Composer
Dmitri Shostakovich
A composer whose music carried coded meaning under constant political pressure.
Dmitri Shostakovich composed his entire career under Soviet political scrutiny, and that pressure shaped his music directly: after official condemnation of an earlier work, his Symphony No. 5 was presented as "a Soviet artist's creative response to just criticism," even though many listeners and scholars have since read real irony and coded protest underneath its outwardly triumphant surface - a tension that runs through much of his output.
Life in brief
Shostakovich was born in St Petersburg in 1906. As a teenager after the Revolution, he helped support his family by playing piano for silent films in cinemas. His First Symphony, written as his graduation piece at the Leningrad Conservatory, premiered when he was nineteen and quickly made him internationally famous.
In 1936, disaster struck. His opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District had been a huge success for two years when Stalin attended a performance and walked out. Days later the official newspaper Pravda attacked it in an unsigned editorial, "Muddle Instead of Music" - at the height of Stalin's purges, a potentially fatal denunciation. Shostakovich withdrew his ambitious Fourth Symphony during rehearsals (it wasn't heard until 1961) and, according to friends, kept a small suitcase packed in case he was arrested in the night. His Fifth Symphony (1937) restored his standing.
During the Second World War his Seventh Symphony made him a worldwide symbol of resistance, but in 1948 he was condemned again, along with Prokofiev, and for years he kept some of his most personal works in a drawer, releasing them only after Stalin's death in 1953. He remained a public figure - joining the Communist Party under pressure in 1960 - while his private music grew darker and more inward. He died in Moscow in 1975.
Music and style
Shostakovich's music swings between extremes: bleak, desolate slow movements; savage, mechanical marches; and biting, sarcastic humor that can turn a cheerful tune sinister. He often wove a musical signature into his works - the notes D, E-flat, C, B, which spell his initials "D. Sch." in German notation. That combination of enormous technical skill and music that could be read on multiple levels - officially patriotic, privately skeptical - makes Shostakovich one of the most closely studied and debated composers of the 20th century.
Key works
- Symphony No. 5 (1937) - its blazing finale is either sincere triumph or forced rejoicing, depending on whom you ask.
- Symphony No. 7, "Leningrad" (1941) - composed partly during the Nazi siege of that city, it became a genuine symbol of wartime resistance, famously performed in 1942 by a starving, depleted orchestra in the besieged city itself and broadcast to boost morale.
- Symphony No. 10 (1953) - written in the year of Stalin's death, and full of his musical signature.
- The fifteen string quartets - especially No. 8 (1960), dedicated "to the victims of fascism and war." See string quartet.
- Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1934) - the opera that nearly cost him everything.
- Piano Concerto No. 2 (1957) - written for his son, with a famously tender slow movement.
- Waltz No. 2 - from a suite of light music, now familiar from film.
Legacy
Shostakovich wrote fifteen symphonies and fifteen string quartets, and both cycles are now central to the 20th-century repertoire. Arguments about what his music "really" means - fueled in part by Testimony, a disputed memoir published after his death - have never been settled, and probably never will be. What's clear is that few composers have so powerfully captured life under fear.
Where to start listening: the finale of Symphony No. 5 is the starting point for the ongoing debate about its "true" meaning; the first movement of the "Leningrad" Symphony builds tension as relentlessly as its history suggests. For his lighter side, try the Waltz No. 2 or the slow movement of the Second Piano Concerto.