[2] According to Lev Lebedinsky, the commission resulted from an impromptu visit to the composer's apartment by Vassili Nebolsin, who came to express the Bolshoi's urgent need of a celebratory work on short notice.
[3] With only three days to meet the deadline, Shostakovich agreed to provide an appropriate work and immediately began to compose the Festive Overture.
[8] Gerard McBurney has observed that the work's resemblance to Mikhail Glinka's overture to his opera Ruslan and Lyudmila is evidence for its use as a model for Shostakovich.
grasped the timeliness and necessity of the overture as a mass, democratic genre," praising its "spectacular flash of expressiveness, festive sparkle, [and] brilliance of orchestration."
[12] Five years after Shostakovich's death, the Festive Overture was chosen as the signature musical theme of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow.