The official story behind the composition of the music for Leo Arnshtam's film Five Days—Five Nights is that Shostakovich wrote it immediately after his trip to Dresden in July 1960. The story is that, having viewed the still ruined city, the emotionally shattered Shostakovich composed the music in a white heat along with his Eighth String Quartet "Dedicated to the victims of War and Fascism." The story is that, after seeing the once beautiful city still prostrate after the America fire-bombing in 1945, Shostakovich finally joined the Communist Party.

The real story is much different. Five Days—Five Nights, a film about the saving of the paintings of the Dresden Art Gallery by heroic Soviet soldiers, was indeed filmed in and around Dresden and the director did indeed invite Shostakovich to visit the set in July 1960. But imagine Shostakovich's reaction to seeing a city still in ruins after fifteen years of Communist rule, imagine his reaction to having to write, once again, music for a movie extolling the heroism of Soviet soldiers, imagine his reaction to having compose music for a film about art saved from destruction. As Shostakovich wrote to his good friend Isaak Glikman, "However much I tried to draft my obligations for the film, I just couldn't do it." The music he wrote instead, the Eighth String Quartet, although officially dedicated to the victims of War and Fascism, was unofficially dedicated to himself as an autobiographical work dedicated to a victim of Communism. And the music he finally wrote for Five Days—Five Nights is, as they say in Capitalist countries, plagiarized.

Much of the music is self-plagiarized, mostly from the battle music of the Eleventh Symphony. But the climax, amazingly enough, is swiped from Beethoven's Ninth, specifically, directly from the "Ode to Joy." Although Shostakovich's rewrite is louder and more banal than anything in the final movement of the Ninth, it is still recognizably—all-too recognizably—the "Ode to Joy" and one can only imagine that Shostakovich meant it to sound somewhat less than entirely sincere. Indeed, taken in context of the quotation-laden Eighth Quartet, Shostakovich's use of the "Ode to Joy" in the score to Five Days—Five Nights begins to seem distinctly ironic. After all, how much joy is there in a city which is still in ruins fifteen years after the end of the World War II?

© James Leonard, All Music Guide