Dmitri Shostakovich

Wunderkind

Born in St Petersburg, Shostakovich received his first music lessons from his mother, who had studied piano at the city’s conservatoire. Obviously prodigiously gifted, he was admitted to Petrograd Conservatory when he was just 13. Despite being stricken by scrofula and giving his graduation recital in bandages from a recent operation, Shostakovich graduated from the institution as a pianist in 1923. He wouldn’t graduate as a composer for another two years, and this frustrated him immensely. ‘Give me my freedom,’ the 18-year-old imagined saying to his teachers. ‘Let me listen to the voice which comes from inside me, and don’t force me to unquestioningly accept what I hear you tell me.’ His eventual graduation piece was the First Symphony, which was a phenomenal success at its premiere.

Danger

In the early years of the 1930s, Shostakovich established himself as one of the most promising composers of the day. His Second Symphony was premiered in 1927, his Third Symphony and first opera The Nose in 1930, and his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District was enormously popular at its 1934 premiere.

Then in January 1936, an article called ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ appeared in the Communist Party newspaper, Pravda, denouncing Lady Macbeth as ‘chaotic’. It was followed by an attack on his ballet The Limpid Stream. Almost overnight, Shostakovich went from leading a charmed musical existence to being a man under intense pressure and scrutiny. He was interrogated by the secret police in 1937. Although he ultimately managed to survive Stalin’s Purges, several of his colleagues were executed — including the co-librettist of The Limpid Stream. His Fifth Symphony was composed and premiered in the aftermath of the Lady Macbeth scandal, and it was received with overwhelming support. ‘He’s given his answer, and it was a good one,’ wrote artist Lyubov Yakovleva.

World War II

During World War II, Shostakovich became a propaganda icon. He volunteered for the fire brigade, and the image of ‘Fireman Shostakovich’ in his uniform and hat made its way around the world, boosting his already considerable profile. This was enhanced by the Leningrad premiere of his Seventh Symphony while the city was still under siege. Copies of the score were flown out of the Soviet Union so it could be played abroad, and the idea that the Symphony had been written in defiance of German invasion elevated Shostakovich to almost legendary status. In the immediate post-war period he was showered with official awards.

International Recognition

Shostakovich’s status and popularity within the Soviet Union wavered in the late 1940s, but recovered in the 1950s. He gained accolades both internally and internationally, and made several trips abroad, as part of official Soviet delegations, to hear his music performed and to accept honorary doctorates. He kept composing throughout political turmoil and serious health problems in his later years, including treatment for lung cancer. He died in August 1975, aged 68. Fellow composer Aram Khachaturian remembered Shostakovich as ‘the conscience of Soviet music, a man who expressed our epoch in music better, fuller and deeper than any of his contemporaries.’

Johann Sebastian Bach was a major influence for Shostakovich. He wrote his own set of 24 preludes and fugues for piano, as an answer to the earlier composer’s set called the Well-Tempered Clavier. Ludwig van Beethoven was another important predecessor, especially his symphonies and string quartets. Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky was one of Shostakovich’s favourites, and he re-orchestrated and arranged several of his works, including completing his opera Khovanshchina. Among Shostakovich’s contemporaries, Gustav Mahler and Igor Stravinsky were particularly significant as influences.

Shostakovich’s 15 Symphonies are among his most important works, and are regularly performed worldwide. So, too, are his 15 String Quartets. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Shostakovich was a talented pianist himself, many of his most captivating and personal works feature the piano. His second piano concerto was written for his son Maxim, while his Piano Trio No 2 was dedicated to his friend Ivan Sollertinsky, who died while Shostakovich was composing the piece. Shostakovich’s film scores are now mostly heard, if at all, as suites. In his lifetime, though, both his original film scores and incidental music for the theatre were major contributions to the genres, and shaped his development as a composer.

The LSO first conducted a Shostakovich work in 1935 with a performance of his Symphony No 1. We also performed the English premiere of the Ninth Symphony, conducted by Basil Cameron at the Proms in 1946.

In recent years, our most significant involvement in the music of Shostakovich has been the LSO Live release of the complete Shostakovich Symphonies – conducted by LSO Principal Guest Conductor Gianandrea Noseda – in a project that spanned nearly a decade of concerts at the Barbican.

Some of Shostakovich’s most meaningful relationships were with the performers who made his work famous. He wrote his two cello concertos for cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who was a close friend. Rostropovich delighted in telling quirky anecdotes about the composer, such as when they celebrated the completion of a new composition by taking a horse-drawn sleigh to a kiosk that served them illegal alcohol.

The violinist David Oistrakh was another good friend and the dedicatee of Shostakovich’s two Violin Concertos. The Beethoven Quartet, pianists Sviatoslav Richter and Tatiana Nikolayeva and conductor Evgeny Mravinsky were all important advocates of Shostakovich’s work — Mravinsky conducted the premiere of many of Shostakovich’s symphonies.

Among composers, Benjamin Britten was especially close to Shostakovich in his later years. In 1963, Britten wrote to the older man that ‘your work and life have been an example to me — of courage, integrity, & human sympathy’, and dedicated his opera The Prodigal Son to him. Shostakovich returned the compliment in 1972, saying that he liked Britten ‘both as a man and as a musician … I particularly admire his talent and his sensitivity.’ He made Britten the dedicatee of his Fourteenth Symphony.

Shostakovich had a more complicated relationship with composer and pianist Galina Ustvolskaya. They first encountered each other when Ustvolskaya was in Shostakovich’s composition class at the Leningrad Conservatory, and they stayed in contact long afterwards. ‘It is not you who are under my influence, but I who am under yours,’ he wrote to her. He proposed to Ustvolskaya after his wife Nina died, but she rejected him. In later years, Ustvolskaya became so infuriated by the idolatry that surrounded Shostakovich, and being continuously referred to as his pupil, that she tried to distance herself from him. ‘I bluntly refused to accept his music,’ she wrote in 1994. ‘Such an outstanding figure as Shostakovich was not outstanding to me.’