The composer who scored the Soviet century, and walked through two official annihilations
"Most of my symphonies are tombstones. Monuments to all the people of our nation who were killed." — From oral memoirs recorded by Solomon Volkov
One of the 20th century's greatest composers, he wrote 15 symphonies and 15 string quartets. His graduation piece, the First Symphony (1926), brought instant international fame, while his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1934) was celebrated for two years before Pravda destroyed it as 'Muddle Instead of Music' in 1936. The Seventh ('Leningrad') Symphony, written during the siege, became a global symbol of Soviet resistance, yet in 1948 he was again purged from public life by the Zhdanov decree against formalism. Across symphonies, chamber works, and film scores, his music remains an aural record of the tension between the Soviet regime and the artist's conscience.
Career Timeline
- 1919–1925Petrograd Conservatory: piano and composition; graduates with First Symphony
- 1927–1936Chopin Competition diploma; operas The Nose and Lady Macbeth; international renown
- 1936Pravda's 'Muddle Instead of Music'; withdraws Fourth Symphony premiere
- 1937–1948Professor at Leningrad Conservatory; rehabilitated by Fifth and Seventh Symphonies
- 1948Zhdanov decree: denounced as formalist, stripped of professorships, many works banned
- 1949–1953US peace congress visit; Stalin Prize for Song of the Forests; secretly writes satirical Rayok
- 1957–1975Secretary of USSR Composers' Union; late symphonies and quartets; dies 1975
Related historical events
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeComposer under pressureA Soviet composer who kept working under official denunciation and the fear of arrest.
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarComposer of the Seventh ('Leningrad') SymphonyHe remained in Leningrad during the first months of the war, serving as a fire-watcher at the Conservatory, and began writing the Seventh Symphony there. Performed in besieged Leningrad on 9 August 1942, the symphony became a global symbol of Soviet resistance.
The 1936 Denunciation and the Shadow of the Great Terror
On 26 January 1936, Stalin attended a performance of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District at the Bolshoi Theatre and left without a word. Two days later, Pravda published the unsigned editorial 'Muddle Instead of Music,' widely believed to have been written or dictated by Stalin himself. Eyewitnesses described Shostakovich as 'white as a sheet' when he took his curtain call. The same February his ballet The Limpid Stream drew a second Pravda attack.
The denunciation coincided with the onset of the Great Terror. Between 1936 and 1938, Shostakovich lost a circle of intimates: his patron Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky (executed June 1937), the musicologist Nikolai Zhilyayev (executed), his brother-in-law Vsevolod Frederiks (arrested), his mother-in-law Sofiya Varzar (sent to a camp), and his friend the writer Galina Serebryakova (twenty years in the gulag). Shostakovich is said to have waited on the landing by the lift at night, expecting arrest, and withdrew his already-completed Fourth Symphony from rehearsal.
His answer was the Fifth Symphony. Premiered in November 1937 and publicly framed as 'a Soviet artist's creative response to just criticism,' the music carried grief and terror beneath its surface. The audience wept; the authorities declared he had 'learned from his mistakes.' Shostakovich had survived again. But the wound of 1936 never healed.