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{shahs-tah-koh'-vich}
Dmitry Dmitrievich Shostakovich, b. Saint Petersburg, Sept.
25 (N.S.), 1906, d. Aug. 9, 1975, was one of the foremost
20th-century Soviet composers. He showed no bent for music
until age nine, when he started lessons with his mother, a
piano teacher. In scarcely a month he was playing simple classics
and trying to compose, and at 11, he performed Bach's entire
Well-Tempered Clavier. Accepted into the Petrograd Conservatory
in 1919, he studied piano with Leonid Nikolaev and composition
with Maximilian Steinberg. The sensational premiere in 1926
of his First Symphony and its subsequent successes abroad
identified him as the leading young composer in Russia after
the Revolutions of 1917.
Drawn into a semiofficial role as representative of Soviet
music, Shostakovich's career evolved in the constant glare
of publicity. He responded by composing many works of a topical
character, among them 4 of his 15 symphonies--the 2d, To October
(1927), the 3d, May First (1929), the 11th, The Year 1905
(1957), and the 12th, The Year 1917 (1961).
An interest in modernist devices, love of irony (both in choice
of subject and its treatment), and commitment to personal
creative vision brought him repeatedly into the center of
controversy. His opera The Nose, produced in Leningrad in
1930, was withdrawn under attack for its "bourgeois decadence."
In 1936, Pravda declared Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, another
of his operas, "a mess instead of music." He was
chastised along with Sergei Prokofiev in 1948 for "formalistic
excesses" counter to the spirit of Socialist realism.
His Thirteenth Symphony (1962), which memorialized the Jews
massacred by the Nazis at Babi-Yar during World War II, angered
Communist officials by implicitly criticizing residual Soviet
anti-Semitism.
Following Prokofiev's death in 1953 and his own admission
into the Communist party in 1960, Shostakovich was widely
acclaimed the foremost Soviet composer--a position still unchallenged
at the time of his death. His musical language remained rooted
in tonality, despite free dissonance, intricate counterpoint,
and even transient dodecaphony (12-tone style). A refined
eclecticism and flair for musical satire survived even the
dark subjectivism of his last works, as in the references
to Rossini's William Tell overture and Wagner's Ring and Tristan
in his Fifteenth Symphony (1971). His autobiography, Testimony:
The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, was published in 1979,
but the authenticity of the work was disputed by Soviet officialdom.
His son Maxim Shostakovich, b. May 10, 1939, a pianist and
conductor of the Moscow Central Radio and Television Symphony
Orchestra, decided to stay in the West while visiting Europe
in 1981.
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