Gabriel S. answered • 05/19/19
Columbia University Music Major
This is a great question.
Shastakovic began working on his 4th Symphony in 1935. While he was working on the Symphony, Pravda the official newspaper of the Russian communist party, released an article condemning Shastakovic's earlier work, the popular opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. While some branches of earlier soviet leadership had embraced modernism in the arts, Stalin's campaign of mandating a national soviet realist style in the 1930's meant a clamping down on the arts. The 1936 Pravda article put Shastakovic's increasingly dissonant and modernist style at odds with the national Soviet aesthetic, marking him for professional failure or worse if he did not change his ways. It's not clear if Shastakovic withdrew the 4th Symphony of his own will or if it was forcibly removed, but the result was unquestionably due to the Party's condemnation.
In Response, Shastakovic began working on a new Symphony which he allegedly stated was "a Soviet artists response to justified criticism", a direct response to the 1936 article. Basically, the 5th Symphony was Shastakovic's attempt to conform to the official party line and it was very successful. Popular and official views of the premiere were overwhelmingly positive. Some later critics have found elements of dissent in the work describing the final movement as a kind of forced celebration. Whatever the interpretation, the style of the 5th Symphony shows a marked change from Shastakovic's earlier style and this change is directly linked to the political pressures of the time.
