Dmitri Shostakovich: Encyclopedia II - Dmitri Shostakovich - Life

Dmitri Shostakovich - Life

Dmitri Shostakovich - Early life

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, Shostakovich was a child prodigy as both a pianist and composer. His family was politically liberal and tolerant (one of his uncles was a Bolshevik, but the family also sheltered far-right extremists). In 1918, he wrote a funeral march in memory of two leaders of the Kadet party, murdered by Bolshevik sailors. In 1919, he was allowed to enter the Petrograd Conservatory, then headed by Alexander Glazunov. However, he suffered for his perceived lack of political zeal, and initially failed his exam in Marxist methodology in 1926. His first major musical achievement was the First Symphony (premiered 1926), written as his graduation piece.

After graduation, he initially embarked on a dual career as a concert pianist and composer, but his dry style of playing (Fay comments on his "emotional restraint" and "riveting rhythmic drive") was often unappreciated. He nevertheless won an "honorable mention" at the 1927 Warsaw International Piano Competition; after the competition, Shostakovich met the conductor Bruno Walter, who was so impressed by the composer's First Symphony that he conducted the Berlin premiere later that year. Thereafter Shostakovich concentrated on composition and soon limited performances primarily to those of his own works. In 1927 he wrote his Second Symphony (subtitled To October). While writing the symphony, he also began his satirical opera The Nose, based on the story by Gogol. In 1929, the opera was criticised as "formalist" by RAPM, the Stalinist musicians' organisation, and it opened to generally poor reviews in 1930.

1927 also marked the beginning of the composer's relationship with Ivan Sollertinsky, who remained his closest friend until the latter's death in 1944. Sollertinsky introduced Shostakovich to the music of Gustav Mahler, which had a strong influence on his music from the Fourth Symphony onwards. 1932 saw his open marriage to his first wife, Nina Varzar. Initial difficulties led to divorce proceedings in 1935, but the couple soon reunited.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s he worked at TRAM, a proletarian youth theatre. Although he did little work in this post, it shielded him from ideological attack. Much of this period was spent writing his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District; it was first performed in 1934 and was immediately successful.

Dmitri Shostakovich - First denunciation

In 1936 Shostakovich fell from grace. The year began with a series of attacks on him in Pravda, in particular a famous article entitled Muddle Instead of Music. The campaign was instigated by Stalin and condemned Lady Macbeth as formalist; consequently, commissions began to dry up, and his income fell by about three quarters. The Fourth Symphony entered rehearsals, but the political climate made performance impossible. It was not performed until 1961, but Shostakovich did not repudiate the work: it retained its designation as his fourth symphony. A piano reduction was published in 1946.

More widely, 1936 marked the beginning of the Great Terror, in which many of the composer's friends and relatives were imprisoned or killed. His only consolation in this period was the birth of his daughter Galina in 1936; his son Maxim Shostakovich was born two years later.

The composer's response to his denunciation was the Fifth Symphony of 1937, which was musically more conservative than his earlier works, and lacked overtly political content. It was a success, and is still one of his most popular works. It was also at this time that Shostakovich composed the first of his string quartets. His chamber works allowed him to experiment and express ideas which would have been unacceptable in his more public symphonic pieces. In September 1937, he began to teach composition at the Conservatory, which provided some financial security but interfered with his own creative work.

Dmitri Shostakovich - War

On the outbreak of war between Russia and Germany in 1941, Shostakovich initially remained in Leningrad during the siege, when he wrote the first three movements of his Seventh Symphony (nicknamed "Leningrad"). He also contributed to propaganda efforts, posing as a fire warden and delivering a radio broadcast to the Soviet people listen ▶ (help·info). In October 1941, the composer and his family were evacuated to Kuybishev (now Samara), where the symphony was completed. It was adopted as a symbol of Russian resistance both in the USSR and in the West.

In spring 1943 the family moved to Moscow. The Eighth Symphony of that year is a long and dark work, which proved to be too dark for the authorities. It was soon banned until 1960. Shostakovich continued to compose chamber music, notably his Second Piano Trio (Op. 67), dedicated to the memory of Sollertinsky, with a bitter-sweet, Jewish themed totentanz finale.

Dmitri Shostakovich - Second denunciation

In 1948 Shostakovich was again denounced for formalism in the Zhdanov decree. Most of his works were banned, he was forced publicly to repent, and his family had privileges withdrawn. Yuri Lyubimov says that at this time "he waited for his arrest at night out on the landing by the lift, so that at least his family wouldn't be disturbed".^[2]

In the next few years his compositions were divided into film music to pay the rent, official works aimed at securing official rehabilitation, and serious works "for the desk drawer". These latter included the Violin Concerto No. 1 and the song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry. There is some dispute over whether he realised the dangers of writing the latter. Laurel Fay has argued that he was attempting to conform with official policy by adopting folk song as his inspiration; on the other hand it was written at a time when the post-war anti-Semitic campaign was already underway, and Shostakovich had close ties with some of those affected.

The restrictions on Shostakovich's music and living arrangements were eased in 1949, in order to secure his participation in a delegation of Soviet notables to the U.S. That year he also wrote his cantata Song of the Forests, which praised Stalin as the "great gardener". In 1951 the composer was made a deputy to the Supreme Soviet. Stalin's death in 1953 was the biggest step towards Shostakovich's official rehabilitation, which was marked by his Tenth Symphony. The symphony contains a number of musical quotations and codes (notably the DSCH and Elmira motifs), the meaning of which is still debated. It ranks alongside the Fifth as one of his most popular works. 1953 also saw a stream of premieres of the "desk drawer" works.

During the forties and fifties Shostakovich had close relationships with two of his pupils: Galina Ustvolskaya and Elmira Nazirova. He taught Ustvolskaya from 1937 to 1947. The nature of their relationship is far from clear: Mstislav Rostropovich described it as "tender" and Ustvolskaya claimed in a 1995 interview that she rejected a proposal from him in the fifties. However, in the same interview, Ustvolskaya's friend, Viktor Suslin, said that she had been "deeply disappointed" in him by the time of her graduation in 1947. The relationship with Nazirova seems to have been one-sided, expressed largely through his letters to her, and can be dated to around 1953 to 1956. In the background to all this remained Shostakovich's first, open marriage to Nina Varzar until her death in 1954. He married his second wife, Margarita Kainova, in 1956; the couple proved ill-matched, and divorced three years later.

Dmitri Shostakovich - Joining the Party

1960 marked another turning point in Shostakovich's life: his joining of the Communist Party. This event has been interpreted variously as a show of commitment, a mark of cowardice, or as having been forced. On the one hand, the apparat was undoubtedly less repressive than it had been prior to Stalin's death. On the other, his son recalled that the event reduced Shostakovich to tears,^[3] and he later told his wife Irina that he had been blackmailed.^[4] Lev Lebedinsky has said that the composer was suicidal.^[5] Around this time, his health also began to deteriorate. Shostakovich's musical response to these personal crises was the Eighth String Quartet, which like the Tenth Symphony incorporates quotations and his musical monogram.

In 1962 he married for the third time, to Irina Supinskaya. In a letter to his friend Isaak Glikman, he wrote that, "her only defect is that she is 27 years old. In all other respects she is splendid: clever, cheerful, straightforward and very likeable".^[6] In November Shostakovich made his only venture into conducting, conducting a couple of his own works in Gorky: otherwise he declined to conduct, giving nerves and ill-health as his reasons.

That year saw Shostakovich again turn to the subject of anti-Semitism in his Thirteenth Symphony (subtitled Babi Yar). The symphony sets a number of poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the first of which commemorates a massacre of the Jews during the Second World War. Opinions are divided as to how great a risk this was: the poem had been published in Soviet media, and was not banned, but it remained controversial. After the symphony's premiere, Yevtushenko was forced to add a stanza to his poem claiming that Russians and Ukrainians died alongside the Jews at Babi Yar.

Dmitri Shostakovich - Later life

In later life, Shostakovich suffered from chronic ill-health, although he resisted giving up cigarettes and vodka. From 1958 he suffered from a debilitating condition which particularly affected his right hand, eventually forcing him to give up piano playing: in 1965 this was diagnosed as polio. He also suffered heart attacks the following year and again in 1971, plus several falls in which he broke both his legs; in 1967 he wrote in a letter;

"Target achieved so far: 75% (right leg broken, left leg broken, right hand defective. All I need to do now is wreck the left hand and then 100% of my extremities will be out of order.)"^[7]

Most of his later works — the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Symphonies, and the late quartets — are dark and introspective. They have attracted much critical favour in the west, as they do not pose the same problems of interpretation as the earlier, more public pieces.

Shostakovich died of lung cancer on August 9, 1975 and after a civic funeral was interred in the Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow. The official obituary appeared in Pravda only three days after his death, apparently because the wording had be to approved at the highest level, by Brezhnev and the rest of the Politburo.^[8] Even before his death he had been commemorated in the naming of the Shostakovich Peninsula on Alexander Island, Antarctica (it lies between the Beethoven Peninsula and Bach Ice Shelf on one side, and the Stravinsky Inlet and Monteverdi Peninsula on the other).

He was survived by his third wife Irina, his daughter Galina, and his son Maxim, a pianist and conductor who was the dedicatee and first performer of some of his father's works. Shostakovich himself left behind several recordings of his own piano works, while other noted interpreters of his music include his friends Emil Gilels, Mstislav Rostropovich, Tatiana Nikolayeva, and Maria Yudina.

Shostakovich's musical influence on later composers has been relatively slight, although Alfred Schnittke has taken up his eclecticism, and his contrasts between the dynamic and the static; his influence can also be seen in some Nordic composers, such as Kalevi Aho^[9] and Lars-Erik Larsson.^[10] His conservative idiom has however grown increasingly popular with audiences, as the avant-garde has declined in influence and information about his political views has come out. According to Grove, he has now become, "the most popular composer of serious art music of the middle years of the 20th century".^[11]

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Life", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki