Piano Quintet (Shostakovich)

Piano Quintet
by Dmitri Shostakovich
Shostakovich in 1942
Key	G minor
Opus	57
Composed	July 13, 1940 (1940-07-13) – September 14, 1940 (1940-09-14): Shalovo or Kellomäki; Leningrad, Russian SFSR
Publisher	Muzgiz Am-Rus Music Corporation Edition Peters Hans Sikorski Musikverlage Muzyka DSCH Publishers
Duration	c. 29 minutes
Movements	5
Premiere
Date	November 23, 1940 (1940-11-23)
Location	Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory Moscow, Russian SFSR
Performers	Beethoven Quartet Dmitri Shostakovich (piano)

The Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 57 is a five-movement composition for two violins, viola, cello, and piano by Dmitri Shostakovich. He composed it between July 13 and September 14, 1940. Sources conflict on where he began to compose it—the location is variously stated to be Shalovo, Kellomäki, or Moscow—but most agree that it was completed in Leningrad. It is the second of Shostakovich's two attempts at composing a piano quintet. His first dated from his student years, but was ultimately abandoned and repurposed in other compositions.

A suggestion from the Beethoven Quartet over dinner in 1938 led to the creation of the Piano Quintet. Originally, Shostakovich had conceived the work as a string quartet. However, according to Isaak Glikman, an arts critic and close friend, Shostakovich modified the instrumentation because he hoped that demand for his performances as pianist would result in increased opportunities for personal travel. According to the musicologist Richard Taruskin, Shostakovich modeled his Piano Quintet, including its key and use of Baroque musical forms, on Sergei Taneyev's. Over the years, a number of small alterations to the score were made, which are documented in the two recordings of the work that Shostakovich made with the Beethoven Quartet in 1940 and 1955.

The Piano Quintet's official premiere on November 23, 1940, at the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory was an immediate public success. Encores at this and subsequent concerts became so commonplace, that it quickly became a source of jokes for wags who referred to the work as a five-movement work with seven movements. Occasionally, audiences demanded encores of the entire work. Performances of the Piano Quintet took up so much of Shostakovich's time between late 1940 and mid-1941 that he had only enough time to compose a single work during that period.

Opinions were more mixed among Shostakovich's professional colleagues. Sergei Prokofiev and Alexander Goldenweiser both were ambivalent about the music's merits, while the musicologist Daniel Zhitomirsky defended the work against detractors who had simplistic expectations from Soviet music. Even before the Piano Quintet's official premiere, it had been nominated for the inaugural Stalin Prize, along with works by Prokofiev, Nikolai Myaskovsky, and Aram Khachaturian. After three rounds of voting by the prize committee—as well as an unsuccessful last-minute personal appeal to Joseph Stalin from a disgruntled CPSU member who sought to deny the work a prize—the March 16, 1941 issue of Pravda announced that the Piano Quintet won the Stalin Prize, first class. Its monetary award of 100,000 rubles attracted significant commentary from music critics in the United States after the work's stateside premiere in Carnegie Hall on April 29, 1941.