Dmitri Shostakovich

1906–1975, RUSSIAN

Regarded as the foremost composer of his generation, Shostakovich successfully developed an original and sometimes rebellious musical style, despite the constraints of the Stalinist establishment.

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH
The composer is pictured here as a young man in his thirties, working on a score that is believed to be to his Symphony No. 7, known as “Leningrad.”

IN CONTEXT

The Great Purge, 1936–1938

During the 1930s, Stalin faced opposition as his policies failed to deliver prosperity. He began to fear a coup or even assassination. So began the “Great Purge,” in which he sought to eliminate his opponents and cow the population into compliance. The Ministry of Internal Affairs, NKVD, was given unprecedented powers. More than 1.5 million people were arrested, and hundreds of thousands of them executed. This reign of terror was not restricted to political dissidents, but extended to any prominent figures perceived to be critical of the Stalinist regime, including artists and composers.

LAVRENTIY PAVLOVICH BERIA, HEAD OF THE SOVIET SECRET POLICE, THE NKVD

Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was born in 1906 in St. Petersburg, a city whose changing names reflected the seismic changes in Russia during his lifetime; it was renamed Petrograd in 1914, and then became known as Leningrad in 1924, reverting to its original name in 1991. His father, of Polish descent, had moved there from Siberia, as had his mother, an amateur musician. Dmitri began piano lessons with his mother at the age of nine—he soon showed remarkable talent, and a particular interest in composing.

At the age of 13, he was admitted to the Petrograd Conservatory, whose alumni included Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev. Since the revolutions of 1917, however, the Conservatory had become less tolerant of innovation, and the curriculum was prescribed by Soviet ideology. As a young composer, Shostakovich had little interest in emulating the great Russian composers, preferring the exciting new music of Stravinsky and Prokofiev, a tendency that was frowned on by his teachers.

PETROGRAD, 1920
The Communist International Congress in Shostakovich’s home town (formerly St. Petersburg). The city was named Leningrad after the death of Lenin (shown left) in 1924.

Innovation and development

This was the beginning of his uneasy relationship with the Soviet musical establishment, reflected in the development of his unique style: his desire to experiment and innovate had always to be tempered by accessibility, a hybrid of several different styles within an “acceptable,” conventionally classical framework. As a result, his music is often ambiguous and unsettling, sometimes with a touch of satire, or even bitter irony in its tone. His first major composition was the Symphony No. 1, which he wrote as his graduation piece in 1926. Despite his perceived lack of commitment to the Soviet aesthetic, Shostakovich eventually graduated from the Conservatory that year, aged just 19. Intending to make his name as a concert pianist, he moved to Moscow, but in the face of fierce competition decided instead to devote his time and effort to composing.

Encouraged by the success of his Symphony No. 1, which had been performed in Germany and the US, he wrote the Second Symphony, which although pro-Soviet in its intent, was too experimental to gain full approval from the musical establishment after its first performance in 1927.

He was also working on an opera, The Nose, and a Third Symphony; both premiered in 1930. The Nose in particular attracted criticism from the authorities—who misunderstood its satirical nature—and stinging reviews condemning its incomprehensible modernity. This response was a lesson to Shostakovich in how far he could go before incurring the wrath of the establishment, and the dangers he faced in his next major project, the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, completed in 1934. The opera was enthusiastically received by audiences as well as the authorities. But the good times were short-lived. Shostakovich’s marriage to Nina Varzar ended in divorce in 1935, but they remarried shortly after when Nina discovered she was pregnant (their daughter, Galina, was born in 1936 and a son, Maxim, in 1938).

In 1936, Shostakovich was advised to attend a performance of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District at which Stalin would be present. It soon became clear to the terrified composer that Stalin disapproved of the opera, which was then slated in the official newspaper, Pravda. Shostakovich was summoned by Platon Kerzhentsev, the chairman of the USSR State Committee on Culture and denounced for “Formalism”—the catch-all criticism aimed at those who ignored the tastes of the proletariat, and did not write music that sought to glorify the Soviet state.

Shostakovich thus struggled to find work as a composer. He had finished his Fourth Symphony, but withdrew it before its first performance, fearing further sanctions or even worse, as Stalin had his political opponents and their supporters summarily removed.

In a bid to restore his reputation, he completed the Fifth Symphony in 1937, which was written in a less challenging style. Dubbed by the establishment as “a Soviet artist’s creative response to just criticism,” the symphony was accepted as a gesture of good faith, and Shostakovich was offered a post at the Leningrad Conservatory to teach composition.

THE NOSE
Based on a satirical short story by Nikolai Gogol, Shostakovich’s opera The Nose is performed here in 2016 by London’s Royal Opera, conducted by Ingo Metzmacher and directed by Barrie Kosky, at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

LADY MACBETH OF MTSENSK
This is the program cover for the first concert performance in England of Shostakovich’s opera. It was held at Queen’s Hall, London, in March 1935.

The war years

At the beginning of World War II, he tried to enlist in the Soviet Army, but was refused because of his very poor eyesight. He remained in Leningrad as a firefighter, leaving only when the German attack on the city turned into a lengthy siege (see box). Shostakovich and his family were evacuated to Kuibyshev, where he finished his Seventh Symphony, which he had begun in Leningrad. The siege dragged on and the symphony, seen as a symbol of resistance to the German oppressors, was given the title “Leningrad.” It was premiered in Kuibyshev in March 1942, and later that year given a moving performance in Leningrad by the few surviving members of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra, along with whatever musicians could be found in the city.

Shostakovich was expected to produce more patriotic music to boost morale. In 1943, now living in Moscow, he completed his Eighth Symphony, but far from uplifting, it depicted the dark aspects of war. The government first saw it as anti-Soviet, but put a positive spin on it by dubbing it the “Stalingrad” symphony, as if in honor of the fallen of the Battle of Stalingrad.

In the immediate postwar years, Shostakovich’s relationship with the authorities eased, although he reacted against the increase in anti-Semitism in Russia with works incorporating Jewish themes. But in general, he adopted a lighter, more conservative style of composition, and in 1947 was rewarded for his services by being made a deputy to the Supreme Soviet.

Humiliation and decline

However, the following year, in a reign of terror led by Andrei Zhdanov, chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet, he and a number of his fellow composers were denounced for Formalism. He was dismissed from the Conservatory and forced to make a public apology. His humiliation was compounded when he was selected as a representative to the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace in New York in 1949, and paraded before the world’s press as a puppet of the Soviet state. Only after Stalin’s death in 1953 did he achieve rehabilitation of his status with the Tenth Symphony, one of his most popular works.

Shostakovich’s wife, Nina, died in 1954, and although it is rumored that he had affairs with at least two of his students in the 1940s and 1950s, when he remarried it was to a Leninist activist, Margarita Kainova, in 1956. The marriage ended in divorce just three years later, and he married his third wife, 27-year-old Irina Supinskaya, in 1962.

By the mid-1960s, Shostakovich was becoming increasingly ill. He was diagnosed as suffering from polio, although it seems more likely that his condition was motor neuron disease. In the final decade of his life, he gradually lost the use of most of his limbs and had a number of falls resulting in broken bones. His sight was also severely restricted, and he suffered a number of heart attacks, not helped by his lifelong heavy smoking and drinking. Nevertheless, he continued composing for as long as he was able to wield a pencil. He died of lung cancer in 1975.

FIREFIGHTING, 1941
Shostakovich is pictured with a hose on the roof of the Leningrad Conservatoire in his role as a firefighter in the first year of the siege of Leningrad (1941–1944) during World War II.

IN CONTEXT

The Siege of Leningrad

In April 1941, Hitler began the offensive against Leningrad in conjunction with the Finnish attack on the region from the north. Evacuation of the population began in June that year, but by September all roads out of the city were blocked, and the long siege began. Rather than occupy the city, Hitler announced that “Leningrad must die of starvation,” amid continual bombardment. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died of cold and starvation, leading some to classify the campaign as genocidal. Lasting 872 days, the siege was one of the longest in history, and was finally lifted in January 1944.

POSTER OF ANDREI ZHDANOV, HEAD OF COUNTER-SIEGE OPERATIONS IN RUSSIA