Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), born in St. Petersburg, was a Russian composer, renowned particularly for his 15 symphonies, numerous chamber works, and concerti, many of them written under the pressures of government-imposed standards of Soviet art. He entered the Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg, subsequently Leningrad) Conservatory in 1919, where he studied piano with Leonid Nikolayev until 1923 and composition until 1925 with Aleksandr Glazunov and Maksimilian Steinberg. He participated in the Chopin International Competition for Pianists in Warsaw in 1927 and received an honorable mention but made no subsequent attempt to pursue the career of a virtuoso, confining his public appearances as a pianist to performances of his own works. Even before his keyboard success in Warsaw, he had had a far greater success as a composer with the Symphony No.1, which quickly achieved worldwide currency. The symphony's stylistic roots were numerous; the influence of composers as diverse as Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Paul Hindemith (and, avowedly, Shostakovich's contemporary Sergey Prokofiev) is clearly discernible. In the music Shostakovich wrote in the next few years he submitted to an even wider range of influences. The cultural climate in the Soviet Union was remarkably free at that time; even the music of Igor Stravinsky and Alban Berg, then in the avant-garde, was played. Béla Bartók and Hindemith visited Russia to perform their own works, and Shostakovich openly experimented with avant-garde trends. His satiric opera The Nose, based on Nikolay Gogol's story "Nos," displayed a comprehensive awareness of what was new in Western music, although already it seems as if the satire is extended to the styles themselves, for the avant-garde sounds are contorted with wry humour. Not surprisingly, Shostakovich's incomparably finer second opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, revised and retitled Katerina Izmaylova, marked a stylistic retreat. Yet even this more accessible musical language was too radical for the Soviet authorities. From 1928, when Joseph Stalin inaugurated his First Five-Year Plan, an iron hand fastened on Soviet culture, and in music a direct and popular style was demanded. Avant-garde music and jazz were officially banned in 1932, and for a while even the stylistically unproblematic Tchaikovsky was out of favour, owing to his quasi-official status in tsarist Russia. Shostakovich did not experience immediate official displeasure, but when it came it was devastating. It has been said that Stalin's anger at what he heard when he attended a performance of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in 1936 precipitated the official condemnation of the opera and of its creator. Shostakovich was bitterly attacked in the official press, and both the opera and the still unperformed Symphony No.4 were withdrawn. The composer's next major work was his Symphony No.5, which was described in the press as "a Soviet artist's reply to just criticism." A trivial, dutifully "optimistic" work might have been expected; what emerged was compounded largely of serious, even sombre and elegiac music, presented with a compelling directness that scored an immediate success with both the public and the authorities. In 1937 Shostakovich became a teacher of composition in the Leningrad Conservatory, and the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 found him still in that city. His works written during the mid-1940s contain some of his best music. Their prevailing seriousness, even grimness, was to contribute to Shostakovich's second fall from official grace. When the Cold War began, the Soviet authorities sought to impose a firmer ideological control, demanding a more accessible musical language than some composers were currently using. In Moscow in 1948, at a now notorious conference presided over by Andrey Zhdanov, a prominent Soviet theoretician, the leading figures of Soviet music-including Shostakovich were attacked and disgraced. As a result, the quality of Soviet composition slumped in the next few years. His personal influence was reduced by the termination of his teaching activities at both the Moscow and Leningrad conservatories. The composer had visited the United States in 1949, and in 1958 he made an extended tour of western Europe, including Italy (where already he had been elected an honorary member of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Rome) and Great Britain, where he received an honorary doctorate of music at the University of Oxford. In 1966 he was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society's Gold Medal. Despite the brooding typical of so much of his music, which might suggest an introverted personality, Shostakovich was noted for his gregariousness. After Sergei Prokofiev's death in 1953, he was the undisputed head of Russian music. The Second Waltz Performed by the Johann Strauss Orchestra André Rieu, Conductor

• published: 22 Jul 2013
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