[2][3][4][5] Shostakovich began to plan and sketch the Fifteenth in late 1970, with the intention of composing for himself a cheerful work to mark his 65th birthday the next year.

The Fifteenth Symphony was first performed privately in a reduction for two pianos for members of the Union of Soviet Composers and invited guests in August 1971.

The premiere took place in Moscow on January 8, 1972, performed by the All-Union Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra conducted by Maxim Shostakovich.

Bernard Jacobson wrote in 1972 that the symphony's lasting appeal was secured because it made use of "one of [Shostakovich's] greatest expressive assets—a teasing and often powerfully affective emotional ambivalence".

[8] Shostakovich completed a sketch outline of the Fifteenth Symphony totaling 18 pages,[9] which used spare notation and extensive shorthand,[10] by no later than April 2, 1971.

[3] The sketch manuscript also includes an unfinished and still unpublished setting of Yevgeny Yevtushenko's "Yelabuga Nail", a poem about the suicide of Marina Tsvetayeva.

[13]Shostakovich later made similar remarks to Sofia Khentova, telling her that the symphony did not "allow [him] a moment's rest": It was a work which simply grabbed me, one of the few which appeared in my mind with total clarity from first note to last.

[19] Shostakovich wrote to Shaginyan on August 26 that the completion of the symphony he had "worked on day and night" left him feeling as if in a void.

Aside from an arrangement of the "Serenade" by Gaetano Braga, which was intended for an unrealized projected opera based on Anton Chekhov's "The Black Monk"), Shostakovich composed nothing again until the Fourteenth Quartet in March 1973.

The completed score of the Fifteenth Symphony was sent to copyists at the Union of Soviet Composers by September 9 in preparation for its world premiere, which had been announced for autumn 1971.

[26] Leopold Stokowski had vied for the rights to conduct the American premiere, but lost to Eugene Ormandy, who performed it with the Philadelphia Orchestra on September 28, 1972.

Hugh Ottaway observed that Shostakovich's use of such motifs in this symphony create an "enlarged tonal field in which 'chromatic' and 'diatonic' cease to be meaningful distinctions".

[33] A muted string restatement of the opening chorale fades away on a timpani roll, after which bassoons announce the start of the scherzando third movement.

"[43] Tikhon Khrennikov praised the symphony as one of Shostakovich's "most profound", adding that it was "full of optimism [and] belief in man's inexhaustible strength".

[44] The first movement drew especial praise from Norman Kay in England, who called it a "tour-de-force of concentration, self-dissolution, and musical economy".

[45] Eric Roseberry noted that the symphony's instrumental timbres and use of passacaglia suggested that Shostakovich had been influenced by the late operas of his friend, Benjamin Britten.

[51] He reported to Glikman[31] and Krzysztof Meyer that he made use of "exact quotations" from Beethoven, as well as Rossini and Wagner, and that he had been under the influence of Mahler's music while he composed the symphony.

[53] Maxim Shostakovich expressed the opinion that to him the symphony reflected "the great philosophical problems of a man's life cycle".

[55] Alfred Schnittke, whose own music was deeply influenced by Shostakovich,[56][57] held that the Fifteenth was a "crossroads in time" where "the past enters into new relationships with the present, and, like the ghost of