ABSTRACT
Ivan Sollertinsky claims that the social relevance of the symphony is embodied in the musical fabric itself, as a 'musical collectivisation of feelings'. After temporarily breaking with Stalin over collectivization in 1928, Nikolay Bukharin's political comeback had begun with an invitation to address the Seventeenth Party Congress in January 1934, the first he had spoken at since 1927. The political necessity of 'content' in art raised severe formal problems, which some musicologists, not without considerable contortions of semantics and logic, tried to address. Given the political and aesthetic climate of the time, there seems very little doubt that even in a flawless performance the massive, 'Mahlerian' work would have been construed as the epitome of formalism, an act in arrogant defiance of the Party's benevolent guidance. Composers and critics affiliated to Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians were not alone in recognising the potential for a new kind of Soviet symphonism to emerge from the ashes of the Western symphonic tradition.
