ABSTRACT
Shostakovich completed his Fourth Symphony in autumn 1936, soon after the official denunciation of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District.1 As the atmosphere grew increasingly oppressive, and his music was criticized and condemned, the composer eventually decided to withdraw his new symphony from rehearsals; its premiere took place 25 years later, in 1961. Nevertheless, it was the Fourth Symphony that marked, more clearly than any other Shostakovich work of that time, a watershed in his development as a composer. It signified the end of an early period that comprised approximately ten years of Shostakovich’s creative work and was characterized by a radical avant-garde style and bold experimentation with genres and musical forms. In particular, the Fourth opened a distinct new period in Shostakovich’s symphonic writing, whose chronological boundaries roughly coincided with the epoch of ‘high Stalinism’. The last symphony belonging to this line, the Tenth, was completed a few months after Stalin’s death, in 1953. While his two previous symphonies, the Second (1927) and the Third (1932), departed radically from the traditional symphonic form (the Second was not even called a symphony in the beginning), the symphonies of Stalin’s era (with the exception of the Ninth) clearly rejoined the tradition of the ‘grand’ symphony, which had been founded by Haydn and Mozart, fully developed by Beethoven, and which continued to evolve throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their expansive contours and many features of their musical form, including the dominance of the first movement, accorded well with this established genre. The first movement-the so-called sonata or symphonic Allegro-of Shostakovich’s symphonies of his middle period in general, and of the Fourth in particular, will be the subject of this chapter.
