Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • Free Essays • My Term Papers • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Music Shostokovich Shostokovich Born: Sept. 25, 1906, St. Petersburg, Russia Shostakovich was a Russian composer, renowned particularly for his 15 symphonies, numerous chamber works, and concerti, many of them written under the pressures of government-imposed standards of Soviet art. Shostakovich was the son of an engineer. He entered the Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg, subsequently Leningrad) Conservatory in 1919, where he studied the piano with Leonid Nikolayev until 1923 and composition until 1925 with Aleksandr Glazunov and Maksimilian Steinberg. He participated in the Chopin International Competition for Pianists in Warsaw in 1927 and received an honorable mention but made no subsequent attempt to pursue the career of a virtuoso, confining his public appearances as a pianist to performances of his own works. Even before his keyboard success in Warsaw, he had had a far greater success as a composer with the First Symphony (1924-25) which quickly achieved worldwide currency. The symphony's stylistic roots were numerous; the influence of composers as diverse as Tchaikovsky and Paul Hindemith (and Shostakovich's contemporary Sergey Prokofiev) is clearly discernible. In the music Shostakovich was to write in the next few years he submitted to an even wider range of influences. The cultural climate in the Soviet Union was remarkably free at that time; even the music of Igor Stravinsky and Alban Berg, then in the avant-garde, was played. Béla Bartók and Paul Hindemith visited Russia to perform their own works, and Shostakovich openly experimented with avant-garde trends. His satiric opera The Nose, based upon Nikolay Gogol's story, displayed a comprehensive awareness of what was new in Western music, although already it seems as if the satire is extended to the styles themselves, for the avant-garde sounds are contorted with wry humor. Not surprisingly, Shostakovich's incomparably finer second opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (later retitled Katerina Izmaylova), marked a stylistic retreat. Yet, even this more accessible musical language was now too radical for the Soviet authorities. From 1928, when Joseph Stalin had inaugurated his First Five-Year Plan, an iron hand fastened on Soviet culture, and in music a direct and popular style was demanded. Avant-garde music and jazz were banished, and for a while even the unproblematic Tchaikovsky was out of favor. Shostakovich did not experience immediate official displeasure, but when it came, it was devastating. It has been said that it was Stalin's personal anger at what he heard when he attended a performance of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in 1936 that precipitated the official condemnation of the opera and of its creator. Shostakovich was bitterly attacked in the official press, and both the opera and the, until then, unperformed Fourth Symphony (1935-36) were withdrawn. The composer's next major work was his Fifth Symphony (1937), which he described as "A Soviet artist's reply to just criticism.” A trivial, dutifully "optimistic" work might have been expected; what emerged was compounded largely of serious, even somber and elegiac music, presented with a compelling directness that scored an immediate success with the public and even the authorities. With the Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich escaped from the stylistic instability of his earlier works, finally forging the personal style that he used in his subsequent compositions. Gustav Mahler was a clear progenitor of both the Fourth and Fifth symphonies, but the latter represented a drastic shift in technique. Whereas the earlier symphony had been a sprawling work, founded upon a free proliferation of melodic ideas, the first movement of the Fifth was marked by melodic concentration--certain particles providing the main bases of music that grows organically to a relentless climax. This single-mindedness is reflected elsewhere in Shostakovich's work 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 language than some composers were currently using. In Moscow in 1948, at a now notorious conference presided over by Andrey Zhdanov, a prominent Soviet theoretician, the leading figures of Soviet music, including Shostakovich, were attacked and disgraced. Consequently, the quality of Soviet composition slumped in the next few years. Shotsokovich’s personal influence was reduced by the termination of his teaching activities at both the Moscow and Leningrad conservatories. Yet he was not completely intimidated, and in his String Quartet No. 4 (1949), and especially in his Quartet No. 5 (1951), he offered a splendid rejoinder to those who would have had him renounce completely his style and musical integrity. His 10th Symphony, composed in 1953, the year of Stalin's death, flew in the face of Zhdanovism, yet, like his Fifth Symphony of 16 years earlier, compelled acceptance by sheer quality and directness. From that time on, Shostakovich's biography is essentially a catalog of his works. He was left to pursue his creative career largely unhampered by official interference. He did, however, experience some difficulty over the texts (Baby Yar) by the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko on which he based his 13th Symphony (1962), and the work was suppressed after its first performance. Yet he was undeterred by this, and his deeply impressive 14th Symphony (1969), cast as a cycle of 11 songs on the subject of death, was not the sort of work to appeal to official circles. The composer had visited the United States in 1949, and in 1958 he made an extended tour of western Europe, including Italy (where he had already been elected an honorary member of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Rome) and Great Britain, where he received an honorary doctorate of music at the University of Oxford. In 1966, he was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society's Gold Medal. Despite the brooding typical of so much of his music, which might suggest an introverted personality, Shostakovich was noted for other qualities as well. After Prokofiev's death in 1953, he was the undisputed head of Russian music. There was no reason to doubt that he was a sincere Communist, and he even participated in political conferences. Yet as a composer he always refused to be a mere cipher of official politics. He appeared to flourish in tension, writing much of his best music when his fiercely independent creative thought, under the abiding pressure from his masters for comprehensible expression, was channeled into a musical language of the utmost directness. The Nose (composed 1927-28; first performed 1930); Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (composed 1930-32; first performed 1934; later renamed Katerina Izmaylova, and performed in the revised version, 1962). The Golden Age (1930); Bolt (1931); Bright Rivulet (1935). 15 symphonies, including No. 1 (composed 1924-25), No. 5 (1937), No. 7 (Leningrad, 1941), No. 10 (1953), No. 14 (a cycle of 11 songs, 1969). Violin: No. 1 (1948) and No. 2 (1967). Cello: No. 1 (1959) and No. 2 (1965). Piano: No. 1 (1933) and No. 2 (1957). 15 string quartets; Piano Quintet (1940); two piano trios, the first of which (Opus 8) was repudiated by the composer. Two sonatas; 24 Preludes and Fugues (1951). The Execution of Stepan Razin (1964). Bibliography: Sources: 1. The Story of Great Music: Music of Today 2. The Timid Soul’s Guide to Classical Music 3. Dictionary of Music 4. Shostokovich: A Life Remembered Word Count: 1453
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