retitled Katerina Izmaylova), marked a stylistic retreat. Yet, even this more accessible musical language was now too radical for the Soviet authorities. From 1928, when Joseph Stalin had inaugurated his First Five-Year Plan, an iron hand fastened on Soviet culture, and in music a direct and popular style was demanded. Avant-garde music and jazz were banished, and for a while even the unproblematic Tchaikovsky was out of favor. Shostakovich did not experience immediate official displeasure, but when it came, it was devastating. It has been said that it was Stalin's personal anger at what he heard when he attended a performance of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in 1936 that precipitated the official condemnation of the opera and of its creator. Shostakovich was bitterly attacked in the official press, and both the opera and the, until then, unperformed Fourth Symphony (1935-36) were withdrawn. The composer's next major work was his Fifth Symphony (1937), which he described as "A Soviet artist's reply to just criticism.” A trivial, dutifully "optimistic" work might have been expected; what emerged was compounded largely of serious, even somber and elegiac music, presented with a compelling directness that scored an immediate success with the public and even the authorities. With the Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich escaped from the stylistic instability of his earlier works, finally forging the personal style that he used in his subsequent compositions. Gustav Mahler was a clear progenitor of both the Fourth and Fifth symphonies, but the latter represented a drastic shift in technique. Whereas the earlier symphony had been a sprawling work, founded upon a free proliferation of melodic ideas, the first movement of the Fifth was marked by melodic concentration--certain particles providing the main bases of music that grows organically to a relentless climax. This single-mindedness is reflected elsewhere in Shostakovich's wor...
