Pietari Inkinen

Details

Information

Commissioned by the government of Finland to celebrate the fiftieth birthday of Sibelius, already regarded as a national hero, the Fifth was a troubled work that cost the composer seven years of gestation, from 1912 to 1919. Unforgettable is the «swan theme», which gives the Fifth its identity as the «swan symphony»: that motif, played by horns and trombones, was inspired by the sight of sixteen swans flying over his house at Ainola, deep in the Finnish forests.
Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich

In 1937, at the height of the terrible Stalinist purges, Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his Fifth Symphony, one of his most anguished works. The year before he had been attacked by Pravda, which accused him of «formalism», the bourgeois art that was the «enemy» of the people. In that very period Shostakovich had finished the experimental and complex Fourth Symphony, but once in the regime’s sights he decided to lock it away and wait for better times. In its place he composed the Fifth, a work strangely appreciated by the Soviet establishment, which failed to recognise the composer’s painful act of denunciation hidden beneath an apparently triumphal façade. Years later Shostakovich himself would reveal how the jubilation of this symphony was a mask worn in order to set creativity free in a time of terror.