Can Music Be Political?

             Born in 1906, Shostakovich was one of the two most important composers of the Soviet period, the other being Prokofiev, and certainly the leading composer during the Stalin period. His works all seemed to follow Stalin's guidelines set regarding the composition of new music, but it has been highly debated that he is rejecting everything that Stalin had enforced on composers and even in places mocking Stalin. His Fifth Symphony is one of the most debated examples of whether or not music can be political. At the time that Shostakovich wrote the Fifth Symphony, his work was beginning to take two tacks, the first the melodic style found in his later symphonies and the other is that of a laborious, prolonged style of working out supposedly conflicting but not always obvious ideas.
             "The two styles, neither of which, to be sure, dominates exclusively any one work, are the fruit of Shostakovich's severing his ties with the stage, and particularly with the idiom he had previously fancied appropriate thereto. The depth of the conflict lies in the fact that the decision was Shostakovich's own, regardless of the fact that external factors would have forced such a decision in any case. When official reasoning in the mid-thirties indicated that Shostakovich's music was ideologically and socially wrong, there is no indication that Shostakovich did not immediately try to understand and adopt, as well as he could, that line of reasoning, criticizing himself and apologizing sincerely."-Stanley Dale Krebs, Soviet Composers.
             Up until the publication of "Testimony: the memoirs of Demitri Shostakovich" edited by Solomon Volkov in 1979, it was unclear what the composers intentions were when writing the Fifth Symphony. Even fellow composers living under the same threat from Stalin failed to see the hidden meanings in his work. In the early 1940's, Prokofiev criticized Shostakovich's lack of musical daring, accusing him of writing "safe" music.