THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL MUSICIANS OF ALL TIME

7 The 100 Most Influential Musicians of All Time 7

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 still-unperformed
Symphony No. 4 (1935–36) were withdrawn. The composer
responded with his next major work, Symphony No. 5
(1937). Compounded largely of serious, even sombre and
elegiac music and presented with a compelling directness,
the symphony scored an immediate success with both the
public and the authorities.
With his Symphony No. 5, Shostakovich forged the style
that he used in his subsequent compositions. Gustav
Mahler was a clear progenitor of both Symphony No. 4 and
Symphony No. 5, 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 Symphony No. 5 was
marked by melodic concentration and Classical form.
Indeed, Shostakovich had an almost obsessive concern
with the working out of a single expressive character,
which can also be seen in the recurrence in his mature
music of certain thematic ideas, notably various permuta-
tions founded upon the juxtaposition of the major and
minor third, and the four-note cell D-E♭-C-B derived
from the composer’s initials in their German equivalent
(D. Sch.), interpreted according to the labels of German
musical notation (in which “S,” spoken as “Es,” equals E♭
and “h” equals B).
In 1937 Shostakovich became a teacher of composition
in the Leningrad Conservatory, and the German attack on
the Soviet Union in 1941 found him still in that city. He
composed his Symphony No. 7 (1941) in beleaguered
Leningrad during the latter part of that year and finished
it in Kuybyshev (now Samara), to which he and his family
had been evacuated. The work achieved a quick fame, as