Dmitri Shostakovich
Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47
Dmitri Shostakovich was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia in 1906 and died in Moscow in 1975. He composed his Fifth Symphony in three months in 1937, and it was first performed the same year by the Leningrad Philharmonic under the direction of Yevgeny Mravinsky. The score calls for 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, 2 harps, piano, celeste, and strings.
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We who live where artistic freedom is taken for granted may have a hard time imagining the sort of life Shostakovich led. In a country where the wrong artistic choice might prove fatal, he was a man who had seen countless colleagues and acquaintances shot or sent to the gulag, and who came within a hair’s breadth of the same. He lived his life knowing his very survival depended solely on the whims of the monstrously deranged man, Joseph Stalin. Shostakovich was so sure he would be arrested one day that he actually kept a small suitcase packed and ready by the door.

By January 28, 1936, Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District had played for some two years to critical and popular approval. Yet on that day an article appeared in Pravda entitled “Muddle Instead of Music.” The article thoroughly condemned the opera and its composer; it also contained the ominous note that all of this “could end very badly.” The language of the article didn’t sound like that of a music critic—Shostakovich and others believed it came from the pen of Stalin himself.

Shostakovich considered himself a doomed man, as did others around him.  His friends evan began to keep their distance. A newspaper announcement read: “Today there is a concert by Enemy of the People Shostakovich.” Fearful it would be the last straw, Shostakovich withdrew his just-completed Fourth Symphony, an intense and often harsh sounding work. The piece would languish in a desk drawer for twenty-five years.

Shostakovich decided to make his Fifth Symphony a vehicle for his artistic and political rehabilitation. In a masterful stroke of public-relations acumen, he called it “A Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism” and gave it an outlandish but politically correct program. Its premiere performance was greeted with popular, critical, and—most importantly—political acclaim.

But for Shostakovich himself, the Fifth Symphony was the musical metaphor of his artistic dilemma: how to integrate the free-spirit of the artist within the constraints of Stalinist repression. His struggle, and its ambivalent outcome, are expressed in all the movements, but most directly by the eloquent Largo. This heart-wrenching piece gives voice to the composer’s profound anxiety and the unfairness of his predicament. He dared not speak his mind, but his passion—and futility—can be heard in every bar.

The Finale was received by the political coterie as a work of triumph and joy, and a celebration of Socialist Realism. But we now know that the Finale is not heroic, joyful or triumphant. In the composer’s own words, “the rejoicing is forced, created under threat . . . it’s as if someone were beating you with a stick, saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,’ and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, ‘Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.’”

It’s hard to miss the striking spatial metaphor in these closing pages. As the winds and brass blare “Our business is rejoicing,” the strings hammer away at a unison A-natural—insistent, hard, and cold. It is as if the string section, arrayed as it is across the front of the orchestra, represents the steel bars of a huge prison cell, behind which the cowering masses “rejoice.”

The Fifth Symphony was a gamble, and Shostakovich was fortunate: those who held his life in their hands heard only the “triumph” in the music. That he accomplished this with a piece that is really about repression is something beyond ironic.