Dmitri Dmitryevich Shostakovich (Дмитрий Дмитриевич Шостакович) was born in St. Petersburg on the 25th September 1906. He died on the 9th August 1975 in Moscow.

Although he was arguably the greatest symphonist since the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, he also composed excellent chamber music. Notable amongst these are: the Piano Quintet in G minor, opus 57 (1941); the Second Piano Trio in E minor, opus 67 (1944); the First Violin Concerto in A minor, opus 99 (1948) , and all the fifteen string quartets: it is these quartets which are the principle subject of this website. Alongside those of Beethoven and Bartók Shostakovich's quartets represent the most significant contribution that any composer has ever made to this genre.

Inevitably his fifteen string quartets are contrasted with the cycle of six from Bartók since both were written in the twentieth century. But they differ markedly. Shostakovich's are melodic, lyrical and more intimate; whereas listening to Bartók's can certainly be an abrasive, even a repellent first-time experience.

Also Shostakovich's quartets do not reflect the solemn, contemporary issues which are often the subject matter of his symphonies. There are no quartets dedicated to the revolutionary events of 1905 or 1917, as is the case in his eleventh and twelfth symphonies; nor to the battle for Leningrad (the seventh symphony); nor to the massacre of 100,000 Jews, Gypsies and Soviet prisoners of war at Babi-Yar in the Ukraine (the thirteenth symphony: his last work to be banned in the Soviet Union). Instead the dedications in the quartets, where they occur, are to close, intimate friends with whom he shared his life.

Chamber music is by its very nature highly intimate; just a few instruments play and often they appear to be communicating more with themselves than with any listener. On hearing the Shostakovich's quartets you become keenly aware that you have entered the personal and inward world of another being; a world full of hope, defiance, despair, sadness; full of pain and fear: a deeply intimate world; complex, compassionate, dark and austere. Listening to the whole cycle of quartets gives a feeling of having been personally acquainted with him.

But Shostakovich lived in a political world, because he was a public figure within a totalitarian regime and simultaneously a pawn within the propaganda machine.

Everything in his life was affected by the 1917 revolution, even everyday facts. The revolution renamed the city of his birth to Leningrad as well as the street in which the family now lived from Nikolaevskaya to Ulitsa Marata¹ and, because Russia adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1918, it also changed the date of his birth. Russia was the last major European power to make the calendar conversion and because by 1918 the Julian and Gregorian calendars were differing by 13 days ², this number of days had to be "lost". This happened in Russia from the 1st to the 13th February 1918 which "disappeared". As Shostakovich was born before this change the date of his birth was recorded, until 1918, as having been on the 12th September 1906. But that day under the Gregorian calender is the 25th September 1906 and this proleptic date is the one used nowadays for his birth³.

Anyone born in Europe before 1960 and interested in classical music, but not oblivious to politics, will find Shostakovich's music to be a fascinating illustration of the tyranny of the status quo. His works were criticised on both sides of the Berlin wall but for different reasons. In the West some of the most savage reviews before the fall of communism were reserved for his music. He was accused of being a dedicated communist who had failed to confirm earlier expectations; his compositions were flawed and full of the gestures of great music but lacking in substance. Whilst in Eastern Europe his music was so poignant that it was either banned or awarded accolades. At one time the Soviet state would denounce him as an enemy of the people; at another they would broadcast Yuri Gagarin celebrated achievement of being the first man in space by playing, during his flight, Shostakovich's song "The Homeland Hears" from the " Four Songs", opus 86.

His death unleashed flowing praise for his works throughout the whole Warsaw Pact: obituaries cited his official titles and awards; Pravda described him as "a true son of the Communist party"; he was buried in the in the prestigious Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow and a peninsula in the Antarctic was named after him. But it took three days for the authorities to write his official obituary because it had to be approved by Brezhnev.

Then four years after his death the book, "Testimony: the Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov", appeared in the West. Controversy commenced as to whether these memoirs were from Shostakovich himself or someone else who had assumed his name and identity. Despite the initial scepticism, the book is now generally considered to honestly reflect Shostakovich's bitter contempt for the Stalin and post-Stalin regimes. It exploded the official myth on both sides of the Berlin Wall that Shostakovich was a blindly committed believer in communism.

The pendulum then swung to the other extreme. Shostakovich's music suddenly became a covert rebellion against the totalitarian machine; it contained denunciatory subtexts masterly balanced between ineffective obscurity and suicidal transparency. He became a deft dancer before the authorities; the fool to the Soviet King Lear; the unacknowledged speaker of the truth. In 1990 the musicologist Ian MacDonald published a book entitled "The New Shostakovich" in which he subjected the composer's works  not only to excellent musical analysis but also scrutinized their political meaning. In the same year Alexander Ivashkin⁴ commented:

For many years we weren't allowed to speak or show what we thought. Consequently a strange thing happened. When something came out into the open, part of it stayed hidden - like an iceberg with only a small part above the water. So symbolism became very characteristic of Russian music - symbolism of the simplest kind. An interval, sound or rhythm became a symbol which the listener could identify.

And just when Shostakovich music seemed to be rife with such hidden symbols for anyone with a little imagination to find, the whistle blowers appeared and declared that no one who had not experienced that totalitarian could understand its covert messages. Even worse, they insisted that without such understanding "Soviet music is reduced to little more than an interesting, and occasionally obscurely moving, arrangement of noises." Thus a balanced judgement of Shostakovich's works immediately after the fall of the Berlin wall was just as difficult to achieve as it had been before.

The truth was, that despite all the honours he achieved, Shostakovich's life had been precarious in the Soviet Republic. Twice he was publicly condemned. The first occasion was in January 1936 when his opera " Lady Macbeth" was described in "Pravda" as being cacophonous, pornographic, degenerate and an insult to the people of the Soviet Republic. The article was assumed to have been inspired by Stalin himself and contained the phrase that "things could end very badly" for the composer if he did not mend his ways: this, in the terminolgy of the time, was generally understood to mean imminent arrest⁵.

The second occasion was in February 1948 when works of Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Khatchaturian were selected for systematically and vitriolic condemnation. This persecution under the leadership of Stalin ideologue Andrei Zhdanov lasted until the dictator's death in 1953⁶. During that time every composer who wished to survive gave detailed consideration to which pieces he published and which he kept back. In addition to these personal attacks Shostakovich had to endured the disappearance, exile, torture and murder of many of his friends and colleagues. Some of his reactions to these horrors he expressed in his music, and, in particular, in his set of fifteen string quartets. Music composed under these circumstances could not be commonplace, it would be "written with the heart's blood".

Nevertheless if Shostakovich's life under a dictatorship is unimaginable for the majority of us, fortunately his music is easier to comprehend. This is because it is firmly within the classic tonal tradition: there is little evidence of twelve note technique. Musically Shostakovich follows the path trodden by Tchaikovsky and Mahler, composers whose music he often quotes. And just like those composers the appeal of Shostakovich's works lies not just in the beauty of the music but in the suggested revelation of hidden human, all too human, traumas.