Dmitri Shostakovich

Dmitri Shostakovich was born in Saint Petersburg in September 1906, the son of a chemical engineer and a pianist mother. He entered the Petrograd Conservatory at thirteen in 1919, in the year that the city’s musical life was being reconstituted under the new Soviet regime, and graduated as a pianist in 1923 and a composer in 1925 — his First Symphony, written as a graduation piece, brought him almost immediate international attention.

His career was shaped throughout by his relationship with the Soviet state — alternately favoured, denounced, rehabilitated, denounced again, and ultimately decorated. The 1936 *Pravda* attack on *Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District* (“Muddle Instead of Music”), the 1948 Zhdanov decree, and the rehabilitations under Khrushchev and Brezhnev each marked turning points in a private compositional life that ran parallel to, and often beneath, public events. His fifteen symphonies, fifteen string quartets, two cello concertos, two violin concertos, two piano concertos, the song cycle *Suite on Verses of Michelangelo*, and the operas *The Nose* and *Lady Macbeth* form the core of his output. He also wrote extensively for film.

Shostakovich was made a Hero of Socialist Labour in 1966 and died in Moscow in August 1975. He was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery. The reception of his work in the West has been continuously reshaped by political readings — the *Testimony* memoir controversy, in particular, since the 1970s. Music Preserved’s archive includes a substantial range of his symphonic and chamber work.