Major Shostakovich tempo discrepancy - which is right and as the composer intended?

by EDTa380

In my violin 1 part for Shostakovich Symphony 10, movement 2, the tempo is marked as 1 Quarter Note = 176 bpm.

However in this score published in 1955, also seen in this video, the tempo is marked as 1 Half Note = 116 bpm, equal to 1 Quarter Note = 232 bpm (approximately the video set to 1.5x speed...). Obviously, a quarter note being 232 bpm is much faster than 176 bpm...

Any ideas as to what happened here? Which is correct? (Not surprisingly, I can't find any original manuscripts online)

Bodark43

While I am not a Shostakovich expert, what you have is a good example of a textual history problem: you have two versions of a text ( in this case, a composition) and you want to know which one is closest to the original, the urtext. You would also like to know if the composer himself changed his mind on the tempo later in life ( he did live longer than 1955) and so if the newer tempo in your text with the first violin part better reflected his final opinion. Hitting a Shostakovich bibliography ( this one lists a Shostakovich urtext) and a good biography would be a start.

However, for a quick check, there is a useful list of recordings of the 10th here along with notes below on the various times each recording has for each movement. Assuming it's to be trusted, I notice that Shostakovich seemed to slow the tempo when he was conducting in 1954, compared to the tempo of the New York Philharmonic under Mitropoulos, about the same time. But, as you can tell, there seems to be quite a variety of opinions about how fast to play it. Of course, some of these times might not be only tempi. A Roman orchestra conducted by Rodzinski seems to have shaved almost 10 minutes from the first movement, compared to Shostakovich himself, and I wonder if he was getting rid of a few repeats, doing serious changes to the written score.