Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47

Introduction

The Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47, by Dmitri Shostakovich is a work for orchestra composed between April and July 1937. Its first performance was on November 21, 1937, in Leningrad by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under Yevgeny Mravinsky. The premiere was a huge success, and received an ovation that lasted well over half an hour.

Form

The symphony is approximately 45 minutes in length and has four movements:

1. Moderato—Allegro non troppo

   The symphony opens with a strenuous string figure in canon, initially leaping and falling in minor sixths then narrowing to minor thirds. The sharply dotted rhythm of this figure remains to accompany a broadly lyric melody played by the first violins. Variants of this theme return throughout the 3rd and 4th movements. The second theme is built out of octaves and sevenths. Whereas the first theme is based on a sharp dotted rhythm, the second relies on a static long-short-short pattern. With that is found all the musical material for this movement—one that is tremendously varied, its climax harsh. The coda, with the gentle friction of minor in strings against chromatic scales in celesta, ends on a note of haunting ambiguity.

2. Allegretto

   The opening motif in this waltz-like scherzo is a variation of the first theme in the first movement; other variations can be detected throughout the movement. The music remains witty, satirical, raucous while also nervous.

3. Largo

   After the assertive trumpets of the first movement and the raucous horns of the second, this movement uses no brass at all. The strings are divided throughout the entire movement (3 groups of violins, violas in 2, cellos in 2; basses in 2). Shostakovich fills this movement with beautiful, long melodies—one of them again based on the first theme of the first movement—punctuating them with intermezzi of solo woodwinds. Harp and celesta play prominent roles here as well. The music is emotive and even elegiac in tone; it returns to the sober mood which the scherzo has interrupted.

4. Allegro non troppo

   This movement, in an abbreviated sonata form (with no 2nd theme at the recapitulation), picks up the march music from the climax of the opening movement, at least in manner if not in specific material. A tense conclusion leads to the quieter section of the piece. This section ends and the short snare drum and timpani solo introduces a brief militaristic introduction to the finale of the movement—an extended and obsessive reiteration of the D major tonality.

Instrumentation

The work is scored for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets and E-flat clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three Bb trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drum, triangle, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, glockenspiel, xylophone, two harps (one part), piano, celesta and strings.

Overview

Composition

After his fall from favour in 1936 over the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and the ballet The Limpid Stream, Shostakovich was under pressure to simplify his music and adapt it to classical models, heroic classicism being a prime characteristic of socialist realism. An adequate portrayal of socialist realism in music meant a monumental approach and an exalted rhetoric based on optimism. Shostakovich's music was considered too complex, technically, to fall under the strictures of socialist realism. Lady Macbeth had been derided in Pravda as "a farrago of chaotic, nonsensical sounds." At the meeting of the Composers' Union weeks after the Pravda article, Lev Knipper, Boris Asafyev and Ivan Dzerzhinsky suggested that the composer should be helped to "straighten himself out." Essentially a non-person in an era of unprecedented state terrorism, Shostakovich appeared to have no choice but to comply.

Shostakovich sought the aid of Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, one of the highest-ranking officers in the Red Army and since 1925 a patron of the composer. However, the marshal himself became a victim, convicted on a trumped-up charge of treason and shot. Many of Shostakovich's friends and relatives were arrested and disappeared, and for a year the composer feared the same would happen to him. He completed his Fourth Symphony in April but withdrew the work the following year while it was in rehearsal.

This was the situation Shostakovich faced in April 1937. If he were to do anything but yield to Party pressure, it would have to be subtle, as all eyes would be on him and whatever composition he wrote. His form of musical satire had been denounced and would not be tolerated so blatantly again. Falling back on venting his tragic side cautiously whilst otherwise toeing the line of socialist realism would amount to self-betrayal.^[8] He had to somehow turn the simplicity demanded by the authorities into a virtue, mocking it whilst in the process of turning it into great art.

One work, written 37 years earlier, had achieved this basic paradox—Mahler's Fourth Symphony. Mahler began his Fourth in a mode of apparently childish simplicity, at which initial audiences scoffed. However, Mahler's development subsequently indicated to listeners that the first impression was deceptive. Shostakovich referred to this opening passage from Mahler in his own symphony. Mahler's Fourth starts with 24 F-sharps tapped in consort with sleighbells; the vaulting canon theme which constitutes the first four bars of Shostakovich's Fifth descends to a motto rhythm of three repeated As on the violins. These As would become much more important later in the symphony.

Four months after he withdrew his Fourth Symphony, he began writing his Fifth. This work, he hoped, would mark his political rehabilitation, at least outwardly coming up to party expectations. It could pass for an example of the heroic classicism demanded by official policy. He showed the first movement to Tikhon Khrennikov, Aram Khachaturian, and Vissarian Shebalin in May, and the first two movements were performed in June for Nikolai Zhilyaev and Grigoriy Frid. In October, he and Nikita Bogoslovsky performed a four-handed piano arrangement, after which Yevgeniy Mravinsky and Shostakovich began preparing for the orchestral premiere. Shostakovich slimmed down his musical style considerably from the superabundance of the Fourth, with less orchestral color and a smaller breadth of scope. With this scaling down also came 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, literally "society-moulding power." It is the power to weld an audience together, uplifting and moving them in a single emotion-controlled wave, sweeping aside all intellectual reservations.

The Symphony quotes Shostakovich's song Vozrozhdenije (Op. 46 No. 1, composed in 1936–37), most notably in the last movement, which uses a poem by Alexander Pushkin that deals with the matter of rebirth. This song is by some considered to be a vital clue to the interpretation and understanding of the whole symphony. In addition, commentators have noted that Shostakovich incorporated a motif from the "Habanera" from Bizet's Carmen into the first movement, a reference to Shostakovich's earlier infatuation with a woman who refused his offer of marriage, and subsequently moved to Spain and married a man named Roman Carmen.

Reception

With the Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich gained an unprecedented triumph, with the music appealing equally—and remarkably—to both the public and official critics, though the overwhelming public response to the work initially aroused suspicions among certain officials. The then-head of the Leningrad Philharmonic, Mikhail Chulaki, recalls that certain authorities bristled at Mravinsky's gesture of lifting the score above his head to the cheering audience, and a subsequent performance was attended by two plainly hostile officials, V.N. Surin and Boris M. Yarustovsky, who tried to claim in the face of the vociferous ovation given the symphony that the audience was made up of "hand-picked" Shostakovich supporters. Yet the authorities in due course claimed that they found everything they had demanded of Shostakovich restored in the symphony. Meanwhile, the public heard it as an expression of the suffering to which it had been subjected by Stalin. The same work was essentially received two different ways.

Official

An article reportedly written by the composer appeared in the Moscow newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva a few days before the premiere of the Fifth Symphony. There, he reportedly states that the work " is a Soviet artist’s creative response to justified criticism." Whether Shostakovich or someone more closely connected with the Party actually wrote the article is open to question, but the phrase "justified criticism"—a reference to the denunciation of the composer in 1936—is especially telling. Official critics treated the work as a turnaround in its composer's career, a personal perestroyka or "restructuring" by the composer, with the Party engineering Shostakovich's rehabilitation as carefully as it had his fall a couple of years earlier. Like the Pravda attack at that time on the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, the political basis for extolling the Fifth Symphony was to show how the Party could make artists bow to its demands. It had to show that it could reward as easily and fully as it could punish.

The official tone toward the Fifth Symphony was further set by a review by Alexei Tolstoy, who likened the symphony to the literary model of the Soviet Bildungsroman describing "the formation of a personality"—in other words, of a Soviet personality. In the first movement, the composer-hero suffers a psychological crisis giving rise to a burst of energy. The second movement provides respite. In the third movement, the personality begins to form: "Here the personality submerges itself in the great epoch that surrounds it, and begins to resonate with the epoch." With the finale, Tolstoy wrote, came victory, "an enormous optimistic lift." As for the ecstatic reaction of the audience to the work, Tolstoy claimed it showed Shostakovich's perestroyka to be sincere. "Our audience is organically incapable of accepting decadent, gloomy, pessimistic art. Our audience responds enthusiastically to all that is bright, clear, joyous, optimistic, life-affirming."

Not everyone agreed with Tolstoy, even after another article reportedly by the composer echoed Tolstoy's views. Asafiev, for one, wrote, "This unsettled, sensitive, evocative music which inspires such gigantic conflict comes across as a true account of the problems facing modern man—not one individual or several, but mankind." The composer himself seemed to second this view long after the fact, in a conversation with author Chinghiz Aitmatov in the late 1960s. "There are far more openings for new Shakespeares in today's world," he said, "for never before in its development has mankind achieved such unanimity of spirit: so when another such artist appears, he will be able to express the whole world in himself, like a musician."

Public

To understand fully the public success of the Fifth Symphony and how it resonated with audiences, musicologist Genrikh Orlov argues that the music has to be seen as an artistic portrayal of the time in which it originated. Shostakovich grew in the years preceding the symphony as both a master and a thinking artist-citizen. He did so together with his country and people, sharing their hopes, aspirations and fate, intensely scrutinizing everything going on around him.

At the height of the Stalinist Terror, over half a million people were shot and significant numbers dispatched to the Gulag. Modern estimates place the Gulag population at roughly two and a half million.

During the first performance of the symphony, people were reported to have wept during the Largo movement. The music, steeped in an atmosphere of mourning, contained echoes of the panikhida, the Russian Orthodox requiem. It also recalled a genre of Russian symphonic works written in memory of the dead, including pieces by Glazunov, Steinberg, Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky. Typical of these works is the use of the tremolo in the strings as a reference to the hallowed ambience of the requiem.

For an audience that had lost friends and family on a massive scale, these references were apt to evoke intense emotions. This was why the Fifth Symphony was received and cherished by the Soviet public unlike any other work as an expression of the immeasurable grief they endured during Stalin's regime.

Symphony as artistic salvation

After the symphony had been performed in Moscow, Heinrich Neuhaus called the work "deep, meaningful, gripping music, classical in the integrity of its conception, perfect in form and the mastery of orchestral writing—music striking for its novelty and originality, but at the same time somehow hauntingly familiar, so truly and sincerely does it recount human feelings."

By simultaneously pleasing the authorities with the Fifth Symphony while giving the audience an outlet for their sorrow, Shostakovich showed how effectively he had mastered the essence of the Romantic symphony. Bruckner and Mahler had developed the symphony into a genre working specific musical images and allusions into a network through which each listener could interpret and evaluate on personal grounds. This transcendence of concrete content allowed for varied—and opposing—readings of the musico-emotional content of a symphony while also rendering a definitive account of its meaning impossible. Shostakovich may owe his artistic survival to his mastery of this genre and its now-inherent blurring of boundaries. While satisfying the Soviet demand for monumentality and classicism, it left room for personal expression.

Western critics who heard the Fifth tended to belittle it as a concession to political pressure. It could be argued in retrospect that Shostakovich made no significant concession to authority in writing the Fifth, with the arguable exception of the bombast in the finale. Had the composer truly wanted to make concessions, he could have written a work closer in specifics to socialist realism, such as a programme symphony or a "song symphony." Instead, he challenged prevailing taste by writing an abstract work that simply avoided some of the excesses of his Fourth Symphony. In doing so, he made the new piece a better one by his own standards.

Shostakovich returned to the traditional four-movement form and a normal-sized orchestra. More tellingly, he organized each movement along clear lines, having concluded that a symphony cannot be a viable work without firm architecture. The harmonic idiom in the Fifth is less astringent, more tonal than previously, and the thematic material is more accessible. Nevertheless, every bar bears its composer's personal imprint. It has been said that, in the Fifth Symphony, the best qualities of Shostakovich's music, such as meditation, humor and grandeur, blend in perfect balance and self-fulfillment.

Post-Testimony response

The finale of the Fifth Symphony, which has been called grandiose, has remained the topic of continual discussion revolving around the question, "Is it a Stalinist victory hymn or is it a parody of one?" If it were meant as a parody, the bombast of the coda would have to be deliberately pitched so it would sound ridiculous; this would underline the hypocrisy of the apparent tribute. However, this final movement, often being criticized for sounding shrill, is declared in Testimony to be a parody of shrillness, representing "forced rejoicing". In the words attributed to the composer in Testimony (a work, although attributed to Shostakovich himself, is shown to have serious flaws in its credibility) :

The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in Boris Godunov. It's as if someone were beating you with a stick and 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."

This is symbolized by the repeated "A"'s at the end of the final movement in the string and upper woodwind sections. It includes a quotation from the composer's song "Rebirth", accompanying the words "A barbarian painter" who "blackens the genius's painting". In the song, the barbarian's paint falls away and the original painting is reborn. It has been suggested that the barbarian and the genius are Stalin and Shostakovich respectively. The work is largely sombre despite the composer's official claim that he wished to write a positive work.

Though impossible to confirm, it seems evident in many passages that Shostakovich did not intend to compose a mindless triumphant symphony in an attempt to reenter the Russian music scene with the approval of the Stalinist regime. The march in the first movement is more of a parody of marching than one that draws the feet to tap the beat. The third movement is invariably sad, nostalgic and haunting rather than depicting the struggle of the working class or other progressive ideas. The fourth movement also introduces one of the only themes not based on the first two themes of the opening movement, drawn from a previous composition about an artist being criticised and the final moments of the symphony seem disguised.

While most performances and recordings of the symphony have ended with a gradual acceleration of the coda, especially Leonard Bernstein's October 1959 Columbia Records recording with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra (following a performance in Moscow in the presence of the composer), more recent renditions have reflected a different interpretation (though not clearly provable) of Shostakovich's intention. Vasily Petrenko's 2008 recording, with his Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra on Naxos, exemplifies this "forced rejoicing" interpretation extremely clearly. Shostakovich's friend and colleague Mstislav Rostropovich conducted the closing minutes in a much slower, subdued manner, never accelerating; he did this in a performance in Russia with the National Symphony Orchestra and in their commercial Teldec recording. He told CBS that Shostakovich had written a "hidden message" in the symphony, which is allegedly supported by the composer's words in Testimony.

Nowadays, it is one of his most popular symphonies.