Great Masters - Shostakovich - His Life and Music

Great Masters: Shostakovich
His Life and Music
Professor Robert Greenberg
THE TEACHING COMPANY ®

Robert Greenberg, Ph.D.
San Francisco Conservatory of Music
Robert Greenberg has composed over forty works for a wide variety of instrumental and vocal ensembles. Recent
performances of Greenberg’s work have taken place in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, England,
Ireland, Italy, Greece, and The Netherlands, where his Child’s Play for string quartet was performed at the
Concertgebouw of Amsterdam.
Professor Greenberg holds degrees from Princeton University and the University of California at Berkeley, where
he received a Ph.D. in music composition in 1984. His principal teachers were Edward Cone, Claudio Spies,
Andrew Imbrie, and Olly Wilson.
Professor Greenberg’s awards include three Nicola De Lorenzo prizes in composition, three Meet the Composer
grants, and commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation of the Library of Congress, the Alexander String
Quartet, XTET, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and the Dancer’s Stage Ballet Company.
He is currently on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he served as Chair of the
Department of Music History and Literature and Director of Curriculum of the Adult Extension Division for
thirteen years.
Professor Greenberg is resident music historian for National Public Radio’s “Weekend All Things Considered”
program. He has taught and lectured extensively across North America and Europe, speaking to such corporations
and musical institutions as Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting, Harvard Business School Publishing,
Deutches Financial Services, Canadian Pacific, Strategos Institute, Lincoln Center, the Van Cliburn Foundation, the
University of California/Haas School of Business Executive Seminar, the University of Chicago Graduate School of
Business, the Chautauqua Institute, the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, and others. His work as a teacher
and lecturer has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal, Inc. magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The
Times of London. He is an artistic codirector and board member of COMPOSER, INC. His music is published by
Fallen Leaf Press and CPP/Belwin and is recorded on the Innova Label.
Professor Greenberg has recorded over 300 lectures for The Teaching Company, including the forty-eight–lecture
super-course How to Listen to and Understand Great Music.
©2002 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership i

Acknowledgments
Material from Shostakovich: A Life Remembered by Elizabeth Wilson, is reproduced by kind permission of the
publisher, Faber and Faber, Ltd.
Excerpts totaling approximately 4,500 words from Testimony: The Memoirs of Dimitri Shostakovich by Solomon E.
Volkov, English translation copyright © 1979 by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., were reproduced by permission of
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
ii ©2002 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

Table of Contents
Great Masters: ShostakovichHis Life and Music
Professor Biography............................................................................................i
Course Scope.......................................................................................................1
Lecture One Let the Controversy Begin.........................................3
Lecture Two The Kid’s Got Talent!................................................7
Lecture Three Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk ........................................11
Lecture Four Resurrection.............................................................15
Lecture Five The Great Patriotic War...........................................18
Lecture Six Repression and Depression......................................22
Lecture Seven The Thaw ................................................................26
Lecture Eight Illness and Inspiration..............................................30
Vocal Texts ........................................................................................................35
Timeline .............................................................................................................39
Glossary.............................................................................................................41
Biographical Notes............................................................................................42
Bibliography......................................................................................................44
©2002 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership iii

iv ©2002 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership
Great Masters: ShostakovichHis Life and Music
Scope:
The life of Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich is inextricably connected with the history of his native country,
Russia and the Soviet Union, and major world events of the twentieth century. In no other composer’s work do we
find such a mirror of contemporary Soviet history in music.
Like the Soviet Union, Shostakovich was born in the early years of the twentieth century in St. Petersburg. His
childhood was a happy one. He began piano lessons at age nine with his mother and soon showed extraordinary
talent. He was accepted as a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and, despite the hardships of Conservatory
life, blossomed there. His First Symphony was composed as a student work but vaulted Shostakovich into fame
with its premiere in 1926. His work became more modern and “dissonant” with the Second and Third Symphonies,
both of which disappeared from the repertoire until the 1960s, despite initial success.
Shostakovich composed prodigiously in the years after his Conservatory education, writing orchestral music, a
ballet score, and his first opera, The Nose. With Stalin in power, however, the Soviet government was becoming
increasingly repressive; artistic works were increasingly judged by the standards of Soviet ideology, and anything
modern or dissonant was denounced as “formalistic.” The Nose was slammed by critics, and Shostakovich’s next
opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, provoked charges of musical formalism against the composer from Stalin himself.
With this official sanction, Shostakovich’s entire life changed. He had been hailed as the best, the youngest, and the
brightest but thereafter lived in fear.
Shostakovich canceled the premiere of his anguished Fourth Symphony because of threats to himself and the
performers. To Soviet listeners, his Fifth Symphony was an equally moving and dramatic statement about life under
Stalin, but its performance nonetheless “rehabilitated” Shostakovich in the eyes of the authorities. His next
compositional project was the First String Quartet, a brilliant and lyrical work that reveals the composer’s mastery
of this genre, even in this first undertaking.
The nonaggression pact signed by Hitler and Stalin stunned the world, and its fallout once again put Shostakovich
in the limelight. At the time the pact was signed, he had been working on his Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, followed
by the Quintet for Piano and Strings in G Minor, both of which received public acclaim. When Germany invaded
the Soviet Union, Shostakovich was at work on his Seventh Symphony, which became an instant symbol of heroism
and defiance for the Soviet people and the world. The composer was pictured on the cover of Time magazine, and a
performance of the symphony was broadcast throughout Leningrad during the German siege.
After the war, Shostakovich composed his String Quartet No. 3 in F Major, a reflection on the dual tragedies of
Stalinism and the Russian wartime experience. Unfortunately, Stalin had resumed the repression and terror of the
prewar years, and Shostakovich again became one of his scapegoats. Questions were raised about the Third String
Quartet, as well as the earlier Eighth and Ninth Symphonies, and Shostakovich was charged with formalism and
writing “modernistic bourgeois” music. Almost all of his works were banned, he was fired from his teaching
positions, and he was forced to apologize to Stalin and the Soviet people.
Shostakovich withheld from public performance a number of pieces that included Jewish musical elements,
including his Fourth String Quartet and the Violin Concerto No. 1. After the death of Stalin, he began to release
these pieces, along with the challenging and thoroughly modern Symphony No. 10 in E Minor. Despite his musical
successes, these years were personally difficult for Shostakovich. The sudden death of his wife, Nina, was followed
less than a year later by the death of his mother. He was also compelled to join the Communist Party to secure his
appointment as head of the Russian Union of Composers and to ensure the safety and success of himself and his
children. Shostakovich may have contemplated suicide and composed the String Quartet No. 8 in C Minor as a final
testament to himself. Another masterwork of the post-Stalin era was his Symphony No. 13, based on a poem
denouncing Soviet anti-Semitism that Shostakovich found quite pervasive.
For a time in the early 1960s, Shostakovich found a measure of peace and was able to complete his Ninth, Tenth,
and Eleventh String Quartets and the ‘Cello Concerto No. 2. Unfortunately, as the years went on, he became more
and more nervous and neurotic. He suffered two heart attacks and became, essentially, an invalid, but he retained
his creative powers and still produced extraordinary music. His Fourteenth Symphony sets eleven poems by
different writers on the subject of oppression and violent death. His Fifteenth Symphony, although filled with
©2002 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 1

enigmatic musical references, offers listeners a glimpse into both the darkness and the dark humor of the
composer’s mind. His last major work was the String Quartet No. 15, a bleak, introspective, and subdued
composition. Shostakovich died in Moscow on August 9, 1975. He was hailed as a “hero of the people,” but we
know him as a survivor, a witness, and an artist who spoke for all of humanity.
2 ©2002 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

Lecture One
Let the Controversy Begin
Scope: The life and compositional career of Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich parallel, in many ways, the rise and
fall of his native country, the Soviet Union. Both were born in the early decades of the twentieth century in
St. Petersburg, and both died, about seventy years later, in Moscow. Like the history of the Soviet Union,
the personal history of Shostakovich is filled with disinformation and doublespeak. Publicly, the composer
explained his work as a tribute to Soviet ideology and the Soviet people. In private, however, he detailed
the real impetus behind his music: his experiences during the Terror of Stalin, the Nazi destruction of his
country, postwar reconstruction, and the arms race. No composer’s music seems to mirror world events and
the experiences of his own life more fully than does that of Shostakovich.
Outline
I. Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich has been portrayed as a loyal and patriotic son of the Soviet Union.
A. For instance, we have been told that Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 of 1937 is a perfect example of
Soviet ideology set to music, that its brilliant and stirring finale is a paean by Shostakovich to victory, to
Stalin, to the “new” Russia, and the Soviet working class. (Musical selection: Shostakovich, Symphony
No. 5, movement 4, conclusion [1937].)
B. We might believe that this music represents some sort of Soviet epiphany, because Shostakovich himself
affirmed that notion. Writing in 1940, he said, “The central idea of the work is man and all his sufferings,
and the finale of the symphony resolves the tragic, tense elements of the first movement on a joyous,
optimistic level” (Ho and Feofanov, 164).
C. Of course, what we are not told is that Shostakovich wrote those words, literally, with a gun to his head.
Later in his life, speaking in private, Shostakovich said of the finale of that same Fifth Symphony that its
joy seems to be forced by some outside authority.
D. We have been told that Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 of 1941, the so-called Leningrad Symphony, is a
ferocious and patriotic work in which Shostakovich depicts the approaching Nazi hordes in an inexorable
and utterly banal “Invasion Theme,” a theme that is ultimately crushed by the defiance and strength of the
victorious Soviet people. Again, Shostakovich himself said that the impetus for the symphony was to
capture the image of “our country at war” in music.
1. In performance, the approach and climax of the “Invasion Theme” take more than twelve minutes. We
will hear the approaching theme in two excerpts: first, as a distant, banal, seemingly harmless march,
then, roughly eight minutes later, its brutal climax, when we are all too aware that it is neither silly nor
harmless as it stomps forward to envelope us in dissonance. First, let’s listen to its inauspicious, almost
innocent beginning. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 7 in C Major, Invasion Theme Part 1 [1941].)
2. Roughly eight minutes later, the theme reaches its terrifying climax. (Musical selection: Symphony
No. 7 in C Major, Invasion Theme Part 3.)
3. The Seventh Symphony made Shostakovich a hero of the Soviet Union and an international symbol of
Soviet resolve against the Nazis. The symphony was performed in Leningrad during the siege and was
broadcast across the cityand across no-man’s land to the German linesvia huge speakers set up on
every corner. The score was transported out of Russia and performed and broadcast across Britain and
the United States.
4. In private, however, Shostakovich said that he had planned the Seventh Symphony before the war and
was “thinking of other enemies of humanity” when he composed it. He stated, “I have nothing against
calling the Seventh the Leningrad Symphony, but it’s not about Leningrad under the siege, it’s about
the Leningrad that Stalin destroyed and that Hitler merely finished off” (Shostakovich, Testimony,
117, 155–156).
E. We could list other examples of ideas we are led to believe about Shostakovich that contradict what the
composer himself said. In some ways, Shostakovich’s biography is more controversial than that of other
composers for two reasons.

1. First, Shostakovich died fairly recently, in 1975, and composed major works virtually until the end of
his life. The musical community is still getting to know and appraise his output.
2. The second reason for this controversy is more complicated. Shostakovich was a Soviet artist, and his
music was used as a tool of the Soviet State. Much of what we have been told, much of what the
composer himself said, and much of what we have come to believe about Shostakovich and his music
was a function and a fiction of the Communist Party line and Soviet propaganda.
3. Does the fact that Shostakovich said one thing about his music in private and a different thing in
public make him a lackey of a system he privately purported to hate? No, it makes him a survivor.
II. Art and politics make strange and problematic bedfellows, but they are a coupling we cannot avoid if we are to
talk about Dmitri Shostakovich and his music. This, then, is a biography of a man and his art, a place and a
political system, all of them truly indivisible from one another.
A. Dmitri Shostakovich was born on September 25, 1906, in St. Petersburg and died in Moscow on August 9,
1975, a few weeks shy of his sixty-ninth birthday. The country in which Shostakovich lived and worked
for most of his life, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was, for all intents and purposes, born in
November of 1917 in St. Petersburg. Like Shostakovich, it also died in Moscow, in December of 1991, age
seventy-four.
B. The Soviet Union died bankrupt and physically corrupted, its air, land, and water poisoned and its people
struggling for survival. Shostakovich died, his body corrupted by heart disease and lung cancer as a result
of a lifetime of self-pollution through chain smoking.
C. Dmitri Shostakovich’s compositional career mirrored exactly the rise and history of the Soviet Union from
1917–1975.
1. He began attending the St. Petersburg (Petrograd) Conservatory at the end of the Tsarist era; he
graduated and began his career during the liberal years of Lenin’s rule (the early 1920s); he knew
Stalin personally and was nearly purged twice, in 1936 and 1948; he survived the siege of Leningrad,
argued with Khrushchev, and died while Breshnev was in power.
2. Shostakovich survived because he was considered by the powers that be a yurodivy, a village idiot, a
holy fool who protests in the name of humanity and not in the name of political change, by Russian
tradition one of the chosen few allowed to speak out, a sort of societal safety valve.
3. He was a coward, a hero, an opportunist, and everything in between. He saw his friends purged; he
was eyewitness to Stalin’s horrific “Five-Year Plans,” as well as the Nazi destruction of much of his
country, postwar reconstruction, and the arms race. Most of all, he was a truly great composer. And all
his fear and courage, his experience and imagination, found their way into his music.
4. He wrote music that both pleased and infuriated the State. He wrote a symphony (No. 13, the so-called
Babi Yar) that acknowledged the Holocaust at a time when official Russia did not. He wrote an opera
that almost got him killed. At other times, he kowtowed to the Politburo and the Kremlin, toed the
Party line, and publicly said what he was told to say.
5. Yet his mind remained his own, and his conscienceriddled with fear and guilt and self-
loathingwas the secret inspiration behind much of his music. Shostakovich was not just the most
important composer of string quartets and symphonies from the 1920s to the 1970s, but he was also a
witness to the rise and failure of Soviet Communism, perhaps the defining event of the twentieth
century.
D. No composer’s music that I know mirrors both the world around the composer and the vicissitudes of that
composer’s life better than that of Shostakovich.
III. We must deal with some political issues before we can move on with the life of Shostakovich.
A. In reference to the actions of governments, we must always ask, “At what price?” and “For what purpose?”
Hitler, for example, built the autobahns so that he might more easily move men and material in time of war.
The Soviets industrializedat an unimaginable cost of human life and miseryso that they might first
compete with, then crush, their Western adversaries.
B. According to R. J. Rummel, writing in his book Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since
1917, the Soviet government, from its inception in 1917 to its death in 1991, was responsible for
61,911,000 nonmilitary deaths. By comparison, according to Elie Wiesel, writing in his book Night, Hitler
and the Nazis were responsible for 20,949,000 nonmilitary deaths, roughly one-third the Soviet number.

C. Note that these statistics on Soviet deaths are not “Red Scare” numbers prepared by McCarthyite
propagandists during the Cold War. If anything, the flow of scholarly literature coming out of the former
Soviet Union right now may show that these estimates are too low. (Please see the bibliography for further
sources of information on the Soviet government and its actions against its own people.)
D. As a member of the intelligentsia and as someone with access to foreign newspapers and magazines,
Shostakovich was as aware of what was going on around him as anyone could be while living in the Soviet
Union. According to his own admission, he lived in a state of perpetual fear that shaped his life, his
personality, and his music. And his was not the fear of a paranoid; it was the fear of any Russian citizen
living in the period from the 1920s to the 1970s.
IV. A few years before he died, Shostakovich consented to a series of interviews with a young Soviet musicologist
named Solomon Volkov. The interviews, which became the book Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri
Shostakovich, were devastating; Shostakovich spared nothing and no oneparticularly not himselfin his
appraisal of the Soviet Union and his life as a “Soviet” artist.
A. Of course, these interviewsconducted while Breshnev was in powerwere held in secret. To validate
them, Shostakovich signed the beginning of each chapter of the transcription; in the case of controversial
passages, he signed each page of the transcription. (Handwriting experts have authenticated the signatures
as being Shostakovich’s own.)
B. It was understood from the beginning that Testimony would not be published until after Shostakovich’s
death. In 1976, after Shostakovich had died, Volkov emigrated to the United States with the manuscript
hidden among his belongings, and Testimony was published in New York in 1979.
C. Controversy erupted. The Soviet government declared that the book was another example of the West
defaming a Soviet hero. At the time, Shostakovich had been undergoing what was referred to as
“posthumous rehabilitation,” and the State did not want him reconstrued as a closet dissident.
D. Indeed, even some American scholars criticized the book for further straining relations between the United
States and Russia and accused Volkov of fabricating portions of the memoir for his own purposes. Laurel
Fay, whose biography of Shostakovich remains a basic source on his life and music, dismissed Testimony
as the “deathbed memoirs of a sick and embittered old man.”
E. We believe Testimony, however, because Shostakovich’s son, the conductor Maxim Shostakovich, and his
daughter, Galina, have repeatedly endorsed it as accurate. In addition, Shostakovich’s friends and
associateseither speaking freely since 1991 or speaking from the grave in newly discovered and
translated materialtell us that Testimony contains Shostakovich’s words and stories.
F. Our changing view of Shostakovich, then, and the necessary reappraisal of his music, lie at the heart of this
biography.
V. Before we begin the biography, we must notes a few important points about Russia’s history and culture.
A. First, we need to keep in mind that Russia is physically apart, culturally and emotionally separate, from
both Europe and Asia. Russia’s isolation has historically manifested itself in many ways, including
fostering two mindsets that are important for our consideration in this course.
1. Until the mid- to late nineteenth century, Russia exhibited a cultural inferiority complex relative to the
West.
2. In addition, an essential and basic element of the Russian national psyche has been, for centuries, an
extraordinary xenophobia, a fear of foreigners and of foreign influence.
3. We might interpret these attitudes, as Shostakovich did, as two sides of the same coin. The Russians
feared and hated foreign influence but esteemed any artist who became successful in the West.
B. The first Russian Czar to attempt to lift Russia out of its middle ages and bring it into the European family
of nations was Peter I (Peter the Great), who lived from 1682–1725, during a period in Western Europe
that is referred to as the “High Baroque.”
1. To that end, Peter built another Venicea grand Baroque city of canalsat the mouth of the river
Neva, where it empties into the Gulf of Finland. St. Petersburg was to become Russia’s seaport and
window to the West. Peter stocked his new city with the best foreign artists, architects, musicians, and
teachers he could find.

2. From its very beginning, then, St. Petersburg was the most “westernized” and acculturated city in
Russia. Almost all the leading Russian composers of the nineteenth century were natives, students, or
residents of St. Petersburg, including Peter Tchaikovsky, Anton Rubinstein, Igor Stravinsky, and
Dmitri Shostakovich.
C. The Russian nation came of age as a member of the international community as a result of two galvanizing
events in the early nineteenth century: the defeat of Napoleon in 1812 and the Decembrist Revolution of
December 1825. The Decembrist Revolution was an attempt to create a constitutional monarchy based on
the ideals of the French Revolution.
1. Although the Decembrist Revolution failed politically, it awakened a “sleeping giant”: a latent Russian
political and artistic nationalism. Poets, such as Pushkin and Gogol, and composers, such as Glinka,
began to celebrate Russian themes, Russian folk music, and most important, the expressive power and
rhythmic idiosyncrasies of the Russian language. By the mid-nineteenth century, a genuine Russian
tradition of fine literary and musical art had sprung into existence.
2. From the first, certain factions of the new Russian school were so extreme in their desire to create a
“true” Russian art that they went out of their way to reject Western European compositional models.
Xenophobia became an element of Russian musical dogma for many nineteenth-century Russian
composers.
D. In March 1917, the sins of the Russian government under Czar Nicholas II came home to roost. At war
since 1914, the Czarist government had shown itself to be inept and corrupt, incapable of supplying proper
arms and food to its men, who died by the millions.
1. Tsarina Alexandra, German by birth, looked on her Russian subjects with contempt and took her
advice and counsel from a self-appointed holy man, the strange and dangerous Rasputin.
2. At a time when Russia desperately needed to be inspired by its leadership, Alexandra instead
convinced her weak and vacillating husband, Czar Nicholas II, to play the role of a proud and pitiless
autocrat. On March 8, 1917, food riots broke out in Petrograd (St. Petersburg); the troops were called
out but refused to fire on the rioters and themselves mutinied. Anarchy ensued.
3. On March 15, 1917, Czar Nicholas abdicated his throne, and two days later, Russia became a republic
ruled by a temporary, or provisional, government. The provisional government was, from the
beginning, fatally flawed. It was too moderate and too closely associated with the Czarist regime.
4. In April 1917, Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks promised the soldiers, peasants, and workers
“peace, land, and bread” and quickly consolidated their power.
5. On November 6–7, 1917, the Bolsheviks took over the telephone switchboards, railway stations, and
electric plants in Petrograd. A warship trained its guns on the Winter Palace, headquarters of the
provisional government. A quickly assembled “Congress of Soviets” declared the provisional
government dead and created, in its place, a “Council of People’s Commissars” with Lenin at its head.
6. Leon Trotsky was named Commissar of Foreign Affairs, and the thirty-eight–year-old Joseph Stalin
was named Commissar for Nationalities. Almost immediately, Lenin called for an end to hostilities
with the Austrian/German powers and “abolished all landlord property” without compensation, turning
million of acres of arable land over to the peasants.
E. An eleven-year-old piano prodigy and St. Petersburg native named Dmitri Shostakovich witnessed all these
events of 1917.

Lecture Two
The Kid’s Got Talent!
Scope: Shostakovich’s childhood in St. Petersburg was a happy one. He began piano lessons at age nine and soon
showed remarkable talent. When he was thirteen, he auditioned for, and was accepted by, the St.
Petersburg Conservatory. Despite the deprivations of the Conservatory and hardships in his own life,
Shostakovich blossomed during his seven years there. In 1924, at age nineteen, Shostakovich began a
student work that would become his Symphony No. 1, completed in 1925. When the symphony was
premiered in 1926, Shostakovich was vaulted into instant fame. During this time, the young man was also
becoming a prodigious composer, writing piano pieces, chamber compositions, and songs. In 1927, he
received a commission to write a patriotic symphony celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Revolution.
The result was the Symphony No. 2 in B Major, a more modern and “dissonant” work than the First. The
Third Symphony, composed in 1929, followed the template of the Second. Despite their initial success,
both the Second and Third Symphonies disappeared from the repertoire and were not revived until the
1960s.
Outline
I. The Shostakovich family was of Polish and Lithuanian origin. Shostakovich’s father, Dmitri Boleslavovich
Shostakovich, was born in Siberia, where his father had been exiled in 1866 for anti-Czarist political activities.
A. Dmitri Boleslavovich attended St. Petersburg University and worked as an engineer at the Bureau of
Weights and Measures. In 1903, he married Sofia Vasilyevna Kokoulina, a native Siberian who had come
to St. Petersburg to study piano at the Conservatory. Their son, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, was the second of
three children. His older sister, Maria (born in 1903), became a professional pianist and piano teacher; his
younger sister, Zoya (born in 1908), became a veterinarian.
B. By every account, Shostakovichnicknamed “Mitya”grew up in a loving, happy household. His was a
normal childhood, and although he was exposed to music from the earliest age, he seems not to have been
unduly taken with it, at least not at first.
C. Mitya’s piano lessons began when he was nine years old, and his extraordinary talent became immediately
apparent. His progress as a pianist was nothing short of astonishing; within a month, he had auditioned for,
and been accepted as a student by, Ignaty Glasser, Petrograd’s leading piano teacher. Less than five months
after taking his first lesson in Glasser’s studio, Shostakovich performed, from memory, nearly half of
Tchaikovsky’s Children’s Album.
D. Shostakovich’s desire to write music began at the same time as his piano lessons. He was the pride of his
family and his neighborhood: a slim, fine-featured, sensitive, quick-witted, and fun-loving boy who loved
dancing and wordplay.
II. By 1919, when Mitya was thirteen, it was apparent that the only institution capable of nurturing his talents as
both a pianist and a composer was the St. Petersburg/Petrograd Conservatory.
A. At his Conservatory audition, Shostakovich played his own piano compositions for Alexander Glazunov,
the director of the Conservatory and the godfather of Russian composers. He commented that Shostakovich
possessed “a gift comparable to Mozart.”
B. With great things expected of him, Dmitri Shostakovich was enrolled as a student of both piano and
composition at the Petrograd Conservatory in the autumn of 1919. At this point, Russian history and
Shostakovich’s musical legacy became one and the same, but the history was not a happy one.
C. The shy, fun-loving Dmitri Shostakovich who entered the Petrograd Conservatory in 1919 was, by his later
years, an angry and profoundly embittered man. Near the end of his life, during the interviews that make
up Testimony, Shostakovich said that his life was “replete with sorrow,” as were the lives of his friends.
D. Shostakovich spent seven years at the Petrograd Conservatory, from 1919 to 1926. Among the people he
met and befriended during his first year was Leo Arnshtam, a pianist who would go on to become a leading
film director and who remained one of Shostakovich’s closest friends until the composer’s death fifty-six

years later. Arnshtam recalled Dmitri as always animated and already legendary, despite the privations of
the Conservatory.
E. Shostakovich’s most influential teacher, mentor, and friend during his Conservatory years was its director,
Alexander Glazunov.
1. Glazunov was born in 1865 and died in 1936. A prodigious talent himself, he became, at the age of
fourteen, the protégé of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
2. Glazunov completed his first symphony when he was sixteen; his first string quartet, when he was
seventeen. In 1899, he was appointed professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and, in 1905at
the age of fortywas appointed director of the Conservatory, a post he held for twenty-five years.
3. Glazunov reached the height of his international fame between 1905 and 1910. Then, as today, he was
acknowledged as a premiere composer, who reconciled nineteenth-century Russian musical
nationalism with the craft and developmental techniques of German compositional style. Among his
best and most famous works is his Symphony No. 8 in E-Flat Major, Op. 83, composed in
Shostakovich’s birth year of 1906. We hear the opening of its first movement. (Musical selection:
Alexander Glazunov, Symphony No. 8 in E-Flat Major, Op. 83, movement 1 [1906].)
4. Shostakovich even credited Glazunov with saving his life during the famine years of 1919 and 1920,
by ensuring that Dmitri received a scholarship to the Conservatory and, thus, had food to eat.
F. Despite the cold and hunger; despite the death of his father in 1923 and the subsequent necessity for
Shostakovich to take a series of jobs as a pianist for silent movies; despite his contracting lymphatic
tuberculosis in the spring of 1923; despite the uncertain and often dangerous political environment around
him in Petrograd, Shostakovich blossomed at the Conservatory.
1. On November 8, 1923, he presented his first public solo recital. Critic Vladimir Valter was unstinting
in his praise, comparing Shostakovich’s genius as a performer to that of the violinist Jascha Heifetz.
2. Less than a year later, in October of 1924, Shostakovich began work on what amounted to his “senior
thesis,” a work that was to be his Symphony No. 1, completed on July 1, 1925.
3. This symphony would vault Shostakovich into fame after its premiere in 1926. We will listen to the
piece in some detail, but first, we must examine the political situation in Russia during the early 1920s.
III. The civil war between the Red Russians (Bolsheviks/Communists) and the White Russians continued until
1922. It was a horrific war; the almost genocidal brutality perpetrated in particular by the Reds was genuinely
medieval.
A. In addition, Russia had been nearly bankrupt before the war; the deprivations her population faced during
the war were terrible. Disease and starvation were everywhere rampant.
B. The artistic environment in Petrograd, however, particularly after 1922, was extraordinarylargely open,
liberal, and experimental. Music was viewed as a means of establishing the new and “uplifting” ideals of
the government.
1. In the freewheeling Petrograd/Leningrad of the mid-1920s, important new music was premiered every
week and was discussed and debated.
2. Shostakovich, when he wasn’t playing piano for silent movies, attended and raved about performances
by Nathan Milstein and Egon Petri. He heard Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and the Russian premiere of
Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges. At the Leningrad Music Hall, he even heard an American jazz
band, Sam Wooding and the Chocolate Kiddies, perform what was billed as a “negro operetta.”
C. In this rich and stimulating cultural environment, Shostakovich composed his Symphony No. 1. As we
noted, Shostakovich finished the symphony in 1925, when he was nineteen years old. He prepared a two-
piano arrangement of the piece, which he and his friend Peter Feldt played for Glazunov; Maximilian
Steinberg, Shostakovich’s composition teacher; and the Conservatory composition faculty and students.
1. Shostakovich argued with his teachers over the final movement, which, Shostakovich was told, was
“unplayable.” For his part, Shostakovich was convinced that only a live performance of the full
orchestral version of the symphony would prove the piece playable.
2. Shostakovich became obsessed with obtaining such a performance until a premiere was finally
secured. The performance would be the first orchestral concert to be sponsored by the new Leningrad
Association for Contemporary Music.

3. The man who would conduct the premiere of Shostakovich’s First Symphony, Nikolai Malko, was
amazed by both the symphony itself and Shostakovich’s playing. He recognized immediately that the
First Symphony was not a “student work.”
4. After the first rehearsal, Shostakovich was enraptured by the sound of his own music. He dedicated the
symphony to his friend Misha Kvadri, a young composer living in Moscow and the unofficial
“president” of a composers’ cooperative that called itself “The Six.”
D. The premiere, held in Leningrad on May 12, 1926, was triumphant.
1. The audience heard a quirky, ironic, playful, and spare first-movement introduction. (Musical
selection: Symphony No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 10, movement 1 [1925].)
2. This was followed by a brilliant and playful second-movement scherzo. (Musical selection:
Symphony No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 10, movement 2, opening.)
3. Next came a lyric, mysterious, and slow third movement. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 1 in F
Minor, Op. 10, movement 3, opening.)
4. Finally, the audience heard the symphony conclude with great drama, fanfare, and blaring brass.
(Musical selection: Symphony No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 10, movement 4, conclusion.)
E. Shostakovich could hardly believe the response; it was like an incredible fantasy come true.
1. The audience demanded that the second-movement scherzo be encored. They called the composer out
to the stage repeatedly.
2. Shostakovich also felt artistically vindicated; the symphony workedexactly as he composed it,
exactly how he thought it would. The fears expressed by his teachersolder and supposedly wiser
composersproved to be groundless.
3. We might suggest that most of the audience that night left the concert with a keen awareness of having
participated in a very special event: the debut of a major new symphonic composer. That Shostakovich
was a born orchestral composer was apparent to everyone who heard the symphony. What was not
apparent, and what would have stunned many of those first-night listeners, was the fact that the
symphony was the first orchestral work by Shostakovich that he ever heard performed.
F. The First Symphony brought instant fame for Shostakovich. Performances occurred across Russia. In
1927, the symphony was performed in Berlin by Bruno Walter; in 1928, it was conducted by Leopold
Stokowski and Otto Klemperer; in 1931, it became a repertoire work for Arturo Toscanini.
G. During this time, Shostakovich also wrote piano works, chamber compositions (including an octet), and
songs, and by 1926, many of these smaller works were being published, in both Leningrad and Moscow.
1. Shostakovich composed quickly and wrote music in every imaginable genre, including operas,
symphonies, concerti, ballet, string quartets, chamber works, piano music, even film scores.
2. In this course, we will sample his operas and chamber music, but we will focus on his fifteen
symphonies and fifteen string quartets. I emphasize these, because I believe that Shostakovich should
be appraised as the single greatest symphonist of the twentieth century and, along with Bela Bartok,
Arnold Schönberg, and Elliott Carter, one of the greatest twentieth-century composers of string
quartets.
IV. One potentially ominous event occurred soon after the premiere of the First Symphony. Shostakovich, still
ostensibly a student at the Leningrad Conservatory, was informed that he would be required to pass an oral
exam in Marxist ideology.
A. Convinced that he would fail the exam, Shostakovich joked with friends about his “pianistic reliability
versus his political reliability.” Politically, Shostakovich was young and extremely naïve.
B. The exam took place in December 1926 and was administered to five students at a time in front of a
commission. During the exam, one of the students was asked to explain the difference, from the
sociological and economic standpoints, between the work of Chopin and Liszt. Apparently, this student’s
response struck Shostakovich as funny, because he broke into laughter.
C. Shostakovich was instantly dismissed from the exam without having answered a single question. Properly
chastened, he appealed to the commission for reexamination and, the next day, passed the exam without
any further hysterics.
D. One writer refers to Shostakovich’s attitude toward the test as a “prescription for early martyrdom” and,
indeed, a few years later, martyrdom is exactly what would have been the result.

V. In 1927, Shostakovich received his first commission, for a symphonic work to celebrate the tenth anniversary
of the Revolution; the “commissioner” was the Propaganda Division of the State Publishers’ Music Section.
A. Shostakovich was honored by the commission but disinterested (or so he claimed) in its execution. Despite
his patriotism (Shostakovich was a patriot and did love Russia and, as of yet, had no reason to fear or hate
the ruling Communist regime), he found writing purposely “patriotic” music rather slow going.
B. The symphony was subtitled by Shostakovich “Symphonic Dedication to October” and despite its patriotic
contentparticularly a choral fourth movement with a revolutionary text so awful that Shostakovich was
embarrassed to have to set itShostakovich’s Second is a considerably more modern and “dissonant”
symphony than his First. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 2 in B Major, Op. 14, “To October,”
movement 2 [1927].)
C. The Second was premiered in Leningrad on November 5, 1927. Shostakovich wrote by way of
explanation, “In ‘To October’ I tried to convey the pathos of struggle and victory.”
D. The piece was well received despite its modernisms; the choral finale almost guaranteed that the audience
would forget those more modern moments after having experienced the simple, pounding finale. Nikolai
Myakovsky, a professor of composition at the Moscow Conservatory, admitted that in spite of his dislike
for Shostakovich’s music, it “simply and spontaneously thrills.”
VI. In 1928, Shostakovich, then twenty-two years old, decided to move out of his mother’s apartment and settle
temporarily in Moscow.
A. He had been offered the position of music director at the Meyerhold Theater, run by Vsevolod Meyerhold
and his actress-wife Zinaida Raikh. Meyerhold was a true theatric innovator, and the plays and operas he
staged put his theater on the cutting edge of Soviet art.
B. Shostakovich had met Meyerhold and his wife while they were on tour in Leningrad; the three became
great friends, and Meyerhold made Shostakovich an attractive financial offer.
C. Shostakovich lasted only two months on the job. The time he spent at the theater left him little time to
compose, and he was homesick and not a small bit disgusted at living with “theater people.”
D. He returned to Leningrad with some extraordinary new contacts in the Soviet theatrical world, contacts that
would soon stage his first opera, a piece based on Gogol’s story “The Nose.”
E. In Testimony, Shostakovich remembered that Meyerhold was later arrested and executed and his wife was
killed in her apartment by agents of the NKVD.
VII. Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 3 in Eb Major, Op. 20, composed in 1929, followed the template of the Second
almost exactly.
A. Subtitled “The First of May,” Shostakovich’s Third is a programmatic orchestral work that concludes with
a choral finale, in this case, one based on workers’ songs and pioneer marches, music intended to celebrate
workers’ solidarity. Shostakovich wrote that the Third Symphony “expresses the festive spirit of peaceful
construction.”
B. Scholars speculate that Shostakovich intended to compose an entire series of orchestral works dedicated to
the revolutionary calendar. If that is true, this piece is as far as he got; the Fourth Symphony, as we will
see, is a creation of an entirely different sort. For now, let’s sample a bit of the choral finale of
Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 3, The First of May. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 3 in Eb Major,
movement 6, finale opening [1929].)
C. Despite their initial success, both the Second and Third Symphonies disappeared from the repertoire
completely, not to be revived until the 1960s. In one of his typically disingenuous statements, Shostakovich
later dismissed these symphonies as “youthful experiments. . . erroneous striving after [personal vainglory
and] creativity.”
D. We must ask ourselves if Shostakovich really felt this way, or if these are the “official, public” words of a
composer bent on surviving in a system itself bent on destroying the individual creative freedom that a
composer must have.

Lecture Three
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
Scope: The years from 1927 to 1930 were creative ones for Shostakovich. He wrote orchestral music, a ballet
score, and his first opera, The Nose. The opera was well received by the public but slammed by critics, who
were increasingly feeling the pressure to judge artistic works by the standards of Soviet ideology.
Shostakovich’s next major work, the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, was wildly successful with
audiences but provoked even deeper and more dangerous criticism. When Stalin saw the opera, he
pronounced it “degenerate” and issued undisguised threats against those who would perform it. Within a
matter of two years, Shostakovich, who had risen to international fame, was now sanctioned and threatened
as a purveyor of “bourgeois musical formalism.”
Outline
I. We now turn to the piece of music and the event that forever changed Shostakovich’s life: his opera Lady
Macbeth of Mtsensk and the official state reaction to that opera.
A. The years between 1927 and 1930 were extraordinarily creative ones for Shostakovich. Aside from the
Second and Third Symphonies, these years saw Shostakovich writing orchestral music meant to
accompany movies, starting with scores for movies called The New Babylon and Alone. He wrote
incidental music for a satirical play entitled The Bedbug and a ballet score entitled The Golden Age.
B. Most important, Shostakovich composed his first opera, entitled The Nose, in 1928. Based on a story by the
great Russian nationalist writer Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, The Nose was commissioned by the Maly
Opera Theater, whose directors envisioned the future of Soviet opera as one of bold innovation and
experimentation. Indeed, their attitude was one of cultural elitism, which would soon come under fire in the
Soviet Union.
C. Despite the overwhelmingly positive audience response to The Nose, the increasingly politicized critical
community slammed the opera for its serious ideological flaws, modernistic style, and rejection of
traditional Russian operatic values. Shostakovich was stunned and deeply wounded by the political
response of the critics.
D. We must remember that by the late 1920s, the formerly liberal artistic atmosphere of Leningrad was
beginning to suffocate at the hands of Soviet ideologues. Since Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin had
been consolidating his power. By 1927, Stalin had sent Leon Trotsky into exile. Opposition leaders became
puppets of Stalin’s regime and were ultimately destroyed and executed as a result of the political show
trials of 1936–1937.
E. In 1928, Stalin instituted the first of his “Five-Year Plans,” which on its surface, was an attempt to
regenerate the nation’s bankrupt economy by embracing industrialization and collectivization. In reality,
the Five-Year Plan was Stalin’s attempt to create an entirely new ruling class that was loyal to him.
F. When it became clear that the goals and quotas of the first Five-Year Plan were impossible to meet, Stalin
searched for scapegoats for the failure. Accusations of sabotage and espionage, wrecking and hoarding
became convenient methods for both transferring blame and eliminating political opponents. Thus, the
universal climate of fear, distrust, and suspicion that characterized the Stalinist era came into being.
G. At exactly the same timefrom 1928 to 1931a cultural revolution swept the Soviet Union; militant
Party hacks, acting in the name of the “proletariat” (but in reality acting for Stalin) crushed the various
artistic and musical societies that had come into being during the early and mid-1920s. These were
replaced with “unions” for writers, cinematographers, musicians, and so on, which stressed conformity
with Party policies regarding art and expression.
H. Shostakovich did his best to avoid the various composers groups of the 1920s, preferring to remain an
outsider. His independence undoubtedly helped him, because although these groups were shut down by the
authorities, Shostakovich’s lack of participation made him hard to “buttonhole.”
I. Despite the radical modernism of some of his early works and the failure of The Nose, Shostakovich was
much less vulnerable than most of his colleagues to the critical attacks of the Russian Association of

Proletarian Musicians during the cultural revolution of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Shostakovich was
not dependent on any single musical activity for his income. He could compose, perform, teach, and if
necessary, still play piano at the movie theater.
J. Shostakovich managed to walk a fine line between personal self-expression and the increasingly repressive
artistic tenets of the Soviet government. After The Nose was panned by the “new” arbiters of Soviet
musical expression, Shostakovich continuedfor the time being, at leastto compose the music he
wanted to compose. The opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1930–1932) and his Symphony No. 4 (1934–
1936), for example, stand as the crowning glories of his so-called “modern period.”
1. His need to live, compose, and survive in an increasingly hostile artistic environment, however, turned
him into a hypocrite. When the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians condemned what they
called “light music” (gypsy music and jazz, two genres that Shostakovich adored), Shostakovich put
his name behind the campaign to purge the community of musicians guilty of disseminating it.
2. We must remember that in 1930, when Shostakovich wrote those words and began composing his
operatic masterwork Lady Macbeth, he was just twenty-four years old. His whole life was ahead of
him and not in his worst nightmares could he have imagined the dual horrors of Stalinism and Nazism
that were to loom so large so soon. He toed the Party line verbally and continued to write the sort of
music he wanted to write.
II. Shostakovich completed Lady Macbeth in 1932. It is based on a lurid, nasty story written by Nikolai Leskov in
1864.
A. In the story, Katerina Izmailova is the young, bored, illiterate, frustrated, and sexually unfulfilled wife of a
provincial merchant. She falls passionately for a handsome workman named Sergey.
1. The two become lovers, and to sustain her relationship with Sergey, Katerina murders both her
husband and her father-in-law. Eventually, she is caught and, with Sergey, exiled to Siberia.
2. In Siberia, Sergey takes up with another woman, Sonyetka. Crazed with guilt and jealousy, Katerina
kills herself by jumping into the Volga River, dragging Sonyetka with her.
B. Shostakovich worked on Lady Macbeth for almost three years, examining the plight of a woman who is
more talented and intelligent than those around her.
C. As an example of the power of this music, we listen to the brutal seduction and love scene between
Katerina and Sergey. Their angry, passionate, and violent coupling is explicitly heard in Shostakovich’s
angry, passionate, and violent music. (Musical selection: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Act I, scene iii
[1932].) (Note: The excerpts from Lady Macbeth in this course are sung in German in a translation that
was sanctioned by Shostakovich.)
1. This explosive, passionate, and terrifying music not only illustrates the violence of Katerina and
Sergey’s sexuality but the violence their coupling will soon unleash on the world at large.
2. Note particularly the descending trombone glissando that closes this passagea rather graphic
depiction of Sergey’s rapidly wilting passion.
D. Shostakovich finished the opera on December 17, 1932. He dedicated it to his new bride, Nina Varzar,
whom he married in May of that year.
1. The opera concludes with Katerina’s death and the death of her tormenter, Sonyetka. In this last scene,
Katerina, Sergey, Sonyetka, and a group of other convictswho have all been trudging through the
wastes of Siberiapause for a rest by the banks of the Volga. Sergey and Sonyetka have gone off to
be “by themselves.” Katerina, sitting apart from everyone else, numbly contemplates her guilt.
(Musical selection: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Act IV, scene ix.)
2. Even though Katerina appears to be emotionally numb, she is writhing in a hellfire of remorse and
guilt for her actions. Along with Sergey, she has been caught, convicted, and sentenced to a life of
wandering through pre-Gulag Siberia. For his part, Sergey has left her for Sonyetka. To add insult to
injury, Sonyetka has mercilessly and publicly mocked Katerina for her inability to hold onto Sergey.
3. Having insulted Katerina, Sonyetka saunters off to stand at the edge of a bridge that spans the half-
frozen, fast-moving Volga River. Unbeknownst to Soneyetka, her humiliation of Katerina has
constituted, for Katerina, the last straw. (Musical selection: Shostakovich, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,
Act IV, scene ix.)
4. The opera concludes with a mood of utter hopelessness and despair. The convicts line up and, singing,
march off.

E. The conductor Alexander Gauk recalled that during rehearsals, Lady Macbeth provoked a number of
arguments, both for and against its “naturalistic” scenes. In Testimony, Shostakovich said, “In Lady
Macbeth I depicted a quiet Russian family. The members of the family beat and poison one another. If you
looked around, you’d see I wasn’t exaggerating in the least. It was just a modest picture drawn from
[reality]” (Testimony, 268).
F. Lady Macbeth was first performed on January 22, 1934, in Leningrad. It opened in Moscow two days later.
The debate regarding the opera’s “naturalism” was moot; it was, from the first, a smash hit and was
declared a masterpiece.
G. As a result, the twenty-six–year-old Shostakovich’s international reputation as the leading Soviet composer
was assured.
1. By 1936, Lady Macbeth had been performed eighty-three times in Leningrad and ninety-seven times
in Moscow. Within five months of its premiere, it was broadcast five times; within two years, it had
been performed in New York, Stockholm, London, Zurich, Copenhagen, Argentina, and
Czechoslovakia.
2. Inside the Soviet Union, Shostakovich became a celebrity. His artistic plans and progress, his comings
and goings, were tracked by the press; his ideas on topics both musical and nonmusical were solicited;
and he was elected a deputy of Leningrad’s October District.
3. On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, Dmitri Shostakovich had everything he could have wished
forfame, professional respect, a phenomenally successful career, a solid marriage, and a baby on the
way, but on January 26, 1936, his world collapsed. Joseph Stalin, along with a group of high-ranking
Soviet officials, attended a performance of Lady Macbeth at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow.
III. We must remember some key dates in examining the topic of Joseph Stalin and Soviet “social realism”:
A. Vladimir Lenin died in January of 1924.
B. By 1927, after a three-year power struggle, Joseph Stalin had eliminated all opposition to his rule.
C. In 1928, the first of Stalin’s Five-Year Plans was set in motion. It intended nothing less than to shift the
Soviet Union from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy in five years.
D. By 1932, with the inception of the second Five-Year Plan, no one was safe from the long arm of
Stalinist/Soviet repression.
E. On April 23, 1932, the Central Committee of the Communist Party released a resolution stating that all
musical works should have a Socialist content. The Party then closed the Soviet Union to all Western
musical modernism: The music of Schonberg, most Stravinsky, Hindemith, Bartok, Webern, Berg, and
others was banned.
1. “Critics,” or official spokespersons for government artistic doctrine, developed a strange jargon in
which music was evaluated not on its own merits but on its “doctrinal purity.”
2. The most dreaded charge that could be leveled against a composer was one of “formalism”: a
catchword for anything modernistic and dissonant, anything that did not reflect the heroic ideals of the
Soviet working class.
F. Shostakovich had managed, for the most part, to float above the dictates of Soviet Socialist musical realism
for a number of reasons, including the fact that he was the first great composer to grow, develop, and
flourish under the Soviet regime; the hard line he took verbally against artistic decadence and musical
formalism; and the sheer popularity of his music. However, when Stalin and his officials attended the
performance of Lady Macbeth, they stomped out of the theater after the first act, livid and enraged over
what they called “that degenerate music!”
G. Two days later, on January 28, 1936, the Soviet artistic community was stunned by the appearance of an
unsigned editorial entitled “Muddle Instead of Music,” which appeared in Pravda, the official newspaper
of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The article was, in fact, dictated by Joseph Stalin,
denigrating the opera and ending with an undisguised threat.
H. It would take some time for the ramifications of this article to sink in. An example had been made of
Shostakovich; the best and the youngest been cast down, converted, by official sanction, from the brightest
star among young Soviet composers to a purveyor of depraved bourgeois formalism, a cultural enemy of
the people.

I. Shostakovich later remembered that the article changed his existence. He became an “enemy of the people”
and fell into near-suicidal despair. For the rest of his life, he would see himself as a “condemned man…[in]
an enormous prison from which there was no escape” (Testimony, xxix–xxx).

Lecture Four
Resurrection
Scope: Shostakovich was now living in fear. He met with the head of the Committee for Artistic Affairs and was
told that he had to reject his “formalist mistakes” of the past and submit any future work to the committee
for screening. He was forced to cancel the premiere of his Fourth Symphony, a dramatic and angst-filled
piece, because of threats to himself and the performers. In this atmosphere, he was expected to compose his
Fifth Symphony, which would either rehabilitate him or seal his doom. The first-night audience for the
Fifth clearly understood the work as a statement about the Great Terror, but Shostakovich was nevertheless
officially declared “rehabilitated.” His next compositional project was a string quartet, and although the
genre was new to Shostakovich, the String Quartet No. 1 in C Major shows that he had already mastered it.
Outline
I. Throughout 1936, Shostakovich lived in fear, doing his best to keep a low profile.
A. He met with Platon Kerzhentsev, chief of the Committee for Artistic Affairs, and was told that his
rehabilitation depended on his rejection of “formalist mistakes,” the composition of music accessible to the
masses, and in the future, the submission of any proposed project to screening by the committee.
B. Shostakovich found his solace in his wife, his newborn daughter, and the fact that he was still able to
compose.
II. Symphonically, Shostakovich’s Fourth is a turning point in his work. It combines his newfound adoration of
the symphonies of Gustav Mahler with operatic dramatic power and self-expressive angst, or what the Soviets
might see as “formalistic expressive tendencies.”
A. The first movement of Shostakovich’s Fourth begins with a series of tormented screams in the orchestra,
followed by a blaring, grim, and inexorably tragic march. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 4 in C
Minor, Op. 43, movement 1 [1936].)
B. The third and final movement is a twisted, ironic, bitterly comic Mahler-inspired funeral march, almost
certainly meant to illustrate the composer’s own “death,” his fall from grace in January 1936. (Musical
selection: Symphony No. 4 in C Minor, Op. 43, movement 3.)
C. After a series of genuinely bizarre dance episodesintended as a commentary on the vain attempts to
participate in something resembling a normal lifethis third movement ends in throbbing, deathly silence.
The music is clearly very personal, powerful, and formalistic.
D. Shostakovich was forced to cancel the performance of the symphony on the day it was to be premiered,
December 11, 1936. The excuse given was that Shostakovich was “dissatisfied” with it. Again, we must
see this statement as a means of survival for Shostakovich. In fact, the performers and conductor, as well as
the composer, were threatened if the premiere went forward.
E. The symphony was finally premiered twenty-five years later, on December 30, 1961. At the time, a friend
of Shostakovich speculated that his life might have been dramatically different if his “living spirit” had not
been “warped” by Stalin’s article.
III. Shostakovich managed to scratch out a living in 1936 and 1937, but doing so was not easy. By 1937, no new
work of his had been presented to the public in over two years. Under these circumstances, Shostakovich was
expected to compose his Fifth Symphony, the composition that would either rehabilitate him or seal his doom.
His life was truly at stake.
A. The premiere of Shostakovich’s Fifth took place on November 21, 1937, in a tense atmosphere. The
audience could not predict what the “official” reaction to the symphony would be.
1. In fact, immediately before the premiere in 1936, Shostakovich’s Fifth had been performed for a small
number of Party select, who were to determine its “ideological suitability.” Toeing the “Party line,”
Shostakovich wrote three years later that he was delighted with the opportunity to have the Party
audience preview his work.

2. Shostakovich’s friend and colleague, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, described the same Party
“audition” as “a few dozen nincompoops [gathered] together to judge a genius” and said that
Shostakovich fooled them by describing his music as “joyous and optimistic” (Ho and Feofanov, 166).
B. Overall, Shostakovich’s Fifth is a four-movement work built on the traditional symphonic model. The first
movement is serious, moving, and moderately paced; it begins with a vaguely Slavic-sounding theme in the
low strings. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, Op. 47, movement 1, opening [1937].)
C. The second movement is an energized scherzo; again, note the Slavic and Russian flavor and the
accessibility of the melodic material. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, Op. 47, movement
2, scherzo I.)
D. The third movement is a gorgeous and lyric largo, which tips its hat in the direction of the fourth (and
second-to-last) movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 of 1902, the famous “Adagietto.”
1. A back-to-back comparison is most revealing; first, we hear the fourth movement of Mahler’s Fifth.
(Musical selection: Mahler, Symphony No. 5, movement 4, opening [1902].)
2. Now, we hear the third movement of Shostakovich’s Fifth. (Musical selection: Shostakovich,
Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, Op. 47, movement 3, opening.)
E. The fourth and final movement of Shostakovich’s Fifth is as rousing and brilliant as anything he had
written to that point of his career. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, Op. 47, movement 4,
opening.)
F. The brief program note indicated that the symphony constituted “A lengthy spiritual battle, crowned by
victory” (Fay, 99). (Musical selection: Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, Op. 47, movement 4, finale.)
G. Witnesses later recalled that men and women wept openly during the third movement. As the last
movement progressed, the audience members began to rise to their feet, one by one. As the last notes
sounded, pandemonium erupted; the audience applauded for an hour in a demonstration of support for the
composer.
1. Clearly, the first-night audience in Leningrad knew from the beginning that the symphony was about
the Great Terror. No matter how Shostakovich sugar-coated his statements for the benefit of the
authorities, the audience’s understanding of the circumstances in which the symphony was created
allowed them to understand the work in a way that we today generally do not.
2. One first-night listener wrote that the opening of the fourth and last movement is “The iron tread of a
monstrous power trampling man” (Ho and Feofanov, 165). (Musical selection: Shostakovich,
Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, Op. 47, movement 4, opening.)
3. Of course, certain members of the Western musical community did not understand the symphony.
Many Western writers belittled Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony as a “concession” to political pressure
and empty Soviet bombast. Their insensitivity was as appalling as their abject ignorance.
4. In fact, the Fifth is a magnificent, abstract, incredibly personal work that brilliantly straddles the line
between accessibility and personal compositional integrity. It is music that has stood the test of time,
despite whatever immediate political ends it served.
H. After the premiere of the Fifth, Shostakovich was officially “rehabilitated.” He even issued a statement
indicating his “joy” at being accepted back into the fold of the Soviet cultural family.
1. Again, this statement reflected the “public” Shostakovich, the one who was vindicated and
rehabilitated.
2. Privately, of course, his fear and loathing of Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy never left him. By the
end of his life, the weight of his memories and his bitterness had grown to extraordinary proportions.
IV. Shostakovich did not return to composing for a year after submitting the Fifth Symphony. When he finally did,
it was in a genre, the string quartet, that was, for all intents and purposes, new to him, a genre that he would
master as he had already mastered the symphony.
A. Regarding his first string quartet, Shostakovich said that he began to write it as a sort of composer’s
exercise, with no special ideas in mind. Before its first performance, he warned his audience not to
compare the “joyful, merry, lyrical” quartet to his previously completed work, the Fifth Symphony.
B. I might also suggest that the quartet is direct and technically “uncomplicated.” In particular, these
descriptions fit the brilliant and engaging fourth movement, which was the first of the four movements to

have been composed. (Musical selection: String Quartet No. 1 in C Major, Op. 49 movement 4, opening
[1938].)
V. We now return briefly to Shostakovich the man.
A. He was small and slight and could not bear to sit still. He was given to fidgeting and squirming and liked to
while away idle moments playing solitaire. He loved reading fiction, both classic and contemporary. He
was a passable chess player, a better billiards player, and an avid poker player.
B. Although he liked to bike and play volleyball with friends during the summer, Shostakovich was not
terribly coordinated as an athlete. His great athletic passion was as a soccer fan and he would arrange his
vacations and business travel just to attend certain matches.
C. Shostakovich was fairly indifferent to clothes, but he was meticulous about their cleanliness and personal
hygiene in general. He liked to lift a glass with friends, but his capacity for alcohol was limited. Not so
with cigarettes, which he chain smoked.
D. We are told that he was a considerate friend and a tireless correspondent who answered his mail promptly
and always remembered to send birthday greetings and New Year’s cards to his many friends and
acquaintances.
E. Shostakovich was up at 6:00 every day; his mornings were for composing. Dinner was served promptly at
2:00 P.M. Chronically punctual himself, Shostakovich could not tolerate laziness or lateness.
F. As a teacher of composition at the Leningrad Conservatory, he was gentle, caring, and solicitous of his
students though, by his own confession, he was not a “natural” teacher. His students, by every account,
adored him; they were awed by his phenomenal memory, his encyclopedic knowledge of the repertoire, his
ability to sight-read anything at the piano, and his own incredible compositional fluency.
G. As a composer, Shostakovich was, like Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Arnold Schonberg, that incredibly rare
“natural,” a composer who simply sat down and wrote directly in full score without the need to sketch or
make revisions.
1. Shostakovich was accused of writing too quickly, the implication being that he didn’t think things out,
that he simply went with his first musical idea. To this, Shostakovich replied that he thought about his
music completely in his mind before writing it down.
2. If we are to believe Shostakovich, he would have to have had an incredible memory for both classical
and contemporary music, which by all accounts, he did.
3. Shostakovich’s family and friends were amazed by the way he composed: his concentration, his
discipline, and his speed. Once his pieces were complete, Shostakovich did not revise or rewrite them.
4. Shostakovich’s “hearing ear” was in every way as astonishing as his memory and compositional
facility. He could hear individual instruments in an orchestra, as well as the orchestra as a whole.
5. Shostakovich was frankly proud of his facility. Once, on a dare from the conductor Nikolai
Andreyevich Malko, the twenty-one–year-old Shostakovich was given one hour to orchestrate, from
memory, a pop tune by the American songwriter Vincent Youmans, a song known in Russia under the
title “Tahiti Trot.” Shostakovich orchestrated the piece in forty-five minutes and was so pleased with
the results that he incorporated the piece into his ballet The Golden Age (1930). We listen to it, labeled
in the ballet score as “Interlude II.” (Musical selection: The Golden Age, Interlude II [“Tea for
Two”/“Tahiti Trot”] [1930].)

Lecture Five
The Great Patriotic War
Scope: The nonaggression pact signed by Hitler and Stalin stunned the civilized world and opened the way for
Hitler to begin World War II. At the time the pact was signed, Shostakovich was working on his
Symphony No. 6 in B Minor. This ironic and pessimistic piece was enormously successful with audiences
but not critics. Shostakovich’s next major work, however, the Quintet for Piano and Strings in G Minor,
received both public and critical acclaim. It contains four lyric and graceful movements interrupted in the
middle by a vulgar “march of the clowns,” again, an ironic political statement on the part of Shostakovich.
Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union sparked a new intensity in composing for Shostakovich, who was
at work on his Seventh Symphony even as the Germans blockaded Leningrad. Shostakovich became a
“hero of the people” as he worked in the Conservatory fire-fighting brigade, broadcast messages of
assurance on the radio, and appeared on the cover of Time magazine. When the Seventh Symphony was
finished, both the work and the composer became instant symbols of heroism and defiance. Other major
works of this period include the Trio in E Minor, a commentary about death and cultural destruction, and
the Ninth Symphony, a piece of music that was supposed to glorify Stalin but instead evokes an image of
the mouse that roared.
Outline
I. Even as Stalin’s show trials and purges continued in 1938–1939, an even more insidious event took place in
Soviet foreign relations.
A. On August 23, 1939, the Soviet government signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler’s Germany. In a
secret protocol, the Soviet Union and Germany agreed to divide Poland between them. The Baltic States
would stay in the Soviet sphere of influence; in return, Stalin pledged to stay out of any war between
Germany and Poland or between Germany and any of the Western democracies.
B. The pact stunned the civilized world. Communism and Nazismthe great sworn enemieshad made an
agreement. Nine days after the signing, on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Two days later,
Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, thus beginning the Second World War.
C. Soviet citizens were unaccustomed to having the Nazis as their allies. In Testimony, Shostakovich recalled
a hurried production of a Wagnerian opera, Die Walküre, at the Bolshoi. Soviet officials were eager to
impress their new German friends.
II. At the time the nonaggression pact was signed, Shostakovich was at work on his Symphony No. 6 in B Minor,
Op. 54.
A. The symphony was premiered under the baton of Evgeny Mravinsky on November 21, 1939, to enormous
success. The audience demanded that the third and final movement be encored, a rare event for the
premiere of an orchestral work. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, Op. 54, movement 3,
conclusion [1939].)
B. The public Shostakovich wrote of this third-movement finale, “I wanted to convey in it the moods of
spring, joy, youth, and lyricism” (Fay, 115).
1. The rollicking, bouncing, “popular,” almost circus-like music of this finale would seem to bear out
Shostakovich’s description, but we must place this piece against the backdrop of Soviet fear and
purges and against the cynicism engendered by the pact with Hitler.
2. Understood against this background, we see that this music is not about “spring, joy, youth, and
lyricism.” Given the fact that Shostakovich hated “cheap, light” music, the finale can be heard as
deeply ironic.
C. Despite the success of its premiere, the Sixth was not received well by the critics. Perhaps, coming on the
heels of the phenomenally successful Fifth Symphony, it was simply eclipsed. Perhaps the critics also
sensed the irony and pessimism of the piece.

III. Shostakovich’s next major work, however, the Quintet for Piano and Strings in G Minor, Op. 57 (1940), was
acclaimed by both audiences and critics.
A. The piece strikes a marvelous balance between historical models, in particular J. S. Bach, and
Shostakovich’s trademark wit, clarity, and melodic charm. However, I would suggest that a good deal of
the quintet’s critical popularity rested on its seemingly abstract expressive content and its apparent lack of
irony.
B. For example, movements one and two, which are played without a break, are labeled “Prelude and Fugue.”
Note that the quintet has five movements, and movements four and five are also played without a break;
the third-movement scherzo stands as the capstone of the arch. The opening two movements are a clear
tribute to Bach. (Musical selection: Quintet for Piano and Strings in G Minor, Op. 57, movement 1,
Prelude, opening [1940].)
C. Likewise, the fourth and fifth movementslabeled, respectively, “Intermezzo” and “Finale”are graceful,
lyric, and direct and, on first listening, seemingly devoid of the angst so common to Shostakovich’s
symphonic works of the same period. (Musical selection: Quintet for Piano and Strings in G Minor, Op.
57, movement 5, Finale, opening.)
D. The middle movement, the scherzo, is the capstone, the keystone, of the quintet. Underneath its explosive
virtuosity and rhythmic energy is an ironic, personal bit of musical iconography. The movement is based
on a march theme traditionally used to accompany the entrance of the clowns in Russian circuses. Listen
for the “wrong” notes and incomplete phrases planted in this rustic dance; they help to imbue it with a
sense of satire and vulgarity. (Musical selection: Quintet for Piano and Strings in G Minor, Op. 57,
movement 3, scherzo opening.)
E. If this music had been written by any other composer at any other time, we would hear it for what it isa
vulgar, rustic, and energized movement seated astride an otherwise sophisticated, classically styled five-
movement piano quintet. The nature and placement of this “clown” music, however, right in the middle of
the quintet, is an extraordinarily personal, political, and ironic statement on Shostakovich’s part.
F. In March 1941, Shostakovich was awarded a Stalin Prize for his Quintet in G Minor. His resurrection was
complete. Once acclaimed as the youngest, best, and brightest, then toppled and pushed to the brink,
Shostakovich had clawed his way back to the top. Within just a few months, circumstances would convert
this former “enemy of the people” to a genuine “hero of the people.”
IV. On Sunday, June 22, 1941, Shostakovich and a friend planned to attend a soccer match doubleheader and go
out to dinner afterwards. On their way to the soccer stadium, however, they heard Molotov’s radio broadcast
announcing the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
A. Shostakovich immediately volunteered for the army, but with his eyesightto say nothing of his
importance as a cultural iconhe was instantly rejected. He spent the next month digging ditches and anti-
tank barriers around Leningrad and was then assigned to the Conservatory fire-fighting brigade.
B. Mostly, however, Shostakovich composed, with a new intensity that was surprising even for him. He
arranged patriotic melodies and anthems, composed marching songs, and most important, began work on
his Symphony No. 7.
C. Shostakovich completed the magnificent and inspiring first movement of the Seventh on September 3,
1941, just as the Germans were completing their blockade of Leningrad. (Musical selection: Symphony
No. 7 in C Major, Op. 60, movement 1 [1941].)
1. At the heart of this first movement is the so-called “Invasion Theme,” a purposely banal theme that
approaches from the distance, growing in volume and dissonance, until it brutally consumes the rest of
the movement.
2. From its first appearance to its cacophonous climax, this theme and its inexorable repetitions occupy a
full twelve minutes of the movement. We heard a portion of this theme in Lecture One; for now, let us
listen to its thunderous and brutal climax. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 7 in C Major, Op. 60,
“Invasion” Theme climax, movement 1.)
3. The sheer banality of this theme, with its ever-growing, ever louder, ever uglier incarnations, is the
musical equivalent of a cancerous tumor, dividing and multiplying and eventually destroying its host.

D. By early September of 1941, most of Leningrad’s artists and intellectuals had been evacuated from the city,
but Shostakovich refused to evacuate. On September 4, the Germans began shelling Leningrad. Two weeks
later, on September 17, Shostakovich spoke in a broadcast over Leningrad Radio, announcing that he had
just completed two movements of a symphonic composition to assure listeners that life in the city was
continuing.
E. A month later, Shostakovich was ordered to evacuate and, to the relief of his friends and family, he flew
out of Leningrad with his wife and two children.
F. Eventually, Shostakovich and his family ended up in Kuybishev, on the Volga River, just west of the Ural
Mountains. There, Shostakovich completed the Seventh Symphony on December 27, 1941.
1. Shostakovich and his Seventh Symphony were propaganda windfalls for the embattled Soviet
government. Here was the heroic young composer, resisting evacuation from his native city; at the
same time, he was composing a symphony that expressed the plight, the power, the dignity, and the
optimism of the Russian people.
2. Shostakovich and his Seventh Symphony became symbols overnight. Wearing his fireman’s helmet,
the composer appeared on the cover of Time magazine. The finished score of the Seventh was carried
out of Russia on microfilm, to be performed and broadcast across England and the United States.
3. Orchestral parts of the symphony were carried back into Leningrad for an amazing, gut-wrenching
performance in that embattled and starving city on August 9, 1942. Loudspeakers broadcast the
performance throughout the city and to German troops stalled in their siege lines just outside the city.
4. Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony instantly became a cultural icon, both in the Soviet Union and in
the West, a symphonic symbol of heroism and defiance. Shostakovich’s fame was at its zenith.
G. The real meaning of the Seventh Symphony (and, for that matter, the Eighth, as well) is rather more
interesting than legend.
1. Shostakovich played through the completed Seventh Symphony for his friends and neighbors in
Kuybishev on the evening of December 27, 1941. Later that evening, he spoke with Flora Litvinova, a
neighbor and friend of his wife. As Litvinova recalled, Shostakovich said that the symphony was “not
about fascism but about our system, in general about totalitarianism” (Litvinova).
2. Shostakovich said much the same thing thirty years later, noting that he had planned the symphony
before the war and calling Stalin as much a criminal as Hitler for the millions he tortured and killed
and for his destruction of Leningrad before the war. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 7, Op. 60,
movement 4, opening [1941].)
3. Without the war as a pretext, some speculate that Shostakovich would have been unable to write the
Seventh Symphony. In fact, during the war years, Soviet artists could express “grief and
destruction…In peacetime, unclouded optimism was required of art” (Testimony, xxxiv).
H. Of course, the war also created hardships for Shostakovich and his family. They lived in a school library
for two years; suffered illnesses that were rampant at the time (Shostakovich himself contracted typhoid);
and experienced terrible losses, as one friend and family member after another fell victim to battle, Nazi
brutality, and disease.
V. While at Kuybishev, Shostakovich continued to compose: an opera based on Gogol’s play The Gamblers, sets
of concert songs, a second piano sonata, the Eighth Symphony, String Quartet No. 2, and the Trio No. 2 in E
Minor, Op. 67, for Piano, Violin, and ‘Cello.
A. The Trio in E Minor is one of Shostakovich’s great masterworks and one of the key works of the chamber
repertoire. He began work on it in late 1943.
B. On February 11, 1944, while still working on the first movement of the trio, Shostakovich’s dear friend
Ivan Sollertinsky died of a heart attack at age forty-one.
1. Sollertinsky was a genuine polymath: He was a linguist, specializing in Spanish and Romance
languages; he was, as well, an expert on philosophy, art history, theater, and music. He was
responsible for having the music of Gustav Mahler and Anton Bruckner first performed in the Soviet
Union and served as artistic advisor to the Leningrad Philharmonic.
2. Shostakovich first met Sollertinsky in the late 1920s. The composer’s sister remembered their
friendship as very close.

C. Sollertinsky’s death left Shostakovich crushed; the loss was incalculable. The death of his dear friend also
profoundly influenced Shostakovich’s trio in progress. Sollertinsky’s sister wrote that the breathtaking
second movement was “an amazingly exact portrait of Ivan Ivanovich [Sollertinsky].” (Musical selection:
Piano Trio in E Minor, Op. 67, movement 2 [1944].)
D. The third movement of the trio is a quiet and deeply moving dirge; it is the perfect setup for the incredible
fourth movementa violent, wailing, screaming dance macabre based on various Jewish melodies.
1. Shostakovich was fascinated by klezmer musicthe traditional Jewish dance band music of Central
and Eastern Europe. Late in life, he told Solomon Volkov that Jewish folk music “can appear to be
happy while it is tragic.”
2. By using Jewish dance melodies in this fourth movement, Shostakovich turns his grief for his friend
into an extraordinary totentanz (dance of death).
3. Even as this music was being written, advancing and disbelieving Soviet troops were discovering, one
after another, Nazi forced labor and extermination camps. This fourth movementand the entire trio,
by extensionultimately became a universal statement about death, cultural destruction, and
desolation. (Musical selection: Piano Trio in E Minor, Op. 67, movement 4.)
VI. The war in Europe officially ended on May 8, 1945. Shostakovich immediately began work on his Ninth
Symphony, which he completed later that year.
A. Stalin expected the Ninth to be an apotheosis to himself, a grand piece of music that would glorify the
leader of the Soviet Union, but Shostakovich later confessed that he could not bring himself to write such a
piece for Stalin. He believed he knew the consequences of his actions, but he didn’t.
B. We first listen to a sample of the almost Mozartean first movement; note in particular the piccolo solo,
which brings to mind the word pipsqueak, punctuated, as it is, by blaring brass. Truly, the music evokes the
mouse that roared, exactly the sort of ironic commentary that was likely to provoke the authorities.
(Musical selection: Symphony No. 9 in Eb Major, Op. 70, movement 1 [1945].)
C. Like the first movement, none of the following movements is terribly “apotheotic”not the clarinet-
dominated second-movement opening; the playful, wind-dominated third-movement opening; the blustery
fourth movement; or the rather oily, furtive bassoon theme that initiates the fifth and last movement.
(Musical selection: Symphony No. 9 in Eb Major, Op. 70, movement 5 opening.)
D. Shostakovich would have done well to keep this symphony hidden, but he did not.

Lecture Six
Repression and Depression
Scope: After the war, Shostakovich composed his first genuine string quartet masterwork, the String Quartet No. 3
in F Major, which reflects the dual tragedies of Stalinism and the Russian experience in World War II.
Unfortunately, this piece, along with the Eighth and Ninth Symphonies, once again put Shostakovich in the
line of Party fire. He again faced charges of formalism and was expected to publicly apologize to Stalin
and the Soviet people. He was also fired from his teaching jobs and forced to acknowledge speeches
denouncing the United States on a mission there to the Congress of Peace and Culture. He withheld from
performance his String Quartet No. 4 in D Major, a piece that uses a number of Jewish musical elements.
In 1952, Shostakovich completed his String Quartet No. 5, an emotionally and thematically rich
composition that evokes the loss of innocence and the need to survive the horrors of life. A year later,
Stalin seems to have been preparing the Soviet Union for a final, apocalyptic war with the West. When
Stalin died under questionable circumstances, Shostakovich’s reaction was relieved but guarded.
Outline
I. The war over, Shostakovich and his family were resettled in Moscow, not Leningrad, at the personal command
of Joseph Stalin.
A. Starting in 1946, the Shostakovich family began spending summers in the village of Komarovo outside of
Leningrad. There, during the summer of 1946, Shostakovich composed his extraordinary String Quartet
No. 3.
B. The Third Quartet was the composer’s first genuine string quartet masterwork. The piece is almost
symphonic in scale and dramatic impact, and it follows the five-movement plan that Shostakovich
generally reserved for his most serious and important works.
C. The quartet reflects the dual tragedies of Stalinism and the Russian experience in World War II. It is filled
with bitter, ironic music and striking musical juxtapositionings, signature elements of Shostakovich’s
work. For example, the quartet begins with an almost comic or cute first movement that when taken in
context with the movements that follow, becomes a profoundly ironic statement: Fiddle on now, clown, for
we are about to burn. (Musical selection: String Quartet No. 3 in F Major, Op. 73, movement 1, opening.)
D. Shostakovich originally gave the movements of his Third Quartet programmatic titles, but he eventually
withdrew these titles, perhaps because he didn’t want us to take them too literally. Nevertheless, they are
helpful in allowing us to understand the large-scale dramatic flow of the quartet.
1. Movement 1 was called “Calm unawareness of the future cataclysm.”
2. Movement 2 was called “Rumblings of unrest and anticipation.” (Musical selection: String Quartet
No. 3 in F Major, Op. 73, movement 2, opening.)
3. Movement 3 was “The forces of war unleashed.” (Musical selection: String Quartet No. 3 in F Major,
Op. 73, movement 3, opening.)
4. Movement 4 was “Homage to the dead.” (Musical selection: String Quartet No. 3 in F Major, Op. 73,
movement 4, opening.)
5. Movement 5 was called “The eternal questionWhy? And for what?” (This last movement is so
profound, intimate, and pained that any attempt to excerpt it out of context runs the risk of trivializing
it.)
E. Shostakovich’s Third String Quartet was premiered in Moscow by the Beethoven String Quartetto which
it was dedicatedon December 16, 1946. The music, like most of Shostakovich’s compositions, would
soon disappear from public view.
II. In 1946, Joseph Stalin saw that the Soviet “sphere of influence” now included eastern Germany,
Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and Yugoslavia. His problems, however, lay at
home.
A. During the war, the generals in the army had become accustomed to independence and had tasted glory.
Even before the war ended, Stalin was already building cases against the army leadership; they were
growing too powerful and too confident.

B. In Stalin’s eyes, the intelligentsia had, as well, become emboldened. Intellectuals were beginning to
question Soviet ideology.
C. Any hopes that victory over the Nazis had mellowed Stalin, any hopes that the postwar period might see a
grateful Soviet government loosen its controls over its victorious but spent population were foolish
pipedreams. For Stalin, it was time to reinstate the Terror, time to pick up where he left off in 1941.
D. Stalin would address, first, the intellectuals and artists, then the Jews, then the army, and finally, his own
inner circle, just as he had done from 1932 to 1940.
1. In 1946, Stalin appointed a new ideological watchdog, Andrey Zhdanov, and the Central Committee of
the Communist Party issued a resolution that triggered a new round of cultural purges.
2. This new wave of repression, arrests, show trials, and shootings, spearheaded by Zhdanov, washed
over the world of Soviet music in early 1948. And, incredible as it might seem to us now, the
committee focused its attention on Shostakovich, who had once been accused of formalism and was
now viewed as a possible recidivist for that crime.
3. Questions were raised about the complex musical language of the Eighth Symphony and the official
disappointment with the Ninth Symphony. That Shostakovich was perceived to be above
criticismthat he seemed to be an artist of the world, above and beyond the Soviet Unionmade him
that much more vulnerable.
4. Even as Shostakovich was watching his life and career go up in flames for the second time in twelve
years, the body of his great friend, the distinguished Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels, was discovered
mutilated in Minsk. Recently declassified documents reveal the elaborate plans of Lavrenty Beria, a
member of the Politburo and the head of the secret police, to assassinate Mikhoels.
E. On February 10, 1948, the Central Committee brought charges against Shostakovich, Sergey Prokofiev,
and Aram Khachaturian, among others, accusing them of formalism and of writing “modernistic
bourgeois” music. Shostakovich and Prokofiev were singled out for their “unhealthy individualism and
artistic pessimism” and their “spirit of negative criticism, despair, and non-belief” (Testimony).
1. Shostakovich and his fellow anti-democratic, formalist, bourgeois-leaning enemies of the people were
forced to stand up and apologize to Stalin and the Soviet people and beg forgiveness for their sins.
2. All but a few of Shostakovich’s works, excluding Symphonies No. 1, 5, and 7, were banned and, in
practical reality, even those works that were not banned were not performed, because no one was
willing to take the chance of performing music by a condemned composer.
3. On September 1, 1948, Shostakovich was fired from his teaching jobs at the Leningrad and Moscow
Conservatories and stripped of his professorial rank. Even his ten year-old son, Maxim, was made to
denounce his father during his elementary school examinations.
4. Some have speculated that Shostakovich contemplated suicide at this time. As he had in 1936,
however, he again found support among his family and a very small circle of loyal friends, many of
whom were Jewish.
5. Shostakovich found work writing movie music, which he hated. Between 1948 and 1952, he wrote
symphonic scores for seven films.
6. Even under the dark cloud of official censure, Shostakovich, who was still an international celebrity,
was expected to do his political duty for the Soviet Union.
7. In late February 1949, Stalin personally called Shostakovich to ask him to travel to the United States
for the Congress of Peace and Culture. When Shostakovich pointed out that his symphonies were
played in the United States but forbidden in the Soviet Union, Stalin assured him that a mistake had
been made.
8. A few weeks later, on March 16, 1949, Stalin ordered the ban on Shostakovich’s music lifted. Four
days later, Shostakovich was on his way to the United States as a member of the Soviet delegation to
the Congress of Peace and Culture during the worst days of the Cold War.
9. During the trip, while Shostakovich looked on, interpreters read speeches ostensibly written by the
composer. These statements were strident and hostile, accusing the United States of warmongering and
imperialism. At least one Soviet witness to this spectacle knew that the speeches were prepared by the
Party and attributed to Shostakovich as part of his “punishment.”
10. Shostakovich later confessed to hating every moment of the trip. He was naturally shy, nervous, and
awkward, and his anxiety was exacerbated by the crush of curious Americans wanting to get a look at

the famous Soviet composer. His distress was likewise magnified by the constant presence of his
Soviet handlers and the fear that he might say or do something wrong.
III. On returning home, Shostakovich composed his String Quartet No. 4 in D Major, Op. 83. Like the Piano Trio
No. 2, the Violin Concerto No. 1 in A Minor (completed in 1947), and the song cycle From Jewish Poetry
(which was completed in 1948), Shostakovich’s Fourth Quartet draws extensively from the content and spirit of
Jewish folk music and dance.
A. Shostakovich was a genuine student of Jewish music. Many of his friends were Jewish, his third wife was
Jewish, and he took the new oppression of Jews in the Soviet Union in the late 1940s personally.
1. As we’ve observed, Jewish thematic elements began appearing in his music as early as 1944, in the
Trio in E Minor.
2. Such elements are also in evidence in the Fourth Quartet, in the first movement and, in particular, in
the fourth movement. (Musical selection: String Quartet No. 4 in D Major, Op. 83, movement 4
[1949].)
B. Unfortunately, Shostakovich’s decision to use Jewish musical elements in the Fourth Quartet (as well as in
the Violin Concerto No. 1 in A Minor and the song cycle From Jewish Poetry) came at a bad time, perhaps
a bad time chosen on purpose. Shostakovich’s interest is Jewish music and culture in 1948 and 1949
corresponded exactly with Stalin’s ruthless campaign against Jews, Jewish culture, and Zionism.
C. With this in mind, Shostakovichwith the active encouragement of his friendsdecided to withhold his
Fourth Quartet from public performance. Like his Violin Concerto No. 1 and the song cycle From Jewish
Poetry, Shostakovich’s Fourth String Quartet would not be publicly performed until after Stalin’s death.
IV. One of the most amazing and most disheartening aspects of the history of the Soviet Unionand, by
association, the life of Shostakovichwas how cyclical and frequent were the bad times. The Stalinist purges
of the 1930s were followed in close order by the horrors of the Nazi invasion and the Second World War in the
early 1940s, which was followed soon enough by another round of purges and repression from 1948 to 1952.
A. In many ways, Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony of 1936 and his String Quartet No. 5 of 1952 are sister
works. Both of them were composed under the cloud of “official” Soviet sanctions and both were put aside
by Shostakovich for performance during less dangerous times. They are both incredibly “personal” (i.e.,
“formalistic”) works in which Shostakovich gives vent to his darkest, angriest, and most violent emotions.
B. Shostakovich’s Fifth Quartet begins quietly enough. The first twelve measures of the first movement stroll
gently forward, innocently, naively, although an obsessively repeated melodic idea in the viola part creates
a sense of nagging unease. (Musical selection: String Quartet No. 5 in Bb Major, Op. 92, movement 1
[1952].)
C. This innocent introduction suddenly turns a corner and comes face to face with realityShostakovich’s
realitya grim, violent, fiery place, in which the obsessively repeated melodic idea played by the viola in
the introduction sounds perfectly at home. (Musical selection: String Quartet No. 5 in Bb Major, Op. 92,
movement 1, from beginning.)
D. From this point on, the piece provides only occasional moments of relief. The three movements of
Shostakovich’s Fifth Quartet proceed without a break. The first and second movements are bridged over by
an icy, sustained, very high “F” in the first violin. Although the second movement is quieter and slower
than the first, its chilled, bittersweet mood offers little emotional respite from the terrors of the first.
(Musical selection: String Quartet No. 5 in Bb Major, Op. 92, movement 2, opening.)
E. Like the first and second movements, the second and third movements are “bridged” over by a high,
sustained first violin. Soon enough, we hear a sweet, inoffensive waltz, which might lead us to think that
all is well. (Musical selection: String Quartet No. 5 in Bb Major, Op. 92, movement 3.)
F. However, as in the first-movement introduction, this almost childlike music will be transformed into
something much darker and more violent as the movement progresses. The metaphors invoked by this
musicthe loss of innocence, the encounters with, and survival of, the terrors of lifeare reinforced by
the cool, quiet resignation of the quartet’s conclusion. The emotional range and thematic richness of this
music rivals the literature of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

V. According to most accounts written before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Joseph Stalin died as a result of
a stroke. According to Edvard Radzinsky, writing in 1996 with access to a wealth of recently declassified
Soviet documents, Stalin was murdered by Lavrenty Beria, Nikita Krushchev, Georgi Malenkov, and Nikolai
Bulganin.
A. Certainly, the circumstances of Stalin’s death have been the subject of much controversy over the years.
Given that Radzinsky had far greater access to papers and people in the post-Soviet era than any historian
before him, we might benefit from a brief examination of his evidence to separate fact from speculation.
B. We know the following pieces of evidence to be facts about the Soviet Union in the early 1950s.
1. By 1953, Stalin had completed construction of a huge, double-ringed anti-aircraft missile defense
system that virtually circled Moscow twice.
2. By 1953, the Russians had developed a hydrogen bomb capable of delivering a yield of 400,000
kilotons of TNT, roughly twenty times the power of the Hiroshima bomb.
3. The Russian army had never “stood down”; millions of battle-hardened troops were still in the field.
4. Thousands of trucks and hundreds of thousands of gallons of gasoline had been requisitioned and
placed throughout the urban areas of the Soviet Union. Thousands of unheated wooden barracks had
been erected in Siberia and Kazakhstan (where many still stand today). Stalin was preparing to deport
Jews from Soviet cities to the wastes of Siberia and Kazakhstan.
5. Stalin had already begun another purge of Party leadership. On October 16, 1952, at a meeting of the
Politburo, he accused both Molotov and Anastas Mikoyan of cowardice and defeatism. At the same
time, Lazar Kaganovich and Kliment Voroshilov were stripped of their responsibilities. These men
were as good as dead. Lavrenty Beria knew he was next. Nikita Krushchev, Georgi Malenkov, and
Nikolai Bulganin began looking over their shoulders.
C. What do all these facts mean when pieced together? The following speculations have been made.
1. The deportation of Jews would have caused, in Stalin’s estimation, a permanent break with the West
and would have provided the pretext he required to initiate hostilities.
2. As in 1938 and 1939, Stalin was purging his Soviet leadership of old, tired blood to in order to prepare
for war.
3. Stalin was preparing for the apocalypse, the third and last world war that would finally achieve his
dream of a Socialist world state.
4. Whether acting out of altruism, to avoid the coming apocalypse, or simply acting to save their own
lives, the quartet of Krushchev, Beria, Malenkov, and Bulganin plotted and carried out the
assassination of Joseph Stalin.
D. If we return again to facts, we know that on the evening of February 28, 1953, Stalin’s bodyguards were
dismissed. Stalin spent the evening with Krushchev, Beria, Malenkov, and Bulganin, who together
departed his dacha at 4:00 A.M.
1. By 10:00 P.M. the next evening, Stalin still had not come out of his room. One of the bodyguards,
summoning all his courage, went to investigate. The bodyguard found Stalin on the floor,
semiconscious but paralyzed and unable to speak.
2. The four men who had last seen Stalin upright, Krushchev, Beria, Malenkov, and Bulganin, were
called; they returned, conferred, ordered the guards to stand fast, and left. No doctors were called in
until 9:00 A.M. on March 2. After having been discovered on the floor, the seventy-four–year-old
Stalin had had no medical attention for more than seventeen hours.
3. At the least, Krushchev, Beria, Malenkov, and Bulganin had deliberately denied Stalin medical help
and left him to die. But the finger points to Lavrenty Beria, who seemed to have known from the
beginning that Stalin would not recover. He later reportedly told Molotov, “I took him out!”
(Radzinsky, 575).
4. Joseph Stalin, the Great Leader and Teacher, died at 11:50 P.M. on March 5, 1953.
E. Flora Litvinova remembered that Shostakovich’s reaction to Stalin’s death was somewhat relieved but still
guarded.

Lecture Seven
The Thaw
Scope: After Stalin’s death, Shostakovich began to release all the works that he had hidden since 1948, including
the Tenth Symphony, a modern, personal composition that served as a model for the “new” Soviet music.
In the Tenth, Shostakovich repeatedly uses a musical signature to proclaim the celebratory spirit of the
piece as his own. The 1950s were difficult years for Shostakovich. His wife, Nina, died suddenly of cancer,
and his mother died less than a year later. Shostakovich would ultimately remarry twice, but he composed
the moving Seventh String Quartet in memory of Nina.
During this time, Shostakovich was also asked to take a position that would require him to join the
Communist Party. He had vowed never to join the Party but did so now to ensure the safety and success of
himself and his children; he was filled with self-loathing afterward. Despite his Party affiliation,
Shostakovich continued to compose radically modern music, including the String Quartet No. 8 in C
Minor, dedicated to the victims of fascism, and the Symphony No. 13, which is based on a poem decrying
Russian anti-Semitism.
Outline
I. Shostakovich’s immediate preoccupation following Stalin’s deathin the period known as the “Thaw”was
the release of all the works he had kept out of sight since 1948: the Fourth String Quartet, the Fifth String
Quartet, the Violin Concerto No. 1, and the song cycle From Jewish Poetry. Truly, the most exciting premiere
of these years was that of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 in E Minor, Op. 93.
A. The Tenth was premiered in Moscow on December 29, 1953. The piece sparked yet another controversy,
but for once, it was a positive controversy. The Tenth became a model for what the “new” post-Stalin
Soviet music might aspire to, that is, a more personal, less explicitly programmatic, more frankly modern
musical language that both engaged and challenged its listeners. The Tenth Symphony is among
Shostakovich’s greatest works.
B. In Testimony, Shostakovich explained that the Tenth is “about Stalin and the Stalin years. The second
movement, the scherzo, is a musical portrait of Stalin, roughly speaking.” The second movement of the
Tenth is as brutal and vicious as any music he ever wrote. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 10 in E
C. Throughout the third and fourth movements of his Tenth Symphony, Shostakovich uses a musical
motivea melodic ideaover and over again.
1. The motive consists of four pitches: D – Eb – C – B. (Musical selection at the piano: D – Eb – C –
B.)
2. These pitches are significant, because they constitute the composer’s musical signature. In German,
the pitch names are D – S(Eb) – C – H(B) – D S C H, as is D. Shostakovich. (Musical selection:
Symphony No. 10 in E Minor, Op. 93, movement 3.)
3. Shostakovich first used this four-pitch musical signature in his Second Piano Sonata and his Violin
Concerto No. 1, and it would become a recurring feature of his work in the post-Stalin era. Its message
is that Shostakovich was now willing to go on the record, claiming the thoughts and feelings in his
music as his own.
D. Nowhere is Shostakovich’s self-identification with the spirit of the Tenth Symphony more apparent than
during its genuinely celebratory last minute; the reiterated D – S – C – H motive heard among blaring brass
is a clear and unequivocally personal statement: “I am here, I am alive, and I can still write!” (Musical
selection: Symphony No. 10 in E Minor, Op. 93, movement 4 conclusion.)
E. Just to play it safe, a few months after the premiere of the Tenth, Shostakovich wrote an absurd apology for
the work, stating that he had written it too fast, that the first movement wasn’t in “proper sonata form,” the
second movement was too short, and so on. Clearly, he wrote the apology to head off any potential critics
and to obviate the need to “explain” the symphony programmatically. He still felt the uncertainty of the
Stalin era.

F. Some Party critics pointed to the lack of positive ideas in the symphony, but Shostakovich’s Tenth became
an instant classic and was performed across the Soviet Union and abroad. As for Shostakovich himself,
after five years of disgrace following the Decree of 1948, he emerged with his reputation actually
enhanced. The sheer quality of his Tenth Symphony was a testament to his incredible artistic integrity and
imagination.
II. Despite his musical successes, the 1950s were personally difficult times for Shostakovich. In December 1954,
his wife Nina died of cancer at age forty-three, leaving him the sole caregiver of his two teenaged children.
A. Shostakovich and Nina had been married in 1932; they each had affairs during the marriage and began
divorce proceedings in 1935 but realized that they couldn’t live without each other and called off the
divorce.
1. Nina Vasilyevna was a physicist by profession, intelligent and calm by nature, physically small, and
very attractive. She was a fabulous hostess and conversationalist who turned the Shostakovich
apartment into an intellectual salon. She was an amateur pianist of not inconsiderable ability, an
excellent athlete and skier, and an ardent boxing fan
2. Most of all, she was a rock of strength for her husband. She stood by him during the terrible years of
1936–1937 and 1948–1952. She was “the calm one,” who could quiet her nervous, twitching, overly
sensitive husband, whom she protected with a ferocity that inspires our admiration.
3. Her sudden and premature death was a terrible blow for Shostakovich. Nina had been away on a
research trip in Armenia when she developed a blockage in her intestine. She underwent surgery; a
huge, cancerous tumor was discovered in her colon; an attempt was made to remove it; she went into a
coma during surgery and died a few hours later.
B. Less than a year later, in November 1955, Shostakovich’s mother died, leaving him bereft. Even as he
struggled to deal with his grief, however, the many new works that had gone unperformed between 1948
and 1953 were premiered to great success. Heaps of honors were piled at Shostakovich’s feet, most notably
the Order of Lenin, bestowed in 1956, in honor of his fiftieth birthday.
C. The year 1956 was also, finally, the year that Stalin fell from grace. On February 25, 1956, Nikita
Khrushchev denounced Stalin to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party and revealed the true
extent of Stalin’s crimes against the Soviet people. Russia was still a totalitarian police state, but the
Stalinist Terror was truly over.
D. Shostakovich remarried during the summer of 1956, and although the marriage was to last only three years,
it did restore some degree of domestic balance to his life. Having composed almost nothing since Nina’s
death in 1954, new works once again began to fly from his pen: the Piano Concerto No. 2 (1957); the
Symphony No. 11, The Year 1905 (1957); the operetta Moscow Cheryomushki (1958); the ‘Cello Concerto
No. 1 in Eb Major (written for Mstislav Rostropovich, 1959); and the Sixth and Seventh String Quartets
(1956 and 1960, respectively).
III. Shostakovich’s Seventh String Quartet is a piece that, emotionally, took him six years to write. It is a birthday
piece; Nina would have been fifty years old when it was completed. Shostakovich dedicated the quartet, “In
Memory of Nina Shostakovich,” and despite its brevity, it traces a musical landscape of extraordinary contrasts
of expression.
A. The quartet begins with an odd chromatically descending melody in the violin, which is followed, in the
‘cello, by a rhythmic idea that pervades the entire opening of the quartet: “It must be.”
1. The iconography of the opening descending violin melody is a quirky, even flippant question about
fate, life, and the terrible inevitability of death: “Must it be?”
2. The groups of three repeated notes first heard in the ‘cello constitute a rather unequivocal answer: “It
must be.” (Musical selection: String Quartet No. 7 in F# Minor, Op. 108, movement 1, opening
[1960].)
B. The second movement is a brief and moving song of sorrow.
C. The third and last movement, which constitutes the emotional and dramatic climax of the piece, is
wrenching and violent; note that the movement beginsnow explosivelywith a rising version of the
descending violin melody that began the first movement. (Musical selection: String Quartet No. 7 in F#
Minor, Op. 108, movement 3 opening.)

IV. The year 1960 brought another crisis related to the Communist Party for Shostakovich, although this time, the
crisis was precipitated by the composer himself.
A. During the late 1950s, Shostakovich was increasingly used by the Soviet authorities as a sort of artistic
figurehead, meant to represent the supposedly “free” Soviet intelligentsia. In 1960, Nikita Khrushchev
decided to make Shostakovich the chairman of the newly founded Russian Union of Composers.
1. The appointment was an honor, and Shostakovich apparently felt that the position would make him,
finally and forever, unassailable and would guarantee the safety and success of his two grown
children, Galina (twenty-four) and Maxim (twenty-two).
2. To take the position, however, Shostakovich had to join the Communist Party, which he had sworn he
would never do under any circumstances. He did join, telling friends that he signed the necessary
papers while under the influence of alcohol, and for months afterward, was filled with self-loathing.
B. Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 110, was completed on July 14, 1960, during the
midst of his crisis over joining the Communist Party. It is a remarkable piece, and according to friends, was
meant to be the composer’s last work, because he planned to commit suicide after its completion.
C. Dedicated “To the Memory of the Victims of Fascism and War,” Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet is in
reality dedicated to a particular victim of fascism, namely, Shostakovich himself. It is an entirely
autobiographical work, written from start to finish in an astonishing three days.
1. In a letter to Isaac Glikman, Shostakovich wrote: “The main theme [of the quartet] is my monogram,
D, S, C, H [D Eb C B], that is, my initials” (Glikman). (Musical selection: String Quartet No. 8 in C
2. In the same letter, Shostakovich points out the themes from his work that are incorporated in the
quartet: “…from the First Symphony, the Eighth Symphony, the Piano Trio No. 2, the first ‘Cello
Concerto, and Lady Macbeth. Wagner’s Funeral March from Götterdämmerung and the second theme
from the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony are also hinted at. And I forgotthere’s
also a theme from my Tenth Symphony” (Glikman).
3. We could spend a great deal of time identifying these themes in the quartet. I’ll point out a couple of
them with the understanding that they are brilliantly buried in this musical retrospective of
Shostakovich’s life.
4. For example, the violent, screaming, frenzied second movement pounds away on the “Shostakovich”
motive until, about one minute in, the frenzied Jewish dance music from the Piano Trio No. 2 bursts
forth in octaves in the two violins. (Musical selection: String Quartet No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 110,
movement 2.)
5. Wagner’s funeral music from Götterdämmerung (“Twilight of the Gods”) makes an appropriately
violent statement about the deaths of those who would be gods: Hitler and Stalin. (Musical selections:
Wagner, Götterdämmerung, Siegfried’s Death and Funeral March [1876]; Shostakovich, String
Quartet No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 110, movement 4.)
D. Lev Lebedinsky, a friend of Shostakovich, wrote that the composer “expressed his hatred of the totalitarian
regime in his music” and that the Eighth Quartet was undeniably his autobiography. It is also one of
Shostakovich’s masterworks and has been considered so since it was premiered on October 9, 1960.
E. For all the world, Shostakovich was the picture of a good and obedient Communist apparatchik. Motivated
by fear, he attended every Party event and, when necessary, mouthed the Party line, but as always, the great
truths were to be found in his music.
V. In November 1962, Shostakovich married for the third and final time. His bride was Irina Antonovna
Supinskaya, a literary editor he had first met in 1960.
A. At twenty-seven years old, Irina was twenty-nine years his junior, and she was Jewish. Her father had died
in Stalin’s purges, and most of the rest of her family perished during the siege of Leningrad. She had spent
time growing up in orphanages for children of “enemies of the people.” But Irina was smart, loving,
industrious, and devoted and brought order and tranquility back into Shostakovich’s life.
B. Also in 1962, the post-Stalin “Thaw” reached its most dramatic point with the publication of Alexander
Solzhenitsin’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. And in this year, inspired and reinvigorated by his
marriage to Irina, Shostakovich once again went head-to-head with the authorities as a result of yet another
controversial symphony, his Thirteenth.

1. The background to this symphony is as follows: On September 19, 1961, a poem entitled “Babi Yar”
was published. Written by a twenty-eight–year-old poet named Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the poem is an
outright condemnation of Russian anti-Semitism and unleashed a firestorm of controversy.
Yevtushenko was vilified, ostracized, and threatened.
2. Babi Yar is a ravine outside of Kiev where more than 100,000 men, women, and children, mostly
Jews, were slaughtered and dumped by the Nazis; on one day alone, September 29, 1941, over 30,000
people were killed there. The Soviet government did not officially “recognize” the slaughter has ever
having taken place.
3. Yevtushenko’s poem tore away the official Soviet façade and revealed for everyone to see the rampant
societal anti-Semitism behind that façade. Yevtushenko’s poem ends with the lines:
There is no Jewish blood in my blood,
But I feel the loathsome hatred
Of all anti-Semitism as though I were a Jew
And that is why I am a true Russian!
4. Shostakovich read the poem and was profoundly moved. He wrote that Jews had become a symbol for
him of the defenselessness of all of mankind. Yevtushenko’s “Babi Yar” revealed the “power of art,”
because it had broken the country’s silence about the tragedy.
5. In 1962, Shostakovich called Yevtushenko and asked if he could set the poem to music. Yevtushenko
was stunned by the request from Shostakovich, who had been a lifelong hero to the poet, and when he
heard the music, believed that Shostakovich had made his work even more powerful and meaningful.
6. We will listen to the setting of the first stanza only. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 13, Babi Yar,
Op. 113, movement 1.)
7. Shostakovich set four more poems by Yevtushenko, and together, the five settings for bass soloist,
men’s chorus, and large orchestra became his Symphony No. 13.
C. Obviously, a composition like Babi Yar would not meet with the approval of state ideologues. In the old
days, the symphony would simply have disappeared, probably along with the composer. But by 1962,
Soviet censors had learned that the surest way to create a cultural martyr out of the symphony was to ban
its performance. The authorities took a more subtle approach.
1. Shostakovich’s choice for the bass-soloist was Boris Gmirya, who professed to be “thrilled” to have
been chosen to sing the premiere. He then held the score for a month before writing Shostakovich that
in light of the “dubious” text, he could not take part in the performance.
2. The conductor, Evgeny Mravinsky, also had a sudden change of heart and likewise refused to premiere
the Thirteenth Symphony, for which Shostakovich never forgave him. Mravinsky’s withdrawal
horrified his friends and admirers, some of whom branded him a coward.
3. On the day of the dress rehearsal and premiere, the new bass soloist, Viktor Nchipailo, phoned in and
claimed to be “indisposed.”
4. Anticipating just such a possibility, Shostakovich and the new conductor, Kirill Kondrashin, had
arranged for another singer to secretly learn the part. This singer was brought forward and the
rehearsal began.
5. After completing the dress rehearsal of the first movement, Kondrashin, received a telephone call from
Georgi Popov, the Minister of Culture. Popov asked Kondrashin if there was any reason that he could
not conduct that evening or if he could perform the symphony without the first movement. Kondrashin
answered no to both questions.
6. The performance went ahead as scheduled, but without the planned television broadcast. It was a
triumphant and emotional evening for everyone involved, but only one “review” was published. This
unsigned editorial, which appeared a few days after the premiere, called the symphony a “mistaken,
distorted portrayal” (Fay, 235).

Lecture Eight
Illness and Inspiration
Scope: The Breshnev regime, which came to power in 1964, refused to tolerate artistic freedom or political
dissidence, driving a good deal of Soviet expression underground. Shostakovich, however, was a puzzle
for the administration; he seemed to be a good Party functionary, but he still composed “modernist
bourgeois” music. The regime essentially left him alone, and he was able to enjoy some peace for a few
years in his life. This measure of quietude enabled Shostakovich to complete his Ninth, Tenth, and
Eleventh String Quartets and the ‘Cello Concerto No. 2.
By the last years of his life, Shostakovich was constantly nervous and filled with anxiety. He suffered two
heart attacks, and his life increasingly became that of an invalid. As a composer, he was still producing
extraordinary music, including the String Quartet No. 12, a work of “philosophical lyricism,” and the
Fourteenth Symphony, which sets eleven poems by diverse writers on the subject of violent, unnecessary
death. Shostakovich’s last symphony, the Fifteenth, is filled with musical quotes, the meanings of which
remain mysterious. More than anything else, the Fifteenth is a summing up of the composer’s life, a peek
into the bitter, angry, darkly humorous, and powerfully expressive mind of Shostakovich.
Outline
I. On October 14, 1964, Nikita Khrushchev was removed from power. Repeated shortfalls in agricultural
production and faulty administrative practices, as well as Khrushchev’s role in the Cuban missile crisis and the
growing rift with China, had all intensified the opposition to him.
A. He was succeeded by Leonid Breshnev, who assumed the position of First Secretary of the Communist
Party, and Alexander Kosygin, who was appointed Chairman of the Council of Ministers.
B. Breshnev and Kosygin were bureaucrats and ideologues who lacked almost entirely the charisma of
previous Soviet leaders. They were also conservatives who blamed many of the Soviet Union’s recent
problems on liberalism and Khrushchev’s lax handling of bourgeois Western imperialistic influences.
C. In an attempt to assert its authority and to drive home the message that neither literary freedom nor political
dissidence would be tolerated, the new administration decided to scapegoat two writers. They chose the
novelist and essayist Andrei Sinyavsky, a protégé of Boris Pasternak, and the Jewish writer Yuli Daniel.
Tried in a kangaroo court in 1965, they were both given long sentences to hard labor for their ostensibly
“anti-Soviet” activities.
D. Any hopes that the Breshnev regime would resume a program of liberalization after having consolidated its
power were dashed when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in August of 1968 to crush the increasingly
liberal government of Alexander Dubcek.
1. The Soviet liberal community was reportedly “shocked” by this blatant use of force.
2. A small group of people went so far as to stage a demonstration against the invasion in Red Square,
but they were all arrested, tried, and sent to prison for sedition.
E. By the mid-1960s, the so-called “samizdat,” or “self-publications,” had become important in the Soviet
Union. These self-published works, which circulated from hand-to-hand in typescript, became a sort of
underground press.
1. Often, the Western media would obtain these publications, and their contents would be broadcast back
into the Soviet Union by such operations as Radio Free Europe, thus assuring the dissident Soviet
community that their thoughts, ideas, and creations would be heard.
2. Increasingly, the real Soviet culture of the 1960s and 1970s functioned in this semi-underground way.
F. Musically, the new regime came out strongly against experimentation and modernism, though this didn’t
stop such young composers as Alfred Schnittke, Edison Denisov, and Sofia Gubaidulina from composing
modernist works that would soon come to the attention of the West.
G. Shostakovich, however, stood apart; no one knew quite where to place him. As far as the authorities were
concerned, he was, for better or worse, unassailable; a good Party functionary who said what he was told to
say and did what he was told to do, at least until he composed music, and then he often drove the

establishment to distraction. For the younger generation, Shostakovich was a figure whose music they
could admire and respect, but whose words and actions gave them pause and inspired distrust.
H. Later in life, Shostakovich protested that he never tried to flatter Soviet authorities and was never in favor
with them. When he wrote music, he was always in danger of offending the authorities, ultimately, always
risking imprisonment or death.
II. For all its conservatism, the new regime essentially left Shostakovich alone. Shostakovich had a new wife, who
brought great joy and stability to his life. By 1964, he also had three grandchildren, ages four, three, and two.
He had come to terms with himself as a member of the Party. Ultimately, Shostakovich finally had a measure of
quiet and peace.
A. Despite his deeply scarred psyche, he was able to put that stability and quietude to good use. In 1964,
Shostakovich completed his Ninth and Tenth String Quartets, and 1966 saw the completion, among other
works, of the Eleventh String Quartet and the ‘Cello Concerto No. 2.
B. We step back for a moment to note that Shostakovich completed his “first pass” at a Ninth String Quartet
sometime during the fall of 1961, but he did not like the piece at all. He did not get around to composing
the final Ninth Quartet until 1964.
C. This Ninth is a powerful, tightly unified piece, written in five movements that are played without a pause.
The effect is of a single, huge movement that begins mysteriously and ends jubilantly. The quartet is
dedicated to Shostakovich’s new wife, Irina.
D. The brief first movement lays out the three major thematic ideas that will become the essential grist for the
entire quartet.
1. The first theme is the gentle murmuring accompaniment heard, initially, in the second violin. Such
quiet, throbbing oscillations will be heard throughout the quartet in different forms and permutations;
the rocking effect imbues much of the piece with a sense of gentle calm and stasis unusual in
Shostakovich’s music.
2. The second theme is the rather plaintive violin melody heard over the murmuring accompaniment at
the very beginning of the quartet.
3. The third theme follows immediately; it is the staccato ‘cello theme, accompanied by pizzicato
(plucked) upper strings. (Musical selection: String Quartet No. 9 in Eb Major, Op. 117, movement 1
opening [1964].)
E. Time prevents us from hearing the foot-stomping finale of this Ninth Quartet, a movement that stands as a
polar opposite to the gentle, lyric opening movement we have sampled.
III. Shostakovich’s Tenth String Quartet is truly the companion piece of the Ninth. The two pieces were written
almost back-to-back in 1964; they were premiered together, in Moscow, on November 20, 1964; and they are
both relatively “abstract, absolute” works, short on programmatic content, which may reflect the relative
stability of Shostakovich’s life during the mid-1960s.
A. The Tenth Quartet is written in four movements, and it represents Shostakovich’s “classical,” even “pre-
classical,” structural leanings: The first movement is a sonata form; the second, a scherzo; the third, a
passacaglia; and the fourth, a rondo.
1. We will sample the extraordinary second-movement scherzo, marked in the score allegretto furioso.
This movement is slashing, energizeda hallmark of Shostakovich.
2. We hear the final minute of the movement and the headlong charge into its abrupt ending. (Musical
selection: String Quartet No. 10 in Ab Major, Op. 118, movement 2 [1964].)
B. Violist Fyodor Druzhinin joined the Beethoven Quartetfor whom Shostakovich wrote virtually all of his
late quartetsjust in time to premiere the Ninth and Tenth. He recalled that he was accepted into the
quartet after a grueling “endurance test,” at which Shostakovich was present, and that the rehearsals
seemed to relax the composer but that he “reacted painfully to the point of anguish to any external or alien
presence” (Wilson, 390–391).

IV. By the last years of his life, Shostakovich was emotionally unsettled. Some of this is attributable to his natural
personality and physique: shy, hypersensitive, and physically frail. The extraordinary stresses of his life had
also exacerbated his problems.
A. Friends remembered that he was a constant bundle of nervous tics and twitches and might suddenly jump
up and leave the room during a conversation, with no explanation. He was eventually diagnosed (but not
until 1965!) as having a form of poliomyelitis that affected nerve endings and bones, which made it
increasingly difficult for him to play the piano.
B. On May 28, 1966, almost immediately after a concert celebrating his sixtieth birthday, Shostakovich made
his last public appearance as a pianist. He was a nervous wreck, terrified that he would be unable to play.
C. Shostakovich’s Eleventh String Quartet was premiered at that same concert; it was greeted with such
acclaim that it was encored on the spot. But the hall was stifling hot, and for Shostakovich, the strain
proved too much.
1. Later that evening, he had a heart attack. It was not severe, but it was, in many ways, the beginning of
the end. His health, never very good, began a precipitous descent.
2. At sixty years old, Shostakovich was still a relatively young man and still had another nine years to
live, but his life was increasingly that of an invalid.
D. As a composer, however, he was no invalid. Despite his constant fears that his creative powers were
waning, Shostakovich continued to compose extraordinary music. His work became, increasingly, a
vehicle for self-discovery and private confession, music that, according to composer Alfred Schnittke,
displays the quality of “philosophical lyricism.”
1. Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 12 is just such a work.
2. The piece was dedicated to Dmitri Tsyganov, the founder, leader, and first violinist of the Beethoven
Quartet. Shostakovich said of his Twelfth Quartet that it was more a symphony than a chamber work. I
might suggest that it is more like a concerto, with its emphasis on the first violin. (Musical selection:
String Quartet No. 12 in Db Major, Op. 133, movement 2 [1968].)
V. On January 13, 1969, Shostakovich began a month-long stay at the Moscow Kremlin Hospital. While he was in
the hospital, influenza broke out in the city; as a result, a strict quarantine on the hospital patients was enforced.
No visitors were allowed in, not even family.
A. Restricted to his bed because of his polio and the quarantine, Shostakovich read poetry (in Russian
translation), much of it about death. Eight days later, on January 21, still lying in bed, he began to compose
on that “eternal theme.”
B. Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony is a work of monumental proportions. Scored for soprano and bass
soloists and a string orchestra with percussion, it sets eleven poems by such diverse poets as Federico
Garcia Lorca, Guillaume Apollinaire, Wilhelm Kuchelbeker, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
C. Before the first performance of the Symphonya “closed” performance for a specially invited audience,
including the usual Party censorsShostakovich stood up and spoke to the audience, a rare occurrence.
The composer said that life is a precious possession and should be devoted to fighting for the “liberation of
humanity.”
D. Even the most cursory glance at the eleven poems on which Shostakovich’s Fourteenth is based reveals
that the symphony is not about death per se; it’s about violent, unnecessary death, unnatural death, death
caused by murder, war, and the oppression of evil.
1. In Testimony, Shostakovich explained, “In the Fourteenth Symphony, I don’t protest against death, I
protest against those butchers who execute people. That’s why I chose Appolinaire’s poem ‘The
Zaporozhian Cossacks’ Answer to the Sultan of Constantinople’” (Testimony, 182).
2. Shostakovich went on to say that if he were a poet, he would write such a poem to Stalin; instead, he
wrote it with music. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 14, Op. 135, movement 8 [1969].)
3. Shostakovich might have been lying sick, weak, and in quarantine in a Kremlin hospital bed when he
wrote this music, but he hadn’t lost any of ability to express moral outrage!
E. A particularly ironic event occurred during that first performance of the Fourteenth, on June 21, 1969.
1. Among the audience that night was Pavel Ivanovitch Apostolov who, as a member of the Music
Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, had been one of Shostakovich’s
principal tormentors in 1948.

2. Apostolov fell ill during the concert, was carried out, and died almost immediately. We’d like to think
that just before he passed on, Apostolov was contemplating Shostakovich’s introductory words:
“Death is on his guard; think of your conscience.”
F. Certainly, by the late 1960s, death was constantly on Shostakovich’s mind; issues of mortality and morality
lie at the heart of his late compositions and thoughts.
VI. Nowhere is the biting, ironic, and enigmatic Shostakovich more apparent than in his Fifteenth and last
symphony.
A. Composed during the summer of 1971, the symphony is filled with verbatim quotesfrom Rossini’s
William Tell Overture and Wagner’s Götterdämmerung and Tristan und Isolde to Mahler’s Fifth
Symphony and Shostakovich’s own Fourth Symphony. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 15 in A Major,
Op. 141, movement 1 [1971].)
B. Composers generally use such quotes to make pointed emotional, spiritual, or programmatic references.
The meanings of the references in Shostakovich’s Fifteenth, however, remain mysterious.
1. Certainly, the toy soldier fanfares and marches and galloping music (of Rossini) in the first movement
are identifiable as toys come to life.
2. But by the end of the movement, the mood of the music turns ugly; it has been described as a metaphor
for everything from the underground life of the intellectual in the Soviet Union, to the destruction
wrought by tyrants who would be soldiers, to everyday life in the Soviet Union.
3. Regarding the “toys come to life” character of the opening of the movement, Shostakovich liked to
say, “We are all marionettes.”
4. The second movement is an extraordinary funeral march; the third, a biting scherzo; and the long
fourth movement, a dark contemplation of great depth and ambiguity.
5. This fourth movement begins by invoking Siegfried’s Funeral March from Wagner’s
Götterdämmerung, “The Twilight of the Gods.” (Musical selection: Symphony No. 15 in A Major,
Op. 141, movement 4 opening.)
6. Shostakovich then goes on to quote the music that represents unrequited longing from Tristan und
Isolde, then the melody from a song by Glinka, “Do not tempt me needlessly.”
7. Of course, all these references are effortlessly and seamlessly merged into Shostakovich’s own music,
which itself moves through a kaleidoscopic series of textures and moods.
C. The symphony is nothing less than a summing up, a retrospective look over a musical lifetime, as well as a
profile of Shostakovich’s conscious and unconscious mind at the end: bitter, ironic, angry, despairing,
enigmatic, and darkly humorous, a portrait of someone who is truly aware of the absurdities of life.
D. Shostakovich’s Fifteenth is not the sort of music we come to know in a conscious, cognitive way; rather,
it’s a work we sense and, over time, learn to understand. In this process, our own life experiences and
world views are incrementally extended by those of Shostakovich.
VII. In mid-September 1971, soon after completing the Fifteenth Symphony, Shostakovich suffered a second heart
attack. He was hospitalized for two months. When he was released, he was almost a complete invalid: He was
in constant pain, had limited use of his right hand, and could hardly walk.
A. Invalid or not, Shostakovich’s last years saw, among other events, the triumphant premiere of his Fifteenth
Symphony; a revival of his opera The Nose; the composition of his song cycles Op. 145 and 146 and the
Viola Sonata, Op. 147; and the composition of his last two string quartets, Nos. 14 and 15, works that rival
Beethoven’s late quartets for their incredible intensity and expressive power. We can only marvel at
Shostakovich’s incredible creative spark, at his indomitable spirit, at the extraordinary richness and power
of his inner life.
B. We turn, in closing, to Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 15 in Eb Minor, Op. 144, his last major
composition. It is a bleak, introspective, subdued work of great and quiet intensity, consisting of six slow
movements played without a break. (Musical selection: String Quartet No. 15 in Eb Minor, Op. 144,
opening [1974].)
C. Though not quite his last work, Shostakovich’s Fifteenth String Quartet is his last major work, written at a
time when his health was deteriorating rapidly. Its mood, its spirit of resignation and finality, mark it as a

masterwork written by a composer who was, indeed, recognizing his own mortality and anticipating his
own death. He died in Moscow on August 9, 1975; the immediate cause of death was lung cancer.
D. Shostakovich was given a state funeral; he was mourned across the globe; his obituary was signed by
Breshnev; he was called “the great composer of our time” and a “hero of the Soviet people.”
E. If Shostakovich were here with us now, the first thing he’d tell us was that he was no hero; in the Soviet
Union, “heroes” died young. Shostakovich was a survivor and a witness, his music a testament to what he
saw and felt, in a world that we can hardly imagine.
F. Shostakovich’s work leaves us a record unique in the repertoire. We can only admire this small, frail,
nervous man, who showed such humanity, imagination, and strength of purpose.

Vocal Texts
Lecture Two, Symphony No. 3 in Eb Major, movement 6, finale opening

V pervoe, Pervoe Maya On the very first May Day
Broshen v byloe blesk. A torch was thrown into the past.
Iskru v ogon razduvaya, A spark, growing into a fire,
Plamya pokrylo lesa. And a flame enveloped the forest.
Ukhom ponikshikh elok With their ears the fir trees
Vslushivalis lesa Of the forest listened
V yunykh eshcho maevok To the voices and clamor
Shorokhi, golosa. Of the new May Day parade.
Lecture Three, love scene from Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
Katerina Katerina
Ja Yes
Schon gut, Sergey, geh’ jetzt! All right, Sergey, go away now!
Sergey Sergey
Ich geh’ gleich. I’m going.
Katerina Katerina
Leb wohl! Bye!
(Sergey does not leave.)
Sergey Sergey
War’s nicht toll, unser That wasn’t bad, our little
Ringkampf. Wrestle.
Du lagst mir im Arm, I had you in my arms,
Spürtest meine Kraft. You felt my strength.
Katerina Katerina
Fang nicht damit an? You’re not starting that again?
Sergey Sergey
Gefiel’s dir nicht? Don’t you like it?
Es war schönste Kampf, It was the best fight
Meines Lebens. Of my life.
Willst du nicht noch einmal? D’you want to try it again?
Katerina Katerina
Nein, lass doch! No, leave me alone!

Sergey Sergey
Los doch, wehre dich! Let’s go, let’s do it!
(He embraces Katerina.)
Katerina Katerina
Lass los, Sergey! Let go, Sergey!
Hör auf! Bist du wahnsinnig? Stop it! Are you crazy?
Lass los! Let go!
Der Alte ist stets auf der Lauer. The old man is always on the lookout.
Hör auf, Sergey! Stop it, Sergey!
Sergey Sergey
Bin starker noch als du! Well, I’m stronger than you!
Katerina Katerina
Sergey, nein! Tu’s nicht! Sergey, no, you mustn’t!
Hor doch, ich hab’ Angst! What are you doing? I’m afraid.
Sergey Sergey
Komm doch, komm!! My dearest!
Katerina Katerina
Gott, was machst du nur, God, what are you doing?
Liebster, Darling,
Ach lass! Liebster, Let go, my darling,
Nein, nicht doch. . . No, I don’t want . . .
Lecture Three, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Act IV, scene ix
Katerina Katerina
Ich weiss; irgendwo im Wald I know; somewhere in the wood
Liegt ein See, There is a lake,
So rund wie der Mond, und tief, Round as the moon, and deep,
Tief wie das Meer. Deep as the sea.
Und sein Wasser ist so schwarz And the water is as black
Wie mein schwarzes Gewissen ist. As my black conscience.
Wenn der Wind durch den Wald When the wind blows through
Weht bei Nacht, The wood at night,
Erheben sich aus der Tiefe The waves rise
Die Wellen; Out of the deep;
Ganz hohe Wellen, Huge waves,
Es ist schrecklich! It is frightful!
Im Herbst steigen aus dem See In the fall the waves
Die Wellen auf! Rise out of the lake!
Aus dem schwarzen Wasser. Out of the black water,
Hohe Wellen, Huge waves,
Tiefschwarze, ganze hohe Wellen. Deep black, huge waves.
(Sonyetka and Sergey come out from backstage.)
Sergey Sergey
Weisst du eigentlich, Sonyetka! D’you know, Sonyetka,
Wem wir beide sehr ahneln? Whom we look like?
Ich bin Adam, du bist Eva! I am Adam, you are Eve.
Sonyetka Sonyetka
Doch das Paradies But my idea of paradise
Stell’ ich mir anders vor! Is quite different!
Sergey Sergey

Hör doch auf! Stop it!
Wir waren eben noch im Paradies! We were just in paradise!
(Sonyetka goes over to Katerina, who is sitting motionless, her eyes staring straight ahead.)
Sonyetka Sonyetka
Ich dank dir, Katerina Lwowna, Thank you, Katerina Lvovna,
Ich dank dir, Katerina Lwowna, Thank you, Katerina Lvovna,
Für die warmen Strümpfe! For the warm stockings!
Sieh doch her, wie sie passen! Look how well they fit me!
Ach, ich find’ sie wunderschöne! Ah, I think they’re beautiful!
Sergey streifte sie mir über, Sergey slipped them on me,
Küsste meine kalten Füsse And tenderly kissed my cold feet
Zartlich warm. Warm.
Ach, Sergey, meiner Sergey, Ah, Sergey, my Sergey,
Katerina war so toricht, Katerina was such a fool
Dich nicht langer festzuhalten. To let you go.
Sie war wirklich blöde! She was really stupid!
Auch die Strümpfte bist du los; You even lost your stockings;
Er hat sie mir geschenkt! He gave me them.
Hörst du? Mir ist jetzt schöne warm! D’you hear me? I’m warm now!
Lecture Three, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Act IV, scene ix
Officer Officer
Steht auf! Es geht los! On your feet! We’re on our way.
Macht schon! Hurry up!
Convicts Convicts
Ach! Es geht weiter! Ah! We’re off again.
Immer weiter! Always on the move.
Endlos der Weg! It never ends.
(The convicts line up. Katerina remains motionless; an old convict approaches her.)
Old Convict Old Convict
Du, hörst du nicht? Hey you, didn’t you hear?
Mach schon, ‘s geht weiter! Hurry up, we’re off again!
Pass auf, man wird dich schlagen! Watch out, they’re going to hit you!
Hörst du? D’you hear me?
(Katerina slowly walks over to Sonyetka, who is standing on the bridge by a broken parapet. She pushes Sonyetka
into the river and jumps in after her.)
Sonyetka Sonyetka
Ach! Ah!
Convicts Convicts
Grosser Gott! My God!
Was ist das los? What’s going on?
Officer Officer
Bleibt stehen! Don’t move!
Halt! Oder . . . Stop! Or . . .
Sonyetka Sonyetka
Ach! Ach! Ah! Ah!
Officer Officer
Beide sind ertrunken. They’ve both drowned.
Keine Hoffnung. It’s hopeless.

Die Stromung ist zu stark! The current’s too strong!
Achtung! Stellt euch auf! Listen all of you! Back in line!
Lecture Three, closing scene of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
Old Convict
When will our suffering be over?
Will we be kicked around forever?
Will we ever be free again
Before we turn to dust?
Convicts
Ah, steppes, you are so vast.
The days and nights are countless here.
Our thoughts are without hope,
And the guards are merciless.
Lecture Seven, first two stanzas of Yevtushenko’s “Babi Yar”
There is no memorial above Babi Yar.
The steep ravine is like a coarse tombstone.
I’m frightened,
I feel as old today
As the Jewish race itself.
I feel now that I am a Jew.
Here I wander through Ancient Egypt.
And here I hang on the cross and die,
And still bear the mark of the nails.
I feel that I am Dreyfus.
The bourgeois rabble denounce and judge me.
I am behind bars, I am encircled,
Persecuted, spat on, slandered,
And fine ladies with lace frills
Squeal and poke their parasols in my face.

Timeline
September 25, 1906 ................. Shostakovich is born in St. Petersburg, Russia.

1915 ......................................... Receives his first piano lessons, from his mother, at age nine.
1919 ......................................... Admitted to the Petrograd Conservatory as a student of both piano and composition.
1924 ......................................... Vladimir Lenin dies; St. Petersburg/Petrograd is renamed Leningrad; Joseph Stalin
comes to power.
1925 ......................................... Symphony No. 1.
1927 ......................................... Symphony No. 2.
1929 ......................................... Symphony No. 3.
1930 ......................................... The opera The Nose and the ballet The Golden Age are completed.
1932 ......................................... The opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is completed; Shostakovich marries Nina
Varzar.
January 28, 1936...................... Appearance of the “Muddle Instead of Music” article.
1936 ......................................... Symphony No. 4.
1937 ......................................... Symphony No. 5 and “rehabilitation.”
1938 ………………………….String Quartet No. 1
1939 ......................................... Symphony No. 6; the USSR signs a nonaggression pact with Germany and World
War II begins.
1940 ......................................... The Piano Quintet in G Minor is composed and awarded a Stalin Prize.
1941 ......................................... Germany invades the USSR; Symphony No. 7, Leningrad.
1943 ......................................... Symphony No. 8.
1944 ......................................... Trio in E Minor; String Quartet No. 2.
1945 ......................................... Symphony No. 9, the “apotheosis” that never happened.
1946 ......................................... String Quartet No. 3.
1948 ......................................... Shostakovich is accused of “formalism” and culturally purged.
1949 ......................................... Shostakovich is sent to the United States on a propaganda mission; String Quartet
No. 4.
1953 ......................................... Stalin dies; Symphony No. 10.
1954 ......................................... Shostakovich’s wife dies.
1956 ......................................... Shostakovich marries Margarita Kainova; String Quartet No. 6.
1957 ......................................... Symphony No. 11.
1958 ......................................... Nikita Khrushchev becomes Premier of the USSR.
1959 ......................................... Shostakovich divorces Margarita Kainova.
1960 ......................................... Shostakovich is compelled to join the Communist Party; String Quartets Nos. 7 and
8.
1961 ......................................... Symphony No. 12.

1962 ......................................... Shostakovich marries for the third time, to Irina Antonovna Supinskaya; Symphony
No. 13, Babi Yar.
1964 ......................................... Khrushchev is deposed, and Leonid Breshnev becomes First Secretary of the USSR;
String Quartets Nos. 9 and 10.
1966 ......................................... Shostakovich suffers his first heart attack; String Quartet No. 11.
1969 ......................................... Symphony No. 14.
1971 ......................................... Symphony No. 15.
August 9, 1975 ........................ Shostakovich dies in Moscow.

Glossary
Atonality: The absence of an established tonality, or identifiable key.

Cadenza: Virtuoso music designed to show off a singer’s or an instrumental soloist’s technical ability.
Classical musical style: Designation given to works of the later eighteenth century, characterized by clear melodic
lines, balanced form, and emotional restraint. The style is brilliantly exemplified by the music of Franz Joseph
Haydn.
Concerto: Musical composition for orchestra and soloist(s) typically in three movements.
Consonance: Two or more notes sounded together that do not require resolution.
Crescendo: Gradually increasing volume.
Dissonance: Two or more notes sounded together that require resolution.
Exposition: Opening section of a fugue or sonata-form movement in which the main theme(s) are introduced.
Movement: Independent, self-standing piece of music within a larger work.
Musical form: Overall formulaic structure of a composition, such as sonata form; also the smaller divisions of the
overall structure, such as the development section.
Overture: Music that precedes an opera or play, often played as an independent concert piece.
Pedal note: Pitch sustained for a long period of time against which other changing material is played. A pedal
harmony is a sustained chord serving the same purpose.
Polyrhythm: The simultaneous use of contrasting rhythms.
Polytonality: The simultaneous use of two or more different keys (major and/or minor) or modes.
Requiem: Mass for the dead, traditionally in nine specific sections.
Rhythmic asymmetry: Rhythms that do not use regular accents.
Short score: Two- or three-staff score that can be played on the piano and serves as the basis for a full orchestral
score.
Sonata: Piece of music typically in three or four movements, composed for a piano (piano sonata) or a piano plus
one instrument (violin sonata, for example).
Sonata form: Structural formula characterized by thematic development; usually used for the first movement of a
sonata, symphony, or concerto.
String quartet: (1) Ensemble of four stringed instruments: two violins, viola and cello; (2) Composition for such an
ensemble.
Symphony: Large-scale instrumental composition for orchestra, containing several movements. The Viennese
classical symphony typically had four movements.
Voice: A range or register, commonly used to refer to the four melodic ranges: soprano, alto, tenor, and bass.

Biographical Notes
Beria, Lavrenti Pavlovich (1899–1953). Soviet Communist leader, Beria rose to prominence in the Cheka, or
secret police, eventually becoming the Minister of Internal Affairs and a member of the Politburo. He was “feared
profoundly” for his incredible cruelty.
Bulganin, Nikolai Aleksandrovich (1895–1975). Soviet Communist military and political leader, Bulganin served
as Minister of Defense under Stalin, became a member of the Politburo in 1948, and was Premier of the USSR from
1955 to 1958.
Ehrenburg, Ilya Grigoryevich (1891–1967). Writer and journalist, Ehrenburg worked as a foreign correspondent
in the West and with the Soviet Army during World War II.
Glazunov, Alexander Konstantinovich (1865–1936). Russian composer, a student of Rimsky-Korsakov,
Glazunov was the head of the St. Petersburg/ Petrograd Conservatory from 1906 to 1928.
Glikman, Isaak Davidovich (1911– ). Drama and literary critic and professor at the Leningrad Conservatory,
Glikman was among Shostakovich’s closest friends for fifty years.
Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich (1894–1971). Soviet Communist leader, he succeeded Stalin as the first secretary
of the Communist Party in 1953 and served as Premier of the USSR from 1958 to 1964.
Kondrashin, Kirill Petrovich (1914–1981). Russian conductor, Kondrashin conducted the premiere performances
of Shostakovich’s Fourth and Thirteenth Symphonies.
Lebedinsky, Lev Nikolayevich (1904–1992). Russian musicologist and folklorist, Lebedinsky was a close friend of
Shostakovich’s during the 1950s and early 1960s.
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (1870–1924). Russian revolutionary and leader, born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin was
the essential force behind the Russian Revolution of 1917, the founder of Bolshevism, and the first leader of the
USSR.
Litvinova, Flora Yasinovskaya (1920– ). Biologist, she spent the war years in Kuibyshev, where she befriended
Shostakovich and his family.
Malenkov, Georgi Maksimilianovich (1902–1988). Soviet Communist leader, Malenkov was a trusted aid of
Stalin, became a member of the Politburo in 1946, and served as Premier of the USSR from Stalin’s death in 1953
until 1955.
Meyerhold, Vsevolod (1874–1940). Russian theater director and producer, Meyerhold ran an experimental, avant-
garde theater company in Moscow. He was eventually purged and killed.
Mikhoels, Solomon Mikhailovich (1890–1948). Russian actor, Mikhoels founded the Jewish theater in Moscow
and was killed on Stalin’s orders.
Molotov, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich (1890–1986). Soviet political leader, Molotov was foreign minister under both
Stalin and Malenkov; in this capacity, he negotiated the Russian-German nonaggression pact, signed at Moscow in
August 1939.
Mravinsky, Yevgeny Alexandrovich (1903–1988). Russian conductor, Mravinsky was a champion of
Shostakovich’s music until their falling out over Mravinsky’s unwillingness to conduct Shostakovich’s Symphony
No. 13.
Prokofiev, Sergey Sergeyevich (1891–1953). Russian composer and pianist, Prokofiev left Russia in 1918 but
returned and resettled in Moscow in 1936. After 1938, he was no longer allowed to travel abroad.
Raikh, Zinaida Nikolayenva (1894–1939). Russian actress and wife of Meyerhold, she was tortured and killed
after her husband’s arrest.
Rostropovich, Mstislav Leopoldovich (1927– ). Russian ‘cellist, pianist, and conductor, Rostropovich studied
composition with Shostakovich and has been a champion of Shostakovich’s music his entire career.
Shostakovich, Galina Dmitriyevna (1936– ). Shostakovich’s daughter.

Shostakovich, Irina Antonovna Supinskaya (1934– ). Literary editor and Shostakovich’s third wife. They were
married in 1962 and remained so until his death in 1975.
Shostakovich, Margarita Andreyevna Kainova (1924–?). Komsomol activist and instructor and Shostakovich’s
second wife; they were married in 1956 and divorced in 1959.
Shostakovich, Mariya Dmitriyevna (1903–1973). Shostakovich’s sister.
Shostakovich, Maxim Dmitriyevich (1938– ). Conductor, pianist, and Shostakovich’s son, he defected to the West
in 1981.
Shostakovich, Nina Vasilevna Varzar (1909–1954). Physicist and Shostakovich’s first wife and the mother of his
two children. They were married for twenty-two years, from 1932 until her death in 1954.
Shostakovich, Zoya Dmitriyevna (1908–1990). Veterinarian and Shostakovich’s sister.
Sollertinsky, Ivan Ivanovich (1902–1944). Polymath and professor at the Leningrad Conservatory, Sollertinsky
was from 1927 until his death, Shostakovich’s closest friend.
Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich (1879–1953). Soviet Communist leader and leader of the USSR from 1924 until his
death. His birth name was Joseph Dzhugashvili. He took the name Stalinmeaning “man of steel”originally as a
pen name around 1913.
Tukhachevsky, Mikhail Nikoleyevich (1893–1937). Marshall of the Soviet army and hero of the Soviet Union,
Tukhachevsky was a friend and supporter of Shostakovich. He was purged and killed on Stalin’s orders.
Vishnevskaya, Galina Pavlovna (1926– ). Russia soprano and wife of Rostropovich.
Vovsi-Mikhoels, Natalya Solomonovna (1921– ). Linguist and daughter of the actor Solomon Mikhoels.
Yevtushenko, Yevgeny Aleksandrovich (1933– ). One of the most admired Russian poets of the post-Stalin
generation.
Zhdanov, Andrei Aleksandrovich (1896–1948). Soviet Communist leader, Zhdanov was largely responsible for
the extreme nationalism, oppression, and strict political control (known as Zhdanovism) of intellectuals and the arts
in the postwar period.

Bibliography
Resources on Shostakovich
Fay, Laurel E. Shostakovich: A Life. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000.
Ho, Allan Benedict, and Feofanov, Dmitry. Shostakovich Reconsidered. Toccata Press, 1998.
Ribke, Juliane. From a Conversation with Mstislav Rostropovich. DG 410 509-2
Schwartz, Boris. “Shostakovich,” in Groves Dictionary.
Shchedrin, Rodion. Gramophone Magazine, Volume 75, No. 894, November 1997.
Shostakovich, Dmitri, and Volkov, Solomon. Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich. Harper and Row,
New York, 1979.
Taruskin, Richard. “The Opera and the Dictator,” New Republic, 200/12, March 20, 1989.
Weiss, Piero, and Taruskin, Richard. Music in the Western World. Schimer Books, New York, 1984.
Wigglesworth, Mark. Program note. BIS CD-1173.
Wilson, Elizabeth. Shostakovich: A Life Remembered. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1994.
Resources on Russian History
Conquest, Robert. The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. W.W. Norton, 2001.
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1987.
Figes, Orlando. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924. Penguin, 1998.
Furet, Francois, and Furet, Deborah (trans.). The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth
Century. University of Chicago Press, 2000.
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Malia, Martin Edward. The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia. Free Press, 1995.
Pipes, Richard. Russia under the Bolshevik Regime. Vintage Books, 1995.
Radzinsky, Edvard, and Willetts, H. T. (trans.). Stalin. Anchor Books/ Doubleday, 1996.
Remnick, David. Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. Vintage, 1994.
Roseberry, Eric. The Illustrated Lives of the Great Composers:Shostakovich. Music Sales Corporation, New York,
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Rummel, R. J. Death by Government. Transaction Pub., 1997.
Satter, David. Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union. Yale University Press, 2001.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich. The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. I.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich, and Solzhenitsyn, Yermolai. The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth
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Volkogonov, Dmitri. Lenin: A New Biography. Free Press, 1994.

Great Masters - Shostakovich - His Life and Music

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Great Masters: Shostakovich

His Life and Music

Professor Robert Greenberg

THE TEACHING COMPANY ®

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Lecture Two, Symphony No. 3 in Eb Major, movement 6, finale opening

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September 25, 1906 ................. Shostakovich is born in St. Petersburg, Russia.

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Atonality: The absence of an established tonality, or identifiable key.

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