Response to Geoff Kuenning's artical "Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5 in D Minor"

The artical talked about the mentioned it was Shostakovich's misstep that he composed the Fourth Symphony after the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and he " Despite the risk of associating with an 'enemy of the people' ". Actually, it's not Shostakovich's fault. And the opera Lady Macbeth is also a great opera. But in that time 1930s, Russia was undergoing and the Soviet government killed lots of people. And the main problem is inside of the government, they even created a rule for the composers that all the composition must in tonal and triditional in harmony and with clear melody. But in 1920s to 1930s Prokofiev and Stravinsky is like the super star in composers, many composers influenced by them. And they were tried to use some use textures to compose. But it's not allowed by the soviet government. So Shostakovich met a denunciation, in the 1936 began with a series of attacks on him in Pravda, in particular an article entitled Muddle Instead of Music. The campaign, which condemned Lady Macbeth as formalist, "coarse, primitive and vulgar,"was thought to have been instigated by Stalin; consequently, commissions began to dry up, and his income fell by about three quarters. The Fourth Symphony entered rehearsals that December, but the political climate made performance impossible. It was not performed until 1961, but Shostakovich did not repudiate the work: it retained its designation as his Fourth Symphony. A piano reduction was published in 1946.
More widely, 1936 marked the beginning of the Great Terror, in which many of the composer's friends and relatives were imprisoned or killed. His only consolation in this period was the birth of his daughter Galina in 1936; his son Maxim was born two years later.The composer's response to his denunciation was the Fifth Symphony of 1937, which was, because of its fourth movement, musically more conservative than his earlier works. It was a success, and is still one of his most popular works. It was also at this time that Shostakovich composed the first of his string quartets. His chamber works allowed him to experiment and express ideas which would have been unacceptable in his more public symphonic pieces. In September 1937, he began to teach composition at the Conservatory, which provided some financial security but interfered with his own creative work.

The introduction of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony is available at "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._5_(Shostakovich)"