Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5, Op. 47 — Spartanburg Philharmonic

by Chris Vaneman

One especially cold night in January 1936, Joseph Stalin went to the opera. The Soviet dictator was curious about Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, the first opera by the enormously gifted young composer Dmitri Shostakovich. By that point Lady Macbeth had been running continuously for nearly two years, and its composer was already well known abroad as well as in the USSR. So when, two acts into the opera, patrons looked and saw that the Chairman’s box was already empty, they knew that, for Shostakovich, trouble was afoot.

Sure enough, within two weeks an editorial had appeared in Pravda, the state-run newspaper, condemning Lady Macbeth and its composer. Titled “Chaos Instead of Music,” the article derided what it called “an incoherent chaotic stream of sounds” and “petty bourgeois sensationalism,” asserting, “it is difficult to follow such ‘music;’ it is impossible to remember it… Such music can only appeal to aesthetes and formalists who have lost all healthy tastes.” It concluded that “Soviet art can have no other aim than the interest of the people and the State.” This was more than just a bad review: it was, in effect, an artistic death sentence, pronounced by Stalin himself, and everyone knew it. Shostakovich, who had been as busy and popular as any Soviet composer, went into a sort of internal exile; he lost all his commissions and remained unperformed and unemployed for the better part of two years.

This was harsh treatment by any measure (especially considering that Lady Macbeth is one of the finest operas of the 20th Century and is relatively accessible to audiences as well), and it was just beginning. Over the next dozen years Shostakovich and Prokofiev, among many others, would feel Stalin’s wrath whenever they wrote a note that displeased his decidedly middlebrow tastes. Until that point Shostakovich, who came of a liberal St. Petersburg family, had been sympathetic to socialist ideals, and was the first respected composer to be a product of the Communist-run State music schools. His First Symphony, which he wrote at 19 as a graduation exercise, entered the repertoire of orchestras in Europe and America as well as Russia within just a few years.

So, Shostakovich was shocked and deeply traumatized by his treatment at the hands of the state, and when he was permitted to re-enter the Soviet music world with his Symphony No. 5 – to which he gave the groveling subtitle “A Soviet Artist’s Constructive Reply to Just Criticism” – the composer and his music were changed irreparably. While he was constrained by Stalin’s horror of formal, rhythmic, and harmonic complexity, Shostakovich’s slow movements grew more anguished and pleading, and his finales and scherzos developed a bitter, ironic, or even manic tone: if the dictator would compel him to be loud, fast, and motoric, Shostakovich would respond by pushing their loudness, speed, and register to unheard-of extremes. Shostakovich followed the letter of Stalin’s law, but flouted its spirit by exaggerating its diktats almost to obscene degrees.

Shostakovich’s Fifth follows the same broad outline as Beethoven’s: a minor key transformed over four movements into a major one, with a touching slow movement shockingly interrupted by a brassy finale. The frantically insistent final resolution (octave A’s are repeated no less than 253 times before they finally resolve to the Symphony’s home note, a unison D) is one of the things that inspired Maxim Shostakovich, the composer’s son, to call the Fifth his father’s “Heroic Symphony.” But, as the insightful New Yorker music critic Alex Ross asks: at this moment, exactly who, or what, is triumphing?