The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Dmitri Shostakovich · Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47 · four movements for large orchestra, with two harps, piano and celesta · first performed by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under Yevgeny Mravinsky, Leningrad, 21 November 1937 · about forty-four to fifty minutes in most performances
Mode
Symphony in four movements; sonata form, a scherzo and trio, a slow movement in two broad statements and coda, and a march finale
Mythos
Through darkness to light: the hero’s passage inherited from Beethoven, built and then made doubtful
Phase
D minor, A minor, F sharp minor, D minor to D major; a Moderato, a Ländler, a Largo without brass and a march to an apotheosis that will not settle
Presentation
Concert music; large orchestra with two harps, piano and celesta; the brass silent through the Largo
Register
From lament and the sublime of emptiness to grotesque wit and a hammered apotheosis; no word anywhere
Scale
One mind and the public around it; about forty-four to fifty minutes in most performances
Governing Proposition
A symphony in D minor, written in the year of the Great Terror by a composer whose opera had been condemned in print, keeps the classical plan of four movements, gives its slow movement the full length of a lament without brass, and ends in D major with winds and strings held on one repeated note while brass and drums hammer the tonic. The wager of the work is that a public form can carry a private voice inside it, and that an affirmation can be compelled and be heard to be compelled.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The symphony opens with a canon in the strings on a dotted, leaping figure, in D minor and in 4/4. One voice states the figure and another takes it up, and the first movement, in sonata form, grows from that canon and from what follows it: a second subject in the violins, a long, quiet line over a soft rhythmic ostinato. Few themes are set out, and they are worked hard. The movement takes about a third of the running time, and its outer sections are slow; with the Largo, well over half of the symphony is slow or moderate music.
The development changes the tempo to Allegro non troppo and the character of the material. The long violin line, which was private and lyric, is turned into a march, with piano and low brass driving it: the lyrical made mechanical. This is the work’s argument in small, the private voice taken over by the public one, and the movement needs it. Then the recapitulation, reordered, brings the opening back in augmented canon at full force, the figure that began as a quiet imitation in the strings now stated by the whole orchestra. The lyric has become catastrophe.
The coda empties. Over a sustained D the celesta climbs a rising chromatic scale, and the movement ends on it. It is the sublime of emptiness, height reached not by mass but by its absence, and it is one of the places where the making bears the most weight: a single instrument, a scale, a held note. The plan of the whole is already clear. Grief and doubt will be given the middle of the symphony, and the end will have to be public.
Movement II
The second movement is a scherzo and trio in A minor, in 3/4, a Ländler in Mahler’s manner. Cellos and basses open it with a heavy, sardonic dance, and the upper instruments answer with wit. It is short, about five minutes, the briefest movement by far, and it stands a fifth above the home key, the first of the steps by which the symphony’s tonics climb.
The trio gives a solo violin a line of its own, and then the scherzo returns, changed, in pizzicato and wind, before the full close. The scoring is skilful and knowing. This is the popular and the grotesque, a country dance put into a symphony and given an edge, and its manner is borrowed: it is pastiche of Mahler, as exact as pastiche can be.
It is the mask. The scherzo obeys the law of the whole as a public face, wit worn over what the first movement has shown, but it stands apart in material and in manner, and it is the movement least bound to the rest. Its relation to the argument is one of tone, not of theme. Of everything in the symphony it is the most separable: five minutes that could go with the plan intact. It is also the last laughter the work allows before the Largo.
Movement III
The Largo is in F sharp minor, in 4/4, and the brass is silent throughout. Its key lies a major third above the home tonic, on the far sharp side for a symphony in D minor, as remote in sound as the plan allows. The movement is laid out in two broad statements and a coda, and it takes about a third of the running time, the longest span in the work after the first movement. The private lament is the largest slow music the symphony holds.
The strings are divided more finely here than anywhere else in the work, and the movement begins in their lamenting polyphony. Over string tremolo come solos for oboe, for clarinet and for flute, plain lines of grief over a trembling ground. There is a single climax, of naked force, made without brass, and then the music withdraws. The close is pianissimo, in F sharp major, with harps and celesta.
This is the private voice alone. Its scoring sets it apart from the public movements on either side, and the place it holds in the plan gives grief its full length, in the middle of the work and nowhere else. At the first performance, in November 1937, listeners are reported to have wept in the Largo. It was the year of the Great Terror, and the mourning the movement holds was heard by a hall full of people who had their own to mourn.
Movement IV
The finale opens with timpani and brass, a march in D minor that accelerates as it goes. The public voice returns with everything the Largo withheld. The march is built of plain, repeated material, and its gathering tutti relies on volume and doubling more than on line; it restates its tune more than it develops it. This is drive more than transport, and the work means it to be.
A slow central section follows, quieter and long for what it carries, and then the long crescendo begins that leads to the coda. The key turns from D minor to D major. In the coda the upper winds and strings repeat a single note, A, for a long stretch, while brass and timpani hammer the tonic and its fifth beneath them. The private voice is held on one note inside the public one. The repetition is not give: the repetition is the point. The orchestration is blunt by design.
How the coda goes depends on how fast it is played, and the score does not settle it. The first edition’s metronome mark gives a fast crotchet; another reading of the mark gives a quaver at about half that speed. Performances divide between a quick, triumphant close, Bernstein’s among them, and a slow, hammered one. Played fast and bright, the ending is a conventional victory. Played slow, it is the sublime of dread, a triumph that sounds like a sentence being carried out. The work was made to admit both.
Movement V
On 28 January 1936 an unsigned editorial in Pravda, under the title “Muddle Instead of Music”, condemned Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. In December of that year he withdrew his Fourth Symphony in rehearsal, a work in three movements for a huge orchestra with an open, unresolved close; it was not played until 1961. The Fifth, composed in 1937, was the first new symphony he put before the public after the attack, and it went back to the plan the Fourth had left: four movements, sonata form, a scherzo, a slow movement and a finale in the major.
It was first performed on 21 November 1937 in the Great Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic, by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under Yevgeny Mravinsky. The ovation was long; its length is reported variously. A journalist’s phrase, which the composer accepted, called the work a Soviet artist’s creative response to “just criticism”, and the phrase has followed it since, though it is not a title on the score. In 1979 Solomon Volkov published Testimony, a memoir presented as the composer’s, which says the rejoicing of the finale is forced; its authenticity has been disputed since Laurel Fay’s article of 1980.
The work became the model of the Soviet symphony for a generation, and it is among the most performed symphonies of its century. It has been played as written since 1937 and recorded continuously from Mravinsky onward, and it has outlived the state that praised it. What it says has not been settled, and it was made not to be: a classical plan for the official speech, a Largo without brass for the private one, and an ending that holds a single note inside the hammered tonic and leaves the listener to decide what that sounds like.
Act III · The Twelve
The large plan is compelled by what the work has to say: a public symphony that must end in affirmation, with grief allowed only in the middle. Remove the Largo and the finale’s triumph has nothing to answer; remove the finale and the Largo has no public to mourn beneath. The first movement grows from its opening canon and its long violin line, and the march of its development is that line made mechanical, which the argument needs. The test finds give in three places: the scherzo, bound to the rest by tone more than argument; the finale’s slow central section, long for what it carries; and the finale’s first march, which restates its tune more than it develops it. The coda’s repeated note is not give: the repetition is the point.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: under terror the public voice and the private one part, and affirmation can be both compelled and heard to be compelled. The work does not say this; it stages it. Grief is given full length in the Largo, without brass, and the first audience is reported to have wept there, in a year of arrests. The finale reaches D major by force, and its coda holds winds and strings on one repeated note while brass and timpani hammer the tonic. What holds the axis at the gate is that the score permits this hearing and does not compel it. Played fast and bright, the coda is a conventional victory, and it has been heard so. The ambiguity is the disclosure, and it is also the limit.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Height is reached several times and in more than one register. The Largo is the summit of beauty: strings divided more finely than anywhere else in the work, oboe and clarinet over tremolo, one climax of naked force, and a close in F sharp major with harps and celesta. The first movement rises twice, when the opening returns in augmented canon at full force, the lyric made catastrophe, and when the celesta climbs over held D, the sublime of emptiness. The finale’s coda is the sublime of dread, if it is anything. Held below the top on height and frequency together: the scherzo is wit and grotesque, the finale’s march is drive more than transport, and the work rises less often and less far than Winterreise (9.3) or Otello (9.4).
Score: 8.9 / 10
The archetype is the one Beethoven built into the symphony: through darkness to light, struggle to victory, the hero’s passage. Here it is evoked and put under strain: the work builds the passage and then makes its arrival doubtful. That doubling is a real construction, an archetype turned against itself, and it bears weight. But the archetype is inherited whole, from Beethoven’s Fifth and Tchaikovsky’s, and what the work adds is irony, not a new figure. The particulars are vivid, the march with piano, the Largo’s mourning, the repeated note, yet they take their significance from the history around the score more than from figures the score builds. A wordless symphony keeps little particular. Myth evoked well and turned with intent.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is the four-movement symphony of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Mahler, and the work’s turn is, on its surface, a turn back. After the Fourth, with its three movements, its huge orchestra and its unresolved close, the Fifth returns to classical proportions: sonata form, a scherzo, a slow movement, a finale in the major. The swerve is in the double voice, a public form made to carry an undertone it cannot be held to. The stake in 1937 was his standing and perhaps his life, but it attached to departing at all; the wager is placed on the proven path, made to speak twice. Beside Webern’s Symphony, Op. 21, of 1928 or Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta of 1936, it moved the form least.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows, and what it knows depends on the form being conventional. The classical plan is the official speech; the ambiguity lives in how the plan is filled. The Largo stands third and is the work’s largest slow music, and the silence of its brass sets the private lament apart in sound from the public movements on either side. The coda is made by repetition and register, an insistence only a symphonic close could make. Recast as a programme work it would lose its deniability; given an open ending like the Fourth’s, it would lose the compelled affirmation that is its subject. Held below the top by the scherzo, whose form is a container its tone fills, and by the finale’s slow section, placed more than required.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence, not promise: nearly nine decades of it, much of it argument. The questions stay open: whether the coda is triumph, irony or both; which reading of its metronome mark the composer meant; how far Testimony, published by Solomon Volkov in 1979 and disputed since Laurel Fay’s article of 1980, can be trusted. Fay, Richard Taruskin and David Fanning are among those who have kept the argument alive. Performance is unsettled too, from Mravinsky’s readings to Bernstein’s fast coda and the slow, hammered closes of later conductors. Held below the top because much of the yield concerns context and biography rather than the score’s own depth: its formal questions are fewer than the greatest symphonies pose, and the return is often to the history, not to the notes.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is the symphony of the 1930s. The intrinsic force is moderate: the work showed that a large public symphony, tonal and in four movements, could still carry tragedy and doubt in an age of modernism. It did not reorganise what a symphony could be; it reasserted it, with a new undertone. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is large and documented. The work became the model of the Soviet symphony for a generation, the template the state held up and that his later symphonies and those of his Soviet contemporaries answered, and it fixed his idiom, the long slow movement, the sardonic scherzo, the ambiguous march, as one of the century’s recognisable voices, heard after him in concert music and film. Much of that reach is presence and idiom, not a redirection of the form.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Survival is weighed in form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole: published, unrevised, performed as written since 1937. Presence is as wide as for any symphony of its century: performed continuously in the Soviet Union and, from the late 1930s, in the West; recorded continuously from Mravinsky onward; a staple of orchestras and of youth orchestras. The dispute over the coda’s metronome mark is a small textual doubt, not a loss. What holds the axis is the surface fixed to its moment: the work was made for an occasion of 1937, and part of what it says depends on knowing that occasion. It has outlived both the state that praised it and much of the debate over whether it praised the state.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The making bears weight in many places: the Largo’s orchestration, strings divided more finely than anywhere else in the work, the brass withheld, harps and celesta held for the close; the first movement’s canon and its return in augmentation at full orchestra; piano and low brass turning the lyric line into a march; the celesta’s chromatic scale over held D; an economy of material, few themes worked hard. The costs are in the score. The finale’s first march is built of plain, repeated material, and its accelerating tutti relies on volume and doubling more than on line. The scherzo is skilful pastiche of Mahler. The coda is blunt by design, and design does not make it subtle. Against the Goldberg Variations (9.7) and Otello (9.5) the making bears weight in fewer places.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements, the Largo’s lament and the finale’s march. One law governs them: the opposition of a private voice to a public one, which runs through the whole. In the first movement the lyric line becomes a march; the Largo is the private voice alone, without brass; the finale is the public voice, and its coda sets the private voice, a single note repeated in winds and strings, inside it. The key plan supports the law: the dark of D minor, the Largo’s remote F sharp, the forced D major. The tension is the scherzo, whose grotesque wit obeys the law of public masks but stands apart in material and manner. The range governed is wide for a symphony, and the law is felt more than shown in the motifs.
Score: 8.6 / 10
A wordless symphony holds orders through sound alone, and this one holds several: consciousness, in the first movement’s lyric line and in the Largo; the state and the crowd, as the public voice of the march and the coda; mourning and the community of mourners, in the Largo as it was heard in 1937; the popular and the grotesque, in the scherzo’s dance; history, as the occasion the work answers. They are integrated by the law of public and private voice, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the state and history are present by inference from the occasion, not in the score, and that the family, labour, the natural order and the sacred named as such do not appear.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, The Made at 9.0 and The Sublime at 8.9. A form that survives whole and a presence as wide as any symphony of its century; a command of the orchestra that bears weight in the Largo’s scoring, the first movement’s canon and the celesta’s scale over held D; and height reached in more than one register, the beauty of the Largo, the emptiness of the first movement’s close and the dread of the coda.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.5: consciousness, the state and the crowd, mourning, the grotesque and history are held, the state and history only by inference from the occasion, and the family, labour, the natural order and the sacred are absent. Next above it, The Swerve at 7.8, a turn back to the proven form made to speak twice; The Archetypal Deep at 8.0, an inherited archetype made doubtful rather than a new one built; and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2, a reach greater than its force.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.0, The Living Form at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1 clears the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment meets it exactly at 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.2, The Archetypal Deep at 8.0 and The Swerve at 7.8 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.8, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5. Four of the five summit conditions are met, and with the Epochal Gate unmet on three axes and an aggregate of 8.5 the work stands in Tier IV.
Basis · the score of the Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47, in its standard performing version, the four movements for large orchestra as published and as played since 1937, scored as one work, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, edition or recording was in hand, and the running time is a range across performance, not a measurement. Where the published texts differ, above all in the metronome mark of the finale’s coda, the score as played is the object and the dispute is named. Performances and recordings are evidence, and no single one is the object. The work has no words; the only words quoted are the title of the editorial of 1936 and two words of the phrase under which the work was received, neither of them on the score. What the music discloses is credited as fully as disclosure in words. The key plan and the shares of running time were computed by script. Details that could not be verified, among them the months and places of composition, the finer division of the Largo’s strings and the instruments of its climax, a quotation in the finale’s slow section, the number of repeated notes in the coda, the figures of the two readings of its metronome mark, a phrase of Bizet proposed in the first movement and the story behind it, the composer’s own published account of the work, a diary entry of the premiere year, the first Western performances and the titles and dates of most of the critical literature, are not given. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.