Shostakovich: Symphony No. 8

Description

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 - 1975)Symphony No.8, Op. 65Dmitri Shostakovich was born in St. Petersburg in 1906, the son of anengineer. He had his first piano lessons from his mother when he was nine andshowed such musical precocity that he was able at the age of thirteen to enterthe Petrograd Conservatory, where he had piano lessons from Leonid Nikolayev andstudied composition with the son-in-law of Rimsky-Korsakov, MaximilianSteinberg. He continued his studies through the difficult years of the civilwar, positively encouraged by Glazunov, the director of the Conservatory, andhelping to support his family, particularly after the death of his father in1922, by working as a cinema pianist, in spite of his own indifferent health,weakened by the privations of the time. He completed his course as a pianist in1923 and graduated in composition in 1925. His graduation work, the FirstSymphony, was performed in Leningrad in May 1926 and won considerablesuccess, followed by performances in the years immediately following in Berlinand in Philadelphia. As a pianist he was proficient enough to win an honourablemention at the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw.Shostakovich in his early career was closely involved with the theatre, andin particular with the Leningrad Working Youth Theatre, in musical collaborationin Meyerhold's Moscow production of Mayakovsky's The Flea and in filmmusic, notably New Babylon. His opera The Nose, based on Gogol,was completed in 1928 and given its first concert performance in Leningrad inJune 1929, when it provoked considerable hostility from the vociferous andincreasingly powerful proponents of the cult of the Proletarian in music and thearts. The controversy aroused was a foretaste of difficulties to come. Hisballet The Golden Age was staged without success in Leningrad in October 1930.Orchestral compositions of these years included a second and third symphony,each a tactful answer to politically motivated criticism.In 1934 Shostakovich won acclaim for his opera Lady Macbeth of theMtsensk District, based on a novella by the 19th century Russian writer NikolayLeskov, and performed in Leningrad and shortly afterwards, under the titleKaterina Ismailova, in Moscow. Leskov's story deals with a bourgeois crime, themurder of her merchant husband by the heroine of the title, and the opera seemedat first thoroughly acceptable in political as well as musical terms. Itscondemnation in Pravda in January 1936, apparently at the direct instigation ofStalin, was a significant and dangerous reverse, leading to the withdrawal fromrehearsal that year of his Fourth Symphony and the composition thefollowing year of a Fifth Symphony, described, in terms to whichShostakovich had no overt objection, as a Soviet artist's creative reply tojustified criticism. Performed in Leningrad in November 1937, the symphony waswarmly welcomed, allowing his reinstatement as one of the leading Russiancomposers of the time.In 1941 Shostakovich received the Stalin