The program notes for the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra’s first Masterworks concert of the 2026-27 season (September 3) are below. The text that appears in the program may be modified from that which appears here. Tickets can be purchased online.
The Composers and the Stalinist Regime
Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich were the two greatest Soviet composers of the Stalin era, but their relationships with the regime differed fundamentally. Prokofiev voluntarily returned to the Soviet Union after many years abroad. He believed that his prestige and political detachment would permit him to work comfortably within the system. Shostakovich never had such a choice. He grew to adulthood under Soviet rule and learned, through repeated encounters with terror, how to survive inside it. Prokofiev’s tragedy was that he entered Stalin’s world through miscalculation. Shostakovich’s was that he could never leave it.
Prokofiev was fifteen years older and had already established an international career as both concert pianist and composer before Stalin acquired absolute power. After leaving Russia in 1918, he lived in the United States and Western Europe, where he composed such works as the Third Piano Concerto, The Love for Three Oranges, and several ballets. He was cosmopolitan, famous, and accustomed to moving freely among countries and artistic circles.
Shostakovich, by contrast, was formed almost entirely by Soviet institutions. His First Symphony made him internationally famous while he was still a student, but his career remained dependent upon Soviet orchestras, theaters, publishers, conservatories, and cultural officials. Prokofiev knew that another world existed because he had lived in it. Shostakovich knew the West principally through music, books, visitors, and occasional supervised journeys.
This difference shaped their attitudes toward the government. Prokofiev was politically indifferent and extraordinarily self-confident. He seems to have believed that Soviet officials needed him more than he needed them. The government encouraged this illusion. It offered commissions, generous fees, prestigious productions, comfortable housing, servants, and the prospect of recognition as Russia’s leading living composer. Dissatisfied with his somewhat uncertain position in Western Europe and increasingly homesick, he settled permanently in Moscow in 1936.
The date could hardly have been worse. Stalin’s Great Terror was beginning, and artistic life was being brought under rigid ideological control. Only months earlier, Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District had been condemned in Pravda. Prokofiev nevertheless returned, apparently assuming that Shostakovich’s disgrace was either temporary or irrelevant to him. His misjudgment was remarkable. He entered the Soviet Union precisely when it was becoming nearly impossible to leave and when artistic independence was being redefined as a political offense.
Shostakovich had already learned what Prokofiev failed to understand. In January 1936, Stalin attended Lady Macbeth and left before the opera was over. Two days later, Pravda published “Muddle Instead of Music,” accusing the opera of vulgarity, dissonance, and formalism. At the height of Stalinist terror, such language could precede arrest or execution. Shostakovich’s income collapsed, performances were canceled, and his associates began disappearing into prisons and execution chambers. The youthful exuberance that had characterized his work to this point was forever quashed.
From that moment, fear became a permanent element of his life. Prokofiev encountered Stalinism chiefly as censorship, bureaucratic interference, financial pressure, and the destruction or arrest of people around him. Shostakovich experienced it more immediately as a possible death sentence. The difference was one of degree rather than kind, but it affected their music and conduct profoundly.
Both composers responded by adapting their styles, but they did so differently. Prokofiev had already begun advocating what he called a “new simplicity” – a clearer and more lyrical musical language. Soviet aesthetic doctrine appeared, at first, to coincide with this development. Works such as Peter and the Wolf, Romeo and Juliet, Alexander Nevsky, Cinderella, the Fifth Symphony, and portions of War and Peace demonstrated that accessibility need not mean artistic inferiority. His Soviet works often contain broad melodies, strong rhythms, vivid characterization, and immediate dramatic appeal.
Yet Prokofiev’s natural musical personality remained abrasive, sardonic, rhythmically aggressive, and harmonically unpredictable. Soviet officials could admire his melodies while objecting to the very traits that made him Prokofiev. They demanded revisions, delayed productions, altered librettos, and rejected works that seemed insufficiently optimistic or too complex. His attempt to satisfy the government without ceasing to be himself became increasingly exhausting.
Shostakovich responded less through simplification than through ambiguity. After the denunciation of Lady Macbeth, he withdrew his huge and uncompromising Fourth Symphony before its premiere; it was not performed until 25 years later, in 1961. He then produced the Fifth Symphony, a more conventionally structured work officially described as “A Soviet artist’s creative response to just criticism.” Its finale could be heard as a triumphant affirmation, but it could also sound forced, brutal, and emotionally hollow.
This doubleness became central to Shostakovich’s mature art. His music could satisfy official expectations on the surface while suggesting grief, terror, sarcasm, or resistance beneath them. Marches might sound heroic or grotesque. Celebrations might resemble coercion. Laughter might become hysteria. Prokofiev generally tried to give the government what it requested while preserving his distinctive musical craftsmanship. Shostakovich became a master at writing music whose political meaning could not be securely fixed.
It would be too simple, however, to describe Shostakovich as the secret dissident and Prokofiev as the willing collaborator. Both men wrote propaganda. Prokofiev composed Zdravitsa, or Hail to Stalin, for the dictator’s sixtieth birthday. Shostakovich wrote patriotic cantatas, film music, ceremonial pieces, and The Song of the Forests, which praised Stalin as the benevolent transformer of the Soviet landscape. Both delivered public confessions, accepted official honors, and allowed their names to be used by the regime.
Neither composer was politically heroic in the conventional sense. They did not openly oppose Stalin. Open opposition would almost certainly have resulted in imprisonment or death. Their public compliance must therefore be judged within a society in which a careless remark, an unfavorable artistic judgment, or mere association with a condemned person could destroy an entire family.
The essential difference lies in their awareness of the bargain they were making. Prokofiev entered it voluntarily and initially expected to retain considerable autonomy. Shostakovich was forced into it and understood its dangers almost from the beginning. Prokofiev treated politics as an irritating distraction from composition. Shostakovich came to recognize that politics could determine whether a composition was performed, whether he could teach, whether his family could eat, and whether he would still be alive the following morning.
Their personal temperaments also differed. Prokofiev was confident, emotionally reserved, practical, and sometimes remarkably insensitive to danger. His diaries reveal an artist deeply absorbed in his work, career, financial arrangements, spiritual interests, and personal relationships, but often slow to grasp the full implications of political events. He seems to have believed that professional usefulness and international fame gave him leverage.
Shostakovich was nervous, vulnerable, self-conscious, and acutely aware of the power surrounding him. His anxious manner could be almost comic, but it was rooted in genuine fear. He developed a public personality of exaggerated obedience while privately expressing bitter opinions to trusted friends. His tendency to speak through irony was not merely an aesthetic preference; it was also a survival mechanism.
The regime manipulated both men through alternating reward and punishment. Prokofiev received six Stalin Prizes and was repeatedly presented as a major Soviet composer. Shostakovich likewise received numerous Stalin Prizes, official titles, prestigious appointments, and international prominence. These honors did not mean that either man was secure. Under Stalin, distinction could increase danger by making an artist more visible and therefore more useful as an example.
Both were condemned in the anti-formalist decree of 1948. Their music was accused of pessimism, excessive complexity, individualism, and alienation from the Soviet people. Performances disappeared, incomes declined, and both composers were required to confess their supposed errors publicly. The decree revealed the absurdity of Stalinist cultural control. The state had rewarded the same composers it now denounced and would soon reward them again.
The consequences were especially severe for Prokofiev because his health was already failing. He suffered from severe hypertension, sustained a serious concussion in a fall in 1945, and later suffered a stroke, forcing him to reduce his activity. His estranged wife, Lina, was arrested shortly after the 1948 decree and sentenced to twenty years in labor camps. Although her arrest was not necessarily ordered as a direct punishment of Prokofiev, it demonstrated that his international fame could not protect even his own family.
Shostakovich lost his conservatory positions and feared financial ruin. He placed some of his most personal works in a desk drawer, including the First Violin Concerto and From Jewish Folk Poetry. He wrote officially acceptable music to restore his position while withholding works that might attract further condemnation. This division between public and private composition was more pronounced in Shostakovich than in Prokofiev.
Their wartime symphonies also reveal their contrasting responses. Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, composed in 1944, is expansive, confident, and grandly lyrical. Although its conclusion contains violence and ambiguity, the work broadly projects human strength and dignity. It was readily accepted as a major patriotic statement.
Shostakovich’s wartime symphonies were more troublesome. The Seventh made him a symbol of resistance during the siege of Leningrad, but the Eighth offered tragedy rather than victory. His Ninth Symphony was expected to be a monumental celebration of Stalin’s defeat of Nazi Germany. Instead, Shostakovich produced a short, witty, antic work that deflated heroic expectations. Whether intended as political mockery or not, it was precisely the wrong response to Stalin’s desire for glorification.
Prokofiev was often more direct and theatrical; Shostakovich was more psychologically evasive. Prokofiev’s music could portray violence, tenderness, grotesquerie, and passion with extraordinary vividness. Shostakovich’s music often dramatized the instability of meaning itself. One could rarely be certain whether a triumphant passage was sincere, parodic, terrified, or all three at once.
This distinction should not be exaggerated. Prokofiev was capable of profound ambiguity, especially in the piano sonatas, later symphonies, and War and Peace. Shostakovich was capable of direct lyricism and genuine public grandeur. Nevertheless, Prokofiev’s characteristic strategy was accommodation through craftsmanship, while Shostakovich’s was accommodation through equivocation.
Their relationships with Russian tradition also differed. Prokofiev returned partly because he wanted a national audience and believed that Russian soil would nourish his music. He imagined himself becoming the central figure in a renewed Russian musical culture. Shostakovich never needed to return to Russia because he had never left it. His Russianness was inseparable from Soviet reality, including its communal rituals, bureaucratic language, cheap popular songs, military marches, private grief, and public lies.
The final contrast is almost symbolic. Prokofiev died on March 5, 1953, less than an hour before Stalin. The dictator’s death overwhelmed public life so completely that Prokofiev’s passing received little notice. Flowers had been commandeered for Stalin’s funeral, and relatively few people attended the composer’s burial. The man who had returned to Russia hoping to occupy a place of national honor was eclipsed in death by the ruler whose system had trapped and diminished him.
Shostakovich survived Stalin by twenty-two years. He was able to release previously suppressed works and compose music that more openly confronted memory, death, persecution, and personal identity. Yet Stalin’s disappearance did not make him free. He remained subject to Soviet pressure, joined the Communist Party in 1960 under circumstances that appear to have caused him intense distress, and continued to sign official statements that may not have represented his private views.
His survival allowed him to become the principal musical witness to the Stalinist age. The Tenth Symphony, the late string quartets, the Fourteenth Symphony, and other works gave him opportunities unavailable to Prokofiev. Shostakovich could look back upon Stalinism, however cautiously, while Prokofiev died before any meaningful political thaw began.
Prokofiev’s Soviet career is therefore a tragedy of miscalculation. He exchanged international freedom for security, prestige, and a national role, only to discover that the promised security was illusory and the prestige conditional. His confidence in his ability to manage the regime proved unfounded.
Shostakovich’s career is a tragedy of entrapment. He learned early that the state could destroy him, yet he had no realistic means of escape. His life became a continuous performance in which public obedience protected a private creative self. The emotional strain of that performance entered his music and became one of its defining subjects.
Prokofiev preserved his identity by continuing to compose unmistakably Prokofievian music despite official demands. Shostakovich preserved his by dividing it into public and private forms, often allowing both to coexist within the same composition. Prokofiev tried to remain himself while accommodating the state. Shostakovich made the very act of accommodation part of his artistic language.
Both men compromised, suffered, and produced masterpieces. Neither can be reduced to the label of collaborator, dissident, victim, or opportunist. Prokofiev underestimated totalitarian power; Shostakovich understood it all too well. Prokofiev entered Stalin’s system believing that genius would protect him. Shostakovich survived it by never assuming that he was protected at all.
The Festive Overture
Shostakovich wrote the Festive Overture in just three days in 1954 for an official concert at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre celebrating the thirty-seventh anniversary of the October Revolution. It is a brilliant orchestral showpiece bursting with speed, color, and high spirits. A bold brass fanfare launches the work, followed by a breathless main theme that races through the orchestra. Though outwardly celebratory, the music has the composer’s characteristic edge – its exuberance is so intense and precisely controlled that it can seem almost theatrical. The overture ends in a dazzling blaze of brass and percussion, making it one of Shostakovich’s most immediately accessible and frequently performed works.
Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 3
Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, completed in 1921, is his most popular concerto and one of the great virtuoso works of the twentieth century. It combines dazzling keyboard technique with sharp wit, driving rhythm, lyrical melody, and the composer’s characteristic blend of elegance and aggression.
The first movement opens with a quiet clarinet melody before the piano enters with explosive energy. Its contrasting ideas move between brilliance, irony, and lyricism. The second movement is a set of variations on a deliberately simple theme, each variation transforming it through changing rhythms, textures, and moods. The finale is fast, muscular, and often mischievous, with a broad romantic episode at its center before the concerto drives to a spectacular conclusion.
Despite its technical difficulty, the concerto is never merely a display piece. Its virtuosity grows directly from its musical character: athletic, humorous, percussive, and intensely alive.
Shostakovich Symphony No. 5
Dmitri Shostakovich composed his Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47, in 1937, during the most dangerous crisis of his career. As mentioned above, his successful opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had been attacked in Pravda as “Muddle instead of Music,” almost certainly reflecting Stalin’s displeasure. Performances of his music were canceled. In the atmosphere of Stalin’s Great Terror, official condemnation threatened not merely a composer’s career but potentially his freedom and life.
The Fifth Symphony was therefore intended, at least publicly, to demonstrate that Shostakovich had accepted the government’s criticism. It was described in the Soviet press as “A Soviet artist’s creative response to just criticism,” though the phrase was not printed in the score. The symphony returned to a traditional four-movement structure, clearer melodies, and a more accessible musical language. It premiered in Leningrad on November 21, 1937, with Yevgeny Mravinsky conducting, and received an overwhelming public response. Its success restored Shostakovich to official favor. It is the most frequently performed of his 15 symphonies.
The first movement begins quietly but ominously, with a jagged, dotted theme in the strings. The music alternates between bleak introspection, lyrical passages, and increasingly dark marches. A threatening central climax gives the impression of machinery or military power overwhelming the individual. The movement ends not in resolution but in eerie stillness, with the celesta adding an almost otherworldly color.
The second movement is a sardonic scherzo resembling a distorted waltz. Its heavy-footed rhythms and exaggerated gestures suggest a grotesque dance or parody of official merriment. Shostakovich’s humor is unmistakable, but it is humor with a menacing edge: the gaiety feels deliberately coarse and unstable.
The third movement, a largo for strings and winds without brass, is the symphony’s emotional center. Its long, lamenting melodies build toward passages of overwhelming grief before gradually subsiding into silence. Early listeners, many of whom had lost relatives and friends during the purges, reportedly understood the movement as an expression of suffering that could not be acknowledged publicly. Without words or an explicit program, Shostakovich created what amounts to a communal lament.
The finale begins with a violent march and drives toward an apparently triumphant ending in D major. Officially, this could be heard as the composer overcoming doubt and joining in Soviet optimism. Yet the closing triumph is extraordinarily prolonged and forceful. Brass and percussion proclaim victory while the strings repeat the same note relentlessly. Depending upon the conductor’s tempo and emphasis, the ending may sound genuinely heroic, grimly determined, or like rejoicing imposed at gunpoint. Its meaning remains one of the most debated questions in twentieth-century music.
It is tempting to interpret the Fifth as a coded denunciation of Stalin, but the work resists so simple an explanation. Shostakovich may have been simultaneously seeking rehabilitation, expressing private grief, and satisfying an audience that heard its own suffering in his music. The symphony’s greatness lies in this ambiguity. It gave Soviet officials the affirmative conclusion they demanded while allowing other listeners to hear tragedy, coercion, and survival beneath the surface.
The Fifth Symphony saved Shostakovich’s career, but it is far more than an act of political accommodation. Its combination of formal clarity, memorable themes, biting irony, and profound sorrow made it his most popular symphony. It portrays the individual struggling against an immense external force and arriving at a victory whose authenticity can never be taken for granted.
