Symphony No. 11 (Shostakovich)

103 (subtitled The Year 1905), by Dmitri Shostakovich was written in 1957 and premiered by the USSR Symphony Orchestra under Natan Rakhlin on 30 October 1957.

The first performance given outside the Soviet Union took place in London's Royal Festival Hall on 22 January 1958 when Sir Malcolm Sargent conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

[5][unreliable source] In his study of Shostakovich's symphonies, Hugh Ottaway praised the Eleventh as one of the great achievements in program music.

Because of this romantic aura, The Eleventh Symphony is among a group of diverse works that embody a spirit of struggle for a just cause, such as Sergei Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin and Boris Pasternak's narrative poems "1905" and "Lieutenant Schmidt.

According to Solomon Volkov, Shostakovich allegedly told him that the symphony was "about the people, who have stopped believing because the cup of evil has run over.

"[10][full citation needed] In the wake of the publishing of Testimony, the Eleventh has attracted speculation over its possible references to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

'"[12] According to Zoya Tomashevskaya, Shostakovich also allegedly remarked to Igor Belsky not to forget that he "wrote the symphony in the aftermath of (the) Hungarian Uprising".

When Sofia Khentova asked Shostakovich in 1974 whether the Eleventh was a veiled reference to the Hungarian Revolution, he replied: "No, it is 1905, it is Russian history".