Dmitri Shostakovich

Russian composer

• Born: September 25, 1906
• Birthplace: St. Petersburg, Russia
• Died: August 9, 1975
• Place of death: Moscow, Soviet Union (now in Russia)

Shostakovich was a first-rank composer in the Soviet Union for a full five decades. He adroitly balanced the insistent requirements of totalitarian political dictatorship over artistic culture with his own irrepressible inspiration for superb creativity to win worldwide acclaim.

Early Life

Dmitri Shostakovich (dih-MEE-tree shahs-tah-KOHV-yich) grew up in a musical family, adopting a musical vocation quite naturally. His mother, a product of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, was a piano teacher. Amateur musical evenings in the family home were a regular part of Shostakovich’s childhood. At the age of fourteen, Shostakovich himself entered the conservatory, where he studied piano and composition. Already he had displayed a talent for composition with pieces, as their titles suggest (Soldier and In Memory of the Heroes Who Fell in the October Revolution), that manifested another of his natural inclinations, namely the reflection of contemporary political conditions in his creative productions.

Shostakovich acquired international fame early with his Symphony no. 1 in F Minor (1925), written as his graduation composition when he was only nineteen. After Bruno Walter introduced it in Berlin in 1927, performance of the symphony soon spread around the world and contributed to a positive view of artistic creativity in Soviet music during the New Economic Policy (1921-1928). The government showed its recognition of Shostakovich’s potential value to it by subsidizing a European tour in 1927, during which he received an award in the International Chopin Competition as a pianist. Presently he made the decision to concentrate his talents on composition at the expense of piano performance.

Life’s Work

The 1920’s in the Soviet Union was a period of experimentation in all aspects of human social existence. Shostakovich celebrated the new society in his compositions. His Second Symphony (1927) and Third Symphony (1929) carried explicitly political titles, October and May Day, respectively, and expressed the optimistic triumphalism of the revolutionary milieu with bold instrumental and grandiose choral movements. Shostakovich ventured into the arena of social criticism with modernist ballets The Golden Age (1928), The Bolt (1930), and The Limpid Stream (1935) and operas The Nose (1928) and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1932) that satirized bourgeois values, some of which he found surviving in Soviet Russia.

Of his ballets and operas, only Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk earned sustained critical praise, but it was also the work that brought him into collision with the Stalinist regime that put an end to the opportunity for artistic experimentation that the 1920’s had afforded. After the opera he enjoyed numerous successful performances for two years in both the Soviet Union and abroad. Joseph Stalin attended a performance in January, 1936. The Communist Party daily Pravda published a vicious attack on it under the rubric “chaos instead of music.” The work was condemned as discordant, incomprehensible, and pornographic, whose true meaning was revealed by the approval it won among capitalist enemies. The shock of the Pravda attack changed Shostakovich’s behavior, and his composing became cautious. He withdrew his Fourth Symphony (1936) from rehearsal, and it waited until the cultural thaw of 1961 for its premiere. With his Fifth Symphony (1937), Shostakovich adopted a new, more straightforward and traditional compositional style. The success of the symphony established his position as the preeminent Soviet composer.

After the German invasion in 1941, Shostakovich wrote two patriotic symphonies (Seventh Symphony, 1942, and Eighth Symphony, 1943) in which the world heard the inspirational celebration of the heroism and courage of the Soviet people. Shostakovich’s world fame reached its greatest height. Western appreciation of Shostakovich waned after the war. One reason for the fading of his luster was the recognition that the wartime symphonies were not great compositions by modern aesthetic standards. Another reason was the imposition of stifling artistic restrictions in the Soviet Union by Stalin’s cultural dictator, Andrei Zhdanov.

In January, 1948, Zhdanov staged an event that actually amounted to a trial of Shostakovich, at which he was accused, in effect, of possessing musical talent that was appreciated in the rest of the world. Zhdanov assembled a conference of composers at which, in the guise of an exchange of opinions about Soviet music, he set the example for a parade of speakers who attacked Shostakovich for his failure to “reform” in the years since 1936. Other composers also were attacked, but Shostakovich was the principal target. Although he was defended by the courageous intervention of such talented musicians as Aram Khachaturian and Visarion Shebalin, Shostakovich meekly requested that the party explain what he must do. That explanation came on February 10, 1948, in the form of a resolution of the party Central Committee that condemned the “formalism” and obedience to Western artistic standards of Shostakovich and the composers who defended him. The resolution declared socialist realism the only style that could be tolerated in the country, and that meant that music must be simple and straightforward enough to be enjoyed by unsophisticated laborers, that it must be tuneful, harmonious, and elevating.

The resolution’s effect was like that of the Pravda article in 1936. Other musicians spoke against Shostakovich’s “formalistic” work, especially his Sixth (1939), Eighth, and Ninth (1945) symphonies, and Shostakovich recanted. In a public statement, he acknowledged that the party had criticized him justly because his music had failed to speak the idiom of the people. He offered as propitiation civic music Song of the Forests (1949) and patriotic film scores The Fall of Berlin (1949) and The Unforgettable Nineteen-Nineteen (1951) all of which heaped exaggerated praise on Stalin, who did not fail to show his appreciation. Shostakovich not only was permitted to retain his privileged living conditions in Moscow but also could travel to Western countries and was awarded the Stalin Prize. However, in the period between the resolution and Stalin’s death, the musical compositions that Shostakovich published were artistically inferior.

Only after Stalin’s death did Shostakovich unfetter his talent. The Tenth Symphony, which premiered in December, 1953, proved its worth in both the acclaim it won at home and abroad and the controversy it stirred. For it, Shostakovich won the highest honor that the Soviet Union bestows on an artist, the title “People’s Artist of the Soviet Union.” The 1948 resolution that had cast a shadow over Shostakovich was substantially rescinded by formal action of the Central Committee in 1958.

In the circumstances of the post-Stalin cultural “thaw,” Shostakovich regained his artistic footing to become the moral leader of Soviet music. His best years were the ten between 1954 and 1964. In February, 1954, Shostakovich published an article condemning the party’s dogmatic and brutal imposition of ideological strictures on artistic creativity. This article served as a manifesto on which Shostakovich based his repeated advocacy of the right of the Soviet composer to experiment with modern techniques. At the same time, Shostakovich balanced his appeals for freedom of the creative spirit with forthright recognition of the artist’s social responsibility, which meant, for Shostakovich, that the musician was morally obligated to promote the just society toward which the Communist Party aspired. He confirmed this recognition by his successful application for membership in the Communist Party in 1960.

Shostakovich excelled in creative production in this period with artistically successful grand works. These included his Eleventh (1957) and Twelfth (1961) symphonies (the latter dedicated to Lenin’s memory), the Second Concerto for Piano, and a magnificent Concerto for Cello (1959). He added to the body of his successful quartets by writing the worthy Seventh and Eighth (1960) quartets. He made an especially bold statement with his Thirteenth Symphony(1962), which carried the title “Babi Yar,” the name of a palace in the Ukraine where Germans had conducted a mass slaughter of Jews. Shostakovich teamed with the anti-Stalinist poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko to produce this patriotic piece, which also directed a clear attack on anti-Semitic manifestations that remained vigorous within Soviet society even at the time of the composition. Further evidence of Shostakovich’s rehabilitation was the production of the very opera that had occasioned his first brutal censure in 1936. In 1963, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk returned to the Soviet theater, renamed Katerina Izmailova. Soon, however, the reality that he was not entirely free manifested itself. Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev banned the Thirteenth Symphony after only two performances, and it was withdrawn from the repertoire.

About one year before his death, as the maestro Mstislav Rostropovich (for whom Shostakovich wrote two cello concertos) was in the process of emigrating from the Soviet Union because of restrictions on his artistic expression, Shostakovich addressed the fifth congress of the Union of Composers (April, 1974) with words that repeated his formal adherence to the Soviet artistic standard. It is immoral, he declared, for music to satisfy the tastes of the elite or merely to entertain. The composer is ethically bound to direct his art to the construction of communism and to the creation of hope and happiness for humankind. When he died of heart disease in the Kremlin hospital on August 9, 1975, Shostakovich was honored officially as a “true son of the Communist Party” and a “civic-minded artist.” After a week of official mourning, Shostakovich was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery.

Significance

Shostakovich’s death marked the end of an era of Russian music history. Shostakovich was a composer very much in tune with his own time and his native society. He provided resounding refutation of a widely held belief that a great artist could not prosper publicly in a society dominated by a Communist Party that aspired to totalitarian control and that great art could not be produced by someone who sincerely supported the social vision that party promoted. Although he was rebuffed repeatedly because of the directions in which his creative genius drove him, he consistently sought to restore harmony between himself and the revolutionary transformations that surrounded him. He was a man of his own people, even while he reserved to himself the right to protest against society, with its vulgarity, anti-Semitism, and bloody suppression of human value.

Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony (1937) can be taken as a touchstone of interpretation of his significance as a composer. He himself named it a “response to just criticism” of the Pravda article on Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Widely acknowledged as a superb technical masterpiece of the symphonic form, it also has been criticized as an unfortunate abandonment of the avant-garde directions implied in works immediately preceding it. Political convictions appear to bias unavoidably the evaluations of even the most sophisticated critics. While most acknowledge the work as a masterpiece, some see in it a maturing of the talent of an artistic genius informed by patriotism, while others excoriate a craven submission to politically inspired cultural terrorism. In its grandiose and precise dimensions, it mirrors the new society toward which the Stalinist regime aspired, yet this frankly political statement was achieved without compromise of aesthetic excellence. Such was Shostakovich’s distinct achievement throughout his life.

Bibliography

Fay, Laurel E. Shostakovich: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Fay uncovers the facts and resolves inconsistencies in what is known about the events of Shostakovich’s life. The book is particularly good when describing the relationship between the composer and Soviet authorities, who required Shostakovich to make speeches, appear at conferences, and engage in other activities in support of the government.

Kay, Norman. Shostakovich. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. A brief but useful biography of Shostakovich, in the Oxford series of composers.

Norris, Christopher, ed. Shostakovich: The Man and His Music. Boston: Marion Boyars, 1982. A collection of scholarly essays evaluating Shostakovich’s compositions, with separate treatments of the various forms in which he wrote.

Schwarz, Boris. Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia. Rev. ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983. A detailed treatment of Soviet musical history in which the figure of Shostakovich looms large.

Seroff, Victor Ilyich, with Nadejda Galli-Shohat. Dmitri Shostakovich: The Life and Background of a Soviet Composer. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943. This book, written in collaboration with Shostakovich’s aunt, is a detailed biography up to the year of its publication. Includes appendixes, an index, and photographs.

Sollertinsky, Dmitri, and Ludmilla Sollertinsky. Pages from the Life of Dmitri Shostakovich. Translated by Graham Hobbs and Charles Midgley. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. A highly laudatory yet complete biography. Includes several photographs and an index.

Volkov, Solomon. Shostakovich and Stalin: The Extraordinary Relationship Between the Great Composer and the Brutal Dictator. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis. New York: Knopf, 2004. Examines the political maneuvering and other strategies in which Shostakovich was forced to engage to survive and create his music during Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian regime.