k in his liking for the repetitive Baroque structures of the fugue and chaconne, each of which grows from, or is founded upon, the constant repetition of a single melodic idea. This almost obsessive concern with the working out of a single expressive character can also be seen in the recurrence in his mature music of certain thematic ideas, notably various permutations founded upon the juxtaposition of the major and minor third (already clear in the Fifth Symphony), and the four-note cell ‘D-E?-C-B’ derived from the composer's initials in their German equivalent (D. Sch.), interpreted according to the labels of German musical notation (in which "S," spoken as "Es," equals E? and "h" equals B). In 1937 Shostakovich became a teacher of composition in the Leningrad Conservatory, and the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 found him still in that city. He composed his Seventh Symphony (1941) in besieged Leningrad during the latter part of that year, and the work achieved a quick fame, though more because of the quasi-romantic circumstances of its composition than because of its musical quality, which is often banal. Indeed, Shostakovich was always an uneven composer. When some extramusical force conditioned the music, empty rhetoric and impoverished invention all too often had been the result. After the evacuation to Kuybyshev (now Samara) in 1942, Shostakovich settled in Moscow in 1943 as a teacher of composition at the conservatory, and from 1945 he taught also at the Leningrad Conservatory. Shostakovich's works written during the mid-1940s contain some of his best music, especially the Eighth Symphony (1943), the Piano Trio (1944), and the Violin Concerto No. 1 (1947-48). Their prevailing seriousness, even grimness, was to contribute to Shostakovich's second fall from official grace. When the Cold War began, the Soviet authorities sought to impose a firmer ideological control, demanding a more accessible musical ...
