...Continued
Shostakovich Symphony No.5 in D minor, Op.47
The Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under Yevgeny Mravinsky premiered the symphony in Leningrad, now known as St. Petersburg on November 21, 1937.

Denunciation

The span surrounding the Fifth Symphony for Shostakovich fell during a period of political intrigue in his life. In 1936, a year before the composition of the symphony began Shostakovich fell from grace. At this time, his opera Lady Macbeth and the Mtensk District (1934) was in particular the start of this. An article in Pravda, the leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, panned the opera as being too formalist in an article entitled Muddle Instead of Music. The article panned the opera extensively, noting it was “course, primitive and vulgar,” and “a farrago of chaotic, nonsensical sounds.”

The music in the opera did not follow the ideas of socialist realism as it was considered too complex. An adequate portrayal of socialist realism in music meant a monumental approach and an exalted rhetoric based on optimism. Almost mirroring a sense of heroic classicism.

Socialist Realism and Political Conflict

Its purpose was to elevate the common worker, whether factory or agricultural, by presenting his life, work, and recreation as admirable. In other words, its goal was to educate the people in the goals and meaning of Communism. The ultimate aim was to create what Lenin called “an entirely new type of human being”: a New Soviet Man. Stalin described the practitioners of socialist realism as “engineers of souls.”

Shostakovich was losing political ground quickly. Lady Macbeth was thought to have been instigated by Stalin; a consequence of this rumor was watching his commissions beginning to dry up and his income fell by about three quarters. At the same time his Fourth Symphony entered rehearsals that December, but the political climate made the performance of the work impossible. It was not performed until 1961, but Shostakovich did not reject the work; it still retained its designation of his Fourth Symphony.

This time also coincided with a cataclysmic event sweeping the territory as 1936 marked the beginning of the Great Terror. During this surge, many of his friends and relatives were imprisoned or killed. Shostakovich’s only consolation throughout this siege was the birth of his children; Galina in 1936 and his son Maxim two years later.

New Ground

The composer’s response to his denunciation was the Fifth Symphony in D minor. This was the situation he faced in April of 1937 the month composition began. Shostakovich knew that if he were to anything but yield to Party pressure, it would need to be subtle. All eyes would be on him and whatever composition he finished would be vastly scrutinized. His form of musical satire that had guided his previous works had been denounced and would not be tolerated so blatantly again, a product of the new scheme of the communist party. Falling back on venting his tragic side cautiously whilst otherwise toeing the line of socialist realism would amount to self-hypocrisy. For Shostakovich his goal was clear. He had to somehow turn the simplicity demanded by the authorities into a virtue, mocking it while in the process of turning it into great art.

One work, written 37 years earlier had achieved this basic paradox. It was Gustav Mahler and his Fourth Symphony. Mahler began the work in a mode of childish simplicity, at which initial audiences scoffed. However, he developed his musical material in such a bewildering manner that even the most simple-minded listeners had to admit that they had been fooled. Shostakovich could not be enlighten less-aware listeners without risking at the very least a trip to the Gulag, but he could let the sharper-minded ones know what he was up to by reusing Mahler’s opening gestures from the Fourth.

Mahler’s Fourth starts with 24 F sharps tapped in consort with sleigh bells; the vaulting canon theme of which comprises the first four bars of Shostakovich’s Fifth descends to a motto rhythm of three repeated A’s on the violins. These A’s would engage much more importance later in the work.

Four months after he withdrew his Fourth Symphony, he began writing his Fifth. This work, he hoped would spark the birth of his political rehabilitation, it at least outwardly rising up to party expectations. It could pass for an example of the heroic classicism demanded by official policy. Shostakovich reserved a more conservative scope with the work as the slimed down music was vastly contrasting to the abundance of the Fourth. The Fifth came with less orchestral color and a smaller breadth of scope.

As noted during the video post of the symphony, the scaling down also brought a refinement of his pithiness and a deepening of ambiguity. More importantly, Shostakovich found a language through which he could speak with power and eloquence over the following three decades. Paul Bekker, in describing Mahler’s works, called this power Gesellschaftbildende Kraft, or literally “community-moulding power.” In applying it to the work of Shostakovich, “it is the power to weld an audience together, uplifting and moving them in a single emotion-controlled wave, sweeping aside all intellectual reservations.”

Reception

With the Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich gained an unprecedented triumph with the music appealing equally—and remarkably—to both the official critics and the public. The authorities had found everything they had looked for restored in the symphony whereas the public heard it as an expression of the suffering to which Stalin had subjected.