Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony: Do You Hear What I Hear?
On Jan. 28, 1936, Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich picked up a copy of the newspaper Pravda and found that he had been labeled anathema to the USSR.
Shostakovich’s 1934 opera, “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District,” was “cacophonous” and “an insult to Soviet women,” Pravda claimed. His ballet of the same year, “The Limpid Stream,” was “infected with cynicism.” If Comrade Shostakovich did not change his ways, the article concluded, “things could end badly.”
Shostakovich had been handed a public threat at the direction of Joseph Stalin. His capital crime: “formalism.” Of course, no one knew what constituted “formalism” anymore than anyone knew what made someone a “right-winger.” All that was known for certain was that a formalist was an artist disliked by Stalin, just as a right-winger was anybody Stalin wanted dead.