One of the most frequently performed symphonies from the 20th century, Shostakovich's Fifth has certainly achieved the status of a modern classic. Audiences have long admired its great dramatic power and melodic richness. But the history of the work and its deeply ambiguous Russian context reveal additional layers of meaning that, 71 years after the premiere, we are just about beginning to understand.
Shostakovich wrote the Fifth Symphony in what was certainly the most difficult year of his life. On January 28, 1936, an unsigned editorial in the Pravda, the daily paper of the Communist Party, brutally attacked his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, denouncing it as %u201Cmuddle instead of music.” This condemnation resulted in a sharp decrease of performances of Shostakovich's music for about a year. What was worse, Shostakovich, whose first child was born in May 1936, had to live in constant fear of further reprisals.
However, the Party soon realized that the country's music life couldn't afford to lose its greatest young talent, so Shostakovich was granted a comeback. Less than a year after being forced to withdraw his Fourth Symphony, Shostakovich heard his Fifth premiered with resounding success in Leningrad on November 21, 1937. By that time, however, the %u201CGreat Terror” had begun: political show trials resulting in numerous death sentences and mass deportations to the infamous labor camps. The Great Terror claimed the lives of some of the country's greatest artists such as the poet Osip Mandelshtam, the novelist Isaac Babel, and the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold, Shostakovich was miraculously spared.
Could it be that the qualities in the Fifth Symphony that are so admired today were the same ones that saved the composer's life then? Shostakovich clearly made a major effort to write a %u201Cclassical” piece here, one that would be acceptable to the authorities and was as far removed from the avant-gardistic Fourth as possible. Whether that makes it %u201CA Soviet Artist's Creative Response to Just Criticism,” as it was officially designated at the time, is another question. The work is so profound and sincere as to transcend any kind of political expediency. The symphony was definitely a response to something, but not in the sense of a chastised schoolboy mending his ways – rather as a great artist reacting to the cruelty and insanity of the times.
A lot of ink has been spilled over the %u201Cmeaning” of this symphony. That Shostakovich had a special message to communicate becomes clear at the very beginning, when the usual Allegro is replaced by a brooding first movement that stays in a slow tempo for half its length. (Shostakovich opened his later Nos. 6, 8, and 10 in a similar way.)
The energetic dotted motif at the beginning of the Fifth Symphony is, no doubt, dramatic and ominous. A second theme, played by the violins in a high register, is warm and lyrical but at the same time eerie and distant. The music seems hesitant, until the horns begin a march theme that leads to motivic development and a speeding up of the tempo. Reminiscent of some of Mahler's march melodies but even grimmer, its harmonies modulate freely from key to key which gives the march an oddly sarcastic character. At the climactic point of the march, the two earlier themes return. The dotted rhythms from the opening are even more powerful than before, but the second lyrical theme, now played by the flute and the horn to the soothing harmonies of the harp, has lost the edge it previously had and brings the movement to a peaceful, almost otherworldly close.
The brief second-movement Scherzo brings some relief after the preceding drama. Its Ländler-like melodies again bespeak Mahler's influence, both in the Scherzo proper and the Trio, whose theme is played by a solo violin and then by the flute.
The third movement is an expansive Largo in which the brass is silent and the violins are divided not into two sections as usual but three. It begins with an espressivo melody, scored for strings only. Two flutes and harp play the next subject, in which the first movement's march rhythm is transformed into a lament. The oboe, the clarinet, and the flute intone desolate solo melodies, interspersed with a near-quote from a Russian Orthodox funeral chant, played by the strings. The tension grows and finally erupts, about two-thirds through the movement; the opening melody then returns in a passionate rendering by the cello section in a high register. At the end, the music falls back into the lament mode of the earlier woodwind passages.
Generally accepted as the greatest of the symphony's movements, the Largo was widely understood as a lament for the Soviet Army marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who fell victim to the Stalinist purges in 1937, at the very time Shostakovich was working on his symphony. (Tukhachevsky had been a benefactor and a personal friend of the composer's.) At the first performance, many people wept openly during the Largo, perhaps thinking of their own loved ones who had disappeared.
The last movement finally resolves the tensions that have built up in the first three movements (or so it seems at first) by introducing a march tune that is much simpler and more straightforward than most of the symphony's earlier themes. Yet after an exciting development, the music suddenly stops on a set of harsh fortissimo chords, and a slower, more introspective section begins with a haunting horn solo. Musicologist Richard Taruskin has shown that this section quotes from a song for voice and piano on a Pushkin poem (%u201CVozrozhdenie” or %u201CRebirth,” op. 46, No. 1) Shostakovich had written just before the Fifth Symphony. (%u201CDelusions vanish from my wearied soul, and visions arise within it of pure primeval days” – says Pushkin's poem.) This quiet intermezzo ends abruptly with the entrance of the timpani and snare drum, ushering in the recapitulation of the march tune, played at half its original tempo. Merely a shadow of its former self, the melody is elaborated contrapuntally until it suddenly alights on a bright D-major chord in full orchestral splendor, which then remains unchanged for more than a minute, until the end of the symphony.
The official interpretation of the Fifth Symphony was propounded by the novelist Alexey Tolstoy, who, even though he was a count (and a relative of Lev Tolstoy), was loyal to the Soviet regime. In an influential article, the %u201CRed Count” viewed the symphony as a kind of musical Bildungsroman (a literary genre describing the a person's evolution in terms of education, experience, social consciousness, etc.) This interpretation was echoed in an often-quoted article published under Shostakovich's name but probably not written by him:
The theme of my symphony is the formation of a personality. At the center of the work's conception I envisioned just that: a man in all his suffering… The symphony's finale resolves the tense and tragic moments of the preceding movements in a joyous, optimistic fashion.
Yet critics – even Soviet ones – have had an extremely hard time reconciling this with what they actually heard. The famous passage in the memoir Testimony, edited by Solomon Volkov, reflects a radically different view:
It's as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, %u201CYour business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,” and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, %u201COur business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.”
As Taruskin has noted, this interpretation was actually shared by many people present at the premiere, who had serious doubts about the %u201Coptimism” of the finale. To some, this was a flaw in the work, to others, its greatest strength and hidden message. On both sides of the political fence, it was felt that the finale did not entirely dispel the devastating effects of the third-movement Largo.
As a matter of fact, writing a triumphant finale had never been an easy thing to do since Beethoven's Fifth. That masterpiece has inspired later composers to devote their Fifth Symphonies to human tragedies on a large scale, as in the case of Tchaikovsky, Mahler, and Sibelius. Yet none of the finales in those symphonies is as unambiguously %u201Ctriumphant” as Beethoven's was, a fact that obviously cannot be blamed on politics alone. (Other reasons had to do with the pessimistic side of the Romantic mindset and the increasing complexity of the world surrounding the artist.) In Shostakovich's case, at any rate, politics clearly complicated an already difficult artistic issue even further. Be that as it may, one of the most important messages of the symphony is certainly that issues are never black and white, either in art or in life at large.