Symphony No. 5, Op. 47

Cellos and basses leap from D to B♭, and the violins follow. Rests separate the phrases as they pass across the orchestra. Winds and brass do not play.

On 28 January 1936 Pravda printed an unsigned attack on Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, headed “Muddle Instead of Music”. The opera was driven from Soviet theatres. Shostakovich began the Fifth more than a year later, in April 1937.

Shostakovich began direct work on the symphony on 18 April 1937. He drafted the first three movements quickly. The finale and the full score took longer.

From rehearsal 9 the first violins play a long melody, marked pp espressivo, over repeated notes in the lower strings. Harp chords mark the harmony beneath them.

On 21 November 1937 Yevgeny Mravinsky conducted the première in the Great Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic. Shostakovich’s old teacher Maximilian Steinberg wrote in his diary: “The ovation was stupendous.”

The piano enters low down, playing short, hard-edged figures with the cellos and basses. The horns hold longer notes above.

The Fifth has no dedication and no descriptive title, though Shostakovich liked titles. Harlow Robinson suggested that after the Lady Macbeth scandal Shostakovich may have judged it safer to give his critics nothing to misread.

According to one listener at the première, the audience rose from their seats one by one during the finale until the whole hall was standing, and Mravinsky held the score high above his head. In her diary the artist Lyubov Yakovleva wrote that everyone repeated the same thing: “he retaliated and retaliated well.”

Trumpets and trombones play heavy chords over repeated notes in the strings, and the movement becomes a march. Percussion joins the brass.

The lyrical tune returns in the flute and horn, over harp and quiet repeated strings. The violin section played this phrase earlier. Here two solo players pass it between them.

In January 1938 Literaturnaya gazeta printed Shostakovich’s remark that his new work “could be called a lyrical-heroic symphony”. His 1956 score introduction gave its subject as “the shaping of the individual”, with “man with all his experiences” at the centre of a work “lyrical in essence from start to finish”.

The coda reduces the orchestra to solo violin, harp and muted strings. On the last page the celesta plays rising scales while the bass and inner strings, marked morendo, die away.

Cellos and double basses begin alone, in A minor. The tune is in three beats to a bar, with short notes and sudden leaps.

Harlow Robinson heard in this short movement the sarcastic, ironic Shostakovich already familiar from the First Symphony and the First Piano Concerto.

In the trio a solo violin plays over harp chords and pizzicato cellos, with glissandos and short, clipped phrases. A solo flute then takes up the tune.

On 9 April 1938 Artur Rodzinski conducted the NBC Symphony Orchestra in the symphony’s first American performance, which was broadcast on the radio. He returned to the score in London in 1954 and made the performance heard here.

The opening theme returns in the bassoon and contrabassoon, and the strings follow with pizzicato. At the start of the movement the cellos played the theme with the bow.

Westminster’s sessions with Rodzinski ran from 2 to 14 October 1954 at Walthamstow, in east London. The reissue catalogue names the Royal Philharmonic. The original LP credits the “Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra of London”.

The full orchestra returns for the closing phrases, and the xylophone plays the tune above the strings. Short chords end the movement.

Shostakovich divides the violins into three groups and the violas and cellos into two each, with the basses below. At rehearsal 75 the third violin group begins the melody in F♯ minor. The phrases of the eight parts overlap.

In his introduction to the 1956 score, Shostakovich wrote: “I wrote the third part in three days.” He described a long period of preparation before the music was written down. The movement lasts nearly a quarter of an hour in this performance.

The strings stop. A solo flute plays above plucked notes in the harp, and a second flute then joins it.

From rehearsal 81 the string lines grow louder, and the woodwinds join them. The trumpets, horns and trombones stay silent throughout the climax, because the Largo has no brass parts.

The oboe plays a melody, broken by rests, above a continuous tremolo in the violins. Clarinet and flute solos follow over the divided strings.

About twenty articles appeared in the press after the première. Most were positive, but Alexander Ostretsov complained that “the pathos of suffering” was in places “taken to a naturalistic cry and wail”.

Piano and xylophone enter over the string lament, doubling the woodwinds and strings with hard attacks. The cellos play their line strongly. The brass rest.

In his 1956 introduction to the score, Shostakovich asked whether tragedy belonged in Soviet art and answered that it did. He pointed to Verdi’s and Mozart’s Requiems, whose stern characters fill men’s souls “with courage and the will to struggle”.

After the climax, Shostakovich marks the strings con sordino at rehearsals 92–⁠93. The opening lament returns in the muted strings, marked pianissimo.

The harp returns to its spare accompaniment. A solo second violin plays above the muted strings.

Celesta and harp harmonics share the final melody, with high string harmonics held above them. The strings close the movement with a chord marked morendo (dying away).

After a full attack from woodwind and brass, trumpets, trombones and tuba play the march in D minor over the timpani. The strings rest.

Rodzinski cut 37 bars from this finale. He made the same cut in his 1942 Cleveland recording and kept it in the Westminster version twelve years later.

The brass grow softer and stop. The violins continue in a much quieter passage, playing small repeated figures above long notes in the lower parts.

In the introduction to the 1956 Muzgiz score, published under his name, Shostakovich called the finale “an optimistic, invigorating outlet for all the tragic tensions of the earlier parts”.

At the première in Leningrad on 21 November 1937, the artist Lyubov Yakovleva watched Shostakovich respond to the applause. In her diary she described him as pale and biting his lips: “I think he might have burst into tears.”

The march returns over repeated notes in the strings and woodwinds. Above this accompaniment the brass play longer phrases, and their note values lengthen towards the end.

High strings and woodwinds repeat A above long D major chords in the brass. The harmony underneath scarcely moves.

The repeated notes stop. Brass and strings hold the closing D major chords, and the bass drum and timpani play repeated strokes beneath them.