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Dmitry Shostakovich
DMITRY SHOSTAKOVICH: "LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL!"
The true scale of the composer Dmitry Shostakovich, widely known not only in Russia but also abroad, can only be defined by the words "great, talented".
The more talented a person is, the less we notice the person himself for all his achievements.
Critics and musicologists write large articles about what the composer wanted to show in one or another of his works.
What emotions or experiences were bubbling up in him during the writing of the work.
But, by and large, these are just guesses.
If the creative nature is also secretive, then we will never know about his real feelings.
So it turns out that it is not a very funny picture when, behind dry phrases: a talented composer, pianist, conductor and public figure, we lose the image of a person, but we see only his outer, battered outer shell.
Dmitry Shostakovich is no exception to the rule…
Flowers
The personal life of the composer is of interest to many biographers, musicians, art historians and numerous fans.
It is curious that, having an amazing musical talent, the gift of a virtuoso pianist, having achieved fame and recognition, Dmitry Dmitrievich Shostakovich was very unsure and timid with women.
Shostakovich was born in St. Petersburg on September 25, 1906 in the family of a chemist and a pianist, and from an early age he became interested in playing the piano.
Dmitry was a thin, wordless boy, but at the piano he was reborn into a daring musician.
At the age of 13, the young composer fell in love with 10 year old Natalia Kube.
The admirer dedicated a small prelude to her.
Then it seemed to Dmitry that this feeling would remain with him for the rest of his life.
However, the first love gradually faded, but the composer's desire to compose and dedicate his works to his beloved women remained for the rest of his life.
Berries
After studying at a private school, the young man entered the Petrograd Conservatory and successfully graduated from it in 1923.
At the same time, a girl appeared in the life of a novice composer, with whom he fell in love with a new, already youthful passion.
Tatyana Glivenko was the same age as Shostakovich, she was pretty, well educated and had a lively and cheerful disposition.
A romantic and long term acquaintance was formed.
In the year of meeting Tatiana, the impressionable Dmitry began to create the First Symphony.
Three years later, the premiere of this musical work took place in St. Petersburg, which flew around the whole world many years later.
The depth of feelings expressed by the young composer in the symphony was also caused by the onset of Dmitry's illness, which appeared as a result of sleepless nights, love experiences and severe depression developing against this background.
Experiencing the most tender feelings for his beloved, Shostakovich did not think about the upcoming marriage even after several years of dating.
The Hidden passions of Dmitry Shostakovich
Tatiana wanted children and a legitimate husband.
And one day she openly declared to Dmitry that she was leaving him, having accepted a marriage proposal from another admirer, whom she soon married.
Nina Shostakovich
The composer did not even try to stop the girl from taking such a decisive step, and then Tatiana chose not to maintain any more relations with him.
But it was not possible to forget Tatiana: the composer continued to meet her on the street, write passionate letters, talk about love to the wife of another man.
Three years later, having finally gathered the courage, he asked Glivenko to leave her husband and become his wife, but she did not take Shostakovich's offer seriously.
Besides, she was already expecting a child at that time.
In April 1932, Tatiana gave birth to a son and asked Shostakovich to delete her from his life forever.
Irina Shostakovich
Finally convinced that his beloved would never return to him, in May of the same year, the composer married a young student Nina Varzar.
This woman was to spend more than twenty years with Dmitry Dmitrievich, give birth to a daughter and a son to the composer, survive her husband's infidelities and his hobbies with other women and die before her adored spouse.
After Nina's death, Shostakovich married two more times: to Margarita Kayonova, with whom he lived for a short time, and to Irina Supinskaya, who surrounded her already aging husband with warmth and care, which remained in their family until the end of the great Russian composer's life.
Shostakovich is a musician
Affairs of the heart did not interfere, but on the contrary always helped the composer to create.
Nevertheless, it is very difficult to intertwine the two branches of life, because in each of them he is simultaneously very different and the same.
He is the same in achieving his goal, but the difference lies in the fact that Shostakovich was still more decisive in his relations with music.
So, after graduating from the conservatory in piano and composition classes, Shostakovich passed the already famous First Symphony as a thesis.
Dmitry was going to continue his career both as a concert pianist and as a composer.
In 1927, at the First International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, he received an honorary diploma (the composer played a sonata of his own composition).
Fortunately, the unusual talent of the musician was noticed by one of the members of the jury of the competition, the Austro American conductor and composer Bruno Walter, who suggested that Shostakovich play something else for him on the piano.
After hearing the First Symphony, Walter immediately asked Shostakovich to send the score to him in Berlin, and then performed the Symphony this season, thereby making the Russian composer famous.
In 1927, two more significant events occurred in the life of Shostakovich.
Acquaintance with the Austrian composer Alban Berg inspired Dmitry Dmitrievich to start writing the opera "The Nose" based on Gogol.
Even after one acquaintance, Shostakovich created his First Piano Concerto, which is famous today.
At the same time, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the following two symphonies by Dmitry Shostakovich were written.
The Persecution of Dmitry Shostakovich
The opera "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" was staged in Leningrad in 1934.
Initially, it was received with delight, but after a season and a half, it was unexpectedly defeated in the official Soviet press and was removed from the repertoire.
In 1936, the premiere of the 4th Symphony was to take place – a work of a much more monumental scale than all of Shostakovich's previous symphonies.
However, the composer wisely suspended rehearsals of the Symphony before the December premiere, realizing that in the atmosphere of state terror that had begun in the country, when representatives of creative professions were arrested daily, its performance could be perceived by the authorities as a challenge.
The 4th Symphony was first performed in 1961.
And in 1937, Shostakovich released the 5th Symphony.
Pravda commented on the work with the phrase: "A business like creative response of a Soviet artist to fair criticism."
Relations with the authorities improved for a while, but from that moment on, Shostakovich's life acquired an ambivalent character.
And then there was the war…
During the first months of the Great Patriotic War in Leningrad, Shostakovich began working on the 7th symphony – "Leningrad".
It was first performed on the stage of the Kuibyshev Opera and Ballet Theater on March 5, 1942.
wearing a fireman's helmet on the cover of Time magazine in 1942
In 1943, the composer moved to Moscow and taught at the Moscow Conservatory until 1948.
After the end of the war, the composer wrote the 9th Symphony.
The Soviet press published articles by perplexed reviewers who expected a thunderous hymn to victory from the main musical "socialist realist" of the country, but instead received a small sized symphony of "dubious" content.
After the thunder that thundered first in 1946 over a number of famous writers, in 1948 the Stalinist authorities began to "restore order" in the Union of Composers, accusing many masters of "formalism", "bourgeois decadence" and "groveling before the West".
Shostakovich was accused of professional incompetence and expelled from the Moscow Conservatory.
Again, the vocal cycle "From Jewish folk poetry" was created "at the wrong time", and again the composer was under attack – as "a conniver of rootless cosmopolitans and enemies of the people".
The first violin concerto in connection with these events was hidden by the composer, and its first performance took place only in 1955.
As before, the situation is again saved by the "correct" musical work released in time.
There is no end
It was on such waves that almost the entire creative life of Shostakovich passed.
Then there was the forced entry into the party and many other experiences and falls, but there were still more ups (in terms of the success of the composer's works in his native country and abroad).
In the last few years of his life, the composer was very ill, suffering from lung cancer.
Dmitry Shostakovich died in Moscow on August 9, 1975 and was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery in the capital.
Today, Shostakovich is one of the most performed composers in the world in general, and the first among the composers of the XX century in particular.
His creations are true expressions of the inner human drama and chronicles of the terrible suffering that fell on the XX century, where the deeply personal is intertwined with the tragedy of humanity.
The most notable genres in Shostakovich's work are symphonies and string quartets – in each of them he wrote 15 works.
While symphonies were written throughout the composer's career, Shostakovich wrote most of the quartets towards the end of his life.
Among the most popular symphonies are the Fifth and Eighth, among the quartets – the Eighth and Fifteenth.
son Maxim
***
In one of the letters to his mother, Dmitry Shostakovich wrote: "Love is really free.
The vow made before the altar is the most terrible side of religion.
Love cannot last long... my goal will not be to tie myself in marriage."
***
"I want the audience to leave after the performance of the symphony with the thought: life is beautiful!"
– Dmitry Shostakovich.
Dmitry Shostakovich updated: August 27, 2015 by the author: Elena
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Michal Oginsky Opera "The Nose", D. Shostakovich
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