Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich ( 1906 - 1975) was a modernist Russian composer and pianist , and perhaps the most notable symphonicist of 20th century music. Despite being broadly deemed a Neoclassical composer, Shostakovich had a style of his own, which incorporated influences of other schools.
Both life and works of Shostakovich are subject to much controversy – be it on specialized scholars’ critique or reviews and criticism by composers and conductors. Shostakovich’s intriguing psyche is almost as hard to decypher as his symphonies, chamber music and piano works.
According to Haas, Shostakovich was “the greatest of eclectics”[1] .His works combine extremes such as conservatory, tonal Romantic academicism on the one hand , and on the other hand avant-garde, experimental progressivism – translated in the use of brash harmonies; chromaticisms; atonalism; tone rows[2]; and quotations[3] and motifs[4] (after Alban Berg’s fashion, and which added a bleak, gloomy tinge to them). In addition, he drew extensively on folk tunes and popular themes.
Shostakovich's works are also renowned for their acid irony and sarcasm, and elements of grotesque. They comprise a series of fifteen symphonies and fifteen string quartets, two string octets, cello and violin concerti, three operas, several song cycles, ballets, as well as film scores. His pianistic works are, most importantly, two solo sonatas, two piano trios, a piano quintet , an early set of preludes, a later set of 24 preludes and fugues, and two piano concerti .
The composer’s biography and music were deeply affected by the “Great Terror” of Stalin’s tenure – which overtly imposed constraints on his symphonies and operas. Many of those works were censored and banned from being performed from 1936 (year of Stalin’s ascention to power and of Shostakovich’s first accusation, precisely due to his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District ) to 1953 (as of Stalin’s death), and from 1960 until his own death, in 1975.
Shostakovich started his piano studies with his mother, at the age of nine. His first composition – a funeral march in honour of two leaders of the Kadet party murdered by Bolchevik militants - dates from when the composer was twelve.
At the age of thirteen, he entered the Petrograd Conservatory. There, he studied piano with Elena Rozanova and Leonid Nikolayev, composition with Maximilian Steinberg , counterpoint with Nikolay Sokolov and classical music history with Alexander Ossovsky. In those years at the Conservatory, Shostakovich started to reveal the major influences on his early works – Stravinsky and Prokofiev. He wrote his First Symphony in 1926 - at the age of nineteen - as a graduation piece. The work was an immediate success – premiering in Berlin in that same year, a U.S. premiere in Philadelphia followed.
The year of 1927 brought his Second Symphony – parallel with the composition of the composer’s first opera, a satirical piece named The Nose – to which the Third Symphony followed. Due to the experimental nature of those two symphonies , they were not much acclaimed by the Soviet critics.
In that same year, Shostakovich was introduced to the works of Mahler. The Fourth Symphony, with its late Romantic hues, came as a consequence of the latter’s influence over the composer. This influence would endure for all his works thereafter.
The year 1936 was marked by the ascension of Stalin to power and the beginning of the “Great Terror” and strict censorship on the outputs of Soviet artists. In Shostakovich’s case, the piece which triggered governmental attacks on him – coming in the form of an article published in Pravda[5] - was the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District , premiered in 1934. The article called the piece “muddle instead of music,” condemning it for being “formalist” and for going against the dictates of the new political rule - which prescribed a paradigm for what Russian music should sound like. The Pravda article also included a threat against his life ("this is playing with nonsensical things, which could end very badly."). From that day on, Shostakovich’s life would be marked by the fear of arrest and execution.
This had the effect of causing a turning point in the composer’s creative process and compositional method. The time of the accusation coincided with the period in which Shostakovich was writing the Fourth Symphony. All the terror, intimidation and threats on Shostakovich coming from the government forces ended up causing him to work harder on the piece, so as to conceal or camouflage the messages he wished to convey to his audience – which would become from then on subliminal ones. The avant-garde characteristics would remain, yet protected and dissimutated by a late Romantic façade – which was woven in conformance with the Russian nationalist tradition.
Even having its idiom reformed, Shostakovich made the decision of withdrawing the Fourth Symphony, for reasons that remain obscure – thus keeping it from premiering until 1961, well after Stalin’s death.
Meantime between this last piece and the Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich decided to compose film music – a “safer” genre – so as to keep a low profile and stand clear of governmental attention.
After finally premiering in 1937, the Fifth turned out to be a huge success, being acclaimed by critics and government alike, as well as those who had accused him of “formalism”. It would then be said that the composer eventually” learned” by his past “mistakes”.
He would then direct his hidden “subversion” to chamber music – a less public genre, in which he could express his ideas more freely and return to experimentalism. That was the time in which the composer wrote his first string quartet.
With the outbreak of the Second World War, Shostakovich gave his contribution to Russia by premiering the Seventh Symphony – which was officially a patriotic piece in honour of the people of Leningrad, who had bravely resisted German invasion.
By the time the Eighth Symphony came out, a triumphant Red Army expected a new and bright, optimistic piece. Instead, Shostakovich presented perhaps his most sombre and violent work, overtly suggesting tragedy. Criticism inevitably followed, and the piece was interpreted as representative of the composer’s “fascist” inclinations. However unofficial, a ban was imposed until 1956.
In 1945, as Stalin was expecting a celebratory hymn of victory, Shostakovich produced an ironic Nineth Symphony – which was understood as a mockery of Soviet Union’s victory.
The year 1948 brought the second accusation – the so-called “Zhdanov Affair” – after the condemnatory “Zhdanov decree”. Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Khachaturian (among others) were thereby denounced for “formalist perversion”[6]and accused of writing inappropriate music . The decree was part of a government purge aimed at rooting out any musical influences from the West or openly anti-Russian ones. The decree that followed was an admonition meant for all Russian composers, who should then on compose “proletarian music”.
The punishment received by the “formalists” was a harsh one. As a result, Shostakovich was one of the composers who had to apologize for his works in public. Moreover, the bulk of his works were banned, he and his family had their rights withdrawn, he was dismissed from the Conservatory and nearly lost all his money.
Consequently, the works of the following years would be divided in three different kinds, aimed at different purposes. He would write film scores to pay the rent and to appease the government, “official” pieces for his “rehabilitation”, and finally those regarded “serious works” – the Violin Concerto No. 1 among them.
From 1949 to 1953, official pressure on the composer was eased. However , this also had a price; he was put through a set of humiliating situations – such as delivering a prepared speech as a representative of the Russian artistic class at a New York press conference in 1949. Later, publicly asked by Nabokov if he agreed with the RSFSR denunciation of Stravinsky - whose works had always cast a great influence on him and for whom he nurtured a profound admiration – Shostakovich had no choice but to answer in the affirmative (he never forgave Nabokov for the episode). Another ordeal the composer had to go through was having to comply with Stalin’s demand of a composition in which the government’s leader was depicted as “a great gardner”. Shostakovich then produced a cantata entitled Song of the Forest.
Shostakovich’s path back to being a creative artist started in 1953 – year of Stalin’s death ; its landmark was the composition of the Tenth Symphony, characterized by the use of music quotations and codes – the so-called “DSCH motif”[7] being the most important of them, and whose meaning remains a subject of debate amongst scholars. This year was also marked by the premiere of the afore-mentioned “serious works” – the Festive Overture Op. 96 , the Violin Concerto No.1 and the song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry.
The year 1960 brought another turning point in Shostakovich’s career. Those were the times of Nikita Krushev tenure, and the government wanted to appoint the composer as General Secretary of the Composer’s Union. A condition was, however, imposed – Shostakovich would have to join the Communist Party. And so he did.
This attitude was condemned by many as an act of commitment to the political status quo and of utter cowardice. Under the personal crisis this caused –leading the composer to feel suicidal – he finally wrote the Twelveth Symphony – which portrayed the Bolshevik revolution and was dedicated to Lenin.
As an expression of his state of mind on those days, he wrote the Eighth String Quartet - subtitled "To the victims of fascism and war"[8], overtly in memory of the Dresden fire bombing of 1945. In the same manner of the Tenth Symphony, the quartet features quotations of several of his past works, apart from his “signature”, so to speak - the musical monogram DSCH.
That year also witnessed the composer's return to the theme of anti-semitism, whose outcome was the Thirteenth Symphony – subtitled Babi Yar.
The later works were marked by a concern with Shostakovich’s own mortality , as a result of his fragile health condition - including a polio diagnose and a few heart attacks. Instances of these were his last quartets, the Fourteenth and the Fifteenth Symphony.
Shostakovich died of lung cancer on August 9 1975.
Since his death, many attempts have been made to semantically unravel the composer’s ‘Aesopian’ language - which became an inalienable part of his musical language.
Musicologist David Fanning, on the esprit of Shostakovich’s music, contends: "Amid the conflicting pressures of official requirements, the mass suffering of his fellow countrymen, and his personal ideals of humanitarian and public service, he succeeded in forging a musical language of colossal emotional power." [9]
The piece that follows is the Piano Sonata Op. 61 no.2, in B minor (mvmt 1 and 2 of 3) – acknowledged by many as the composer most significant work for piano. Notice the presence of the DSCH motif hidden under the rethoric and forms of Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky and Mahler.
Performed by Valentina Lisitsa.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2NYLQnjSCI
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[1] David Haas. "Shostakovich's Eighth: C minor Symphony against the
Grain", in BARTLETT, Rosamund. Shostakovich in Context . Oxford and New
York, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 125.
[2] A tone row is a
non-repetitive ordering of a set of pitch classes (each pitch class is a
set consisting of a certain note reproduced in a number of higher and
lower octaves; these notes, in a tone row, may be any of the twelve
notes of a chromatic scale).
[3] A quotation is the practice
of alluding either to a work by the same composer (self-referential) or
to a piece by another composer (appropriation).
[4] A motif
is a musical idea, the smallest unity carrying a thematic identity. A
motif stands out from the rest of a composition, generally easily
noticed.
[5] Pravda was a Russian political paper linked to the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.
[6] Dmitri Shostakovich, “Biography”, in allmusic.com http://www.allmusic.com/artist/dmitry-shostakovich-mn0001517893
[7]
The “DSCH motif” is a musical cryptogram by which Shostakovich
indicated his presence. It consists of the notes D, E flat, C, B natural
(D, Es, C, H in German notation). Therefore, it stood for the
composer’s initials in German: D.Sch.
[8] BLOKKER, Roy and DEARLING, Robert. Shostakovich: The Symphonies, p.37. Tantivy Press, 1979.
[9]
"Dmitri Shostakovich". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians.Ed. Stanley Sadie . London, Macmillan Publishers, 2001, p.
280.
References
1. Books
Roy BLOKKER, Roy and DEARLING, Robert. Shostakovich: The Symphonies. Tantivy Press, 1979.
WILSON, Elizabeth. Shostakovich: A Life Remembered. Princeton University Press, 1994.
2. Articles and entries
David Haas. "Shostakovich's Eighth:C minor Symphony against the Grain", in BARTLETT, Rosamund. Shostakovich in Context . Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 125.
Fanning, David and Fay, Laurel. "Dmitri Shostakovich". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Ed. Stanley Sadie. London, Macmillan Publishers, 2001.
3. Websites
allmusic.com. “ Dmitri Shostakovich: Biography”,http://www.allmusic.com/artist/dmitry-shostakovich-mn0001517893
New World Enciclopedia, “Dmitri Shostakovich” http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Dmitri_Shostakovich
Russia Beyond the Headlines, “Paying Tribute to Shostakovich”. http://rbth.ru/articles/2012/10/20/paying_tribute_to_shostakovich_19291.html
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