Symphonies Nos. 8 and 10 by Dmitri Shostakovich: A Study of Sketches and Drafts.

Abstract

When asked about his compositional process at the outset and the end of his creative life, Shostakovich claimed that he conceived his pieces completely before writing them. Contemporaries who were in a position to know mostly affirmed this claim, suggesting or allowing the implication that Shostakovich never sketched his music. Presumably for this reason, in the nearly 35 years since the composer’s death, scholars of his music have never taken up this most intuitive of compositional habits. Yet the curator of Shostakovich’s private archive in Moscow affirms the existence of a vast body of compositional manuscripts pertinent to the composer’s creative process. To the extent that they are gradually becoming known, these include sketches, drafts, discarded scores, abandoned autographs, thematic lists, proof-sheets, and still unidentified documents. Most numerous among these manuscripts, Shostakovich’s sketches and drafts make possible the serious study of his creativity. This dissertation is a study and interpretation of Shostakovich’s sketch materials for Symphonies Nos. 8 and 10, which are preserved in private and state archives in Moscow. Sketches for the Tenth Symphony represent a mid-to-late stage of compositional process, while drafts for the Eighth reflect a final stage, prefiguring the entire symphony in piano score and serving perhaps as a private record of the work. These documents support Shostakovich’s claim to thorough mental preparation but also occasionally point to changes between any such mental formulation and the symphonies’ finished forms. In the Eighth Symphony drafts, two different variants of the second movement allow a comparison of the composer’s original ideas and his second thoughts, and illuminate how the actual writing of the movement led to its revision. Shostakovich’s manuscripts point to a basic hypothesis of creating, namely, that detailed mental preparation was followed by the act of writing, which could suggest further ideas, as well as allow the recording of diverse thoughts occurring to a constantly creative mind. Intersecting with other areas of Shostakovich scholarship, this study also shows how sketch materials illuminate biographical and historical circumstances surrounding the composition of Symphonies Nos. 8 and 10, as well as questions of meaning in this music.