Who is shostakovich

He was known for his ability to juxtapose numerous musical styles. Shostakovich was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia on September 25, At the age of nine, his mother, Sofiya Kokoulina, gave him his first music lessons. Shostakovich caught on remarkably quick at his piano lessons, it was said that at times, he could remember what his mother played at his last lesson without having to practice or to read music.

His astounding ability with the piano earned him a place at the Petrograd Conservatory, which was also known as the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. Shostakovich enjoyed the company and teaching of established Russian composers.

He took lessons in composition from the famous pedagogue Leonid Nikolavev. He also took lessons in counterpoint and fugue from Maximilian Steinberg and Nikolay Sokolov respectively. One of these pieces, the First Violin Concerto —48 , expresses solidarity with the plight of the Jewish people.

It is one of a number of his works from this period that dared to do so. As its repeating bass line grinds inexorably forward, seemingly rooted in the grey and everyday, the soloist still dares to hope for a radiant future. But, tellingly, the listener is not obliged to accept this image, let alone politicise it.

Understandably cautious, David Oistrakh did not give its premiere until Yet with the death of his first wife and the failure of a second marriage, Shostakovich sometimes seemed less certain of his creative direction.

An exception is the Tenth Symphony, completed in and perhaps the best of them all. Another masterpiece is the tightly conceived First Cello Concerto , written for Mstislav Rostropovich. The choral Thirteenth Symphony completes a symphonic trilogy on life in Russia and the Soviet Union with an explicitly sceptical conclusion. Although Shostakovich had at last been persuaded to join the Communist Party, the conformist quality of the music in fact gives maximal exposure to forthright poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

These condemn Russian anti-Semitism, the police state, the privations of Soviet womanhood and the pressures on the creative artist. Increasingly ill in later years, Shostakovich was devotedly cared for by his third wife, Irina. He appeared very much the establishment figure, but his creative projects were becoming ever more personal. He was shifting away from symphonies and the film work that kept food on the table, in favour of chamber music and song cycles.

Communicating keenly, but in an increasingly enigmatic manner, these pieces draw on precedents set by Schoenberg and Britten as well as the work of his many composition pupils.

But his greatest and most famous wartime contribution was the Seventh Symphony. The composer wrote the first three movements in Leningrad and completed the work in Kuibyshev now Samara where he and his family had been evacuated. The symphony was first premiered by the Bolshoi Theatre orchestra in Kuibyshev and was soon performed abroad in London and the United States.

However, the most compelling performance was the Leningrad premiere by the Radio Orchestra in the besieged city. The orchestra had only fourteen musicians left, so the conductor Karl Eliasberg had to recruit anyone who could play a musical instrument to perform the symphony. The Leningrad Shostakovich reportedly had in mind was not the one that withstood the German siege. In spring , the family moved to Moscow.

Therefore, the public, and most importantly the authorities, wanted another triumphant piece from the composer. However, the symphony did not escape criticism. The Ninth Symphony , in contrast, was much lighter in tone. Shostakovich continued to compose chamber music, notably his Second Piano Trio Op. In , Shostakovich, along with many other composers, was again denounced for formalism in the Zhdanov decree.

The accused composers, including Shostakovich, were summoned to make public apologies in front of the committee. The consequences of the decree for composers were harsh. Shostakovich was among those who were dismissed from the Conservatoire altogether. For Shostakovich, the loss of money was perhaps the largest blow. Others still in the Conservatory experienced an atmosphere that was thick with suspicion. No one wanted their work to be understood as formalist, so many resorted to accusing their colleagues of writing or performing anti-proletarian music.

The latter included the Violin Concerto No. The cycle was written at a time when the post-war anti-Semitic campaign was already under way, with widespread arrests including of I. Dobrushin and Yiditsky, the compilers of the book from which Shostakovich took his texts. For Shostakovich, it was a humiliating experience culminating in a New York press conference where he was expected to read a prepared speech.

Shostakovich, who was a great admirer of Stravinsky and had been influenced by his music, had no alternative but to answer in the affirmative.

It features a number of musical quotations and codes notably the DSCH and Elmira motifs, Elmira Nazirova being a pianist and composer who had studied under Shostakovich in the year prior to his dismissal from the Moscow Conservatoire , the meaning of which is still debated, whilst the savage second movement, according to Testimony , is intended as a musical portrait of Stalin himself.

The Symphony ranks alongside the Fifth and Seventh as one of his most popular works. During the forties and fifties, Shostakovich had close relationships with two of his pupils: Galina Ustvolskaya and Elmira Nazirova. He taught Ustvolskaya from to The relationship with Nazirova seems to have been one-sided, expressed largely through his letters to her, and can be dated to around to He married his second wife, Komsomol activist Margarita Kainova, in ; the couple proved ill-matched, and divorced three years later.

In , Shostakovich wrote the Festive Overture, opus 96, that was used as the theme music for the Summer Olympics. In , Shostakovich appeared on stage in Moscow at the end of a concert performance of his Fifth Symphony, congratulating Leonard Bernstein and theNew York Philharmonic Orchestra for their performance part of a concert tour of the Soviet Union.

This event has been interpreted variously as a show of commitment, a mark of cowardice, the result of political pressure, or as his free decision. On the other, his son recalled that the event reduced Shostakovich to tears, and he later told his wife Irina that he had been blackmailed. Lev Lebedinsky has said that the composer was suicidal. Once he joined the Party, several articles denouncing individualism in music were published in Pravda under his name, though he did not actually write them.

In addition, in joining the party, Shostakovich was also committing himself to finally writing the homage to Lenin that he had promised before. In he married for the third time, to Irina Supinskaya. In all other respects she is splendid: clever, cheerful, straightforward and very likeable. The symphony sets a number of poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the first of which commemorates a massacre of Ukrainian Jews during the Second World War.

Opinions are divided how great a risk this was: the poem had been published in Soviet media, and was not banned, but it remained controversial. In Shostakovich raised his voice in defense of poet Joseph Brodsky, who was sentenced to five years of exile and hard labor.