The role of E. Mravinsky in the triumph of Shostakovich’s Symphony No 5

Abstract

The author reconsiders the interpretation of the concept of Shostakovich’s Symphony No 5 based on the fact that the composition was created during Stalin’s Great Terror of the 1930s and after a harsh criticism of his compositions by the Communist Party and the USSR government in the early 1930s. During the creation of the Symphony No 5, the Soviet music experts defined its concept as a celebration of a “happy” life of Soviet people, However, in the author’s opinion, the symphony has another idea. The researcher notes that the triumph of the Symphony No 5 in the global culture had happened only owing to the director’s interpretation by Yevgeny Mravinsky during the premiere at Leningrad Philharmonic Hall on November 21, 1937, after which the Symphony was performed all over the world and became the gold standard of the Soviet music. Probably, Shostakovich intended to create an optimistic finale for the Symphony. But there are many examples when the composer’s goal doesn’t correspond with the final result. The author provides the conclusion that almost all music experts, who analyze this symphony, use abstract phrases: contrast themes, lyrical image, enemy, etc. But the only proven fact is that a “mechanistic” march is a heavy and ponderous advance of the power of a tyrant eliminating everything he wants based on the principle “who is not with us is against us”. This idea pierces into the Forth and later the Seventh Symphonies by Shostakovich. Today, the Symphony is still a music masterpiece and a part of the global music heritage, but the new socio-cultural interpretations of modern directors each time reveal the new faces of this composition.