Brief biography of Shostakovich. Dmitry Shostakovich - biography, information, personal life

MAIN DATES OF LIFE AND CREATIVITY 1856, August 27 - Ivan Yakovlevich Franko was born in the village of Naguevichi, Drogobych district, in the family of a rural blacksmith.

Dmitry Shostakovich, whose biography interests many fans classical music- a famous Soviet composer, famous far beyond the borders of his native country.

Shostakovich's childhood

Born September 25, 1906 in St. Petersburg in the family of a pianist and chemist. Music, which was an important component in his family (his father is a passionate music lover, his mother is a piano teacher), was carried away from an early age: a taciturn thin boy, sitting down at the piano, turned into a daring musician.

He wrote his first work "Soldier" at the age of 8, under the influence of constant conversations of adults about the outbreak of the First World War. D. Shostakovich, whose biography was associated with music all his life, became a student of the music school of I.A. Glyasser, a well-known teacher. Although Dmitry was introduced to the basics by his mother.

In Dmitry's life, along with music, there was always love. For the first time, a magical feeling visited the young man at the age of 13: 10-year-old Natalia Kube became the object of love, to whom the musician dedicated a short prelude. But the feeling gradually faded away, and the desire to dedicate his creations to beloved women remained with the virtuoso pianist forever.

After studying at a private school, in 1919 Dmitry Shostakovich, whose biography took a professional musical start, entered the Petrograd Conservatory, successfully graduating in 1923 in two classes at once: composition and piano playing. At the same time, a new sympathy met on his way - the beautiful Tatyana Glivenko. The girl was the same age as the composer, pretty, well-educated, cheerful and cheerful, who inspired Shostakovich to create the First Symphony, which, upon graduation, was handed over as a graduation work. The depth of feelings expressed in this work was caused not only by love, but also by an illness that became the result of many sleepless nights of the composer, his experiences and depression developing against the background of all this.

A worthy start to a musical career

The premiere of the First Symphony, which spread all over the world after many years, took place in 1926 in St. Petersburg. Music critics considered the talented composer a worthy replacement for Sergei Rachmaninov, Sergei Prokofiev, who emigrated from the country, and this same symphony brought world fame to the young composer and virtuoso pianist. When performing at the First International Chopin Piano Competition in 1927, held in Warsaw, one of the members of the competition jury, Bruno Walter, an Austro-American composer and conductor, drew attention to Shostakovich's unusual talent. He suggested that Dmitry play something else, and when the First Symphony began to sound, Walter asked the young composer to send him a score to Berlin. On November 22, 1927, the conductor performed this, which made Shostakovich famous all over the world.

In 1927, the talented Shostakovich, whose biography includes many ups and downs, inspired by the success of the First Symphony, set about creating the opera The Nose based on Gogol. Then the First Piano Concerto was created, after which two more symphonies were written in the late 1920s.

Affairs of the Heart

But what about Tatyana? She, like most unmarried girls, waited long enough for a marriage proposal, which the timid Shostakovich, who had exceptionally pure and bright feelings for his inspirer, either did not guess, or did not dare to do. A more agile cavalier, who met Tatiana on the way, took her down the aisle; to him she bore a son. After three years, Shostakovich, who had been pursuing all this time now someone else's beloved, invited Tatiana to become his wife. But the girl chose to completely break off all relations with a talented admirer who turned out to be too timid in life.

Finally convinced that his beloved could not be returned, Shostakovich, whose biography was closely intertwined with music and love experiences, in the same year married Nina Varzar, a young student with whom he lived for more than 20 years. The woman who bore him two children steadfastly endured all these years of her husband's passion for other women, his frequent infidelities, and died before her beloved husband.

After the death of Nina Shostakovich, short biography which has several masterpieces and worldwide famous works, created a family twice: with Margarita Kaionova and Irina Supinskaya. Against the backdrop of affairs of the heart, Dmitry did not stop creating, but in relations with music, he behaved much more decisively.

On the waves of the mood of the authorities

In 1934, the opera The Lady of the Mtsensk District was staged in Leningrad, which was immediately accepted by the audience with a bang. However, after a season and a half, her existence was in jeopardy: musical composition was sharply criticized by the Soviet authorities and was removed from the repertoire. The premiere of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony, which was characterized by a more monumental scope in contrast to the previous ones, was to take place in 1936. Due to the unstable situation in the country and government representatives to people of creativity, the first performance of a musical work took place only in 1961. The 5th symphony was published in 1937. During the years of the Great Patriotic War Shostakovich set to work on the 7th symphony - "Leningrad", first performed on March 5, 1942.

From 1943 to 1948, Shostakovich was engaged in teaching at the Moscow Conservatory of the city of Moscow, from where he was later expelled by the Stalinist authorities, who undertook to “put things in order” in the Union of Composers, due to unsuitability. The “correct” work released by Dmitry on time saved his position. Further, the composer was expected to join the party (forced), as well as many other circumstances, of which there were still more ups than downs.

In recent years, Shostakovich, whose biography is studied with interest by many music fans, was very ill, suffering from lung cancer. The composer died in 1975. His ashes were buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.

Today, Shostakovich's works, embodying a pronounced inner human drama, conveying a chronicle of terrible mental suffering, are the most performed in the whole world. The most popular are the Fifth and Eighth symphonies out of fifteen written. Of the string quartets, which are also fifteen, the Eighth and Fifteenth are most performed.

DMITRY SHOSTAKOVICH

ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: LIBRA

NATIONALITY: SOVIET RUSSIAN

MUSICAL STYLE: MODERNISM

SIGNIFICANT WORK: WALTZ FROM "SUITE FOR VARIETY ORCHESTRA No. 2"

WHERE YOU COULD HEAR THIS MUSIC: ON THE END CREDITS OF STANLEY KUBRICK'S EYES WIDE SHUT (1999)

WISE WORDS: "IF BOTH HANDS ARE CUT TO ME, I WILL STILL WRITE MUSIC WITH THE FEATHER IN THE TEETH."

Imagine that you are playing a game where no one explains the rules to you, but the penalty for breaking the rules is death.

Such was the life of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Hailed as a great talent, he, being a public figure in the Soviet Union, played this dangerous game all his life. Either the composer was praised and admired for his works, or the newspaper Pravda stigmatized his work, and then the performance of Shostakovich's music was forbidden; persecution reached such a high intensity that even the ten-year-old son of the composer was forced to "expose" his father.

Many of the composer's friends and colleagues died or ended up in the gloomy Gulag, but Shostakovich survived. He played that terrible game, pouring out his grief in powerful, deep music, from which we can learn a lot about what kind of tribute totalitarianism takes from the human soul.

IT'S NOT FUNNY

When the revolution broke out in Russia in February 1917, the Shostakovich family, members of the intelligentsia, lived in St. Petersburg, nurturing their apparently gifted son, Dmitry. Later, official biographers wrote that Shostakovich was in the crowd of those who met Lenin, who had returned from exile, at the Finland Station. A touching story, but absolutely implausible - Shostakovich was then ten years old. And yet, while the Shostakovichs were not die-hard communists, they welcomed the revolution in the hope that it would end the corrupt and repressive tsarist regime.

In 1919 Shostakovich entered the Petrograd Conservatory. That time - the beginning of the 1920s - was very difficult. In the winter, in the unheated conservatory, students practiced in coats, hats, and mittens, baring their hands only when they had to write something down. Nevertheless, Shostakovich shocked his teachers and classmates with his thesis work - the First Symphony, written in 1924-1925. For the first time and with great success, it was performed on May 12, 1926 at the Leningrad Philharmonic.

Soon Dmitri Shostakovich was appointed to represent the Soviet Union at the First International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, but before going to Warsaw he had to take a course in Marxist musicology. Shostakovich apparently did not take this course seriously. When another student was asked to explain the differences in the work of Liszt and Chopin from a socio-economic point of view, Shostakovich burst out laughing. He failed the exam. Fortunately, he was allowed to re-examine, and he rattled off without batting an eyelid. And I learned for the future: you should not be familiar with politics.

Stalin is not happy

In 1932, Shostakovich married Nina Varzar, a physicist by profession. Their daughter Galina was born in 1936, their son Maxim in 1938. Meanwhile, Soviet artists began to impose socialist realism as Leninist, and therefore basic artistic method, according to which art should expose the ulcers of capitalism and glorify the achievements of socialism. Formalist "art for art's sake" was to be decisively eradicated, as was complicated, "abstruse" modernism; art should be understandable and accessible not only to the intelligentsia, but also to the worker and peasant masses.

In the early 1930s, Shostakovich tried to adapt these requirements to his own creative quest. The result of his efforts was the opera "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" - based on the story by N.S. Leskov about a merchant's wife. The opera, staged in January 1934, was a wild success.

On January 26, 1936, "Lady Macbeth" was honored by the most respected listeners - Joseph Stalin and his inner circle. The supreme leader left the play without waiting for the finale, and this did not bode well. Two days later, Shostakovich opened the newspaper Pravda and saw an unsigned editorial entitled "Muddle Instead of Music." “Lady Macbeth” was described there as follows: “From the very first minute, the listener is dumbfounded in the opera by a deliberately discordant, chaotic stream of sounds. Fragments of a melody, the beginnings of a musical phrase sink, break out, disappear again in a rumble, rattle and screech. It is difficult to follow this “music”, it is impossible to remember it.” And further: “The ability of good music to capture the masses is sacrificed to petty-bourgeois formalist attempts, to claims to create originality by means of cheap originality. This is a game of abstruse things that can end very badly.

Shostakovich instantly realized what a precarious position he was in. His like-minded friends and colleagues have already been arrested, interrogated and sent to camps. The composer's mother-in-law, Sofya Mikhailovna Varzar, nee Dombrovskaya, was sent to a forced labor camp near Karaganda, and her sister Maria was sent from Leningrad to Central Asia. Writer Maxim Gorky, who essentially existed under house arrest, died under suspicious circumstances. All this was part of Stalin's Great Terror, during which almost two million people died.

But Shostakovich survived. He did not raise his head or open his mouth. When that devastating article was published in Pravda, he was working on the Fourth Symphony. During the rehearsals, it turned out that the gloomy and dissonant ending of the symphony was in no way able to glorify a bright socialist future; the composer took the score and stopped rehearsals.

He began to rehabilitate himself with the Fifth Symphony, which premiered on November 21, 1937. It would not be an exaggeration to say that his life was at stake that day. And then it turned out that Shostakovich's manner had changed radically: from rich dissonant music, he moved on to intelligible and harmonious music. Shostakovich himself wrote about the Fifth as follows: “Its (the symphony) main idea is human experiences and all-asserting optimism. I wanted to show in a symphony how through a series tragic conflicts big inner, mental struggle optimism as a worldview is affirmed. This work of the composer was accepted enthusiastically. Some observers - especially those in the West - saw it as a capitulation. But most Russians heard in the Fifth Symphony the triumph of free will in the face of hopeless terror, and this concept was closer to them than ever.

GET IT, GERMANY!

When in June 1941 the Nazi troops crossed the Soviet border, Shostakovich immediately went to sign up as a volunteer in the army. The army did not need a strongly short-sighted composer, then Shostakovich joined the people's militia and dug trenches near Leningrad. German troops were getting closer, friends persuaded Shostakovich to leave the city, but he stubbornly did not move until he was forced to evacuate to Kuibyshev.

He began the Seventh Symphony back in Leningrad; the blockade grew stronger, and in this score the composer poured out all his anxieties and hopes. The premiere of the symphony took place in Kuibyshev on March 5, 1942, then concerts were held throughout the Soviet Union, and each time the performance of the "Leningrad" symphony sounded like a challenge to the Nazi threat. Russia's allies also wished to hear this composition; the score of the Seventh was transferred to microfilm and sent to New York by a circuitous route via Tehran, Cairo and South America. The New York premiere on July 19, 1942, was conducted by Toscanini, and Time magazine featured a photograph of Shostakovich on the cover.

The inhabitants of Leningrad also wanted to hear "their" symphony, and the score was dropped from a military plane into the besieged city. The Leningrad Radio Orchestra called the musicians to rehearsals, but only fifteen people were able to turn up. At the front they let out a cry: who knows how to play on musical instruments? The situation in the city was so desperate that three orchestra members died of exhaustion before they made it to the premiere. In order to prevent the Germans from spoiling the performance of the symphony, Soviet artillery fired a warning. Soldiers set up loudspeakers along the front lines, broadcasting music to no man's land and enemy trenches. Music became a participant in the war, and Shostakovich became a wartime hero.

Okay, shut up, shut up

During the war, the Soviet authorities, preoccupied with more pressing issues - primarily achieving victory over Hitler, somewhat weakened their attention to the "enemies of the people", to the relief of the latter. Taking advantage of the respite, Shostakovich began to compose, as they say, from the heart - in gloomy, melancholy tones; during these years, for example, the tragic Eighth Symphony was written. The period of relative freedom ended in January 1948. Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and Stalin's favorite Andrei Zhdanov called the composers to a three-day meeting dedicated to the fight against formalism.

Long gone are the days when Shostakovich could laugh at Marxist dogmas. He publicly repented of his composer's mistakes: “... No matter how hard it is for me to hear the condemnation of my music, and even more so the condemnation of it by the Central Committee, I know that the party is right, that the party wishes me well and that I should seek and find concrete creative ways that would lead me to Soviet realistic folk art. Nevertheless, the Central Committee of the party banned most of his works from being performed, then Shostakovich was fired from the conservatory. Ten-year-old Maxim, the composer's son, was forced to "condemn" his father at a music school, and Shostakovich sat in the elevator next to his apartment at night - in case of arrest: if they come for him, then at least they should take him straight from the stairwell without disturbing him. family.

WEAK HEART, KIDNEY STONES, LUNG CANCER - THIS IS ONLY A BRIEF LIST OF SHOSTAKOVICH'S ILLNESSES. AND NOTHING HELPED HIM - EVEN THE LENINGRAD "SWITCH", TREATING BY THE LAYING OF HANDS, turned out to be POWERFUL.

A year later, the disgraced composer received a strange order: he was ordered to represent Soviet music in New York at the All-American Congress of Scientists and Cultural Workers in Defense of Peace. Shostakovich refused until Stalin personally called him. Plucking up courage, Shostakovich asked how he could represent his country if his music was banned in the country. In the life of Shostakovich, this was one of the most courageous acts, and Stalin hastened to lift the ban.

The trip to New York, however, turned out to be a nightmare. As soon as Shostakovich opened his mouth, his words were replicated by the press - on the front pages, in large letters. Soviet "guardians" followed him around; under the windows of his hotel room, demonstrators were trampling around, loudly urging the composer not to return to his homeland; and in addition, the American participants in the conference vied with each other to challenge him to frankness. When the composer Morton Gould somehow managed to catch Shostakovich alone, he immediately left the room, muttering: "It's hot in here."

In 1953, Stalin died, and the political atmosphere in the Soviet Union deflated to some extent. Not even a few months had passed since the funeral of the leader, when Shostakovich's music, written long ago, but never performed before, sounded in the concert halls. However, Shostakovich never recovered from the shocks experienced in the Stalin years.

IF YOU CAN'T BEAT THEM, JOIN THEM

Nina Vasilievna Shostakovich became a famous physicist, she studied cosmic rays. In 1954, while on a business trip to Armenia, she suddenly fell ill. Nina Vasilievna was diagnosed with colon cancer, from which she died. Clever and reasonable Nina was a reliable support for Shostakovich; he deeply felt the loss and worried about teenage children.

Friends who knew about his devotion to Nina were quite surprised when in 1956 Shostakovich suddenly got married. Thirty-two-year-old Margarita Kainova was an instructor in the Central Committee of the Komsomol; in the house of Shostakovich, she put things in order and comfort, but her husband's work was of little interest to her. They divorced less than three years later. In 1962, Shostakovich married for the third time. With a new wife, Irina Supinskaya, a sweet, intelligent woman of twenty-seven, the composer was much more fortunate.

In 1960, Shostakovich joined the Communist Party, a decision that puzzled his friends and colleagues. Later, the composer's wife said that Shostakovich was blackmailed, and another source conveys the words heard from Dmitry Dmitrievich himself: "I'm scared to death of them." And when the young colleagues of the composer started talking about the time to spread their wings and start testing the patience of the authorities, he answered them: “Do not waste your energy. You live here, in this country, and you must accept everything as it is.

In the late 1950s, Shostakovich's health deteriorated sharply. Weakness in right hand prevented him from playing the piano, and he could hardly hold a pencil. Doctors diagnosed him with polio, but it is now believed that he suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. In his condition, it was difficult for the composer to move around - he often fell and as a result received fractures of both legs. In the 1970s, everything seemed to be failing him. Shostakovich was constantly tormented by heart attacks, kidney stones, and he was diagnosed with lung cancer. Shostakovich sought help wherever he could, including a Leningrad sorceress who treated by the laying on of hands. Nothing helped. He died on August 9, 1975.

The assessment of Shostakovich's legacy has changed over the years. In the West, many - and some in their homeland - could not forgive him for close cooperation with the Soviet authorities, arguing that, having succumbed to political pressure, Shostakovich lost in creative terms; others, on the contrary, looked for anti-Stalinist motives in his music, portraying the composer as a secret dissident. None of the portraits is completely true. As a contemporary critic put it, "In the twilight of a dictatorial regime, black-and-white categories lose their meaning."

MUSIC FOR THE STARS

On April 12, 1961, the first cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin sang Shostakovich’s song in space: “The Motherland hears, the Motherland knows where her son flies in the clouds ...” Shostakovich became the first composer whose work was performed outside the planet Earth.

HAPPINESS IS A GLASS OF COLD VODKA

Mstislav Rostropovich, recognized as one of the best cellists of the twentieth century, told the following story about Shostakovich:

“On August 2, 1959, Shostakovich handed me the manuscript of the First Cello Concerto. On the sixth of August I played him a concert from memory - three times. After the first time, he was very excited, and, of course, we drank a little vodka. The second time I didn't play perfectly, and then we drank more vodka again. The third time, it seems to me, I played a Saint-Saens concerto, but he accompanied me from the score of his concerto. We were endlessly happy."