Czech Philharmonic • Semyon Bychkov

One of the most famous compositions in the history of classical music – Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony – began around 1803, when its composer was recovering from his unrequited love for Count Joseph Deym’s young widow, Josephine von Brunswick, whom Beethoven taught to play the piano. At the same time, however, he had another serious personal crisis due to the struggle with his progressive hearing loss. This later prevented him from active as well as passive participation in the concert scene. From then on, he was only able to seek the meaning of his life exclusively in composing. Beethoven became deeply concerned with issues of heroism and noble ideas about the ultimate salvation of the universe, which was reflected in the increased pathos of his compositions. He was at the peak of his creative powers and released into the world one quality work after another, but at the time he was suffering from material deprivation.

The leitmotif of Symphony No. 5, known as “Schicksals-Sinfonie” (Fate Symphony), is the idea of the fight of one’s mind against metaphysically conceived fate, full of life crises and pain, while the result of this fight is the finding of inner harmony and peace. Beethoven worked on his first symphony in a minor key for an unusually long time simultaneously with the composition of his Sixth Symphony. He often returned to his Fifth, changing, reworking and revising many things. He was not satisfied with it until 1808, and on 22 December of that year the two new symphonies were performed for the first time before an audience at the Theater an der Wien.

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony opens with a famous motif consisting of three Gs of equal duration followed by a sustained E flat below the G. This essentially very simple motif, which is to be found in several of Beethoven’s earlier and later works, was allegedly described by the composer as “fate knocking at the door”. Beethoven imaginatively develops the motif in the following energetic flow of music, adhering above all to its rhythmic structure. The slow second movement is based on variations of two contrasting themes – a lyrically peaceful one and a fanfare-like heroic one. The scherzo of the third movement suggests the continued defiance of fate, which is underlined, among other things, by the repetition of the rhythmic pattern of the opening motif. The final victory is announced by an optimistic-sounding finale in the major key, which follows after the scherzo attaca, i.e., without a pause. It is written in sonata form and mostly returns to the musical narratives of the High Classical period.

The great master of music of the Soviet Union, Dmitri Shostakovich, inherited his musical talent from his parents. He composed his first works at the age of nine. In 1923 he graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory in piano performance, and in two years he successfully completed his studies of composition, graduating with his Symphony No. 1 in F minor. This work, performed by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra (as the city was named at that time) in 1926, received great critical acclaim, and the twenty-year-old Shostakovich, who had previously worked as a pianist-improviser for silent films, became a renowned composer literally overnight. He soon adopted the compositional practices of Western European modernism, which are particularly evident in Twenty-Four Preludes and Fugues for piano, Symphony No. 4 in C minor, the ballets The Age of Gold and The Bolt and the operas The Nose and Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. The Moscow premiere of Lady Macbeth in 1936 brought a turning point in his career. It happened to be attended by Joseph Stalin, who subsequently initiated the first cultural-political attack against Shostakovich in the form of an article entitled Muddle Instead of Music published in the Pravda newspaper. Another repression came in 1948 following the adoption of the infamous cultural doctrine formulated by Andrei Zhdanov and subsequent purges against Soviet composers. Both for internal and external reasons, Shostakovich then also composed patriotic works in order “to meet the needs of the Soviet people”, for which he was praised and awarded by the Soviet power. His compositions seeking the official approval include, for example, Symphony No. 7 in C major “Leningrad”, which is a reaction to the siege of Leningrad in 1941, the cantata Poem of the Motherland (1947) or the oratorio Song of the Forests (1949) which celebrates the concept of contemporary forestry policy. Shostakovich wrote a total of fifteen symphonies, the same number of string quartets, six instrumental concerts and many other compositions. A specific part of his work consists of film scores for a large number of Soviet films.

1937 saw the culmination of a campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union called the Great Purge, which began three years ago. It was a period of fear and insecurity for all categories of Soviet society. The paranoid Joseph Stalin decided to destroy all real and perceived enemies of the political regime. Arrests, deportations to Gulag labor camps, mass executions and disappearance of people without a trace were commonplace, and even the regime’s top representatives could not be sure whether they were to be the next victims of these atrocities. Dmitri Shostakovich received an official offer of a teaching post at the Leningrad Conservatory, but he was rightly frightened by the devastating criticism of his opera the year before. He was also afraid to publicly present his avant-garde Fourth Symphony, which by its very modern, experimental tone was certainly not in line with the aesthetic ideas of Socialist Realism, which became a compulsory artistic direction in the Soviet Union. Instead he proceeded to compose Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47. In contrast to his previous symphonies, he chose a more traditional and understandable musical language. He certainly did not resort to banalities and created an impressive composition of very serious and profound content. Shostakovich’s fears of how his Fifth Symphony would be accepted proved unfounded. Its premiere took place on 21 November 1937 as part of the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution. The Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra was conducted by Shostakovich’s close friend Yevgeny Mravinsky. The work was a huge success both with the public and official critics from the Communist Party, and served as a model of Soviet symphonism. Shostakovich was left in peace until the next decade, when he was subjected to other attacks.