Biography
In January 1936, Josef Stalin attended a performance of Dmitri Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District at the Bolshoi Theatre and left before the final act. Two days later, Pravda published an unsigned editorial — almost certainly authorized at the highest level — titled "Muddle Instead of Music." The article attacked the opera as "formalist" and "bourgeois," its dissonances described as deliberate assaults on Soviet socialist culture. Shostakovich was twenty-nine years old, the most celebrated composer in the Soviet Union, and now suddenly in danger. He had a new symphony nearly finished — the Fourth — but withdrew it before premiere, understanding that any further provocation might cost him not just his career but his life. He slept with a bag packed by the front door, prepared to be arrested in the night.
Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich was born on September 25, 1906, in St. Petersburg into a middle-class family with a keen interest in music. He showed exceptional ability as a pianist from early childhood and was admitted to the Petrograd Conservatory at the age of thirteen. His graduation thesis — the First Symphony, completed in 1925 when he was eighteen — was performed internationally and established him immediately as a major voice. The Soviet state, in its early years, was willing to accommodate avant-garde aesthetics, and Shostakovich flourished in this environment, writing operas, ballets, film scores, and orchestral works with the facility and ambition of a man who believed the twentieth century was going to be exciting for music.
The Pravda denunciation of 1936 ended that illusion. The response Shostakovich constructed was one of the most calculated and psychologically complex acts in the history of music. He wrote the Fifth Symphony (1937) — a work that appeared, on its surface, to answer his critics: its final movement seemed triumphant, its gestures were large and its harmonies were conventional enough to pass censorship review. The premiere was received with an ovation that lasted forty minutes. But the triumph of the finale, heard carefully, is not quite what it seems. The tempo marking is "non troppo presto" — not too fast — and when conductors take it too quickly it sounds celebratory; when taken at Shostakovich's apparent true intention it sounds more like an orchestra playing triumph under duress: compelled, forced, a grimace rather than a smile. The question of what the Fifth Symphony means has generated more musicological debate than perhaps any other piece of the twentieth century.
"A creative reply of a Soviet artist to just criticism."— Description of Symphony No. 5 approved by Soviet authorities, 1937
The Seventh Symphony — the "Leningrad" — was written during the German siege of the city in 1941 and became a global symbol of Soviet resistance. Shostakovich began it as the Wehrmacht encircled his city; he was eventually evacuated but continued composing, and the work was performed in the besieged Leningrad in August 1942 by an orchestra so depleted by starvation that musicians had to be brought in from the military front to fill the empty chairs. The first movement's long crescendo — a small military theme that repeats eleven times, growing from whisper to overwhelming roar — was heard as a musical depiction of the Nazi invasion. The symphony was broadcast internationally and microfilmed to be flown to Allied nations. Shostakovich's face appeared on the cover of Time magazine. He had become, for a moment, the most famous composer alive.
The second condemnation came in 1948, when the Zhdanov Decree attacked Shostakovich and other leading composers for "formalism" again. He was dismissed from his teaching position. Several of his works were banned. He wrote his Violin Concerto No. 1 in 1948 and immediately locked it in a drawer, knowing it could not be performed safely while Stalin lived. He composed film scores and approved public cantatas to maintain access to resources and avoid worse consequences, while his real work accumulated in private. Stalin died in 1953. The Violin Concerto was premiered in 1956.
"I think it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat. It is as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, 'Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing.' And you rise, shaking, and go marching off, muttering: 'Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.'"— Dmitri Shostakovich (attributed, Solomon Volkov's Testimony)
His fifteen symphonies span five decades and constitute the most comprehensive response to political totalitarianism in the history of Western music. The Eighth (1943) and Tenth (1953) are dark meditations on suffering and political terror. The Thirteenth, "Babi Yar" (1962), sets poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko commemorating the Nazi massacre of Jews at Babi Yar and confronting Soviet antisemitism. His fifteen string quartets are generally regarded as even more personal documents — the diary that the symphonies, constrained by their public setting, could not fully be. He died on August 9, 1975, in Moscow. His reputation has only grown since, as the full dimensions of what he was working against — and working through — have become clear.