Symphonic rebuke of communism

No greater monument to the brutality of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square massacre exists than Xilin Wang’s 64-minute Symphony No. 3, the April 2018 performance of which by the China National Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Emmanuel Siffert has just been released on Wergo Records.

The composition premiered in 1990 and was recognized immediately as a work of staggering power, yet it somehow went unrecorded for 28 years. Dedicated, in Wang’s words, to the “1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre and … to the people with lofty ideals who pursue democracy and freedom all over the world,” it is perhaps a miracle that the Siffert-conducted performance—which took place in the Beijing Concert Hall after President Xi Jinping began steering China away from cafeteria capitalism and relative cultural openness—took place at all.

Wergo’s packaging identifies the symphony’s four movements only by their tempo markings (adagio, allegro, largo, and allegro respectively). But as anyone who has watched Wang Bing’s 2023 Xilin Wang documentary Man in Black knows, the movements have titles. (Caveat: The documentary is not for the faint of heart, mind, or eyes—Wang, then 86, appears nude throughout.)

As Wang explains, the mournful first movement, “Procession,” recapitulates in sound what he experienced in 1968 at the hands of Mao’s thought police. The explosive second movement, “Slaughterhouse,” does the same for Tiananmen Square. The quietly disorienting third movement, “Madman’s Song,” honors those who, like Wang, survived persecution, imprisonment, and torture only to have their minds, like that of Wang’s sister, give way under the strain.

Wang doesn’t mention the title of the symphony’s fourth movement in Man in Black, but he describes it as a “grand crowd scene” that “in the end …comes back to the prisoner.” “Because,” Wang says, “I see no future. As an author, I can’t give people false hope!”

The future that he doesn’t see, as the context of his remarks makes clear, is the one promised by communism.

The symphony maximizes the orchestra’s potential, giving each section—strings, woodwinds, percussion, horns—a crucial part to play. Ominous brooding alternates with cataclysmic cacophony with little, if anything, in between. Tension runs throughout. When the music isn’t detonating, it coils like a snake preparing to strike. Composed in 1989, recorded in 2018, and released in 2024, it feels like nothing so much as Nineteen Eighty-Four.