Shostakovich – Symphonies Nos. 5 & 9

Not just his artistic future was at stake. Dimitri Shostakovich’s survival was hanging by a silk thread following the notorious article in Pravda “Chaos versus music”, which was published in 1936. An example was made of his second opera “Lady Macbeth of Mzensk”, which was highly criticized. In doing so, willing officials were implementing Stalin’s guidelines with regard to the socialistic music of the future. This was not the way it should sound.
From that moment onwards, the on the whole valued and respected composer Shostakovich became a persona non grata in the Soviet Union, who would have to tread carefully in the near future, in order to avoid ending up as prey for the hangman in the blink of an eye. Despite this campaign against his compositions, Shostakovich continued to work on his Symphony No.4, for the time being without apparently having learned a lesson from the official threats. In November 1936, to be sure, he withdrew the composition shortly before its première and dedicated himself to a greater extent to writing film music: the latter, no doubt, primarily also for financial reasons – after all, he had to feed his family.