Surprisingly, Shostakovich’s initial reaction was to continue with the composition of his Fourth Symphony and he still had hopes that this would be premiered in Leningrad at the end of the same year, 1936. We do not know at what point in the score of his Fourth Symphony Shostakovich had reached when the Pravda article appeared; it is possible that he may well have had the whole Symphony in mind when he started work in 1935, but one cannot help wondering if the stark, bleak coda was composed in response to the savage criticism. Surely this is the most frightening conclusion of any symphony in the repertoire and it portrays the full horror of Stalin’s Terror, at its height in 1936. Düring this time Shostakovich lived with a suitcase packed as he expected at any time to be taken away to the prison camps strewn across Russia. The Fourth Symphony was rehearsed in late 1936 with the planned premiere set for 3O th December with the Leningrad Philharmonie Orchestra under the Austrian-born conductor Fritz Stiedry, who had recently premiered Shostakovich’s Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and Strings with the composer as soloist. Various reasons have been given for withdrawing the Symphony shortly before the planned premiere: Shostakovich reportedly said that he wanted to re-write the Finale; there were also suggestions that the conductor and orchestra were struggling with the work. Undoubtedly, there was pressure from the local authorities who must have grown increasingly uneasy about what they were hearing during the rehearsals. Whilst there was pressure for cancellation, it was probably very wise in retrospect that the Fourth was not performed, as it would probably have been his last symphony. If Stalin had not liked Lady Macbeth ofMtsensk, whatever would he have made of the cacophonous Fourth Symphony and in particular its unforgivingly dark ending? And so in 1937 Shostakovich embarked on his Fifth Symphony. And please note that he called his new symphony his ‘Fifth’ and merely put the Fourth Symphony aside with the plan that it would be performed at a later date, not knowing that it would wait another quarter of a Century, receiving its belated Moscow premiere in December 1961 during the Khrushchev artistic thaw. Shostakovich did not make any revisions to the score that he completed in 1936. Shostakovich knew that he now had to produce a symphony that would comply with the doctrines of ‘Socialist Realism’ as applied to music. The conductor Fritz Steidry left Leningrad after the cancelation of the Fourth Symphony and the young Yevgeny Mravinsky was asked to take Charge of the premiere of the Fifth Symphony. His nervousness at the task is well captured in his personal account of this time, starting with his hope that the composer would be able to advise him regarding the work in question: ‘However, my first meeting with Shostakovich shattered my hopes. However many questions I put to him, I didn’t succeed in eliciting anything from him. In the future I encountered this reticence in regard to his other compositions. This made every meagre comment all the more valuable. In truth, the character of our perception of music differed greatly. I do not like to search for subjective, literary, and concrete images in music which is not by nature programmatic, whereas Shostakovich very often explained his intentions with very specific images and associations. But one way or another, any remark on his own compositions that you can wrest from a composer is always of enormous value to a performer. ‘Initially I could get no Information about the tempo indications in the Fifth Symphony. I then had to recourse to cunning. During our work together I sat at the piano and deliberately took