# Shostakovich’s Darkest Symphony



## mahlernerd

Shostakovich was at the height of his compositional powers during the darkest periods of his, his country’s, and the world’s time. Most of Shostakovich’s works are very pessimistic (with a few exceptions, like the 9th symphony, and on some level the 7th), but what do you think his darkest, most pessimistic symphony is. I would have to pick the 4th.


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## Allegro Con Brio

I haven't heard them all yet, but No. 15 has always been a personal favorite of mine even though it seems like it gets little love around here - perhaps due to that extreme pessimism. It represents his dark, grotesque style and outlook perfectly. The second movement is gorgeous and heartbreaking, and the last couple minutes of the finale are unlike anything else, really. Maybe no other music simulates the actual process of dying quite like it. Although I've heard the 14th is a pure expression of nihilism in music. I haven't heard it yet since I'm not quite sure I'm ready for it.


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## Art Rock

The 14th or the 4th.


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## EdwardBast

Art Rock said:


> The 14th or the 4th.


Likely candidates. I'd say the 13th.


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## elgar's ghost

The 13th and 14th. Unlike some of the non-vocal symphonies there is nothing enigmatic or ambivalent about them at all.


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## chill782002

I'd go for the 8th myself. A very bleak work.


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## Triplets

The death obsessed 14th has to be bleakest.


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## Heck148

#8 is a dark, brooding, violent work, expressing the dark horrors of the titanic German-Soviet struggle during WWII...There is no triumph or victory here...just death, destruction, desolation...
But I think #14 is DS' darkest work...the constant death theme pervades the entire work...I don't listen to the whole piece at one sitting.


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## KenOC

Allegro Con Brio said:


> I haven't heard them all yet, but No. 15 has always been a personal favorite of mine even though it seems like it gets little love around here - perhaps due to that extreme pessimism.


I'm another fan of the 15th, although I don't get a sense of death or depression from it. Plenty enigmatic, of course! Amazing how DSCH could summon all that inspiration and imagination at his age and with his multiple maladies at the time.


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## adriesba

I haven't heard them all, but I don't know if it could get darker than his 14th symphony. Oh my, I tend to agree with Heck148 - I don't know if I could listen to anything more than excerpts at one sitting!


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## SONNET CLV

For as bleak as is the Symphony 13 ("Babi Yar"), it is the 14th by Shostakovich that truly plumbs the depths of darkness and despair.

Music critic and radio commentator Jim Svejda once wrote something to the effect that one shouldn't listen to this particular symphony more than once or twice in a life-time as it could lead one to suicide. I recall remarking that quote to a group of students one time which, predictably, got them interested in wanting to hear this bleak work. The topic under discussion was actually the poetry of Spanish master Garcia Lorca, poetry of whom Shosty set in the first and second movements of the 14th. But I had set-up the class to hear the Shosty piece. (And music by George Crumb as well.) Fortunately no one died for the experience, at least not from my class.

So much of Shostakovich is dark and indeed pessimistic, qualities which seem to increase in the musical fabric of each successive work till it is almost unbearable by the final opus numbers. I've long lamented that Shostakovich didn't live to see the fall of the suppressive Communist regime of which his music so aptly critiques in its dark and sardonic passages.

But Symphony 14 takes the cake for darkness. The enigmatic 15 seems to me to demonstrate something beyond pure bleakness, something more in the realm of "one goes mad" after living in Shostakovich's world for too long. Indeed, if Symphony 15 is not a study in madness, I know not what is. But even madness is perhaps a saving grace compared to the dark dances of death present in Symphony 14.


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## MusicSybarite

I know you're asking for symphonies, but I think his most devastating piece was the String Quartet No. 15. That is another level of darkness. The String Quartet No. 8 suits that feature quite well too.


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## CnC Bartok

I am surprised that No.13 is getting more than a mention or two here. I find it a thoroughly positive work, defiant, praising the Creative, praising the old, and one of the most powerful attacks on anti-Semitism around. I find it a remarkably uplifting piece.

Unsurprisingly, I reckon No.14 takes the dubious crown here. Certainly among the Symphonies, maybe it's out-darked by a couple of the last quartets, or perhaps the Piano Trio?


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## Poor Lemon

I realize this thread is two years old but it's such a great topic. Shosty's 8th symphony is a contender because it most explicitly explores deep personal suffering (I always fancied that the 2nd and 3rd movements, though, were cryptically satirizing Stalin, but I have zero evidence that was ever his intention.) But the 14th symphony is even darker and bleaker still, and indeed the song cycle is explicitly about death without guarantee of redemption. 

However, I have to go with the 15th symphony as being subversively the darkest of the dark, despite its bouyancy and humor. Thematically, the symphony strongly strikes me as a tale about Satan, or rather the presence of evil in the world, however one understands this. (And Shosty certainly witnessed his share.) The first and third movements seem to highlight relatively small but pervasive acts of mischief and cruelty, while the second and fourth movements suggest seduction into wickedness resulting in revelations of the most ghastly sort imaginable. The build up and final crisis of the finale gets more horrifying each time I listen to it. And yet, even after such horrors, we still dance a slow dance with the devil. All will still be well if we trust in him. At the end, while the world burns down, the Devil just winks at us, hands in pockets, and saunters off unscathed, biding his time before the next atrocity. Yep, the 15th, blackest of the black, darkest of the dark, and all the more chilling for not even realizing at first listen what's really happening here. Fantastically brilliant work. (By the way, the 4th symphony isn't really dark, IMO, though it does have some scary moments in the first movement. It's playful, mocking, sarcastic, and magical, but it's really not as dark as all that. It's the opposite of the 15th - one of several symphonies that is actually lighter than it seems at first listen, like the 6th and the 10th as well.)


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## maestro267

No. 14. It's about death.


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## Poor Lemon

.


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## Enthusiast

If the darkness we are looking for is pessimism then I am not sure which work to pick. I don't really hear his music as pessimistic although he certainly puts himself (and us) "through the mill" in much of his music. I hear him _withstanding_, sometimes heroically and sometimes stoically but there is usually strength in abundance in the mix, isn't there? As for darkness per se - yes, he explores the dark ... but is he overcome? I don't think so. 

The 4th symphony has been mentioned as pessimistic but he didn't finish it. I think Caetani - the son of Igor Markevitch - did record a fairly successful completion, though.


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## Poor Lemon

Enthusiast said:


> If the darkness we are looking for is pessimism then I am not sure which work to pick. I don't really hear his music as pessimistic although he certainly puts himself (and us) "through the mill" in much of his music. I hear him _withstanding_, sometimes heroically and sometimes stoically but there is usually strength in abundance in the mix, isn't there? As for darkness per se - yes, he explores the dark ... but is he overcome? I don't think so.
> 
> The 4th symphony has been mentioned as pessimistic but he didn't finish it. I think Caetani - the son of Igor Markevitch - did record a fairly successful completion, though.


Well said. Personally, I don't find the 4th to be pessimistic though it has some harrowing passages. I have heard that the original manuscript was lost or that there were other unpublished fragments, but never that he didn't actually finish it. Please say more about this.....


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## Enthusiast

Poor Lemon said:


> Well said. Personally, I don't find the 4th to be pessimistic though it has some harrowing passages. I have heard that the original manuscript was lost or that there were other unpublished fragments, but never that he didn't actually finish it. Please say more about this.....


I may have it wrong. I just remember that what gets performed and recorded is not the complete work and that Oleg Caetani recorded a version (that seemed convincing to me when I heard it years ago) which was of a completion - I assume based on composer's sketches. Caetani had access to Mravinsky's annotations of some Shostakovich scores which *may *have helped.

EDIT - I can see the what Caetani offers in his recording is "fragments of the unpublished manuscript" of the 4th movement. I remember them as having some coherence and being not unsubstantial but memory can play tricks.


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## scott.stucky48

8 o r 14.


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## clavichorder

4th and 15th are both the greatest two, and the darkest.


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## Montarsolo

13


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## RobertJTh

About two decades ago, when I had some preliminary symptoms of depression, I decided to listen to the 4th in a dark room late at night, with no-one else around.
Boy, was that a bad idea. It triggered more nasty mental stuff than I want to disclose here.
Today, I can listen to the 4th (and even the 14th) without any problems, but I still have issues with those creepy death clock endings. They go under the skin more than the most tragic outbursts of Tchaikovsky or Mahler.


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## pianozach

Wow. There seems to be a distinct lack of love for *Symphony 5* here.


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## RobertJTh

pianozach said:


> Wow. There seems to be a distinct lack of love for *Symphony 5* here.


It's has dark moments, specially in the elegiac adagio, but the finale is pretty life-affirmative (I'm not sure I find the theory that it's all fake and staged very credible).
So it's very much a piece in the classic Beethovenian "victory through struggle" style. Same goes more or less for symphonies 6, 10 and 12.


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## Heck148

RobertJTh said:


> It's has dark moments, specially in the elegiac adagio, but the finale is pretty life-affirmative


The finale is bordering on life-affirming triumph, but it isn't quite there - the final orchestral outcry climaxes on a concert C [high C in trumpets/trombones] which is the flat 7th of tonic key, not the tonic....that adds a dark color [a "not quite'] to the whole concept...


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## Montarsolo

RobertJTh said:


> About two decades ago, when I had some preliminary symptoms of depression, I decided to listen to the 4th in a dark room late at night, with no-one else around.
> Boy, was that a bad idea. It triggered more nasty mental stuff than I want to disclose here.
> Today, I can listen to the 4th (and even the 14th) without any problems, but I still have issues with those creepy death clock endings. They go under the skin more than the most tragic outbursts of Tchaikovsky or Mahler.


What a story. Who knows how close you have come to Shostakovich. Perhaps he was in the same frame of mind when he composed the 4th. I'm not very familiar with the 4th. Listened to this weekend (Petrenko's recording). A special and strange work. But I dare not say that it is his darkest symphony.


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## maestro267

The thread's not about which symphonies "need love" or whatever. It's about which is the darkest. And it is most definitely not No. 5. It's No.14 with its lacerating strings.


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