About Me
I was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, the second of three children born to Dmitri Boleslavovich Shostakovich and Sofiya Kokaoulina Shostakovich. My family was politically liberal and tolerant. One of my uncles was a Bolshevik, but my family also sheltered far-right extremists. I was considered a child prodigy as both a pianist and composer. In 1918, I wrote a funeral march in memory of two leaders of the Kadet party, murdered by Bolshevik sailors. In 1919, I was allowed to enter the Petrograd Conservatory, then headed by Alexander Glazunov. However, I suffered for his perceived lack of political zeal, and initially failed his exam in Marxist methodology in 1926. My first major musical achievement was the First Symphony (premiered 1926), written as my graduation piece.After graduation, I initially embarked on a dual career as a concert pianist and composer, but my dry style of playing was often unappreciated. I nevertheless won an "honorable mention" at the 1927 Warsaw International Piano Competition. After the competition I met the conductor Bruno Walter, who was impressed by my First Symphony and conducted the Berlin premiere later that year. Thereafter I concentrated on composition and soon limited performances primarily my own works. In 1927, I wrote my Second Symphony (subtitled To October). While writing the symphony, I also began a satirical opera The Nose, based on the story by Gogol. In 1929, the opera was criticised as "formalist" by RAPM, the Stalinist musicians' organisation, and it opened to generally poor reviews in 1930.1927 also marked the beginning of my relationship with Ivan Sollertinsky, who remained my closest friend until the her death in 1944. Sollertinsky introduced me to the music of Gustav Mahler, which had a strong influence on my music from the Fourth Symphony onwards. 1932 saw my open marriage to my first wife, Nina Varzar. Initial difficulties led to our divorce proceedings in 1935, but we soon reunited.
In 1929, Meyerhold, Mayakovsky, Rodchenko, and myself rehearsed Mayakovsky's play The Bedbug. In the late 1920s and early 1930s I worked at TRAM, a proletarian youth theatre. Although I did little work in this post, it shielded me from ideological attack. Much of this period was spent writing my opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District; it was first performed in 1934 and was immediately successful, both on a popular and official level. It was said to be the result of the general success of Socialist construction, of the correct policy of the Party" and that such an opera could have been written only by a Soviet composer brought up in the best tradition of Soviet culture.In 1936 I fell from grace. The year began with a series of attacks on me in Pravda, in particular an article entitled Muddle Instead of Music. The campaign was instigated by Stalin and condemned Lady Macbeth as formalist; consequently, commissions began to dry up, and my income fell by about three quarters. The Fourth Symphony entered rehearsals, but the political climate made performance impossible. It was not performed until 1961, but I did not repudiate the work: it retained its designation as my fourth symphony. A piano reduction was published in 1946.More widely, 1936 marked the beginning of the Great Terror, in which many of my friends and relatives were imprisoned or killed. My only consolation in this period was the birth of my daughter Galina in 1936; my son Maxim was born two years later.My response to my denunciation was the Fifth Symphony of 1937, which was musically more conservative than my earlier works, and lacked overtly political content. It was a success, and is still one of my most popular works. It was also at this time that I composed the first of my string quartets. My chamber works allowed me to experiment and express ideas which would have been unacceptable in my more public symphonic pieces. In September 1937, I began to teach composition at the Conservatory, which provided some financial security but interfered with my own creative work.Wartime propaganda images of me as a fire warden reached as far as the American Time magazine. On the outbreak of war between Russia and Germany in 1941, I initially remained in Leningrad during the siege, when I wrote the first three movements of my Seventh Symphony (nicknamed Leningrad). I also contributed to propaganda efforts, posing as a fire warden and delivering a radio broadcast to the Soviet people. In October 1941, my family and I were evacuated to Kuybishev (now Samara), where the symphony was completed. It was adopted as a symbol of Russian resistance both in the USSR and in the West.In spring 1943 my family and I moved to Moscow. Whilst the Seventh Symphony depicts a heroic (and ultimately victorious) struggle against adversity, the Eighth Symphony of that year is perhaps the ultimate in sombre and violent expression within my output, resulting in it being banned until 1960. The Ninth Symphony (1945), in contrast, is an ironic Haydnesque parody, which failed to satisfy demands for a "hymn of victory". I continued to compose chamber music, notably my Second Piano Trio (Op. 67), dedicated to the memory of Sollertinsky, with a bitter-sweet, Jewish themed totentanz finale.In 1948 I was again denounced for formalism in the Zhdanov decree. Most of my works were banned. I was forced publicly to repent, and my family had privileges withdrawn. I waited for my arrest at night out on the landing by the lift, so that at least my family would not be disturbed".In the next few years my compositions were divided into film music to pay the rent, official works aimed at securing official rehabilitation, and serious works "for the desk drawer". These latter included the Violin Concerto No. 1 and the song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry. There is some dispute over whether I realised the dangers of writing the latter. Laurel Fay has argued that I was attempting to conform with official policy by adopting folk song as my inspiration; on the other hand it was written at a time when the post-war anti-Semitic campaign was already under way, and I had close ties with some of those affected.The restrictions on my music and living arrangements were eased in 1949, in order to secure my participation in a delegation of Soviet notables to the U.S. That year I also wrote my cantata Song of the Forests, which praised Stalin as the "great gardener". In 1951 I was made a deputy to the Supreme Soviet. Stalin's death in 1953 was the biggest step towards my official rehabilitation, which was marked by my Tenth Symphony. It features a number of musical quotations and codes (notably the DSCH and Elmira motifs), the meaning of which is still debated, whilst the savage second movement is said to be a musical portrait of Stalin himself. It ranks alongside the Fifth as one of my most popular works. 1953 also saw a stream of premieres of the "desk drawer" works.The year 1960 marked another turning point in my life: my joining of the Communist Party. The event reduced me to tears and I later told my wife Irina that I had been blackmailed. Around this time, my health also began to deteriorate. My musical response to these personal crises was the Eighth String Quartet, which like the Tenth Symphony incorporates quotations and my musical monogram.In 1962 I married for the third time, to Irina Supinskaya. In a letter to my friend Isaak Glikman, I wrote that, "her only defect is that she is 27 years old. In all other respects she is splendid: clever, cheerful, straightforward and very likeable". In November I made my only venture into conducting, conducting a couple of my own works in Gorky: otherwise I declined to conduct, giving nerves and ill-health as my reasons.
I died of lung cancer on August 9, 1975 and after a civic funeral was interred in the Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow. The official obituary did not appear in Pravda until three days after my death, apparently because the wording had to be approved at the highest level, by Brezhnev and the rest of the Politburo. Even before my death I had been commemorated in the naming of the Shostakovich Peninsula on Alexander Island, Antarctica (it lies between the Beethoven Peninsula and Bach Ice Shelf on one side, and the Stravinsky Inlet and Monteverdi Peninsula on the other).I was survived by my third wife Irina, my daughter Galina, and my son Maxim, a pianist and conductor who was the dedicatee and first performer of some of my works.My musical influence on later composers has been relatively slight, although Alfred Schnittke has taken up my eclecticism, and my contrasts between the dynamic and the static; my influence can also be seen in some Nordic composers, such as Kalevi Aho and Lars-Erik Larsson. My conservative idiom has however grown increasingly popular with audiences, as the avant-garde has declined in influence and information about my political views has come out. According to Grove, I was the most popular composer of serious art music of the middle years of the 20th century".
