Ludwig van Beethoven made his mark as a frank and uninhibited revolutionary. Imagine how wild his Symphony No. 5 must have sounded to early 19th-century listeners who didn’t hear it as the most familiar of classical masterpieces. In the first movement, the famous ta-ta- ta-TA pattern is hardly ever absent, generating music that feels faster and more compressed than any heard before.
 
Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 was called “a Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism” after the composer was denounced by Stalin for his earlier, more dissonant orchestral writing. But it set him on a track that found more subtle ways of being expressively truthful while staying more-or-less within the lines of politically accept- able style in the USSR. Shostakovich’s Fifth was an instant success at its 1937 premiere and quickly exported beyond the Iron Curtain.