About the Composer
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 - 1975)
Shostakovich shared with Sergei Prokofiev the distinction of being one of the two best-known Soviet composers of their generation. The symphonic works of both were widely performed abroad, but their operas scarcely seemed to exist, in large part because of political interference at home. Prokofiev persevered in writing operas, but Shostakovich gave up, depriving the twentieth-century lyric stage of one of its major natural talents.
At the age of nine, Shostakovich received his first piano lessons from his mother, a professional pianist. In 1919, he was admitted to the Petrograd Conservatory where he studied the piano with Leonid Nikolayev and composition with Maximilian Shteynberg. Although he continued as a postgraduate composition student until 1930, he rarely consulted Shteynberg, who admitted that he did not understand Shostakovich's more recent music. This music was written in a new idiom: astringent, satirical, and highly dissonant, a style that reflected the modern trends in Western European music.
Shostakovich helped support his widowed mother by playing the piano in a silent film cinema. It was there that the young Shostakovich developed his flair for musical parody and for matching music to the action. Between 1927 and 1930, Shostakovich wrote several works where humor and satire prevail at the expense of lyricism, and are notable for the brilliant and imaginative use of orchestral resources, including The Nose, The Golden Age, and incidental music for a staging of The Flea. The comedic element returns in his only full-length opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, but here the composer, now twenty-eight, also reveals his serious side. There are Grand Guignol elements, seemingly borrowed from horror movies, alongside social commentary that mocks and condemns the greed and ignorance of most of the characters. The music is graphic and energetic, sometimes underscoring the action, sometimes going its own way to express the composer's anger or amusement.
Shostakovich was depicting elements of Soviet life, a fact he took care to disguise by choosing a story from the previous century. Beneath his caricature of the buffoonish gendarmes, for example, lies his disgust with the mechanics of a police state. Though his heroine is a murderess, his sympathies lie with her: he sees her as the victim of a repressive society, driven to a point where she has no choice. In her hopelessness, she makes her own destruction inevitable.
At the age of nine, Shostakovich received his first piano lessons from his mother, a professional pianist. In 1919, he was admitted to the Petrograd Conservatory where he studied the piano with Leonid Nikolayev and composition with Maximilian Shteynberg. Although he continued as a postgraduate composition student until 1930, he rarely consulted Shteynberg, who admitted that he did not understand Shostakovich's more recent music. This music was written in a new idiom: astringent, satirical, and highly dissonant, a style that reflected the modern trends in Western European music.
Shostakovich helped support his widowed mother by playing the piano in a silent film cinema. It was there that the young Shostakovich developed his flair for musical parody and for matching music to the action. Between 1927 and 1930, Shostakovich wrote several works where humor and satire prevail at the expense of lyricism, and are notable for the brilliant and imaginative use of orchestral resources, including The Nose, The Golden Age, and incidental music for a staging of The Flea. The comedic element returns in his only full-length opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, but here the composer, now twenty-eight, also reveals his serious side. There are Grand Guignol elements, seemingly borrowed from horror movies, alongside social commentary that mocks and condemns the greed and ignorance of most of the characters. The music is graphic and energetic, sometimes underscoring the action, sometimes going its own way to express the composer's anger or amusement.
Shostakovich was depicting elements of Soviet life, a fact he took care to disguise by choosing a story from the previous century. Beneath his caricature of the buffoonish gendarmes, for example, lies his disgust with the mechanics of a police state. Though his heroine is a murderess, his sympathies lie with her: he sees her as the victim of a repressive society, driven to a point where she has no choice. In her hopelessness, she makes her own destruction inevitable.
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