Breaking with tradition, Myaskovsky's friends saw in the New Year at his apartment rather than at Pavel Lamm's because he was still unwell. His lengthy illness the previous summer marked the onset of an accelerating decline in his health. From 1946 onwards, his diary entries make increasingly frequent allusions to persistent fatigue and indispositions that kept him housebound and hindered his work. He extricated himself from most of his teaching commitments, preferring to save his energies for composing, though he continued to act as consultant to the state music publisher and to sit on the Stalin Prize committee. Ideas for new creative projects were slow to take shape, so he turned to a less demanding task – fulfilling a request from the legislature of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (the largest of the USSR's fifteen republics) to write an entry for a competition to compose its new anthem. Work advanced fitfully: he struggled to come up with anything interesting in response to Stepan Shchipachyov's wooden verses. The other participants evidently experienced even more acute difficulty, as his was the only entry to make it past the first round. A flurry of revision and re-composition ensued before the second round, which saw the sixty-eight submissions whittled down to eight, Myaskovsky's still amongst them. The conductor Nikolay Golovanov contacted him at the start of March to propose further ‘improvements’ to his anthem before the final round in April – ‘which all came down to turning it into something commonplace’, as he noted sourly in his diary. In the end, his efforts went for nothing: the jury was unenthusiastic about his score. The other finalists included Asafiev, whose anthem he found distastefully saccharine, and Shostakovich, whose entry he considered the best, if somewhat bland.

On completing the first version of the anthem, he returned to the sketches he had made the previous year for two works, one of which would become the Sinfonietta in A minor for string orchestra, op. 68, and other, the Twenty-Fifth Symphony in D-flat major, op. 69; but finding himself unable to make much headway with either, he spent ten days revising settings of the symbolist poet Zinaida Hippius that he had made between 1904 and 1908, fashioning a new op. 4 from twelve previously published songs and a further six that had remained in manuscript.