Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11 in G minor, Op. 103, subtitled The Year 1905, was composed in 1957 and premiered in Moscow on 30 October 1957 by the USSR State Symphony Orchestra under Natan Rakhlin (the Leningrad premiere followed on 3 November under Yevgeny Mravinsky). The work is explicitly programmatic: Shostakovich sets out to recall events surrounding the 1905 Revolution, notably the Bloody Sunday massacre, and he stated that the symphony’s musical language would be close to the revolutionary songs of that period.

The symphony is cast in four linked movements that run without interruption and bear descriptive titles: I. Palace Square (an extended Adagio prologue that introduces prison-song material), II. Ninth of January (depicting the Cossack assault), III. Eternal Memory (a meditative, requiem-like set of variations on the mourning song “You’ve Fallen Victim”), and IV. Tocsin (a percussive, march-driven finale). Much of the work’s thematic material derives from or echoes workers’ and revolutionary songs of the 1905 era, which Shostakovich weaves into large-scale tableaux to create a quasi-cinematic narrative sequence.

Since its premiere the Eleventh has provoked divergent readings—officially received as a socially engaged, populist work, but also interrogated by critics and scholars for possible irony or layered political meaning—an ambiguity that contributes to its continuing interpretive interest.