4. Symphony №5 in D minor, Op. 47: First Movement (Moderato)

(Premiered Nov. 21, 1937, with Yevgeny Mravinsky conducting the Symphony Orchestra of the Leningrad State Philharmonic);
composed by Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich (1906-1975)

If you know Shostakovich, you probably know this symphony. If you know this symphony, you probably know that Stalin’s positive response to it was the only thing keeping the composer out of the Gulag. He was their best beyond question, and even Stalin apparently thought so. Just that every now and then the apparatchiks made him pule like a whipped dog on cue because too many pointy-heads at liberty have a way of slowing History down, despite bringing the nonpareil socialist flavor. But he was Shostakovich and he puled like he did anything else. In the first movement, the trumpety pageant of inexorable history thunders past, but in the last minute, the strings go almost completely quiet while an unprepossessing secondary theme introduced earlier, is reintroduced as a smiling curse: a lonely solo theme played first by piccolo, then seconded by violin. A pule like disobedient history. Bulgakov had to keep the manuscript of The Master and Maragarita literally buried when he was not writing it, as if his words might run away and denounce their author. Shostakovich had no choice but to put an equivalent insult in plain sight. But he put it where no one dared touch it.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day during Advent (approximately).