Talk:Symphony No. 5 (Shostakovich)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 27 August 2020 and 3 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Leonin d NotreDame.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 10:35, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Untitled
does anyone else think that the fact that morrissey sampled this in the song 'the teachers are afraid of the pupils of the album southpaw grammar should be included??? In words of a critic, the composer had finally succeeded to free himself from "individualistic chaos and formalist experimentation". Which critic? Mark1 00:12, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Removal of the "trivia"
I hope nobody is too upset for my removal of the silly bit of trivia that somebody inserted into this article. Pop musicians "sampling" from serious music is nothing unusual and deserves no special mention in an article dealing with serious music. After all, I don't see anyone citing Dr. Dre's and Xzibit's use of J.S. Bach's Third Brandenburg Concerto in their song, Symphony in X major (I think that's what it was called) from the Man vs. Machine album in the Brandenburg concerto article.

Hey, it was me that added it, thought it might be interesting but if you feel that it isn't appropriate then ok.

And by the way, Morrissey isn't a pop musician :D


 * Within pop music, certain pop music critics and audiences tend to make fine (and fairly arbitrary--and I would say silly as well) distinctions that depend on the assumption that no other music than pop music even exists. So they talk and write of a "pop music" within pop music. Whatever the validity of this (and I personally would say it has very little--if any-- validity), Morrissey is most certainly a pop musician in the broader sense of the term, and this is certainly the sense which the original editor above intended. TheScotch (talk) 13:02, 27 November 2016 (UTC)


 * Steven Patrick Morrissey is "singer, songwriter and author" (if we can believe his Wikipedia article, of course). The band with which he was lead singer, The Smiths, was an Indie rock band. The identity of genres within "pop" music is just as valid as that of genres within "classical" music, isn't it? If there is a reliable secondary source for Morrisey's sampling of a piece, I don't see why it is necessarily "trivia".  Martinevans123 (talk) 13:36, 27 November 2016 (UTC)

Something Silly
"Most believe the beginning to be boring, but Shostakovich knows how to write his music, so when the climatic sections are present they are most exciting and intensly musically entertaining."

is "boring" the right word here, it seems more appropriate to say "uneventful". and "but Shostakovich knows how to write his music" sounds bad, really bad. I would ask for removal or re-wording.

and intensely is spelled wrong.

I will get to work ASAP on a general rewrite of this article. El Chileno Chido 19:29, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, this article definitely needs rewriting... my four cents: - "first movement starts calm, tense, and slow" if you've heard it, it's certainly not calm - more distressed and menacing. in the performances i've heard, it doesn't sound particularly slow with its moderato marking either.

- "The strings then come in with a very fun and exciting melody" this is just an extreme example of the sloppy, informal and childish tone of this article. i would argue that the string melody is far from 'very fun' also.

- two different spellings of timpani are used throughout the article.

- "The last two measures is a percussion soli featuring the tympani and the bass drum, but most people remember the very end of the piece as the "cool bass drum solo"." OK, solo is spelled wrong but this really is the icing on the cake. I can't believe an article on such a famous piece ended up like this.

Apalling Article
Someone needs to rewrite this article ASAP. It's worse than Ian MacDonald!```` —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Glasnost111 (talk • contribs) 10:42, 8 February 2007 (UTC).

Planning on some serious revision
I'm listening to the symphony right now, and it's pretty clear that a lot of the article needs rewriting. I'll try to redo some of it in a few days. All the subjective descriptions of the movements need to be taken out (especially anything having to do with "fun" -- obviously somebody didn't understand Shostakovich at all), and the fourth movement doesn't need a blow-by-blow synopsis. People can just go listen to it instead :-) I have a better translation of the famous quote about the ending, and some more useful info in general, from a terrific book by David Dubal -- "The Essential Canon of Classical Music."  A little background on Shostie could be included too, to show where the symphony came from -- what do you all think?  It's definitely a very "motivated" piece, and he risked his life writing it.

By the way, I HIGHLY recommend the recording by Kertesz, with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, 1962. The Realms of Gold 02:00, 17 March 2007 (UTC)


 * I started a bit of toning down, but it's nowhere near complete. The article is pretty fawningly quoting of Macdonald in its citations. DJRafe (talk) 00:13, 14 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I agree. I am fairly new to Shostakovich, but although I greatly (but not unreservedly) admire Macdonald's book on the Beatles, I don't think much of his book on Shostakovich. In any case, it's not good for an article to rely overmuch on one source as this article does, especially if that source (Macdonald) is heavily reliant on the Testimony book. The psychological truth of that book, however compelling it may be to Shostakovich fans who wish that their hero were a genuine dissident, must remain in question as long as the book's own authenticity is unproven, which it is. Also, I don't like a Wikipedia article telling me exactly what to think of a work of art based on someone else's interpretation of it; I would prefer to see more balance in the interpretations. For every Macdonald telling me that it's secretly subversive, I want to hear at least one Soviet hack telling me that it's a glorious work of Soviet art. That, after all, is an important truth about the 5th Symphony; it helped get DS back into favour with the regime, and for all the attempts by Western liberals to prove that Shostakovich's 5th is "actually" ironic or critical, the irony seems to have been entirely lost on the Party and the public, most of whom thought it was great. Lexo (talk) 00:55, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

Bartok quote at end of 1st movement?
Can anyone cast any light on what I hear as a quote from Bartok's 1st quartet at the end of the 1st movement of Shostakovich's 5th symphony? One minute before the end of the 1st movement of Shostakovich's 5th symphony, the solo violin plays a slow tune. This sounds like the tune in the two violins in Bartok's 1st quartet, 90 seconds before the end of the 2nd movement, immediately after the cello pizzicatos. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bartokfan (talk • contribs) 20:02, 29 May 2008 (UTC)


 * You're right, the melody played by the solo violin in the 5th does sound like the melody played by the two violins in Bartok's 1st quartet - an ascending scale followed by a five-note motif. It may be that Shostakovich was unconsciously quoting Bartok. I know that he studied Bartok's works as a young man. He may have been doing a conscious homage, having identified a very Shostakovichian melodic fragment in a Bartok piece. Or it might just be a coincidence. I don't have any evidence of him making a conscious nod to Bartok here. Lexo (talk) 01:03, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

"Carmen" references
I'm not doubting that there is a reference to the Habañera in the first movement, but I can't seem to hear where in the movement, either listening or by viewing the score. I can somewhat guess by listening to the last few minutes of the movement with the interchanging rhythms in the lower orchestra and the solo violin melody, but I'm not quite sure if that's it. If someone could highlight where it is (either in response to this message or in the main article), I'd much appreciate that; thanks. --DannyDaWriter (talk) 06:47, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

I removed http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/mn200/music/shostakovich/fifth-symphony.html
I removed http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/mn200/music/shostakovich/fifth-symphony.html. It has almost no information on the fifth and has just a few notes on the personal listening experience of someone. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.64.228.99 (talk) 06:46, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Requesting consensus to move 'Notable Recordings' to new section
New page Symphony No. 5 (Shostakovich) discography proposed. See also discussion on Talk:Symphony No. 1 (Shostakovich). Centaur81 (talk) 05:39, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

Interpretation/Testimony
An edit in April by Sallyrob added the following paragraph.


 * While most performances and recordings of the symphony have ended with a gradual acceleration of the coda, especially Leonard Bernstein's October 1959 Columbia Records recording with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra (following a performance in Moscow in the presence of the composer), more recent renditions have reflected Shostakovich's true attitude. Shostakovich's friend and colleague Mstislav Rostropovich conducted the closing minutes in a much slower, subdued manner, never accelerating; he did this in a performance in Russia with the National Symphony Orchestra and in their commercial Teldec recording. He told CBS that Shostakovich had written a "hidden message" in the symphony, which is supported by the composer's words in Testimony.

This should be removed or changed. As far as this encyclopedia is concerned, Testimony is to be treated only as ostensibly Shostakovich's work, so it should not say "the composer's words in Testimony". It could be added if reworded and attributed to a specific source (such as MacDonald). Moreover, the composer's "true attitude" is not unambiguously known in this instance. Rostropovich's statement can be kept as long as it is cited. I have decided against removing the section entirely as it contains some valuable information about changing attitudes regarding interpretation over time. Perhaps something akin to the Japanese Wiki's article can be added, giving examples of conductors who use fast and slow tempos in the movement and/or its coda. Xenofan 29A (talk) 19:48, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

Movement descriptions are weird
Sorry if this doesn't follow normal talk page conventions, I'm new to this, have just been using this page for an assignment and some stuff really bothered me:

- there's random capitalisation all through the 'form' section - probably don't need "follows the Sonata form, which many composers use for the first Movement of a Symphony, which consists of three sections, the Exposition, the Development and the Recapitulation" - unnecessary (and not strictly correct) - some of the word choices are weird, it sounds a bit like it's been translated from another language or something - like a "strenuous string figure" and "This movement gives perfect contrast to the Finale; it sounds beautiful" which also is subjective - "This movement, in A-B-A structure, comes out of nowhere." Subjective, and just a bit weird — Preceding unsigned comment added by 110.21.239.234 (talk) 10:26, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

Shostakovich 5 music files?
Earlier today I moved the recently uploaded files of a performance of Shostakovich 5 to the “Form” section. I debated removing them, but decided to hold off. My concern is that the use of a recording of the symphony in its entirety violates copyright. While the performance rights by the DuPage Symphony are public domain, that doesn’t mean that copyright laws regarding the music performed are lifted. These are two different things. According to US law, at least, the copyright on Shostakovich 5 doesn’t lapse until 2032—which would not make it acceptable to use in its entirety here. Can somebody more familiar with copyright and music use step in here for clarification? Just pinging you FYI. —CurryTime7-24 (talk) 22:16, 15 January 2021 (UTC)