The Great Terror bypassed Shostakovich personally; however, because his compositions were subject to official attacks for their “formalism,” he had to expect the worst and confided to his closest friends more than once, “Who knows what will happen to me, they’ll probably shoot me.” Like millions of his fellow citizens, he did not sleep well at night, awaiting the arrival of the secret police to arrest him. (As Yevgeny Shvarts recalled, “For some reason it seemed particularly shameful to stand in your underwear before the messengers of fate and pull on your trousers before their eyes.”122) But arrests did take people close to the composer—his older sister’s husband, his wife’s family. Under these circumstances, he was compelled to recall his Mahlerian Fourth Symphony, but despite that the creative impulse flourished, as it did with Akhmatova. Shostakovich vowed to a friend, “If they chop off both my hands, I’ll still write music with a pen between my teeth.”123 Prokofiev reacted in a similar way to the enormous pressure of the Great Terror, confiding to Ilya Ehrenburg, “Now I must work. Only work! That is salvation.”
Shostakovich wrote his Fifth Symphony very quickly, between April 18 and July 20, 1937; the central part of the symphony, the long Largo, was composed in just three days.
The first audience of the Fifth Symphony entered the hall dressed to the nines, exchanging pleasantries, flirting, gossiping, and wondering what the “disgraced” Shostakovich would offer up for their judgment. But from the very first sounds, reflexive, jagged, filled with nervous tension, the music captured them and did not release them until it ended. The Fifth Symphony developed like a grand monologue without words, in which the protagonist led the audience through the thicket of his doubts and worries, through his private hell, which was painfully familiar to every Leningrader. Shostakovich’s music expressed the feelings of the intellectual who tried in vain to hide from the menacing outside world, which nevertheless found him everywhere—in the great outdoors, on the street, at home—ruthlessly pushing its hapless victim against the wall.
The Fifth Symphony moved the audience; when the music ended, many were weeping.125 The audience rose as one for a thirtyminute ovation. Mravinsky waved the score over his head. The orchestra had long left the stage, but the public would not leave the hall. They understood that this music was about them, about their lives, their hopes and fears. The Fifth Symphony from the very beginning was interpreted by Leningraders as a work about the Great Terror. Of course, it was impossible to say that. As Isaac Babel commented with bitter irony, “Now a man talks frankly only with his wife, at night, with the blanket over his head.”
Therefore the premiere of the symphony was wrapped by the author and his friends in “protective” words to blunt its impact. Shostakovich gave an interview in which he tried to avoid arousing the ire of the authorities against his work. “At the center of the concept of my work I placed man with all his feelings,” he explained vaguely. The reporter published this interview under a headline typical of the times, “My Creative Reply” (Shostakovich’s reply, that is, to the allegedly “just” rebukes for formalism and other mortal sins of the period).
For Shostakovich, as for other Soviet artists, this was a routine feint, a half-hearted attempt to cover his tracks. Shklovsky compared such behavior with the weary circling of a cat with a can tied to its tail. “The cat races around, and the tin can rattles across its tracks.” But Western critics, not understanding or not willing to understand the reality in which Shostakovich lived, accepted the legend that his Fifth Symphony was conceived and written as “an artist’s creative reply to justified criticism.” As a result, this tragic and highly personal symphony, which has won popularity worldwide as perhaps the most frequently performed of Shostakovich’s works, for many years was interpreted in the West as an act of creative capitulation before the Stalinist regime.
