However, according to Isaak Glikman, an arts critic and close friend, Shostakovich modified the instrumentation because he hoped that demand for his performances as pianist would result in increased opportunities for personal travel.

According to the musicologist Richard Taruskin, Shostakovich modeled his Piano Quintet, including its key and use of Baroque musical forms, on Sergei Taneyev's.

Even before the Piano Quintet's official premiere, it had been nominated for the inaugural Stalin Prize, along with works by Prokofiev, Nikolai Myaskovsky, and Aram Khachaturian.

After three rounds of voting by the prize committee—as well as an unsuccessful last-minute personal appeal to Joseph Stalin from a disgruntled CPSU member who sought to deny the work a prize—the March 16, 1941 issue of Pravda announced that the Piano Quintet won in the first-class category.

Its monetary award of 100,000 rubles attracted significant commentary from music critics in the United States after the work's stateside premiere in Carnegie Hall on April 29, 1941.

Karina Balasanyan, a Russian musicologist, said that the closeness of their partnership, rare in music history, led the Beethoven Quartet to become "emissaries of [Shostakovich's] will".

Gerard McBurney,[3] Laurel Fay,[10] Marina Raku, and Vera Zaitseva state that the Piano Quintet was begun in Shalovo (today part of the town of Luga) and completed in Leningrad.

[11] Khentova said that in July 1940, Shostakovich traveled from Gaspra in Crimea, where he completed his orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, to vacation in the village of Kellomäki (present-day Komarovo).

[16] Richard Taruskin, another musicologist, posited that Shostakovich clearly invoked the Piano Quintet of another Russian composer, Sergei Taneyev.

"Taneyev was the very model of an academic composer", he said, "and in emulating him via his Piano Quintet, Shostakovich was characterizing himself the same way, which as we know by now signaled a big change of direction".

[18] As the movement builds to a climax, Shostakovich abandons the fugal form in favor of homophonic textures that make a more immediate emotive impact.

Valentin Berlinsky recalled that he and his fellow Borodin Quartet members were admonished by Shostakovich for slowing down through a particular passage in the "Prelude" during a 1947 rehearsal of the Piano Quintet.

[27] According to a member of the Glazunov Quartet, Shostakovich "accentuated the constructive, motor elements [of the Piano Quintet], and achieved his effect through clarity and the flow of the music".

Shostakovich evinced a desire to press the tempo in a number of places, but was held back by the "safe" pace set by the Beethoven Quartet.

The extant sketches consist of four sheets of slightly yellowed music paper that bear the title "Rough Draft of the Quintet" and notations in purple ink.

[15] The American premiere of the Piano Quintet, played by the Stuyvesant Quartet with pianist Vivian Rifkin, took place at Carnegie Hall in New York City on April 29, 1941.

It was part of an all-Russian program sponsored by the American Russian Institute that also included performances by Vytautas Bacevičius, Andor Földes, Benny Goodman, and Paul Robeson.

But when the Beethoven Quartet, so well-known to Moscow music-lovers, appeared on the stage with Shostakovich himself, and when the first strains of the Quintet resounded, all workaday, dearly-beloved, and accustomed sensations disappeared without leaving a trace.

Prokofiev interspersed his compliments with objections against the Piano Quintet's length, accusations that Shostakovich trafficked in clichéd mannerisms and sounded geriatric in spite of his youth,[44] and insinuations that the work's rapturous reception with Soviet audiences betrayed their unsophistication.

Acknowledging that the Piano Quintet "aroused in certain musicians a spirit of opposition toward Shostakovich", he criticized the work's detractors for their simplistic expectations of Soviet music.

He also addressed misgivings he heard from some of his colleagues concerning the work's "great and authentic feelings" being filtered "through a prism of thought":[41] This type of art may of course provide the highest aesthetic enjoyment, but not always with blazing immediacy, nor will it be attainable at all levels of musical discernment.

But from that standpoint many of the greatest achievements of human culture will seem antidemocratic, for far from all of them, even in our country, the most democratic in the world, are truly accessible (in the sense of being capable of complete inner assimilation) by a wide audience.

[45]Maximilian Steinberg, Shostakovich's former composition teacher, noted in his diary that the Piano Quintet was "an outstanding work of the Soviet chamber music literature"[46] which throughout displayed "wonderful mastery".

[49] Another committee member, the painter Igor Grabar, refuted his colleague's criticisms:[53] When I was listening to Shostakovich's Quintet, I had the feeling that I was not among contemporary composers, but among the great masters.

Because of Shaverdyan's position as editor of Sovyetskoye Iskusstvo, his endorsement was interpreted by readers as representing the official opinion of the Committee on Arts Affairs and its chairman, Khrapchenko.

Concerned that the article was intended to influence the results of the prize committee's first round of voting, which were scheduled to take place later that same day, Goldenweiser immediately contacted the editorial board of Pravda with his disapproval.

[61] Professional nepotism and privileged seclusion from the general musical audience, Grinberg additionally suggested, resulted in the prize committee's unsatisfactory choices of candidates.

[55] Extant evidence indicates that Grinberg's letter never reached Stalin, who likely never heard Shostakovich's Piano Quintet and customarily remained aloof from matters pertaining to music.

[63][64] The Piano Quintet was awarded a Stalin Prize, first class in the third and final round of voting; the results were publicly announced in Pravda on March 16, 1941.

[66] American journalists in the wake of the stateside premiere of the Piano Quintet frequently commented on the monetary award the work earned with its Stalin Prize; the Pittsburgh Sun Telegraph called it "the most expensive piece of chamber music ever composed".