Symphony No. 10 in E minor, Op. 93

I. Moderato: a long, brooding opening built from a slow, searching melody in the low strings that grows and recedes in waves over about 20 minutes, never settling into a clear tune.

II. Allegro: a short, violent scherzo, barely four minutes long, hammered out at top speed and volume; many hear it as a musical portrait of a brutal dictator.

III. Allegretto: a wistful, waltz-like movement built on two musical mottos, a four-note figure (D, E-flat, C, B, spelling "DSCH", the composer's initials in German musical notation) and a horn call repeated obsessively, as if the composer is signing his own name into the music.

IV. Andante, Allegro: a slow, uncertain introduction gives way to a fast, folk-flavored finale full of nervous energy; the DSCH motif returns and is hammered out triumphantly by the full orchestra at the close, tipping the symphony from anxiety toward defiance.

Shostakovich wrote his Tenth Symphony in 1953, the year Stalin died, after an eight-year silence from the symphonic form following official condemnation of his music in 1948. The work was premiered in Leningrad in December 1953 by the Leningrad Philharmonic under Yevgeny Mravinsky and immediately provoked debate among Soviet critics and composers over whether its bleakness and irony were appropriate to Soviet art. Shostakovich himself said little publicly about its meaning, but the symphony's central scherzo has long been read as a portrait of Stalin, and the composer's own musical signature, the four-note DSCH motif, dominates the later movements. The symphony quickly entered the international repertoire and stands today as one of his most frequently performed and recorded works.