Dmitri Shostakovich
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was a Soviet-era Russian composer and pianist who became internationally known after the premiere of his First Symphony in 1926 and thereafter was regarded as a major composer.
Shostakovich achieved early fame in the Soviet Union, but had a complex relationship with its government. His 1934 opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was initially a success but later condemned by the Soviet government, putting his career at risk. In 1948, his work was [|denounced] under the Zhdanov Doctrine, with professional consequences lasting several years. Even after his censure was rescinded in 1956, performances of his music were occasionally subject to state interventions, as with his Thirteenth Symphony. Nevertheless, Shostakovich was a member of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR and the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, as well as chairman of the RSFSR Union of Composers. Over the course of his career, he earned several important [|awards], including the Order of Lenin, from the Soviet government.
Shostakovich combined various musical techniques in his works. His music is characterized by sharp contrasts, elements of the grotesque, and ambivalent tonality; he was also heavily influenced by neoclassicism and by the music of Gustav Mahler. His orchestral works include 15 symphonies and six concerti. His chamber works include 15 string quartets, a piano quintet, and two piano trios. His solo piano works include two sonatas, an early set of 24 preludes, and a later set of 24 preludes and fugues. Stage works include three completed operas and three ballets. Shostakovich also wrote several song cycles and a substantial quantity of music for theatre and film.
Shostakovich's reputation has continued to grow after his death. Scholarly interest has increased significantly since the late 20th century, including considerable debate about the relationship between his music and his attitudes toward the Soviet government.
Biography
Youth
Born on on Podolskaya Street in Saint Petersburg, then in the Russian Empire, Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was the second of three children of Dmitri Boleslavovich Shostakovich and Sofiya Vasilievna Kokoulina. Shostakovich's immediate forebears came from Siberia, but his paternal grandfather,, was of Polish and Lithuanian descent, tracing his family roots to the region of the town of Vileyka in today's Belarus. A Polish revolutionary in the January Uprising of 1863–1864, Szostakowicz was exiled to Narym in 1866 in the crackdown that followed Dmitry Karakozov's assassination attempt on Tsar Alexander II. When his term of exile ended, Szostakowicz decided to remain in Siberia. He eventually became a successful banker in Irkutsk and raised a large family. His son Dmitri Boleslavovich Shostakovich, the composer's father, was born in exile in Narym in 1875 and studied physics and mathematics at Saint Petersburg University, graduating in 1899. He then went to work as an engineer under Dmitri Mendeleev at the Bureau of Weights and Measures in Saint Petersburg. In 1903, he married another Siberian immigrant to the capital, Sofiya Vasilievna Kokoulina, one of six children born to a Siberian Russian.Shostakovich displayed musical talent after beginning piano lessons with his mother at the age of 9. On several occasions, he displayed a remarkable ability to remember what his mother had played at the previous lesson, and would get "caught in the act" of playing the previous lesson's music while pretending to read different music placed in front of him. In 1918, he wrote a funeral march in memory of two leaders of the Kadet Party murdered by Bolshevik sailors.In 1919, at age 13, Shostakovich was admitted to the Petrograd Conservatory, then headed by Alexander Glazunov, who monitored his progress closely and promoted him. Shostakovich studied piano with Leonid Nikolayev and Elena Rozanova, composition with Maximilian Steinberg, and counterpoint and fugue with Nikolay Sokolov, who became his friend. He also attended Alexander Ossovsky's music history classes. In 1925, he enrolled in the conducting classes of Nikolai Malko, where he conducted the conservatory orchestra in a private performance of Beethoven's First Symphony. According to the recollections of the composer's classmate, :
Shostakovich stood at the podium, played with his hair and jacket cuffs, looked around at the hushed teenagers with instruments at the ready and raised the baton.... He neither stopped the orchestra, nor made any remarks; he focused his entire attention on aspects of tempi and dynamics, which were very clearly displayed in his gestures. The contrasts between the "Adagio molto" of the introduction and "Allegro con brio" first theme were quite striking, as were those between the percussive accents of the chords and the momentarily extended piano in the introduction following them. In the character given to the pattern of the first theme, I recall, there was both vigorous striving and lightness; in the bass part there was an emphasized pliancy of tenderly threaded articulation.... Moments of these sorts... were discoveries of an improvised order, born from an intuitively refined understanding of the character of a piece and the elements of musical imagery embedded in it. And the players enjoyed it.
On 20 March 1925, Shostakovich's music was played in Moscow for the first time, in a program that also included works by his friend Vissarion Shebalin. To the composer's disappointment, the critics and public there received his music coolly. During his visit to Moscow, Mikhail Kvadri introduced him to Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who helped the composer find accommodation and work there, and sent a driver to take him to a concert in "a very stylish automobile".
Shostakovich's musical breakthrough was the First Symphony, written as his graduation piece at the age of 19. Initially Shostakovich aspired to perform it only privately with the conservatory orchestra, and prepared to conduct the scherzo himself. By late 1925, Malko had agreed to conduct its premiere with the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra after Steinberg and Shostakovich's friend Boleslav Yavorsky brought the symphony to his attention. On 12 May 1926, Malko led the premiere of the symphony; the audience received it enthusiastically, demanding an encore of the scherzo. Thereafter, Shostakovich regularly celebrated the date of his symphonic debut.
Early career
After graduation, Shostakovich embarked on a dual career as concert pianist and composer, but his dry keyboard style was often criticized. Shostakovich maintained a heavy performance schedule until 1930; after 1933 he performed only his own compositions. Along with, Grigory Ginzburg, Lev Oborin, and Josif Shvarts, he was among the Soviet contestants in the inaugural I International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 1927. Bogdanov-Berezhovsky later remembered:, who heard Shostakovich play his Chopin programs before he went to Warsaw, said that his "anti-sentimental" playing, which eschewed rubato and extreme dynamic contrasts, was unlike anything he had ever heard. called Shostakovich's playing "profound and lacking any salon-like mannerisms."
Shostakovich was stricken with appendicitis on the opening day of the competition, but his condition improved by the time of his first performance on 27 January 1927. According to Shostakovich, his playing found favor with the audience. He persisted into the final round of the competition but ultimately earned only a diploma, no prize; Oborin was declared the winner. Shostakovich was upset about the result but for a time resolved to continue a career as performer. While recovering from his appendectomy in April 1927, Shostakovich said he was beginning to reassess those plans:
After the competition, Shostakovich and Oborin spent a week in Berlin. There he met the conductor Bruno Walter, who was so impressed by Shostakovich's First Symphony that he conducted its first performance outside Russia later that year. Leopold Stokowski led the American premiere the next year in Philadelphia and also made the work's first recording.
In 1927, Shostakovich wrote his Second Symphony, a patriotic piece with a pro-Soviet choral finale. Owing to its modernism, it did not meet with the same enthusiasm as his First. This year also marked the beginning of Shostakovich's close friendship with musicologist and theatre critic Ivan Sollertinsky, whom he had first met in 1921 through their mutual friends Lev Arnshtam and Lydia Zhukova. Shostakovich later said that Sollertinsky "taught to understand and love such great masters as Brahms, Mahler, and Bruckner" and that he instilled in him "an interest in music... from Bach to Offenbach."File:Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.jpg|thumb|Production of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Helikon Opera in 2014While writing the Second Symphony, Shostakovich also began work on his satirical opera The Nose, based on the story by Nikolai Gogol. In June 1929, against the composer's wishes, the opera was given a concert performance; it was ferociously attacked by the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians. Its stage premiere on 18 January 1930 opened to generally poor reviews and widespread incomprehension among musicians. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Shostakovich 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 Mtsensk, which was first performed in 1934. It was initially immediately successful, on both popular and official levels. It was described as "the result of the general success of Socialist construction, of the correct policy of the Party", and as an opera that "could have been written only by a Soviet composer brought up in the best tradition of Soviet culture".
Shostakovich married his first wife, Nina Varzar, in 1932. Difficulties led to a divorce in 1935, but the couple soon remarried when Nina became pregnant with their first child, Galina.