Dmitri Chostakovitch

Dmitri Shostakovich was born in St Petersburg on 25 September 1906. His father, a chemical engineer, worked at the Bureau of Weights and Measures founded by the scientist Mendeleev; his mother, Sofia, was a Conservatory-trained pianist. Dmitri did not begin piano until he was nine, with his mother, but his progress was dazzling. He started composing at once, including pieces inspired by the events of the 1917 revolution, which he witnessed in the streets of Petrograd.

In 1919, aged thirteen, he entered the Petrograd Conservatory, studying piano and composition with Maximilian Steinberg, Rimsky-Korsakov’s son-in-law. The director, Alexander Glazunov, supported him and helped him obtain food rations during the famine years after the revolution. His father died in 1922 and the family fell into poverty. To help, Dmitri, ill with tuberculosis, worked as a pianist in cinemas accompanying silent films, an exhausting job he hated but which fed his sense of humour and satire.

For his diploma he composed his Symphony No. 1, premiered in 1926 when he was only nineteen. Its success was immediate and international: Bruno Walter and Arturo Toscanini soon conducted it in Europe and America. Shostakovich became the most promising composer in the young Soviet Union. He wrote film, theatre and ballet music and the satirical opera The Nose (1930), after Gogol. A football fanatic, he even became a qualified referee.

In 1934 his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, the violent story of a woman who kills to escape a stifling life, triumphed in Leningrad and Moscow. But in January 1936 Stalin attended a performance and left before the end. A few days later the official newspaper Pravda published an article entitled “Muddle Instead of Music”, violently condemning the work. This was the time of the Great Purges: many of his friends were arrested. Shostakovich lived in fear and, it is said, kept a suitcase packed by the door in case of arrest.

He withdrew his Symphony No. 4, deemed too daring, and in 1937 composed the Symphony No. 5, presented as “a Soviet artist’s creative response to just criticism”. At the premiere the audience, moved to tears, gave it an ovation lasting more than half an hour. Many heard hidden irony and suffering behind its triumphant finale. During the Second World War he stayed in Leningrad, besieged by the German army, and volunteered as a firefighter. There he began his Symphony No. 7, “Leningrad”, performed in 1942 in the starving city and broadcast by loudspeaker towards the enemy lines, which became a symbol of resistance worldwide.

In 1948 he was again condemned by the authorities, along with Prokofiev and others, for “formalism”. He lost his teaching post and had to write propaganda works and film scores, while secretly composing more personal works such as the cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry. After Stalin’s death in 1953 he premiered his Symphony No. 10, in which he signed his music with four notes, D-S-C-H (D, E flat, C, B), his initials in German notation. He also composed the famous Waltz No. 2 and the 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano (1951), inspired by Bach.

In 1960 he composed in three days the String Quartet No. 8, dedicated “to the victims of fascism and war”, which he regarded as his musical autobiography. He wrote fifteen symphonies and fifteen string quartets. Suffering from neurological and heart disease, he kept composing to the end, including a Viola Sonata. He died in Moscow on 9 August 1975. His often tragic and ironic work bears witness to an artist’s life under dictatorship and is among the most performed of the twentieth century.