Shostakovich

His Life and Music
By Brian Morton

Dimitri Shostakovich was the most popular Soviet composer of his generation. Internationally esteemed, his reputation has increased since his death in 1975. He is now widely considered to be the last greatest classical symphonist.

He wrote his First Symphony aged only nineteen and soon embarked on a dual career as a concert pianist and composer. His early avant-gardism was to result in the triumph of his 1934 opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.  First praised as being the product of 'the best traditions of Soviet culture', the opera was later denounced by Stalin as both 'muddle' and 'chaos'.

Shostakovich fell from grace and for most of his life would suffer from a complex and at times brutalising relationship with both Stalin, through the years of the Great Terror, and the Soviet governments that followed. He was to endure two official denunciations, in 1936 and again in 1948, both seriously affecting his status and well-being.

In spite of this persecution his Seventh Symphony, with its first movements composed in Leningrad, was embraced as a potent symbol of Russian resistance to the invading Nazi army in both the USSR and the West. Though his later years were marked by ill-health, his rate of composition remained prolific, establishing himself as 'the most popular composer of serious art music in the middle years of the 20th century'.

‘Brian Morton has composed a model biographical sketch buttressed by a sympathetic exegeses of the most important thing: the work.’                           

Stephen Poole, Guardian

Brian Morton was presentor of BBC Scotland's arts programmes The Usual Suspects and The Brian Morton Show. He has published fiction, music and literary criticism, was a founding member of the musical ensemble The Goldon Horde, and has composed jazz and musical theatre pieces. His works include Miles Davis (Haus Publishing, 2004)