The turning point for Shostakovich's career came in 1936, when Stalin himself attended a performance of Shostakovich's opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Stalin disliked the opera, and the government newspaper Pravda predictably attacked the piece under the headline “Chaos Instead of Music.
” Shostakovich was in political disgrace. He reacted by writing his Symphony No. 5 (1937), which was described as “a Soviet artist's practical creative reply to just criticism,
” although this epithet...