Symphony No. 4 (Shostakovich)

Dmitri Shostakovich composed his Symphony No. 4 in C minor, Opus 43, between September 1935 and May 1936, after abandoning some preliminary sketch material. In January 1936, halfway through this period, Pravda—under direct orders from Joseph Stalin—published an editorial "Muddle Instead of Music" that denounced the composer and targeted his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Despite this attack, and despite the oppressive political climate of the time, Shostakovich completed the symphony and planned its premiere for December 1936 in Leningrad. After rehearsals began, the orchestra's management cancelled the performance, offering a statement that Shostakovich had withdrawn the work. He may have agreed to withdraw it to relieve orchestra officials of responsibility. The symphony was premiered on 30 December 1961 by the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra led by Kirill Kondrashin.

Shostakovich uses an immense orchestra in this work, requiring well over one hundred musicians. This, combined with the extreme technical and emotional demands placed on the performers, makes the Symphony No. 4 among his least-performed scores, yet it ranks as one of his most important and personal works.

It is scored for the following instruments:

Shostakovich began the Fourth Symphony in September 1935. His Second and Third symphonies, completed in 1927 and 1929, had been patriotic works with choral finales, but the new score was different. Toward the end of 1935 he told an interviewer, "I am not afraid of difficulties. It is perhaps easier, and certainly safer, to follow a beaten path, but it is also dull, uninteresting and futile."

Shostakovich abandoned sketches for the symphony some months earlier and began anew. On 28 January 1936, when he was about halfway through work on the symphony, Pravda printed an unsigned editorial entitled "Chaos Instead of Music," which singled out his internationally successful opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk for particularly savage condemnation. The fact that the editorial was unsigned indicated that it represented the official Party position. Rumors circulated for a long time that Stalin had directly ordered this attack after he attended a performance of the opera and stormed out after the first act.

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