Citizen Composer

"Only those who have suffered very deeply can totally understand Dmitri Shostakovich's music," said Cellist-Conductor Mstislav Rostropovich as he paid tribute to his former teacher and friend. "He gave to the world not only a sense of great beauty, but also a feeling for the great difficulties and contradictions of the epoch in which he lived."

Few lives, in fact, provide a more poignant illustration of those contradictions than that of the Soviet composer who died at 68 of heart disease outside Moscow. Along with Stravinsky and Prokofiev, Shostakovich was one of the masters of contemporary Russian music. Throughout his long creative life, his works went in and out of capricious official favor with a regularity that Shostakovich must have found dispiriting as well as baffling. His First Symphony, written in 1925 when he was 18, revealed such mastery of orchestration and startling harmonic originality that his reputation was immediately established. He believed in the ideals of the Revolution and did not intend his music to be subversive. But the career of his second opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, was typical. At its premiere in 1934, critics called it a masterpiece, "the first monumental work of Soviet musical culture." So it remained for two years --until Stalin took in a performance and found the opera wanting. Pravda reacted quickly: "The music quacks, grunts, growls." Lady Macbeth was shelved,* and the composer publicly admitted his aesthetic error.

Two years later, Shostakovich was back in favor again with the Fifth Symphony. Striving for simplicity, he avoided complexities and eccentric tonalities. Instead, he fashioned what became his characteristic symphonic architecture: sprawling largos, martial rhythms and jagged melodic intervals.

Cruel Irony. Yet almost each new work was a new test. In 1948 he was attacked by the Central Committee of the Communist Party for "vestiges of bourgeois ideology." He apologized, and two years later won a Stalin Prize. In 1962 he once again aroused the state's displeasure for basing part of his Thirteenth Symphony on Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poem Babi Yar, which denounced the Nazi massacre of Jews outside Kiev.

That official disapproval must have been particularly cruel irony, since Shostakovich had been a rallying point and something of a hero for Russians in World War II. In 1942 his Seventh Symphony was played at a concert in Moscow. Through the thunder of kettledrums in the symphony's last movement, the wail of air-raid sirens was heard, but no one left the hall. With the final burst of dazzling sound the audience sprang to its feet and gave a long ovation to the pale, gaunt composer.

By nature, Shostakovich was a reticent man. He was born in St. Petersburg, the son of a chemist. In a rare interview, he said that the most powerful memory of his childhood was hanging around outside a neighbor's door when the man was practicing music. To make money while studying at the Leningrad Conservatory, he tried playing the piano for silent films. Unfortunately he was too busy watching the screen to pay attention to the score. He was sacked.

When he put his mind to it, he was a brilliant pianist, but he usually composed his many operas, ballets, concertos, chamber music and 15 symphonies right on the page without reference to the keyboard. He claimed that he could write in a doghouse, as--officially, at least--he often did. Beyond his work, his enthusiasms were soccer and chess.

The question will always remain how much his political buoyancy affected his music. As his contemporary Vladimir Nabokov pointed out, it is a wretched thing for an artist to leave his homeland and his native sounds, whether musical or verbal. Perhaps because Shostakovich had to bend his inspiration to the will of the state, the quality of his work varies widely. There are, however, his passages of genuine beauty, crisp wit and sheer energy of genius. For those, it is impossible to name a successor.

*In 1962 the opera was reinstated as Katerina Ismailova.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.