Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5, Op. 57
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was born in Saint Petersburg on September 12, 1906. He died in Moscow on August 9, 1975. He was one of the Soviet Union’s greatest composers. 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. His Fifth Symphony was first performed in Leningrad (now, once again, St. Petersburg) on November 21, 1937. Its success was unequivocal and it remains of the landmark compositions of this century. 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. The work was last performed by the Winston-Salem Symphony in the 2016/2017 season under the baton of Maestro Robert Moody.
Of Shostakovich’s fifteen symphonies, the Fifth Symphony is his most popular and frequently performed work. 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). How many of us, for example, have at some time or other characterized some “popular” music as “coarse, primitive, [or] 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. 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. Those who dared to stand by Shostakovich, either personally or artistically, did so at grave risk to their own career, or even life.
The irony, however, was yet to come. Shostakovich sought to deal with Stalin’s rebuke through continued work on new compositions. His immense Fourth Symphony was written over the course of the subsequent months of 1936, but the work was withdrawn under suspicious circumstances shortly before its scheduled premiere in April. The Fifth Symphony, composed during the next year, enjoyed a much happier fate. 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. Shostakovich, typically, neither endorsed nor renounced the title.
But 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. Here we discover a composer who at first believed that his career lay in ruins. His strategy became the maintenance in public of humility and submission. 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. 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. One may recall here how, one hundred years earlier, the crafty Robert Schumann had slipped the forbidden “Marseilles” past the Viennese censors in his Faschingsschwank aus Wien.
Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony owes, as is the case with much of his other music, a debt of gratitude to the color and sardonic wit found in the music of Gustav Mahler. The powerful opening Moderato begins with a jagged figure treated imitatively in the strings. This paves the way for music of a haunting lyricism. After the first climax, a broad song emerges over a throbbing accompanying figure in dactyls. The gentle pulsation turns outright threatening with the introduction of the percussive sound of the piano and a quickening of speed. The music becomes increasingly frenetic, reaching shattering climaxes before returning to its majestic opening speed and demeanor. It ends shrouded in mystery as the celesta plays its haunting chromatic scales.
The second movement, Allegretto, is a saucy scherzo that dresses itself as a kind of sardonic waltz. Its cheeky character is highlighted by the color of the soprano clarinet and solo violin. The high spirit of this movement yields to the dramatic poignancy of the ensuing Largo. This movement begins soulfully in the divided strings. The highest violins soon introduce a new theme based upon a repeated-note figure. An ethereal duet for flutes over an undulating harp ostinato accompaniment follows. Later, the solo oboe introduces yet another haunting tune. A climax of terrific intensity is achieved based upon the high violin theme, but the tension finally breaks. The movement ends with the oboe theme, now played by celesta and harp (in bell-like harmonics), melting into a more optimistic major chord in the hushed strings.
The finale, Allegro non troppo, is famous for its rousing opening theme, played by trumpets, trombones, and tuba over the pounding kettledrums. This theme may have pleased Shostakovich’s socialist-realist critics, but they would have been less enthusiastic if they knew that its opening notes were derived from the first song, “Rebirth,” from the composer’s Four Pushkin Romances. Even more telling is a later theme in the movement bearing material that Shostakovich had set to the following words: “Thus delusions fall off/ My tormented soul/ And it reveals to me visions/ Of my former pure days.” A tumult of new themes follows, some of which are evocative of themes heard earlier in the symphony. A slowly oscillating ostinato in the violins takes over, leading to one of the real strokes of genius in the movement—the slow, soft reintroduction of the opening martial theme. The movement ends in a dignified blaze of glory as this theme arrives at its apotheosis in the resplendent brass. Perhaps this is what Shostakovich had in mind when he spoke of his Fifth Symphony as “the stabilization of a personality.” Few works can match these concluding pages for depicting the sheer triumph of the human spirit over adversity.
Program Note by David B. Levy, © 2004/2016