To the European mind, no less than fifteen symphonies from the pen of a single composer might seem excessive in the light of a tradition that has taken its bearings from the nine symphonies of Beethoven. But the revolutionary culture that nurtured Shostakovich experienced something of a rebirth of symphonic commitment, and in this connection the ideological climate of Socialist Realism (first proclaimed in 1934) was to prove a potent factor. Far from creatively inhibiting, the Beethoven canon, with its fresh post-revolutionary optimism, could be viewed as positively enabling. The Soviet symphony – a genre that Shostakovich's own Fifth Symphony served memorably to define – became for Shostakovich, as for his colleagues, a medium through which to appear to meet the sociopolitical expectations of Soviet ideology. At the same time, his symphonies, string quartets and concertos encoded a more personal vision that was to remain suspect in orthodox Soviet circles. As a captive yet independently minded artist working in a totalitarian regime, Shostakovich invented for himself a moral persona that would construct, Dostoyevskylike, a polyphonic discourse wherein, to quote Victor Terras on Bakhtin, ‘multiple individual voices, inner dialogue, parody, inter-textual echoes, irony, and ambiguity interact dialogically, independently of a controlling monologic narrative voice’.

Although not all of Shostakovich's symphonies sit comfortably within the traditional parameters of the genre, taken as a whole his symphonic oeuvre gravitates towards the four-movement sonata-cycle prototype, and embraces the several different types – instrumental/absolute, narrative/programmatic, cyclic, vocal-instrumental – that go to make up the main-stream repertoire of the genre in the post-Beethoven era. The content and form of these symphonies, as well as their social context, are linked to Shostakovich’s well-known dilemma as a Soviet composer: the conflictridden burden of responsibility he carried towards his genius, his public and, as a professional artist, the Soviet cultural bureaucracy.