp. 248-255), Shostakovich must have known what to expect. Any attempt to disguise the provenance of the Symphony by faking its dates was clearly pointless. If he rose to the occasion as he'd done in 1937 with the Fifth Symphony, the music would simply be too real not to be officially reviled as subversive or anti-populist.

There can be no doubt that Shostakovich was aware of the expectations for his new work harboured by the intelligentsia; he was a living symbol of integrity. Hence, the inclusion in the Tenth Symphony of his musical signature DSCH for the first time was of immense significance. (The version included in the First Violin Concerto is not precise and, in any case, wouldn't be heard until 1955.) In effect, "DSCH" was a declaration of individualism within a culture of totalitarian collectivism. To have asserted himself thus while Stalin was still alive would have been suicidal; the only legitimate "I" in the USSR till 5th March 1953 was Stalin himself. Yet to declare individualism as Shostakovich did with DSCH was not to assert mere egoism. The understanding of this symbol among the Soviet intelligentsia can only have been that Shostakovich was advancing the concept of individual freedom - not himself as a particular manifestation of it. (In this sense, the DSCH symbol can be seen as an early example of the "conceptualist" art which later arose in the USSR in the 1960s and 1970s.)

It was, of course, possible, where necessary, to choose to read the symbol as Shostakovich positing his own destiny as identical with that of his country. Either way, the launching of the DSCH symbol could only have occurred in the symbolic (and actual) context of Stalin's death. Moreover Shostakovich's use of it in the Allegretto of the Tenth Symphony does not seem to have belonged to whatever spontaneous detours in this movement which Elmira Nazirova may or may not have provoked. For instance, Nelly Kravetz points out that the second of the Pushkin Monologues of 1952, "What is in my name for you?", is woven into the Tenth's opening movement, precisely as "Rebirth" from the Pushkin Romances of 1937 is woven into the finale of the Fifth Symphony. The presence of "What is in my name for you?" in the Tenth Symphony would seem to be meant as a hidden guarantee of the significance of the DSCH symbol in the work's third movement. (Of course, the additional presence of the "Elmira" code, which Shostakovich may perhaps not have intended to include when he set out, rather confuses the issue.)

Stalin's death freed Shostakovich to assert himself as a liberal figurehead, but it also put him on the spot. Could he show himself to be the standard-bearer of Russian culture, let alone of Russian music? The only way to do so would be by writing a great symphony commensurate with that momentous time in his country's history. The anxieties which emerged during the summer of 1953 - perhaps, too, his need for a female muse to inspire him (whether Ustvolskaya or Nazirova) - may reflect the pressures of public expectation he felt himself to be under. So far as the Soviet musical public knew, he'd been all but quiescent as an artist for eight years. After the Third Quartet in 1946, his output had been divided into music "for the drawer" and music which could be officially allowed. The First Violin Concerto, From Jewish Folk Poetry, the Fourth and Fifth quartets, Rayok, the 2 Lermontov Romances, the 4 Pushkin Monologues - none of these officially existed in summer 1953. Instead, Shostakovich's recent public career consisted of a list of Socialist Realist indignities:

1946 - Victorious Spring premièred by NKVD Song and Dance Ensemble; film Simple Folk banned.
1947 - Film: Pirogov. Cantata Poem of the Motherland refused performance.
1948 - Films: The Young Guard, Michurin, The Meeting on the Elbe. Films Pirogov and Michurin "collectively" awarded Stalin Prize 2nd Class.
1949 - Oratorio: The Song of the Forests; film: The Fall of Berlin. Film The Young Guard "collectively" awarded Stalin Prize 1st Class.
1950 - "First Ballet Suite" (arr. Atovmyan). Stalin Prize 1st Class for The Song of the Forests and for the scores for The Fall of Berlin and The Meeting on the Elbe.
The Meeting on the Elbe "collectively" awarded Stalin Prize 1st Class. Film Belinsky refused screening till 1953.
1951 - Film: The Unforgettable Year 1919; 10 Poems on Texts by Revolutionary Poets (Stalin Prize 2nd Class); 4 Songs to Words by Dolmatovsky; "Second Ballet Suite" (arr. Atovmyan).
1952 - Cantata: The Sun Shines Over Our Motherland; Dances of the Dolls (arr. material from 1930-5); "Third Ballet Suite" (arr. Atovmyan). 24 Preludes and Fugues (1950-1) premièred in Leningrad.

The significance of this context became manifest during the apparat controversy over the Tenth Symphony in which the work was repeatedly contrasted unfavourably with The Song of the Forests. In a sense, this background made Shostakovich's composition of a symphony in 1953 inevitably a radical act. (Frans C. Lemaire, La musique du xxième siècle en Russie [Fayard, 1994], p. 142: "...the first open affirmation of a dissent [protestation] which had been growing for twenty years" - that is, since the attacks on him during the Cultural Revolution.)

As for the actual, non-symbolic aspect of Stalin's death, that would have been very real to Shostakovich - and not merely as an afterthought. Stalin's death had been longed for by the dissident intelligentsia since the end of the war. By 1953, aged 74 and in increasing infirmity, he was clearly on his last legs; yet he remained in control and was on the verge of ordaining a new Terror when he died. The effect on the Soviet people was convulsive: hysteria among the crowd at his lying-in-state resulted in hundreds of deaths. The intelligenty received the news grimly. (Rostislav Dubinsky records these events in the fourth chapter of Stormy Applause, beginning with his official call at 5am on 6 March 1953 - as a member of the Borodin Quartet - to attend on the funeral ceremonies: "I picked up the receiver and heard the voice of Alexandrov. 'You know why I'm calling so early.' 'Has the inevitable occurred?' 'Yes. Vice Minister Kholodin himself called me; they need a quartet. Tails and black tie...'") Well-versed in sceptical reserve, Shostakovich must nonetheless have been profoundly relieved by the news.

Yet the regime itself endured. When Flora Litvinova informed him that Beria was being touted as a future liberaliser and reformer of the Gulag, Shostakovich rounded on her: "How can you believe such deliberate lies, lies that have been put into circulation by that department [the KGB]! Beria, who personally cut up corpses and flushed them down the toilet, now wants people to believe that he's grown wings!" Around this time, Edison Denisov said something pleasant about Voroshilov in Shostakovich's hearing. Shostakovich commented: "Edik, if Budyonny is up to his knees in blood, then Voroshilov is up to his balls in blood." "And Kaganovich?" "Kaganovich is up to his neck in blood." (Cf. Yakubov's revelation of unlisted works by Shostakovich, such as "parodies of the hymns of loyalty honouring Party leaders" written, with Glikman, in the late 1930s: "One of these was called 'Going along with Kaganovich' and another 'The Song of the People's Iron Commissar Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov'." [See: www.siue.edu/~aho/musov/yak/yak.html])

The idea, generated by Nikolaeva's claims, that the Tenth Symphony was unrelated to "background" events in the USSR in 1953 - events so dominant as to be more in the nature of "foreground" - can only be sustained in the absence of acquaintance with context. Even if it could be shown that the Symphony was written before Stalin's death, it would be wrong to conclude that Stalin, or his hoped-for demise, must thus be unrelated to the music. He dominated the Soviet Union precisely as Big Brother dominated Oceania in Orwell's satire on Stalin's totalitarian state. Just as everything for the citizens of Oceania converged on Big Brother, all of life in the USSR was lived "under" Stalin - his image and his overseeing "omniscient" gaze. (Cf. the similar ethos of oppressively overbearing images in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.)

Yet the laborious chronology of the Tenth Symphony, together with its quotation from a song of 1952 and its connection with events of Summer 1953 and a particular person involved in them, combine to fatally damage the claim that the work could have been finished two years before Stalin died. What Nikolaeva thought she'd heard Shostakovich play - or, perhaps, when she thought he'd played it - is irreconcilable with what we know to be true from letters written by him during the months following Stalin's death. Possibly she saw or heard an experiment with the themes sketched for the unfinished violin sonata of 1945-6. She certainly cannot have seen or heard the Tenth Symphony as we know it, since it was clearly composed in 1953. Like the early attempts at the Seventh Symphony (from 1939 onwards) or at the First Symphony (mentioned by Shostakovich in his letters to Tanya Glivenko), what Nikolaeva was remembering may have been in some way musically related to the final product without figuring at all in the work's finished form. There is a parallel instance: the false start on the Fourth Symphony which survives as a seven-minute adagio dated by Manashir Yakubov to 1934 (Collected Works Vol. 2; recorded by Gennadi Rozhdestvensky in 1985). One might say that, since Shostakovich started thinking about the Fourth Symphony in 1934, he couldn't have meant the work to be "about" the Terror; yet Stalin's purges and his megalomanic cult gathered pace throughout the 1930s. In this case, while the false start was unrelated to the finished Fourth Symphony, the overbearing cultural context remained identical. The same may have been true of Nikolaeva's alleged "1951 version" of the Tenth Symphony.

[1] Fay adds that "the composer commented to another correspondent [Elmira Nazirova]: 'Well, if a sparrow dirties your creative work with his... [sic], it's not that bad. Much worse when it is done by more significant personalities than a sparrow.'"
[2] Fay confirms my supposition: "In reminiscing about their relationship later in life, Nazirova described Shostakovich's as an opportunistic infatuation. She had the distinct sensation that Shostakovich had needed her most as a muse and that, after the première of the Tenth Symphony, her 'mission' had been accomplished."
[3] Fay quotes from this paper without indicating that putting forward such ideas was intrinsically risky. Far from an indication of agreement with the prevailing aesthetic orthodoxy, Shostakovich's remark that "Socialist Realism opens up extraordinary scope for the artist's ideas" is a typical example of the false ritual line-toeing with which such circumspect requests for liberalisation needed to be diluted at that time. (Cf. similar contemporary addresses by Kabalevsky, Khachaturian, Georgiy Khubov, etc.)

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