A first encounter with the Fifth Symphony

I first encountered Shostakovich in high school, believe it or not. My music theory teacher passed out scores of the Fifth Symphony and insisted that we follow along as best we could as she played a recording. I wish I could remember which recording it was.

My response to the D-minor opening—the unmistakable four intervals followed by the descending figure—without knowing anything of the circumstances of its composition, was a feeling of paranoid menace, which began to intensify as the music accelerated, especially with the strange entrance of one-handed piano line. The piano entered here for a few seconds and never reappeared for the remainder of the first movement; it was as if the pianist had been taken out back and shot.

But then after the menace reached a climax of nightmare, something remarkable happened: over a rhythmic background of strings and harp, a flute, a horn, and then a clarinet transformed the paranoid theme into something of heartbreaking beauty. It seemed a miracle to my eighteen-year-old sensibility.

The Fifth Symphony has been an important part of my life ever since, and it served as a gateway to much of the composer’s great music: the string quartets, the violin concertos, the twenty-four preludes and fugues. And, of course, Shostakovich became to me, as to many others, a troubling, irresistable figure: tragic, farcical, ambivalent, enigmatic. His description of the Fifth Symphony is infamously emblematic of his troubled career and his controversial position in the pantheon of great composers. After a politically ominous review of his music in Pravda, he withdrew his monumental Fourth Symphony, for which rehearsals had begun in May of 1936, and wrote this rich masterpiece, he claimed, as “a Soviet Artist’s creative reply to just criticism.”

This web-log will begin as a series of reflections on the life and music of Shostakovich. What does his music tell us about art and society, art and psychology, art and politics? Where I will go from there is anyone’s guess. Suggestions are welcome . . .