![]() Purely instrumental music, after all, has one advantage over works for the stage censors, who for the most part are musical illiterates, have a harder time applying their political standards. In private, by contrast, Shostakovich set himself on a course of defiant resistance to Stalinist repression by encoding private warnings and references into his scores. His strategy became the maintenance in public of humility and submission. Here we discover a composer who at first believed that his career lay in ruins. Shostakovich, typically, neither endorsed nor renounced the title.īut did the Fifth Symphony truly represent the rehabilitative effort of a man who had fallen from the good graces of a repressive regime? Evidence that has recently surfaced in two books-Solomon Volkov’s Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich (London, 1979) and Elizabeth Wilson’s Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (Princeton, 1994)-paints a rather different portrait. One journalist dubbed the new symphony as “a Soviet artist’s practical, creative reply to just criticism,” a subtitle that was used for the first time at the Moscow premiere in 1938. ![]() The Fifth Symphony, composed during the next year, enjoyed a much happier fate. His immense Fourth Symphony was written over the course of the subsequent months of 1936, but the work was withdrawn under suspicious circumstances shortly before its scheduled premiere in April. Shostakovich sought to deal with Stalin’s rebuke through continued work on new compositions. Those who dared to stand by Shostakovich, either personally or artistically, did so at grave risk to their own career, or even life. Thus began one of the saddest episodes in twentieth-century music history-the official exile of one of the Soviet Union’s most gifted talents. How many of us, for example, have at some time or other characterized some “popular” music as “coarse, primitive, vulgar”? These, however, are the precise words that appeared in a January 1936 article in Pravda entitled “Muddle Instead of Music,” an article (possibly authored by Joseph Stalin himself) that denounced Shostakovich’s opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and ballet, The Limpid Stream. A pejorative overtone creeps in, however, when one tries to define the word “popular” by seeking its opposite, such as when “popular” music (e.g., Rock, Hip-hop, or Traditional) is contrasted with “art” music (Symphonies, chamber music, Opera). Of Shostakovich’s fifteen symphonies, the Fifth Symphony is his most popular and frequently performed work. The work was last performed by the Winston-Salem Symphony in the 2016/2017 season under the baton of Maestro Robert Moody. It is scored for 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (triangle, snare drum, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, bells, xylophone), 2 harps, piano, celesta, and strings. Its success was unequivocal and it remains of the landmark compositions of this century. His Fifth Symphony was first performed in Leningrad (now, once again, St. Although he composed in a wide variety of genres, including film scores, but is best known for his fifteen symphonies, which are among the finest examples of its kind from the mid-twentieth century. He was one of the Soviet Union’s greatest composers. ![]() 57ĭmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was born in Saint Petersburg on September 12, 1906.
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