Symphony No. 4 in C Minor

Shostakovich’s Fourth is both an expression of extreme personal crisis and one of the great Russian tragic symphonies. At the time he began it, in 1935, Shostakovich was a Soviet hero, “the Red Beethoven”, his opera A Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District performed all over the world. The following year, he was stunned to read a vicious denunciation of the opera in the newspaper Pravda. At this time, denunciations frequently led to arrests, and even executions. Shostakovich finished the Fourth Symphony, but he was rightly dissuaded from trying to get it performed. The music veers from savage satire to manic brilliance, its mood growingly ominous, with a devastatingly tragic ending. At a time when art was expected to hymn the rightness of the Communist Utopia, performing it would have been incendiary. Shostakovich hid the score, and it wasn’t heard in public until 1961, when it was a huge success. On one level the Fourth Symphony is a terrifying record of terrifying times, but for many it is also a moving, inspiring record of how Shostakovich found the strength to survive.