Maxim shostakovich

Shostakovich was only 26 when he completed Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District The opera featured a racy plot set to avant-garde music and premiered to critical and popular acclaim. Two years later, three different productions were running in Moscow. Then Stalin himself went to a performance. The next morning the state newspaper Pravda condemned the work, saying it corrupted the Soviet spirit.

The opera disappeared overnight and every publication and political organization in the country heaped personal attacks on its composer. Shostakovich lived in fear, sleeping in the stairwell outside his apartment to spare his family the experience of his imminent arrest.

Dmitri shostakovich most famous works

Unsure about its reception, Shostakovich rejected his own Fourth Symphony while in rehearsal. Instead he premiered Symphony No. Still, many hear a subtext of critical despair beneath the crowd-pleasing melodies. Instead of writing in the approved ultra-nationalist style, Shostakovich wrote his Fifth Symphony on the model pioneered by Beethoven; he begins his symphony with a sonata, albeit with a hesitant feel.

By the third bar of the piece things goes wrong. The music breaks off abruptly and shrugs its way downward to a dead end in an implacable repetition of three notes. This pattern recurs throughout the symphony: assertive statement, apprehensive retraction, dead end. The next theme is derived from a folk song recognizable to the Soviet audience.

By changing just one note, however, Shostakovich shifts the meaning of the music.