Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, Op. 47

Dmitri Shostakovich composed this orchestral piece between April and July 1937. In the 1930s, the purges of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union engendered terror which affected every person; the thought of losing a family member to the gulag or to a death sentence was very real. Official government decrees defined truth and beauty; the traditional composers were declared decadent and their music forbidden. In this environment Shostakovich, deemed the greatest Soviet composer, found himself heavily scrutinized. He was only 26 when he completed Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District  in 1934, which featured a racy plot set to avant-garde music and premiered to critical and popular acclaim. Three different productions were running in Moscow in the next two years, until Stalin himself attended a performance. The next morning Pravda condemned the work, saying it corrupted the Soviet spirit. The opera disappeared overnight and every publication and political organization in the country heaped personal attacks on Shostakovich. He lived in fear, sleeping in the stairwell outside his apartment, to spare his family the repercussions of his arrest. 
 
Subsequently, Shostakovich rejected his own Fourth Symphony while in rehearsal, unsure about its official reception. Instead he premiered Symphony No. 5, obsequiously subtitled "A Soviet Artist's Response to Just Criticism." As required, the work displayed lyricism, a heroic tone and inspiration from Russian literature. On November 21 1937, it was performed in Leningrad by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under Yevgeny Mravinsky. It was extremely well received by both the public and official critics; receiving an ovation that lasted well over half an hour. Official critics treated the symphony as a turnaround in its composer's career. The political basis for extolling the Fifth Symphony was to show how the Party could make artists bow to its demands. However, many hear a subtext of critical despair beneath the crowd-pleasing melodies. Shostakovich lost three close family members to the prison camps. At one stage, Shostakovich himself was summoned for interrogation. He escaped because his interrogator was arrested before his appointment arrived. For the rest of his life Shostakovich had to issue condemnations of other composers, just as they had of him. Often he wrote a piece that mattered to him, only to hide it for years.
 
Shostakovich returned to the traditional four-movement form and a normal-sized orchestra. He organized each movement along clear lines. In the last movement of the Symphony, strains of his song Vozrozhdenije (1936–37), which is based on a poem by Alexander Pushkin that deals with rebirth, an important theme, is played. Commentators have also noted that Shostakovich incorporated a motif from the "Habanera" from Bizet's Carmen into the first movement, a reference to his earlier infatuation with Elena Konstantinovskaya, who refused his offer of marriage. In the Fifth Symphony, the critics claimed that the best qualities of Shostakovich's music, such as meditation, humour and grandeur, blend in perfect balance. The Fifth is one of Shostakovich's most popular symphonies.
 
First Movement: Instead of writing in the approved ultra-nationalist style, Shostakovich wrote his Fifth Symphony on the model pioneered by Beethoven. Incidentally, Beethoven’s music was politically correct in the Soviet mindset. Themes from a folk song, recognizable by the Soviet audience, fulfils the official mandate of celebrating Slavic culture. But the last bars of the opening motif returns, suggesting that the struggle isn't over.
 
Second Movement: The second movement is largely drawn from the scores for ballet, theatre, films and circuses that he composed during his earlier years in St. Petersburg. There are peasants in their heavy boots, a guy on his squeaky clarinet, and a dancer with his violin. Overall, closer listening assures that the peace is not to be trusted.
 
Third Movement: It’s a requiem that mirror the liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church, where the string instruments represent a choir, and it made many weep openly at its premiere. Stalinist authorities interpreted crying in public as criticism of the regime's actions and is a punishable offense.
An oboe soloist, accompanied by a group of strings, plays the loneliest tune in the symphony. The double basses pounded away indicative of the full force of the lament. Then the rest of the orchestra joined the din, and ending in a trail of mournful silence. 
 
Fourth Movement: Its celebratory mood sounds unnatural. The music’s pace quickens, as if the sight of a triumphant conclusion is in view but it ends just like the conclusion of the third movement. All hope is crushed. The quiet music then implies its remembrance of those who had been purged. A death march begins. Then finally, Shostakovich reveals his triumphant ending. It is his signal that the happy harmonies of the ending are as false as a Potemkin facade.
 
Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 reflected his situation as an artist who would be judged first by politics as much as by talent. Although some audiences heard condemnation of the government through inflections of despair, Stalin found the politics of the music acceptable and Shostakovich won a reprieve – at least for another decade.
 
Reference:
Keeping Score. (2009). Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. PBS. https://www.pbs.org/keepingscore/shostakovich-symphony-5.html
 
Symphony No. 5 By Shostakovich. (2024, June 3). In Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._5_(Shostakovich)