Dmitri Shostakovich
Symphony No. 5 D minor, op. 47 Dmitri Shostakovich Symphony No. 5 D minor, op. 47

“To relive the history of our country between 1930 and 1970, it is enough to listen to Shostakovich’s symphonies,” wrote the Russian weekly newspaper Moskovskiye Novosti in 2006, on the occasion of the composer’s centenary. Indeed, Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony of 1937 is far more than a superb work of dramatic instrumental music – it is a subtle response to a time in the Soviet Union when artistic freedom could be life-threatening.

Shostakovich did not flee the Stalinist dictatorship; instead, he attempted a balancing act within a system in which disagreeable artists faced prison or deportation. Stalin may have been an enthusiast for culture, but he persecuted anything that did not match his ideal, denouncing it as “formalism”. After Stalin attended a performance of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in 1936, the composer was vilified in Pravda – most likely on the dictator’s orders – as an “enemy of the people”. To escape the machinery of destruction, the composer presented himself outwardly as repentant. While he consigned his experimental Fourth Symphony to the drawer, he offered what appeared to be a more conformist work in the Fifth, which he elaborated in the spring and summer of 1937 within four months, in Crimea and in Leningrad. The world premiere in November 1937 in Leningrad was a triumph. The press hailed the work as a “creative response by a Soviet artist to justified criticism” – an interpretation that Shostakovich, at least publicly, never contradicted.

For the dramaturgy of his symphony, Shostakovich chose the principle “Per aspera ad astra” (through hardship to the stars), symbolised in the tonal trajectory from D minor to D major. The orchestra’s palette of timbres is expanded, among other things, by two harps, piano, celesta, and an impressive arsenal of percussion instruments. It becomes the agent of an existential narrative in which the shadows of the reflective, introverted opening are driven back ever more forcefully until, in the final rejoicing, all barriers seem to burst.

The first movement begins with several abruptly broken-off leaps of a sixth – a powerful gesture, as yet without goal or counterpart. The restrained, pallid main theme and an energetic secondary theme are led, in free variations, through an intense interplay of menace and paralysis. The second movement is grotesque: a dark ländler dance shaped by coarse rhythms. As in Gustav Mahler’s symphonic ländlers, the supposedly intact world here has an elusive, abysmal underside. In the trio section, the sparse instrumentation makes the music seem strangely empty and fragmented.

In the third movement, a broadly expansive Largo, a delicate, fragile music of mourning unfolds in the remote key of F-sharp minor. In the central section, the sounds of xylophone and piano seem to intensify the tone of lament and accusation. A threatening wind chord and timpani rolls then open an unprecedented finale: an aggressive march, initially struck up by trumpets and trombones, drives the music onward. Yet in the midst of the storm, Shostakovich quotes a melody from his Pushkin song setting Rebirth. The text speaks of a painting that has been overpainted by a barbarian until the alien colour flakes away and the original reappears – a bold allusion to the indomitability of art, before the music ends in the steely D‑major jubilation of its apotheosis. Thus, beneath the striking surface of this symphony, a wealth of interpretative possibilities opens up: for especially in art, nothing is ever (only) as it seems.