Shostakovich started his musical life as a pianist. He took piano lessons from his mother from the age of nine to his induction into the conservatory, where his first symphony was composed as a graduation jury piece. He had fallen pray to the typical musical college establishment by playing previous jury music while pretending to sight read new music given to him. Thus, he wasn’t going to make due as a concert pianist for long. This is one of the reasons he went into composition. Maybe it would be more doable for him as a career and help him with his musically colorful and precocious imagination. This is what he did.
The mystery and atrociousness of the Russian rule had gotten to him. Stalin could no longer be kept under the rug, and yet the tradition for great music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries still found itself booming. After years of rejection, he would finally be able to write the nationalistic music that will stand up against the Stalin establishment. For years before, he was made to keep his state’s views against the dictatorship of the country of Russia hidden to himself. Up to 1936, Shostakovich’s first and second symphonies were really colorful with their rapidly changing harmonic structures, bouncing chromatically from place to place.
By the time of the fourth symphony, his dry musical style that others suspected as far back as the 1920s, was brought up and denounced as being muddle instead of music and “violently vulgar.” It’s funny because, listening to the multi-tempo, chromatically harmonic first symphony, the music may indeed have certain dark moments where the dissonances are muddy, but on the whole, the piece has a lot of energy and interesting harmonies. Is it the time that has passed where new generations of listeners will now accept this music that was shunned or denounced so heavily a generation or two ago? This reviewer believes that we are becoming more accepting of music that may not necessarily be the most uplifting and inspirational as most of the other music in the history of concert music. If you have ever heard of people writing “angry” music and read more of Shostakovich’s biography, you will find how the multiple denunciations of his symphonies and other works was making him. It was making the composer go into hiding with his depression and the depression is, perhaps the reason for all his dry melodic work. Maybe that is the reason for all his poor output.
He came back from denunciation with the Fifth Symphony that had more than mere plaintive notes in it. It features prominent nods to other Russian composers and other important figures in Soviet history, which made many of the people rejoice. It was a rather illustrious and captivating return to form. The Seventh Symphony was another such piece that won much popularity as it expressed ideas that were on the minds of people during the Second World War. It was rather more upbeat and patriotic for the Soviet people.
Soviet and communist governmental forces denounced Shostakovich shortly after his eighth symphony, which was thought to bring glory to the Red Army as a celebratory piece that authorities demanded from the composer. Rather, it was a violent expression, probably the most violent depiction of Soviet expansion during the war.
Later on, Shostakovich would join the Communist party as head of the Soviet Music Composers Union. While at this post, he started writing his string quartets, the eighth string quartet was the most popular. Shostakovich would go onto write the last symphonies of his life, 10 through 13 dealing largely with anti-Semitism. The Thirteenth Symphony was produced on the prompt of a poem that spoke of the tragedy of the slaughter of Ukrainian Jews during the Second World War. This followed by the score to the Russian Hamlet , an adaptation for the Soviet people, which has the stirring Russian chromatic melodies that we all come to know are Russian—was well received by the public. The last symphonies 14 and 15 deal with themes of death as he comes to realize his failing health at the hands of smoking and drinking vodka (probably as a result of his artistic depression) for a mini-lifetime. We all deal with death at one time or another in life, but these two symphonies have a sense of foreboding and foreshadowing his own ill health and the details of his death that later happened in 1975. It was the final gem of the Shostakovich career.
