Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5 - the apology of a Soviet artist

On January 25, 1938, two months after the premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5, the Moscow newspaper Vetchernia Moskva published an article by the author entitled "My Response as an Artist". This article contained the famous passage where Shostakovich pointed out that his Fifth Symphony was "the concrete and creative response of a Soviet artist to fair criticism". In the Soviet Union, the matter went almost unnoticed. Instead, in the West, it was regarded as the official subtitle that the composer himself had added to his Symphony.
The story is a complex one.

Exactly two years before, Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, called Stalin, had qualified as "pornophonic music" an opera by Shostakovich, forcing his retirement from the stage. Around the same time the composer was working on his Symphony No. 4, but due to the stormy debates held at the Composers' Union (with a troubled Shostakovich present during them), the composer chose to withdraw it from the stage when the work was in its last rehearsals.

The great purge

The thirty-year-old author's position became critical. It was not for nothing. The years 1936-38 are remembered today as the cruelest years of the great purge or campaign of repression and political persecution carried out by Stalin in the late USSR. Let us say, by the way, that the Fourth Symphony had to wait for its premiere until 1962.

D. Shostakovich (1906 - 1975)

A political wink
The Fifth, on the other hand, did not have to wait so long. Master Shostakovich, after all, ended up specializing in accommodating political circumstances, using his inventiveness. He understood that writing his music was possible, as long as the authorities were satisfied at the same time with a sort of political wink. The "fair criticism" is a simple example of mutual benefit that, as the maestro must have expected, the "nomenklatura" would minimize and the West would distinguish.

Symphony No. 5, in D minor, op 47
Composed between April and July 1937, the work premiered in Leningrad on November 21 of that year with a thunderous success, literally. The public ovation lasted forty minutes, as recalled by the famous Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich in exile. Commenting on the episode, and as a dissident, he lashed out at the Russian authorities of the time, asserting that the government would have executed Shostakovich for writing such a work if the audience ovation had not lasted forty minutes on the day of its premiere.

A conservative work?
According to those in the know, compared to his earlier symphonies, the musical language of the Fifth is perceived as somewhat more conservative. Even so, and given the circumstances, the work is a bold composition. Primarily, because of its open renunciation of the slightest hint of patriotism, and prodigal, instead, in emotions and tragic feelings, expressions of the soul not seen with good eyes in revolutionary conjunctures.

Movements
Lasting approximately 50 minutes, it is structured in the usual four movements. The second of them, a Largo that is said to have provoked tears in the audience on the day of the premiere; the last one, an allegro of triumphant atmosphere with the apotheotic ending that has made it famous (47:45). It is still debated whether, in this last movement, Shostakovich made concessions to the authorities or just decided to be ironic.

00:22  Moderato
08:12  Allegretto (scherzo)
23:44  Largo
40:09  Allegro non troppo

Leonard Bernstein conducts the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Tokyo, in 1979.