In January 1936, halfway through this period, Pravda—under direct orders from Joseph Stalin[1]—published an editorial "Muddle Instead of Music" that denounced the composer and targeted his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
Despite this attack and the political climate of the time, Shostakovich completed the symphony and planned its premiere for December 1936 in Leningrad.
On 28 January 1936, when he was about halfway through work on the symphony, Pravda printed an unsigned editorial entitled "Muddle Instead of Music", which singled out his internationally successful opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk for condemnation.
Rumors circulated for a long time that Stalin had directly ordered this attack after he attended a performance of the opera and stormed out after the first act.
Stalin, under cover of the Central Committee, may have singled out Shostakovich because the plot and music of Lady Macbeth infuriated him, the opera contradicted Stalin's intended social and cultural direction for the nation at that period, or he resented the recognition Shostakovich was receiving both in the Soviet Union and in the West.
[1] The composer also played the score on piano for Otto Klemperer, who responded enthusiastically and planned to conduct the symphony's first performance outside the USSR in Latin America.
[10] After a number of rehearsals that made the musicians increasingly unenthusiastic,[11] Shostakovich met with several officials of the Composers Union and the Communist Party, along with I.M.
The composer's direct participation is unknown, but the newspaper Soviet Art (Sovetskoe iskusstvo) published a notice that Shostakovich had asked for the symphony's premiere to be cancelled "on the grounds that it in no way corresponds to his current creative convictions and represents for him a long-outdated creative phase", that it suffered from "grandiosomania" and he planned to revise it.
Using the orchestral parts that survived from the 1936 rehearsals, Shostakovich had a two-piano version published in an edition of 300 copies in Moscow in 1946.
were excited at the prospect of finding a major missing link in Shostakovich's creative output, yet refrained from value-laden comparisons.
[16] The symphony is strongly influenced by Gustav Mahler, whose music Shostakovich had been closely studying with Ivan Sollertinsky during the preceding ten years.