Shostakovich dmitri biography
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Biography
Other musicians have seen worse atrocities. But the most gifted composer to spend almost his entire life within a totalitarian struktur was Dmitri Shostakovich. It was left to him to bära witness to the corruption and cruelty of his age, and its many more subtle privations. Remarkably, he did so not through overt polemic but through satire, a sensitive choice of poetic references and a renewal of so-called ‘absolute music’ in his symphonies and his chamber music. Working beneath a censorious and often capricious Soviet regime, Shostakovich was required to write music that would please Party officials. By the same token, anything deemed unsuitable for the popular masses would have to be kept under wraps. The truth is more complex, however. Shostakovich’s beginnings were progressive. He was was brought up in the enlightened city of St Petersburg, where his main teacher was the composer Alexander Glazunov. His astonishingly accomplished First Symphony (1924–25) won him instant f
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Dmitri Shostakovich
Soviet composer and pianist (1906–1975)
"Shostakovich" redirects here. For other uses, see Shostakovich (disambiguation).
Dmitri Shostakovich | |
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Shostakovich in 1942 | |
| Born | (1906-09-25)25 September 1906 Saint Petersburg, Russia |
| Died | 9 August 1975(1975-08-09) (aged 68) Moscow, Soviet Union |
| Occupations | |
| Works | List of compositions |
| Spouses | Nina Varzar (m. 1932; died 1954)Margarita Kainova (m. 1956; div. 1959)Irina Supinskaya (m. 1962) |
| Children | |
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich[a][b] (25 September [O.S. 12 September] 1906 – 9 August 1975) was a Soviet-era Russian composer and pianist[1] who became internationally known after the premiere of his First Symphony in 1926 and thereafter was regarded as a
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Dmitri Shostakovich: A Life
Was Dmitri Shostakovich a stunningly original composer whose music carries the scars of political intervention, or a devoted Soviet citizen who enshrined the glory of Mother Russia in his symphonies? Whichever way you look at it, there’s certainly no sitting on the fence…
Shostakovich was the most brilliantly inventive of all Soviet composers – and the most hotly debated. Yet who was the real Shostakovich? Was he the composer of the Piano Concerto No.2’s delectable slow movement? Or the Symphony No.10’s biting cynicism? Or the gently tuneful episodes of The Gadfly film music? Or the bleak despair of the String Quartet No.15? He was all these things, of course, but how can the listener make any sense of it all?
Shostakovich’s chameleon-like creative personality makes him impossible to tie down. Take his knockabout Piano Concerto No.1, which throws virtually everything into the stylistic melting pot – vaudeville, jazz, mus