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Dmitri Shostakovich 1906–1975

by Paul Griffiths

Dmitri Shostakovich, the Russian composer, died in Moscow on August 9; he was 68. A native of St Petersburg, Shostakovich studied in that city at the Glassor School and then at the conservatory, where he was a composition pupil of Shteynberg. The work he wrote for his graduation in 1925 was the Symphony no. 1, op. 10, which quickly brought him international attention, for, despite debts to Prokofiev and others, it displayed a brisk, exciting and highly accomplished new talent. Shostakovich went on to show his spirited wit, and the range of his awareness of contemporary music, in the opera Nos (‘The Nose’) op. 15 (1926–7), a three-act work based on Gogol and responding brilliantly to the biting caricature of the story. The piece contains astonishingly original inventions, such as the episode for percussion alone, but above all it displays that gift for the grotesque which was to mark Shostakovich’s music to the end. Here, however, the grotesquerie is satirical – not, as later, embittered with irony.

Shostakovich’s next two major works represented the first of his attempts consciously to mould his art to the needs of society, in this case those of a young, revolutionary society. Each of them, the Symphony no. 2 ‘October’ (1927) and the Symphony no. 3 ‘First of May’ (1929), has a bombastic choral finale. The influence of Mahler, already evident in the Symphony no. 3, became unmistakable in its successor of 1936, a purely orchestral work of moving personal intensity. Shostakovich decided to hold the Symphony no. 4 in reserve (it was not played until 1962), for by this time the doctrine of ‘socialist realism’ had been promulgated, and one of its main victims had been his second opera, Ledi Makbet Mtsenskovo uyezda (‘Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk district’) op. 29 (1930-32). The parody of The Nose is now joined by a tragic power which earned the opera high praise at its première in 1934, but which two years later was roundly condemned as pessimism; Lady Macbeth disappeared, to emerge under less oppressive circumstances as Katerina Izmaylova.

In 1938 Shostakovich produced ‘a Soviet artist’s practical creative reply to just criticism’ in his Symphony no. 5, op. 47. The work is by no means as emasculated as the situation might have seemed to demand; it is, indeed, one of Shostakovich’s finest achievements, though there is no doubt that he was trying to leave behind the darkness and involvement of the preceding opera and symphony. He next composed his first important chamber music – the splendid Piano Quintet op. 57 dates from 1940 – and orchestration of Boris Godunov, his own op. 58 (1939–40). The succeeding Symphony no. 7, ‘Leningrad’, op. 60 (1941) illustrates, at least in part, the threat of invasion and the glories of victory; no. 8, op. 65 (1943) is equally grand in its sweep, but its tragic tone again brought criticism from above. That came in 1948, at the initiation of the ‘Zhdanov period’. Once more Shostakovich was compelled to suppress scores – the Violin Concerto no. 1, op. 78 (1947-8) and the String Quartet no. 4, op. 83 (1949) – and he complied with party dictates in a trite oratorio, Pesnya o lesakh (‘The song of the forests’), op. 81 (1949).

With Stalin’s death he was enabled to return to large-scale serious composition, and in the most ambitious and personally intense manner, in the Symphony no. 10, op. 93 (1953). This is perhaps Shostakovich’s most subjective expression, and it was criticized as such, as well as for its formal complexity; it is unusually lacking in his ironic humour. He turned to safe revolutionary themes for his next two symphonies, ‘The Year 1905’, op. 103 (1957) and ‘The Year 1917’, op. 122 (1961). In the first the tunes, too, are revolutionary, though their handling is quite individual and highly effective. After the questionable Symphony no. 13, op. 113 (1962), with its Yevtushenko text remarking on Soviet anti-Semitism, Shostakovich concentrated on the string quartet, producing his nos. 9-11 in the mid-1960s. This period also saw his marvellously atmospheric score for a film of Hamlet (1964). The composition of the Symphony no. 14 in 1970 marked the beginning of a final phase in which his obsession with death, often underlying the pessimistic perturbations of earlier works, became paramount. The Symphony no. 14 deals with poems on mortality; the quotations of the Symphony no. 15 (1971–2) suggest sarcasm taken to the point of despair; and the String Quartet no. 15, op. 144 (1974), apparently Shostakovich’s last major work, is cast in six adagios throughout which the prevailing mood is resigned and funereal.

Shostakovich was the composer of two of the most important operas since Wozzeck, of a cycle of string quartets which ranks among the finest of the century, of several masterly concertos and sonatas, and of ballet scores, film music and songs (all genres in which his work is as yet little known in the West). It seems likely, however, that he will be remembered above all as the last major composer of symphonies. In this form his most obvious antecedent was Mahler; in the context of Russian music he combined the character-writing of The Five – and particularly the bizarre acuity of Musorgsky – with the symphonic breadth and thematic insistence of Tchaikovsky. These alignments with Romantic models seem natural, for Shostakovich showed a deep attachment to the notion of art as autobiographical emotional expression. But if sincerity was not for him the problematic notion it was for many of his contemporaries, the conflict of sincerities caused him repeated difficulties. He strove diligently to accommodate himself to what he was told were the requirements of a society he believed in, but at the same time he found he had to give form to personal, not mass, feelings. And his whole output charts the turmoil of a profoundly conscientious musician.

Musical Times, October 1975