Symphony No. 15 (Shostakovich)

The Symphony No. 15 in A major, Op. 141, composed between late 1970 and July 29, 1971, is the final symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich. Originally intended as a cheerful commemoration of his sixty-fifth birthday in 1971, he began to plan and sketch the symphony in late 1970. After completing the sketch score in April 1971, he began the final orchestral score in June, during his medical therapy in the town of Kurgan. The symphony was completed on July 29 at his summer dacha in Repino. This was followed by a prolonged period of creative inactivity which did not end until the composition of the Fourteenth Quartet in 1973.

The Fifteenth Symphony was first performed privately in a reduction for two pianos for members of the Union of Soviet Composers and invited guests in August 1971. Its scheduled world premiere in September was postponed when Shostakovich experienced his second heart attack earlier that month. Following a two-month hospitalization, he recovered well enough to attend rehearsals in late December 1971 for the Fifteenth's rescheduled premiere, which took place in Moscow on January 8, 1972, performed by the All-Union Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra conducted by Maxim Shostakovich. The first performance outside the Soviet Union took place in Philadelphia on September 28, 1972, played by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy. Immediate critical reaction to the symphony was positive in the Soviet Union, but mixed in the West.

Shostakovich's extensive use of musical quotation in the Fifteenth has attracted speculation. He initially likened the first movement to a "toyshop", but later cautioned listeners against taking his description too precisely. A quotation from Gioacchino Rossini's William Tell Overture recurs throughout the first movement, while the last movement quotes from a song by Mikhail Glinka and from Richard Wagner's Götterdämmerung and Tristan und Isolde. Critics have also detected in the symphony further quotations and allusions, from other composers as well as Shostakovich's own music.