Dimitri Shostakovich
Dmitri Shostakovich, born on September 25, 1905, started taking piano lessons from his mother at the age of nine after he showed interest in a string quartet that practiced next door. He entered the Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg, later Leningrad) Conservatory in 1919, where he studied the piano with Leonid Nikolayev until 1923 and composition until 1925 with Aleksandr Glazunov and Maksimilian Steinberg. He participated in the Chopin International Competition for Pianists in Warsaw in 1927 and received an honorable mention, after which he decided to limit his public performances to his own works to separate himself from the virtuoso pianists.
Prior to the competition, he had had a far ...
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toyed openly with these novelties. His first opera, The Nose, based on the satiric Nikolay Gogol story, displayed a thorough understanding of what was popular in Western music combined with his "dry" humor. Not surprisingly, Shostakovich's undoubtedly finer second opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (later renamed Katerina Izmaylova), marked a stylistic retreat. However, this new Shostakovich was too avant-garde for Stalin.
In 1928, Joseph Stalin inaugurated his First Five-Year Plan, an "iron hand fastened on Soviet culture," (Johnson) and in music a direct and popular style was demanded. Avant-garde music and jazz were banished, and for a while even Tchaikovsky was looked down upon. Shostakovich remained in good favor for a time, but it has been said that it was Stalin's personal anger at what he heard when he attended a performance of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in 1936 that sparked the official condemnation of the opera and of its creator. The focus of the ...
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in the work through his adaptation of the monolithic Baroque structures of the fugue and chaconne, each of which is based on the constant repetition of a single melodic idea. This style of composition continued to be an integral part of Shostakovich’s music.
In 1937 Shostakovich became a composition teacher in the Leningrad Conservatory, where he remained until the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. He composed his Seventh Symphony (1941) in that besieged city during the latter part of that year, and the work was quickly accepted, though more because of the "quasi-romantic circumstances of its composition than because of its musical quality, which is often banal." (Kay) This ...
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"Dimitri Shostakovich." Essayworld.com. October 13, 2008. Accessed April 20, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Dimitri-Shostakovich/91380.
"Dimitri Shostakovich." Essayworld.com. October 13, 2008. Accessed April 20, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Dimitri-Shostakovich/91380.
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