Dmitri Shostakovich Dmitri Shostakovich Dmitri Shostakovich

He was born on the 25 of September,1906. Dmitri Shostakovich was the second of three children of Dmitri Boleslavovich Shostakovich and Sofiya Vasilievna Kokoulina. His immediate forebears came from Siberia.

Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was a child prodigy as a pianist and composer, his talent becoming apparent after he began piano lessons with his mother at the age of nine. He displayed a remarkable ability to remember what his mother had played in previous lessons.

After his father died, the family were short of money, so young Dmitri had to earn money by playing the piano in cinemas for silent movies.

In 1919, at the age of 13, he was allowed to enter the Petrograd Conservatory. In the late 1920s and early 1930s Shostakovich worked at youth theatre. Much of this period was spent writing his opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which was first performed in 1934.

Shostakovich married his first wife, Nina Varzar, in Initial difficulties led to a divorce in 1935, but the couple soon remarried when Nina became pregnant with their first child.

In the second world war Shostakovich became a volunteer for the Leningrad Conservatorys firefighter brigade But his greatest and most famous wartime contribution was the Seventh Symphony. The composer wrote the first three movements in Leningrad and completed the work in Kuibyshev where he and his family had been evacuated. The symphony was first premiered by the Bolshoi Theatre orchestra in Kuibyshev and was soon performed abroad in London and the United States.

Shostakovich was among those who were dismissed from the Conservatory altogether. For Shostakovich, the loss of money was perhaps the largest blow. Others still in the Conservatory experienced an atmosphere that was thick with suspicion. No one wanted their work to be understood, so many resorted to accusing their colleagues of writing or performing anti-proletarian music. Shostakovich said to his friend Isaak Glikman, "I started thinking that if some day I die, nobody is likely to write a work in memory of me, so I had better write one myself."

Later the composer suffered from chronic ill health. Starting from 1958 he suffered from a debilitating condition that particularly affected his right hand, eventually forcing him to give up piano playing; in 1965 it was diagnosed as paralysis. He also suffered heart attacks the following year and again in 1971, and several falls in which he broke both his legs

Dmitri Shostakovich died of lung cancer on 9 August 1975 and after a civic funeral was interred in the Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow. His last work was his Viola Sonata, which was first performed on 28 December 1975, four months after his death. Many of his Russian contemporaries, and his pupils at the Leningrad Conservatory were strongly influenced by his style. Dmitry is one of my favorite composers. His work has made an indelible impression on me.

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