Symphonie-Groteske: Zu Dmitri Schostakowitschs 1. Symphonie op. 10

When in December 1924 Shostakovich referred to his first symphony in a letter, he used the neologism “symphony grotesque.” It relates to the then prominent context within the discourse of contemporary Russian aesthetics concerning “the grotesque”: the theater-grotesque or the theater of the grotesque, an anti-illusionistic and anti-naturalistic theater developed by Vsevolod Meyerhold in his 1912 essay “Balagan,” which correlates to both the tradition of the commedia dell’arte and the Russian fairground-booth theater (Balagan), in which the category of the grotesque plays a central role. With this in mind, Shostakovitch’s First Symphony, especially its first movement, can be understood as an application of Meyerhold’s theater of the grotesque-theory to the symphonic area.