Dmitri Chostakovitch

Although he is best known to the general public for his Waltz No. 2, Dmitri Shostakovich, the greatest composer of the Soviet era, forged a powerful, timeless body of work despite his troubled relationship with the regime - notably through the Symphony No. 7 "Leningrad" and the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The son of a Weights and Measures Office engineer and a professional pianist who gave him his first lessons, Dmitri Dimitrievich Shostakovich was born on September 25, 1906 in St. Petersburg, renamed Petrograd after the 1905 Revolution. He took private lessons with Ignaty Glasser before entering the Petrograd Conservatory in 1919, directed by Glazunov, where he studied piano with Leonid Nikolayev, composition with Maximilian Steinberg, and counterpoint and fugue with Nikolai Sokolov. Composed during his studies, his Symphony no. 1, premiered on May 12, 1926 by Nikolai Malko, was a highly accomplished work, adopted by great conductors such as Bruno Walter, Leopold Stokowski and Arturo Toscanini, before becoming one of his most frequently performed compositions. In 1927, at the start of his career as a pianist, he entered the first Frédéric Chopin International Piano Competition, reaching the final without winning a prize. That same year, his Symphony No. 2 with a patriotic final chorus, commissioned for the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, disappointed with its dissonant modernism. Shostakovich continued in this vein with his first opera, The Nose, based on Gogol's fairy tale, which is as sarcastic as it is avant-garde, particularly in its vocal treatment. Premiered on January 18, 1930, it was a popular success before being withdrawn after sixteen performances, deemed too "decadent" by the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians, and not rehabilitated until 1974. Following in the footsteps of its predecessor, with choir and the use of popular themes, Symphony no. 3, subtitled "First of May", was premiered on January 21, and featured enough modernist elements to be subsequently banned. At the same time, Shostakovich began working for the cinema, with music for the film New Babylon, and set about composing three ballets: The Bug, based on a text by Mayakovsky, The Golden Age with orchestra and jazz band, which was performed thirty times before incurring the wrath of the censors, and The Bolt. He then began composing his second opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, inspired by Leskov's novel of the same name and dedicated to his wife Nina Varzar. Premiered at Leningrad's Maly Theatre on January 22, 1934, it was a hit before being seen two years later in Moscow by Stalin, who disapproved. In an anonymous article, La Pravda described it as "chaos instead of music". Long banned, the revised work was revived in 1962 under the name of the heroine, Katerina Ismailova. Also from this period are twenty-four Preludes for piano, the Concerto for piano, trumpet and orchestra premiered in 1933, a Sonata for cello and piano, and the ballet Le Clair ruisseau, whose criticism by the official press was followed by a condemnation by the Union of Soviet Composers, in a fit of terror in which many opponents lost their lives. Living under constant threat, Shostakovich withdrew his Symphony No. 4 before its premiere, and tried to comply with the demand for "socialist realism" with the next one, which he announced as "a Soviet artist's response to just criticism". Admitted to teach at the Leningrad Conservatory in 1937, the following year he welcomed the birth of his son Maxime and signed the first of fifteen string quartets. Between Symphony No. 6 (1939) and the Piano Quintet (1940), which won the Stalin Prize, Shostakovich reorchestrated Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov and composed several film scores. During the Second World War, in which he took part as a volunteer fireman, he composed the magnificent Symphony No. 7, known as "Leningrad", in support of the defenders of the city besieged by the Nazis. It was triumphantly received and played by the orchestras of the Allied countries. After abandoning the composition of the opera The Players, he set to work on a grandiose Symphony No. 8, dedicated to the conductor Evgeny Mravinsky, who premiered it in 1943, followed by a modest Ninth, far from celebrating the victory of 1945. Appointed deputy to the Supreme Soviet two years later, he wrote his first Violin Concerto (1948), but the pressure exerted by Andrei Zhdanov on the artistic world did not abate, and Shostakovich found himself accused of "formalism", along with Prokofiev and Khatchaturian. Forced to be self-critical and give up his teaching post, he survived by composing film music and sent out a positive signal with the oratorio Song of the Forests, awarded the Stalin Prize in 1950. Privately, he pursued a parallel career with "drawer works for the office", such as the String Quartets and the Bach-inspired Preludes and Fugues. After Stalin's death in 1953, Shostakovich returned to symphonies with No. 10, which became one of his most famous. After his wife's death the following year, he remarried twice, first in 1956, a year also marked by the Suite for Variety Orchestra no. 1, including the famous Waltz no. 2, and then in 1962. Rehabilitated by Khrushchev in 1958, he wrote a second Piano Concerto and received the Lenin Prize for his Symphony No. 11. A friend of Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife Galina Vichnevskaya, he dedicated his 1959 Cello Concerto to the former and the melodic cycle Les Satires to the latter. In three days, he composed String Quartet No. 8, in memory of the victims of the bombing of Dresden, where he had just stayed in the summer of 1960. After taking part in a Soviet delegation on a trip to New York, he was "invited" to join the Communist Party and promoted to the post of delegate to the Supreme Soviet. 1961 saw the premiere of his Symphony No. 12, dedicated to Lenin and evoking the October Revolution, subtitled "Year 1917", while Kirill Kondrachin gave the premiere of his Symphony No. 4, which he had withdrawn from the premiere. A second Cello Concerto was dedicated to Rostropovich in 1966, and a second Violin Concerto to David Oïstrakh in 1967. In 1969, his Symphony No. 14 used texts by Garciá Lorca, Apollinaire, Rilke and Küchelbecker. The last, Symphony no. 15, was premiered by his son Maxime in Moscow on January 8, 1972. It contains a twelve-tone passage, as did his String Quartet no. 12 and Sonata for violin and piano four years earlier. In some compositions, such as Symphony No. 10 and String Quartet No. 8, Dmitri Shostakovich also incorporated the monogram DSCH, a motif based on the German transcription and notation of his name (D. Schostakowitsch): D, E-flat, C, B. In his final years, the composer completed his last two Quartets, six Romances on poems by Marina Tsvetaeva and a Sonata for viola and piano. After several heart attacks and the diagnosis of lung cancer, he died on August 9, 1975, at the age of 68.

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