DmitriShostakovich

For five weeks the cinema had been showing the same film, and Shostakovich had been playing the same accompaniment. “I’ve even started dreaming about this music,” he wrote from Leningrad to Boleslav Yavorsky on 18 October 1925. He was nineteen. His First Symphony was finished, but it was a graduation score and did not pay the household bills. His father had died three years earlier, and accompanying silent films helped to support the family.

He was born in St Petersburg in 1906 and learnt the piano from his mother, Sofiya. At the Petrograd Conservatory, which he entered in 1919, Leonid Nikolayev taught him piano and Maximilian Steinberg composition. Alexander Glazunov, the director, recognised his gifts and helped him through his student years. He graduated as a pianist in 1923 and as a composer in 1925.

Shostakovich told Yavorsky that he had let the conductor Nikolai Malko walk past him before he recovered his nerve and asked to show him the score of the symphony. Malko conducted its première on 12 May 1926, and the audience demanded that the scherzo be played again. International performances followed. In 1927 Shostakovich also entered the Warsaw Chopin Competition, where he received an honourable mention.

The twentiesTheatre, film and early operas

He worked for Vsevolod Meyerhold’s theatre and wrote music for the film-makers Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg. In his score for their The New Babylon (1929), set during the Paris Commune, he set La Marseillaise against the can-can. In The Nose, completed in 1928 and staged in 1930, the nose that leaves its owner in Gogol’s story is sung by a tenor and holds a higher rank than its owner, a baritone. One interlude is scored without pitched instruments. His Second and Third symphonies brought revolutionary choruses into the concert hall.

The heroine of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District is given longer phrases. Katerina, the merchant’s wife in Leskov’s story, has warmer vocal writing than most of the men around her. Shostakovich finished the opera in 1932 and dedicated it to Nina Varzar, the physicist he had married that May. Its Leningrad première in January 1934 led to productions abroad. Their daughter Galina was born in 1936, their son Maxim in 1938.

1936–⁠37“Muddle Instead of Music” and the Fifth Symphony

The Fifth Symphony reached the public first. At its Leningrad première on 21 November 1937, Yevgeny Mravinsky held up the score to the applauding hall. Steinberg recorded the ovation in his diary. In the Largo the brass are silent and the strings are divided into eight parts. The finale moves towards D major, with the strings repeating the note A many times beneath the brass.

1938–⁠45Leningrad and the Seventh Symphony

He was now teaching at the Leningrad Conservatory. The First Quartet followed in 1938; in 1940 the Beethoven Quartet asked for a quintet they could play with him. He took the piano part at its November première. The work won a Stalin Prize the following year, and the Beethoven players became his closest quartet collaborators.

In 1941 he undertook civil-defence duties in Leningrad, including fire-watching on the conservatory roof, while composing the Seventh Symphony. He finished three movements before he was evacuated with Nina and the children on 1 October. He completed the finale in Kuibyshev that December, and Samuil Samosud conducted the première there in March 1942. On 9 August Karl Eliasberg conducted it inside besieged Leningrad, with military musicians reinforcing the depleted radio orchestra. Loudspeakers relayed the performance through the city. Shostakovich was hundreds of miles away at the time.

The Eighth Symphony followed in 1943. The smaller Ninth appeared in 1945, with a piccolo playing above a two-note trombone fanfare. He also wrote works in memory of particular friends who had died. The Second Piano Trio of 1944 commemorated Ivan Sollertinsky. It opens with the cello alone, playing harmonics so high that the violin enters below it. That year he finished orchestrating Rothschild’s Violin, the opera left by his pupil Veniamin Fleischmann, who had been killed defending Leningrad.

1948–⁠53The 1948 anti-formalist campaign

The Party’s anti-formalist campaign of 1948 caught Shostakovich alongside Prokofiev and Khachaturian. He delivered a public self-criticism and lost both conservatory posts, in Leningrad and in Moscow, where he had taught since 1943. Film commissions brought in money. The First Violin Concerto and From Jewish Folk Poetry, completed that year, were not performed in public until 1955. Isaak Glikman remembered Shostakovich coming home from the “shameful, vile discussions at the Congress” to work on the concerto’s third movement, a passacaglia in F minor. “I finished it, and I think it came out pretty well,” the composer said. David Oistrakh, the dedicatee, played the première under Mravinsky in Leningrad on 29 October 1955. The early songs of the cycle are about bereaved parents and hungry households; the final three celebrate Soviet prosperity.

He and Mieczysław Weinberg played their symphonies together at the piano, four hands. Another pianist prompted a new work. At the Leipzig Bach Competition in 1950, Shostakovich sat on the jury and heard Tatiana Nikolayeva, who could play the whole of the Well-⁠Tempered Clavier. His Twenty-four Preludes and Fugues followed in 1950–⁠51. Each major key is paired with its relative minor, and the keys move round the circle of fifths. The fugues range from two voices (No. 9) to five (No. 13), and No. 4 and the last, in D minor, are double fugues.

1960–⁠62The Eighth Quartet and DSCH

He joined the Communist Party that year, a step that Glikman recalled had caused him deep distress. In 1962 he set Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s Babi Yar in the Thirteenth Symphony, in which a bass soloist and a choir of basses sing of murdered Jews and of Russian antisemitism.

The last yearsThe last symphonies and quartets

His hands were failing, and illness kept him at home more and more. Irina, whom he married in 1962, recorded rehearsals so that he could listen to them at home. He began the Fourteenth Symphony in hospital in 1969. Dedicated to Britten, it sets eleven poems about death by Lorca, Apollinaire, Küchelbecker and Rilke for two singers, strings and percussion. The Fifteenth, completed in 1971, quotes Rossini’s William Tell in its first movement and Wagner in its finale. At the end, small percussion instruments play over a sustained chord.

The Fifteenth Quartet of 1974 is in six linked Adagios. His last completed work, the Viola Sonata, was written for Fyodor Druzhinin in 1975; its finale recalls Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata. Shostakovich died on 9 August, before the première. Druzhinin first played the sonata privately on 25 September, the composer’s birthday, and in public on 1 October. At the public performance he answered the ovation by holding the score above his head.