Protest, Ambiguity, and Survival: Listening to Shostakovich’s Tenth

By Milner Fuller
Manager of Classical Programming

When Symphony No. 10 premiered in December 1953, Joseph Stalin had been dead for nine months. For Dmitri Shostakovich, this did not signal freedom so much as suspension. The dictator was gone, but the system he created remained intact. Cultural policy, censorship, and the memory of punishment still shaped what could be said and how safely it could be said. The Tenth Symphony emerges from that moment of uncertainty, when fear had loosened slightly but had not disappeared.

The work is often understood as one of Shostakovich’s most powerful acts of resistance. If it is protest music, however, it is protest shaped not by liberation, but by caution. The danger had changed form rather than vanished. Nothing is stated outright. Everything is implied, sharpened, and protected by ambiguity.

The symphony’s second movement sits at the center of that interpretation. It is short, violent, and relentless, driven forward with a brutality that feels almost mechanical. Many listeners and later commentators have heard it as a portrait of Stalin himself. Whether or not Shostakovich intended a literal depiction, the music presents power as something crushing and joyless, defined entirely by force. Just as important is what Shostakovich never said. He did not confirm the interpretation, and he did not deny it. In a Soviet Union still governed by Stalinist structures, plausible deniability was not artistic coyness. It was survival.

That tension between meaning and concealment places Shostakovich within a long tradition of politically charged music that speaks indirectly. A powerful earlier example appears in Nabucco, specifically the famous “Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves.” Giuseppe Verdi set a biblical lament for an exiled people longing for their homeland. To Italian audiences living under Austrian rule, the meaning required no explanation. The chorus became a surrogate national anthem, a collective expression of political yearning that could plausibly be defended as religious drama. Verdi never named the oppressor. The audience supplied the context themselves. Shostakovich’s protest also operates at the level of musical identity, through the recurring DSCH motif derived from his initials, a quiet assertion of self in a system designed to erase individuality.

By the mid-20th century in the United States, protest music increasingly moved toward directness. During the Vietnam era, artists such as Joan Baez embraced moral clarity as a virtue. Songs like Saigon Bride confronted the human cost of war without metaphor or disguise. That directness can be profoundly moving, but it carries a risk. When protest leaves no interpretive space, it can begin to sound instructional. The listener is told what to feel rather than invited to discover it.

That risk becomes clearer in more recent cultural examples. Avatar positions itself as an anti-imperialist parable, but its direct use of the phrase “shock and awe,” borrowed verbatim from the rhetoric of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, collapses metaphor into quotation. For some viewers, that bluntness clarifies the message. For others, it limits engagement by narrowing meaning to a single, unmistakable reference.

Rock music in the early 21st century often avoids that trap by holding its targets at arm’s length. The Foo Fighters’ Pretender emerged during the later years of the Bush administration, amid deep public distrust of institutions and authority. The song is openly confrontational, but it refuses to name a specific enemy. Its stunning music video reinforces that choice, presenting anonymous ranks and abstract structures of power rather than identifiable agencies or figures. That restraint has allowed the song to age into broader relevance. If the video were remade today with uniforms explicitly labeled “ICE,” the meaning would become instantly clear, but also instantly narrower. The protest would be louder, and perhaps more immediately satisfying, but far less durable.

Ambiguity, in this sense, is not evasive. It is what allows the audience to participate. This Is America (Donald Glover) demonstrates this from another angle. The shock of its music video is central to its impact, but the meaning remains unsettled. Viewers must reconcile violence, spectacle, and entertainment for themselves. That ambiguity is reinforced by the fact that Childish Gambino is an alter ego of Donald Glover. By speaking through a constructed persona rather than his public self, Glover adds another layer of distance between artist and message. The protest is unmistakable, yet filtered and intentionally unstable. Meaning is not delivered whole. It is assembled by the listener.

Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony reminds us that protest does not need to announce itself to be effective. In some contexts, clarity is dangerous. In others, it risks becoming didactic or disposable. Between those extremes lies a space where art can resist without prescribing, accuse without naming, and endure beyond the moment that provoked it. Shostakovich was writing not under Stalin himself, but under the long shadow of a regime that had not yet learned how to let go.

That is the space this symphony occupies, and it is one of the reasons it remains so gripping to hear live. The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra performs Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 on January 9 and 10, conducted by Kevin John Edusei. The program also features Sofya Gulyak, an associate professor of piano at Indiana University, performing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Hearing protest music in the concert hall does not ask us to agree on a single interpretation. It asks us to listen carefully, to recognize what is being risked, and to decide for ourselves what the music is saying.