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Dmitri Dmítrievich Shostakovich (Saint Petersburg, September 25, 1906-Moscow, August 9, 1975) was a composer and pianist Soviet, one of the most important musicians of the twentieth century.
Shostakovich became famous in the early years of the Soviet Union, with works such as the Symphony No. 1 or the opera The nose, which combined with great originality the Russian tradition and modernist currents from the West. Subsequently, his music was sometimes denounced as decadent and reactionary and others, praised as representative of the new socialist art by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). In public, he always showed loyalty to the Soviet system, he held important responsibilities in the artistic institutions, he accepted to belong to the CPSU in 1960 and became a member of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. His attitude towards the government and the Soviet state has been the subject of bitter controversy and it has been hotly debated whether or not he was a clandestine dissident in front of the USSR.
After an initial period in which the influences of Prokofiev, Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith seem to prevail, Shostakovich developed a hybrid style of which his opera Lady Macbeth by Mtsensk (1934) is representative. Later, he moved towards a post-romantic style, where Symphony No. 5 (1937) stands out, and in which the influence of Mahler is combined with the Russian musical tradition, with Mussorgsky and Stravinsky as important referents. Shostakovich integrated all these influences creating a very personal style. Shostakovich's music usually includes sharp contrasts and grotesque elements, 1 with a very prominent rhythmic component. In his orchestral work, fifteen symphonies and six concerts stand out; in his chamber music, his fifteen string quartets should be especially mentioned; He also composed several operas, as well as film and ballet music.
The music of Shostakovich shows the influence of several of the composers whom he admired: Bach in his escapes and his passacaglias; Beethoven in his last quartets; Mahler in his symphonies and Berg in the use of musical codes and quotations. Shostakovich's compositions are widely tonal within the romantic tradition, but with elements of atonality, polytonality and chromatism. In some late compositions (for example, in the Twelfth Quartet) Shostakovich used twelve-tone series. Many commentators have noticed a clear difference between their previous works to the criticisms of 1936 and the later, more conservative works.
Undoubtedly the fifteen symphonies form the core of the Shostakovian work, at least as far as popularity is concerned. Judging by the number of discographic versions on the market and performances in concert halls, Symphony No. 5 seems to be the most popular, followed at a good distance by No. 7, Leningrad and then by symphonies number 1, 10, 9 and 8. Of the six concerts, two for piano, two for violin and two for cello, the first of each pair seems to be much more popular than the second. Among the quartets for strings, very frequently performed in recent years, in number of recordings No. 8 stands out clearly on the others. Other works very performed and recorded are the Trio for piano, violin and violoncello No. 2 and the Quintet for piano and string quartet.
Differentiate in the work of a composer what is better and what is worse is a vain task if what you want is to do science, since value judgments are unverifiable and musicology must be empirically verifiable. However, the preferences of the public and critics are objective data. The aforementioned compositions are undoubtedly among the most "accessible" works of Shostakovich. Several, for example the Symphony No. 5, the Symphony No. 7, Leningrad and the Quintet for piano and strings, very faithfully follow the patterns of tonal music in which often coincided the taste of the Western public and the " patriotic post-romanticism "that the leaders of the USSR claimed from Shostakovich for several decades. This is not the case of the Symphony No. 9, which received harsh criticism in the USSR and which now seems to be one of the most popular, although, for example, many of those who know the Shostakovian work well would consider it a minor work compared to any of the last three symphonies. No. 9 is in the symphonic cycle the work in which the composer seems to adopt to a maximum degree the attitude of jester or, to put it less clearly, the histrionic, humorous and sarcastic use of music. Given the significant character of the number 9 in the symphonic series (neither Beethoven nor Schubert nor Bruckner nor Mahler passed it) and the expectations of the Russian leaders (who expected "their composer" to compose "another great ninth" once the great patriotic war against Nazism), the Ninth Symphony of Shostakovich seems to be interpretable in terms of mockery, we do not know if death, the politicians of the Kremlin, the world composer community or perhaps all of them. But that mockery seems to be very popular with the current public.
The symphonies numbers 10 and 11 form a diptych in which the traditional symphonic mold is reused by the composer with enormous mastery. It seems as if Shostakovich had wanted to show that in the old wineskins of the four movements of the traditional symphonic form new wines can be grown, which are also good. In the Tenth Symphony the musical signature of the composer (the motive re, my flat, do, yes, that is, DSCH in Germanic musical nomenclature) is the structural core of a work that, going from darkness to light, seems to recover from some way the optimism that many years before had shone in the First Symphony. The Symphony No. 11, subtitled "1905" in reference to the revolutionary crisis of that year in Russia, could be considered as the most successful among the programmatic symphonies of Shostakovich. Let the Russian peasants and workers massacred in the Red Sunday of 1905 by the tsarist troops6 (as indicated by the subtitle of the symphony and the titles of its four movements), be the students, workers and Hungarian citizens in general, massacred by the troops in 1956, shortly before the composition of the work (subtext that has been suggested as a possible interpretation of the work and which, according to Laurel Fay, 3 was expressly denied by the composer before his death, which does not necessarily mean that is false), who undoubtedly lives in the compasses of this work is the dynamism of the street tumults and the riots in which very unequal forces are faced. This Symphony No. 11, replete with references to Russian and international revolutionary songs (such as La Varsoviana, in Spain very used by the anarchists of the CNT), which allude, among other things, to political repression, is a prodigy of polysemy .
Ian MacDonald was outraged at the comments that they considered the Symphony No. 12, The Year 1917, as a failure, but his opinion on this 7 seems to be not only minority but absolutely marginal. Almost nobody defends this symphony of little more than half an hour of duration in which it seems that the composer has gotten stuck in a musical material that repeats machaconamente, almost to the satiety. An enigmatic fact is the presence of a motif of the Lemminkainen Suite of Sibelius, an obvious appointment for which no convincing explanation has been given so far.
Many of those who know the fifteen symphonies of Shostakovich consider that the best of their symphonic production is found in the last three. Those who are more inclined towards the musical avant-garde tend to opt for the Symphony No. 14, while No. 13, Babi Yar, or No. 15 are usually the choice of those who look more towards the symphonic tradition and towards the XIX century. Be that as it may, these three symphonies, completely different from each other, almost as if they had been composed by three different composers, are in the judgment of many musical critics among the best that the symphonic form produced in the 20th century. However, Symphony No. 14, orchestrated for chamber orchestra, with two soloists who sing poems by different authors, but all relating to death, in its eleven movements, does not really seem a faithful representation of the symphonic form. Neither is Symphony No. 13, which with soloist and choir that intervene in its five movements seems to be much more an oratorio. In Symphony No. 15 the composer returned to purely instrumental music and structure in four movements, in which on quotes from himself and others (Rossini and Wagner above all) Shostakovich built what could be interpreted as a huge musical mausoleum.
Shostakovich also composed music for films and for the scene, ballets, operas and an operetta. His opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk district, revised as Katerina Izmailova, seems to have already become part of the operatic repertoire. Shostakovich opted in her for an anti-romantic naturalism (it is said that the pornographic glissandi of the trombones provoked the scandal of Stalin) to which it is difficult to find a clear explanation (Taruskin has made an attempt). The nose, comic opera based on a text by Gogol, is probably one of the most successful works of Shostakovich of youth, determined to link with the Russian satirical tradition and at the same time with the musical tendencies of his time. Volkov commented in the introduction to Testimony that Shostakovich often adopted the role of the yurodivy or enlightened and the yuródivy plays an important role in the opera of Mussorgsky, Boris Godunov, which Shostakovich admired and from which he produced a new orchestration. Following Mahler, who dared even with Beethoven, Shostakovich had no qualms about amending the flat to others and thus also orchestrated the Songs and dances of the death of Musorgsky and the Song of the flea of Beethoven and reorchestrated the Concerto for cello of Schumann . But, according to Michael Steinberg in his comments to Mahler's Tenth Symphony, Shostakovich did not dare or did not want to finish this unfinished work, a task in which the Canadian musicologist Jack Diether tried to interest him in the late 1940s.