Dimitri Shostakovich

A detailed Summary of Dimitri Shostakovich

Dmitri Shostakovich, born on September 25, 1905, started taking piano lessons from his mother at the age of nine after he showed interest in a string quartet that practiced next door. He entered the Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg, later Leningrad) Conservatory in 1919, where he studied the piano with Leonid Nikolayev until 1923 and composition until 1925 with Aleksandr Glazunov and Maksimilian Steinberg. He participated in the Chopin International Competition for Pianists in Warsaw in 1927 and received an honorable mention, after which he decided to limit his public performances to his own works to separate himself from the virtuoso pianists.

Prior to the competition, he had had a far greater success as a composer with the First Symphony (1924-25), which quickly achieved worldwide recognition. The symphony was influenced by composers as diverse as Tchaikovsky, Paul Hindemith, and Sergey Prokofiev. The cultural climate in the Soviet Union was, compared to the Soviet Union at its peak, free at the time. Even the music of Igor Stravinsky and Alban Berg, then in the avant-garde, was played. Bela Bartok and Paul Hindemith visited Russia to perform their own works, and Shostakovich toyed openly with these n

Johnson, Priscilla and Leopold Labdez (eds.). Khrushchev and the Arts: the politics of Soviet Culture, 1962-64. MIT Press, 1965.

Shostakovich's works written during the mid-1940s contain some of his best music, especially the Eighth Symphony (1943), the Piano Trio (1944), and the Violin Concerto No. 1 (1947-48). Their dominating seriousness contributed to Shostakovich's second fall from official grace. When the Cold War began, the Soviet authorities sought to increase cultural control, demanding a "more accessible musical language" (Olkhovsky) than some composers were using. In Moscow in 1948, at what is a now notorious conference presided over by Andrey Zhdanov (a prominent Soviet theoretician), the leading figures of Soviet music, including Shostakovich, were verbally attacked and humiliated. As a result, the quality of all Soviet compositions slumped in the next few years. His personal inspirations were reduced by the termination of his teaching responsibilities at both the Moscow and Leningrad conservatories. Yet he continued to fight. In his String Quartet No. 4 (1949), and especially in his Quartet No. 5 (1951), he offered an elaborate answer to those who would have had him renounce completely his "style and musical integrity." (Volkov) His 10th Symphony, composed in 1953, the year of Stalin's death, flew in the face of Zhdanovism, yet, like his Fifth Symphony of 16 years earlier, compelled acceptance by "sheer quality and directness." (Fanning)

Shostakovich was brutally attacked in the official press, and both the opera and the yet to be performed Fourth Symphony (1935-36) were banned. His next major work was his Fifth Symphony (1937), which he described as "a Soviet artist's reply to just criticism." (Salisbury) An insignificant, but dutifully "optimistic" work might have been appropriate; what emerged was "compounded largely of serious, even somber and elegiac music, presented with a compelling directness" (Kay) that won over the public and even the authorities with its stately rhythms and straightforward ideas.

Salisbury, Harrison. 'A Visit with Dmitri Shostakovich.' New York Times, 8 August 1954.

In 1937 Shostakovich became a composition teacher in the Leningrad Conservatory, where he remained until the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. He composed his S

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