The Russia where Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was born in 1906 was in the process of enormous social upheaval. Discontent and unrest throughout the country had led to instability and bloodshed, and a premonition of approaching catastrophe prevailed. Widespread outbreaks of violence culminated in the St Petersburg Palace Square massacre on 9 January 1905 (more commonly referred to at the time as ‘Bloody Sunday’). This tragic slaughter of an unarmed crowd of peaceful demonstrators by Imperial troops was the first in a chain of events which came to be termed the 1905 Revolution. It marked a psychological turning point in the country’s attitude to the monarchy. In the eyes of the people Tsar Nicholas II lost his credibility, and he was forced to grant fundamental civic liberties and to concede the creation of an elected parliament, the Duma. The intransigence of the monarchy seemed to be outweighed merely by the ineffectiveness of the Duma. Nicholas’s regime was generally detested, and no one doubted its days were numbered.
The general mood of ferment and anticipation of impending change was reflected in Russia’s artistic circles, notably in the literary scene. The Symbolists looked to the future with foreboding and gloom, and foresaw the death of the country’s culture, while the many new movements that had come into being searched for new forms and a new and vigorous language to express them. The most dynamic of these groups were the Futurists, who advocated total cultural anarchy.
In the world of music, this search for a new means of expression was evident in Alexander Skryabin’s ‘decadent’ harmonies and mystic philosophy. Rebels of a different kind, Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev broke their ties with the academic schools which had fostered them and dazzled the world with the vitality of their new musical idiom. And in the years preceding the 1917 Revolution, such composers as Nikolai Roslavets and Arthur Lourié had started using elements of dodecaphony, and even graphic notation, in their music, which reflected such diverse influences as Skryabin’s late ‘Promethean’ style, the esoteric and refined sonorities of Claude Debussy, and Pablo Picasso’s visual experiments.
The traditional rivalry that existed between the more ‘Western’ Moscow Conservatoire and the ‘Russophile’ St Petersburg Conservatoire (personified by ‘The Mighty Handful’) from the second half of the nineteenth century continued (and continues!). Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was regarded as being musically conservative, but he was liberal in his politics. Indeed, he was dismissed from his position as director of the St Petersburg Conservatoire for his outspoken condemnation of the 1905 Uprising.
The St Petersburg School could boast of having produced the two greatest Russian composers of the early twentieth century – Stravinsky and Prokofiev. Shostakovich later graduated from the same Conservatoire and thus felt himself rooted in the Russian tradition. He was to be hailed as the Soviet Union’s first ‘home-grown’ composer.
The first written testimony of the future composer is given by his aunt, NADEZHDA (NADEJDA) GALLI-SHOHAT. The young Dmitri in these and other reminiscences is often referred to by the diminutive Mitya. Similarly, his mother Sofiya Vasilyevna is referred to as Sonya, and his elder sister Mariya as Marusya or Musya.
The child was born at five o’clock on the afternoon of the 12th of September 19061 – a fine healthy boy.
The day of his christening2 was a busy one in the Shostakovich household. His father, Dmitri, had come home early from work loaded down with packages of delicacies for the celebration. The whole house was in a busy turmoil. A room had to be prepared for the baptism and the dining room arranged for the tea. The baby slept peacefully in his crib, oblivious of the excitement and gaiety that surrounded him. His three-year-old sister, Marusia, ran about under everyone’s feet, eager to participate and to miss nothing. At three o’clock the priest and his attendant arrived, the font was placed in the middle of Dmitri’s study, and the family gathered for the ceremony.
‘What name do you want to give to your boy?’ the priest asked the parents. ‘We want to call him Jaroslav,’ they replied. The priest raised his eyes in astonishment. ‘That is a very unusual name,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t know what nickname to give him, and his friends in school wouldn’t know what to call him. No, no, that name will not do.’
The family looked at each other, smiling a little, not understanding the priest’s objection to the chosen name.
‘Why don’t you call him Dmitri?’ continued the priest; ‘it is a good Russian name and his father’s name too.’
‘But,’ said Sonya, ‘Jaroslav Dmitriyevich sounds much better than Dmitri Dmitriyevich.’3
But the priest waved aside her objections. ‘Dmitri is a good name,’ he said; ‘we’ll call him Dmitri.’
So the matter was settled.4
Shostakovich’s forebears hailed from Siberia. His mother’s father, Vasili Kokaoulin (1850–1911), a Siberian by origin, made his way from humble beginnings to the position of manager at the Lena Gold-mines at Bodaibo in Eastern Siberia, where he was respected for his liberal attitudes and enlightened concern for the miners. He wished to give education rather than riches to his six children. Sofiya Kokaoulina (1878–1955), the composer’s mother, commended herself as an exemplary student at her exclusive Irkutsk school and as a special honour she was chosen to dance for the Crown Prince (later Tsar) Nicholas. She went on to study piano at the St Petersburg Conservatoire.
Her younger sister, Nadezhda, studied physics at the Bestuzhev Courses for Women in St Petersburg (as did Nina Varzar, the composer’s wife, in later years). Three of Vasili’s children became actively involved in revolutionary politics, which was not unusual as the Romanov monarchy was detested in intellectual circles for its narrow-minded and repressive policies. Indeed, in reaction to the 1905 Uprising, Nadezhda joined the Social Democrat Bolshevik Party. The youngest Kokaoulin sister, Lyubov’, married the socialist revolutionary Vyacheslav Yanovitsky while he was under arrest in the Kresti Prison, Petrograd, in 1907. Nadezhda later lost faith in Bolshevism and emigrated to the United States in 1923.
Shostakovich’s paternal grandfather, Boleslav Shostakovich (1845–1919) was of Polish extraction, but born and brought up in Siberia. Following family tradition, he became involved in revolutionary politics and joined the Zemlya i Volya group5 while still a student. In 1864 he organized the escape from prison of Jaroslav Dombrovsky, who had been arrested for his participation in the Polish Uprising. Two years later Boleslav himself was arrested in connection with the investigation into Alexander II’s assassination. Despite his probable innocence, Boleslav was sentenced to exile in Siberia, first to Tomsk, then Narym. In 1869, while in exile, he married Varvara Shaposhnikova, whose family were on friendly terms with Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the radical publicist and critic. Hence, even if his family was not ‘working class’, the composer could boast an impeccable revolutionary ancestry to satisfy the requirements of Soviet class ideology.
The composer’s father, Dmitri Boleslavovich (1875–1922) attended St Petersburg University, graduating in 1899. In 1902, he found employment as senior keeper at the Palace of Weights and Measures, which had recently been founded by the famous chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev, discoverer of the periodic table. The following year he married Sofiya Kokaoulina,6 and their first daughter, Mariya, was born on 12 November. After Mendeleyev’s death in 1910, the Palace of Weights and Measures went into a period of decline, and D. B. Shostakovich left his job there. From 1910 to 1916 he held the post of Manager of the Rennenkampf Estates at Irinovka. During the First World War he also worked as commercial manager at Promet, the munitions industry. The family by now enjoyed a comfortable standard of living, even having two cars at their disposal.
The engineer DMITRI AZARIEVICH POPOV got to know Shostakovich’s godmother Klavdiya Lukashevich, a well-known children’s writer, and her daughter Zinaida (who suffered from tuberculosis) and her husband Pyotr Anisimov. Popov, himself a physicist who also worked at Promet after 1915, considered the Shostakovichs to be a model happy family.
It was through the Lukashevich family that I got to know the Shostakoviches. This was in 1910. At the time they lived on Nikolaevskaya St no 9.7 The two families were not just on close friendly terms; they were as close as kith and kin. This was because of their common Siberian roots: Klavdiya Lukashevich had spent her youth in Irkutsk where she got to know the parents of both Sofiya Vasilyevna and Dmitri Boleslavovich.
In St Petersburg they essentially lived like one big family. They met nearly every day, and all family celebrations were held together in patriarchal style. Klavdia Vladimirovna was godmother to all three Shostakovich children which, by the laws of the day, meant they were considered close relations (for instance Lukashevich’s son could not marry Shostakovich’s daughter).
[…] I will try and describe the composer’s parents. His mother was somewhat taller than average and her face was fine-featured. One couldn’t call her a beauty in the usual sense, but the Old Russian word ‘milovidnost’ – sweet-looking – was well suited to her. Her son – at least in his youth – inherited her facial features. Sofiya Vasilyevna had a sanguine character. She reacted quickly to everything and took decisions quickly; she could erupt in anger, but calmed down quickly.
In one of his books Viktor Shklovsky called Sofiya Vasilyevna a music teacher. Perhaps after her husband’s death she was forced to earn money to feed the family and started teaching, for pensions then were worth nothing. But in the years I am speaking of (1910–1915) she was a ‘housewife’, although she had servants, and her life was devoted to her family and the children.
Dmitri Boleslavovich was blond, of small stature, and he sported a moustache and a small beard. He was short-sighted and wore glasses. […] In life I have met few such witty and capable people as Dmitri Boleslavovich. Although he wasn’t a musician he loved music, and possessing a good if not large voice he would sing in company.
[…] The Shostakoviches would organize Siberian evenings at home, in which naturally Klavdiya Lukashevich and her daughter Zinaida were always present. The preparations for it consisted in making an enormous quantity of ‘pelmeniye’ – Siberian dumplings – since nothing else was served at these lunches apart from these dumplings made to the best Siberian recipe. The quantity was calculated according to the number of Siberians present – usually there were about 20 of them, mostly from Irkutsk. I don’t remember the average portion, but I think it was about 35 dumplings for each man, and 25 for each woman. The dumplings were made in advance and then put into the ‘freezer’, which in those days before refrigerators, meant being placed outside the windows.
Although I am not of Siberian origin I got invited on one occasion. The lunches were distinguished by Siberian folk traditions. Dmitri Boleslavovich would address the table in Siberian dialect – ‘My dear guests, help yourselves, fill your plates’ – and they would roar their approval in chorus, then the host would fill up their glasses with wine, and those sitting would break into song.8
It was at the Shostakoviches’ that I heard the most original invitation to tea according to Siberian custom: ‘Come and stretch your fingers.’ This referred to the tradition of drinking tea from saucers held on three stretched-out fingers. In general Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s parents felt an enormous attachment to those far-off places of their childhood. […]
The Shostakovichs had a good family library. Dmitri Boleslavovich guarded his books lovingly and had a rubber stamp made stating, ‘This book has been stolen from D. B. Shostakovich.’ I doubt if there were many who would have wanted to take a book with this phrase imprinted on it!
[…] Dmitri I remember as a noisy boisterous five-year-old, who would tease his little sister Zoya. His father spoilt him and named him ‘my goat’ and taught him all kinds of tricks, which sometimes led to unforeseen consequences. […]
Once an important visitor came to see Dmitri Boleslavovich, the Senator Krivtsov. The maid, who knew that Dmitri Boleslavovich was still not dressed […] asked him to wait in the sitting room. The ‘goat’ Mitya appeared and after having politely greeted the senator wanted to entertain him with talk. ‘Uncle, do you know how much one hundred and one hundred is?’ ‘Yes, I do.’ ‘And how much?’ ‘Two hundred.’ ‘Well then, you fool, just keep sitting there,’ Mitya berated the senator, much to his father’s horror.
After the February Revolution, Dmitri Boleslavovich went down several times to the Promet factory ‘to sort out problems’. To start with the workers refused to accept their pay packet in ‘Kerenki’, the new banknotes issued by the provisional government. They demanded payment with the ‘old’ habitual banknotes. The millionaires Metal’nikov and the other commercial managers did not feel like going down to the factory, and sent Dmitri Boleslavovich, knowing his ‘democratic’ spirit. At a meeting with the workers Dmitri Boleslavovich demanded of them, ‘So, comrades, you have overthrown the Tsar’s autocratic regime, and now you want to receive money with the Tsar’s portrait on it? There’s no going back now to old times. With the new money you’ll be able to buy what you want.’9
Dmitri’s elder sister MARIYA recalled their father as a
kind, jolly man. In the summer when we stayed in the village of Irinovka he would go out for walks with us to look for mushrooms and berries. He never got irritated with us children. Neither did he treat us as any kind of ‘wunderkind’. […] For two years we lived at no. 16 Nikolaevskaya in apartment 21; our next-door neighbours then were the Lukashevich family in apartment 20. Then we moved to the top floor apartment (no. 7) at no. 9 Nikolaevskaya (after the Revolution it was renamed Marat Street). It was an enormous flat, with six rooms, and another small room off the kitchen where the servants slept. We lived there for many years; it was there that Father died, and where I got married to the physicist Professor Friederichs. After the Revolution our flat was made into a communal flat. To begin with we gave a room to our acquaintances, a mother and daughter […]. Then we took two girls, who were recommended by Lukashevich’s son-in-law, Boris Sass-Tisovski, a cellist, who worked in Slavyansk in the Ukraine; Mitya stayed with him and his family one summer. Then the film director Sergei Yutkevich and his wife occupied one of our rooms.10
Zoya, the composer’s younger sister, was born on 8 August 1908 in Vyborg, then part of Finland, where the Shostakovich family was on holiday. She studied ballet and music in her youth, but later graduated in veterinary science. In her early years she was the much loved (and perhaps little understood) eccentric of the family. Boris Lossky, the art historian, remembers that while a schoolgirl she was an enthusiastic supporter of the Bolsheviks, to the annoyance of the rest of the family. Whereas Dmitri always remained on very close terms with his elder sister Mariya, his ties with Zoya weakened in adult life, but he was reportedly proud to have a sister who ‘could cure elephants’. (Zoya was apparently on occasion called in by the Moscow Zoo to treat these exotic animals.11) Zoya died in Moscow in February 1990.
Here ZOYA DMITRIYEVNA SHOSTAKOVICH recalls the Shostakovich family life:
We came from a good family. Father was trained as a biologist and worked as an engineer. Both Mama and Papa were Siberians. Father’s family came from Tomsk. His father had been arrested, then exiled to Narym as a revolutionary. Father was not allowed to serve in the army because he was the child of a revolutionary. It was one of the few advantages for children of political prisoners that they could not be called up. Mama’s family came from Bodaibo, in Eastern Siberia, where her father, Vasili Kokaoulin, was general manager of a gold-mine. Although he was not the owner, he was a person of great local importance. So Mama was brought up in deepest Siberia. She studied piano and graduated from the Institute for Noblewomen in Irkutsk, and then came to St Petersburg to continue her studies at the Conservatoire. Then she got married and the children came, and that was that as far as her career went. We never knew our grandparents, they all died early.12
As soon as we reached our ninth birthdays, Mother started each of us at the piano. Two days after she began lessons with Mitya, she announced, ‘We have an outstandingly gifted boy on our hands.’ He was able to grasp things like musical notation instantly, and in a few days’ time he was playing four-hand music with Mother.
Otherwise he was a normal boy, although somewhat reserved and introspective. He liked nature. He enjoyed going for strolls, but he was always listening to something. If we went mushrooming, it was me who found them and Mitya who picked them. He could stand right on top of a mushroom and not notice it. He was somewhat absent-minded. Yet he was a wonderfully kind and cheerful child. He was full of mischief and good spirits in the first years of his life, and indeed he remained so until they started beating the fun out of him.
Up to 1917 we spent a lot of time outside Petrograd living in a large dacha at Irinovka,13 but after the war we stayed in town and never went anywhere. The dacha didn’t belong to us, but to a family friend, Adolf Rennenkampf. Father worked for him as general manager of his estates. Rennenkampf took us children under his wing. This dacha was on his estate, and it was an enormous and eccentric house. Apparently, when it was built they got the measurements muddled, and substituted metres for centimetres, so the rooms were huge and out of proportion. For instance, a room of fifty square metres had only one small window! It was certainly a strange house.
In Petrograd we lived in quite a large flat on Nikolayevskaya Street. Although we weren’t very rich, we lived a comfortable life; we even had servants before the Revolution. Of course, things were a bit easier then, certainly for my parents. When the shortages started in the years following the Revolution, we children nevertheless always got fed something, and didn’t go hungry like the adults.
The first school that Mitya went to was called the Shidlovskaya. It was a co-educational school with high standards attended by children of the intelligentsia, who came from the most varied backgrounds. Mitya’s schoolmates included Leon Trotsky’s son, Alexander Kerensky’s two sons, Boris Kustodiev’s children, and the Princess Tarakanova. However, my sister and I went to a different school nearer to home. Mitya was diligent and got good marks in all subjects, although he had problems with maths.
After the Revolution everything was hard to come by, and there were no exercise books to be had. We had to write on any old thing, newspaper or whatever. We also couldn’t get manuscript paper, and I remember drawing staves on blank paper for Mitya. When Papa was alive he brought home a contraption which allowed you to draw five lines on paper at once with ink. Papa was very fond of all kinds of gadgets.
The Shidlovskaya School was not far from the Finland Bridge. When the Revolution started and Lenin arrived at the Finland Station, a whole group of boys rushed off there. Mitya came back home in raptures, saying he had seen Lenin. Well, he was only a young boy of ten. I remember Father coming home after the February Revolution and shouting, ‘Children, Freedom!’ And Mother got angry.
Our parents were not church-goers, and I do not remember talk of politics in the house. They lived a hard life, but in great harmony and friendship. The atmosphere in our house was very free and liberal. As Mama was incredibly hospitable, it was always full of people, and there was much laughter and entertainment. People kept coming and coming to the house. Mama accepted everybody. Our rooms were on the ground floor, and Mama gave all kinds of people shelter for the night, Chernosotintsy14 and communists included. Amongst the latter was our Uncle Maxim. Some Jews came for the night too. Mama told us, ‘There’s going to be a pogrom tomorrow.’ She said, ‘The Kingdom of the Jews is coming to an end,’ and then, ‘Come and I’ll hide you.’ Mama’s nature was generous and compassionate.15
When Mitya entered the Conservatoire, everything changed. He was only just thirteen, while his friends were all adults in their twenties and thirties. Although he still enjoyed playing some childish games with us, like lapta,16 he started befriending these solid chaps like Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky, who was about twenty;17 and he had one friend who was approaching forty. Mitya was tied to them through their mutual interests in life and their studies together. This age difference meant that he didn’t experience the usual difficulties of the complex teenage years, but his childhood came to an end when he entered the Conservatoire and circumstances dictated that his friends were all ‘respectable’ adults.
Mitya simultaneously continued his studies at school. The Shidlovskaya School was closed after the Revolution and he started attending our school, the Stoyunina Gymnasium. But as he couldn’t attend regularly, the director, Boris Afanasyev, said as a malicious joke, ‘I can do without these geniuses. He has to be at school every day.’ Although the Conservatoire did have some school classes, they didn’t teach maths or science, so Mitya went to another school where he was able to combine school studies with those at the Conservatoire. He was allowed to sit his exams ‘externum’, thereby gaining a certificate of graduation. This, despite being thrown out by the director of the Gymnasium. It wasn’t easy for Mitya, but then in those days one studied ‘approximately’.
When he was young, Mitya’s health was fragile. He got tuberculosis of the lymphatic system and had a swelling on his neck. Everyone feared for his life. He was operated on by Professor Grekov, a friend of the family, and then he was sent to the Crimea. Fortunately, tuberculosis of the lymphatic system is less dangerous than of the lung and everything turned out all right for him. This happened when he was a student. He went to sit his exams with his neck still in bandages. He carried the scars of the operation for a long time.
Mitya practised hard in those days; he was a very good pianist. He spent most of his time composing, playing and improvising. Sometimes he played for our home entertainments, for the dancing. Mama kept an open house and organized an incredible number of ‘balls’, as we called these informal parties. We invited up to thirty people. There was nothing much to feed the guests on, but we would dance until six in the morning. Mama usually invited a professional pianist who came for the fee of two pounds of bread and was willing to play right through the night for it. Alexander Glazunov was amongst our guests, and there were all kinds of other important people. Life was quite fantastic in those days. Mitya enjoyed himself with the rest of us, and didn’t miss out on the dancing either. We certainly knew how to have fun.
Father died early and Mother had a very difficult time with three children to look after. My sister Mariya went to work straight away and Mitya also had to take a job playing in the cinema. He had to improvise and compose for the films. It was a terrible hardship for him and a mark of sorrow on our conscience. Knowing how Mitya suffered, Mama tried to release him from this drudgery, but we had to eat and drink, so Mitya had to keep at it. Sometimes he would fall asleep at the cinema, but sometimes he managed to use the time for himself. I remember that, when he had composed his Piano Trio, Mitya and his friends the violinist Venyamin Sher and the cellist Grigori Pekker rehearsed it in the cinema as the accompaniment to the film. That’s how they learnt it. The cinemas usually tolerated him, but often there were scandals, and the people whistled and booed. I myself was actually rather glad that Mitya had this work as it meant that I got free tickets. He was only released from this torture when he got a job as pianist in Meyerhold’s Theatre in Moscow.
The Trio in question was dedicated to Tatyana Glivenko. I think she was the only true love of my brother. She got to know him at the age of seventeen in the Crimea. Her father was a philologist. Although she didn’t graduate from university, she was a very well-educated, well-read and altogether knowledgeable person. One couldn’t call her very attractive, but she was very interesting and had a certain charm which she has preserved to this day.
Mitya graduated from the Conservatoire as a pianist, and then as a composer. He completed his studies very early. Everybody assumed he would win the pianists’ medal,18 but as I remember he was wiped out. My sister Marusya was given a medal and a diploma, and she was a much less good pianist than he was.
In the 1920s I also studied at the Conservatoire. We went to Mitya’s concerts, where his compositions were played. First there were the Circle of Friends of Chamber Music, where Mitya performed some of his preludes and other piano pieces. My sister also played there. It was a professional organization and had its own posters and programmes.
Mitya’s graduation piece in composition was his famous First Symphony. Glazunov sat and listened and listened to it; he left the hall saying, ‘I don’t understand anything. Of course the work shows great talent, but I don’t understand it.’ Glazunov was a man of the old regime, and he drank an awful lot. Mama even helped him get hold of liquor. There was a woman, Lenochka Gavrilova, who looked after him and whom he eventually married. He was a fat and paunchy man and I had the impression he was a rather abnormal character.
Mitya had a natural facility and wrote very fast, but in addition he was incredibly hard working. He wrote out his music in full score straight away. He would then take his scores to lessons without having even played them through. I always found it amazing that he never needed to try things out on the piano. He just sat down, wrote out whatever he heard in his head and then played it through complete on the piano.
He never demanded or appeared to need silence in order to compose. He had his own room, and there was also the room with the two pianos in it, so he wasn’t hindered while working. My sister and mother were out at work most of the time. We had a lot of room in the apartment, not like in Soviet flats nowadays.
Mitya was also a great letter-writer. He wrote lots of letters in general, including many to Mother. His handwriting was appalling but it was surprisingly easy to decipher his scribbles. When Mama died, Mitya was abroad, in Vienna.19 He got back for the funeral and the first thing he did was to burn all his letters to her. I remember him coming into the room, a bundle of nerves, and going directly to the chest where Mama kept the letters. He took them out and burnt them all in the stove.20,21
Shostakovich has left various accounts of his early musical education:
Until I started to play the piano I had no desire to learn, although I did show a certain interest in music. When our neighbours played quartets I would put my ear to the wall and listen.
Seeing this, my mother insisted that I begin piano lessons. I put up stubborn resistance. In the spring of 1915 I went to the theatre for the first time to see Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan. I liked the opera, but it still did not overcome my reluctance to learn music. ‘The root of knowledge is too hard to grasp – it’s not worth the trouble to learn to play,’ I thought to myself, but mother insisted all the same, and in the summer of 1915 began to give me piano lessons … Things then went ahead very fast. It turned out that I had perfect pitch and a good memory. I learnt music very quickly, I memorized without repetitious learning – the notes just stayed in my memory by themselves. I could also sight-read well…. Soon after I made my first attempts at composition.22
In a questionnaire that Shostakovich filled in on ‘The Psychological Aspect of the Creative Process’ (dated 2–10 September 1927)23 he recalled how he started to compose:
One of my first creative impulses (which were frequent and numerous) came from reading Anderson’s story ‘The Mermaid’ … I attempted ballet on this story. Then a Poème ‘The Soldier’ on military themes in connection with the [First] World War; then a ‘Funeral March in memory of Victims of the Revolution’ (in general I composed a lot under the influence of external events). My method was to improvise at the piano, followed by an attempt to write down what I had played. The next stage was having lessons with G. Bruni, who encouraged improvisation, and set themes such as ‘The Forest’: (1) In the Forest, (2) The Meadow, (3) the Stream.24
NADEZHDA GALLI-SHOHAT recalls how Shostakovich’s musical talent was identified. She describes a visit to the opera (which she dates, almost certainly mistakenly, back to 1911) to see Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan:
They sat breathless through the performance, and the next day little Mitya surprised the family with his unusual memory and ear. He recited and sang correctly most of the opera. Sonya did not conclude from this, however, that her son was a musical genius or a child prodigy; she kept to her decision that he would take up his music in due time, as Marusia had done, and that meanwhile he would play and grow up as any child does.25
*
The summer of 1916,26 when the family went back to Irinovka, Mitya had his first lessons on the piano with his mother. She was surprised how easily he learned and memorized his little pieces. Nadejda remembers very well the first time Mitya improvised for her. He sat down at the piano one evening and, with an absorbed expression on his handsome little face, started to make up a story.
‘Here is a snow-covered village far away –’ a run and the beginning of a little tune accompanied his words – ‘moonlight is shining on the empty road – here is a little house lit by a candle –’ Mitya played his tune and then, looking slyly over the top of the piano, he suddenly flicked a note high in the treble – ‘Somebody peeks in the window.’
But these improvisations were rare; music was not yet all-absorbing, and the children spent most of the time with their playmates. Mitya grew very fond of Jurgensen, the handyman around the estate. Whenever things didn’t go as Mitya liked them at home, he would declare, pouting: ‘Well then, I’ll go and live with Jurgensen.’ One day, when he had misbehaved and Sonya had scolded him, he again threatened to leave. ‘All right,’ said Sonya, ‘get dressed. I’ll take you myself to Jurgensen.’ Muttering to himself, Mitya dressed very quickly and Sonya took him firmly by the hand and they started out across the field for Jurgensen’s house. At first Mitya swaggered along bravely. Then gradually Sonya felt his pace slacken and lag; then his hand began slowly to slip out of hers, finger by finger. Suddenly he burst into tears, turned, and ran back home as fast as he could.27
According to his sister Mariya, one of the things that put the young Mitya off learning the piano was the sight of notated music. Nevertheless, under his mother’s guidance he made excellent progress, and soon was transferred to the school (or courses) run by Ignati Glyasser. Initially he was taught by Glyasser’s wife, but in 1916 he was transferred to Glyasser himself.
The composer describes his first attempts at composition:
In his class I played Haydn and Mozart Sonatas, and the following year Bach’s Preludes and Fugues. Glyasser was very sceptical about my attempts to compose and did not encourage me to continue. Nevertheless I persisted, and composed a lot at the time.28
Shostakovich gave this brief account of his schooling:
In 1915 I was enrolled at Mariya Shidlovskaya’s Private Commercial School, where I remained until the middle of 1918. Then I attended Gymnasium No. 13 [the former Stoyunina Gymnasium] for a year, and completed my secondary education at the School of Labour No. 108.29,30
While he was at the Shidlovskaya School, Shostakovich met BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH LOSSKY, who was also a pupil there. Thereafter they both went to the same schools. Lossky was a year older than Shostakovich and his grandmother ran the Stoyunina Gymnasium. Here are Lossky’s memories of those years:
I first encountered Mitya Shostakovich in the beginning of 1916 in the Recreation Hall of the Shidlovskaya Gymnasium during one of the breaks between classes. The nine-year-old boy, with fragile, sharp features, looked somewhat like a small sparrow. He sat at the window looking blank-faced through his spectacles while his schoolmates played and amused themselves. Probably his introspection was due to his being under the spell of his inner hearing. At the time he seemed out of place and helpless amongst the other children, and I felt a desire to protect him in some way.
Soon after that I was astonished to see this same boy in the Hall of the Stoyunina Gymnasium. This was at one of the annual class concerts, and that evening it was the turn of the Third Class to play. Musya (Mariya) Shostakovich was amongst the performers, and it transpired that she was the elder sister of this interesting boy. Later, in January 1918, I was to hear one of the first compositions of Musya’s brother in this same hall. The occasion was a memorial service commemorating those who had been massacred at the demonstration against the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, and also Fyodor Kokoshkin and Shingaryov, who had been bestially slaughtered. The service at my grandmother’s Gymnasium was attended by teachers and pupils alike. Musya had brought her brother Mitya along, and he played his recent composition, ‘Funeral March in Memory of Victims of the Revolution’. It was most probably inspired by the events of the last few days.
Mitya’s first school was the Shidlovskaya Gymnasium, which we both started to attend in autumn 1915. It was officially entitled ‘The Commercial School’, but despite the name the Gymnasium had no connection with trade or commerce. The pupils were chiefly drawn from the ranks of the ‘out-lived’ liberal intelligentsia who were unsympathetic to the ‘official’ bureaucracy of the day. Instead of the standard school uniforms of peaked caps and leather belts with metal buckles, we wore blue-and-white-striped ‘sailor’ tops and sand-coloured overalls. I remember the names of all of Mitya’s classmates. They included George Pozner, who recently died in Paris after achieving fame as an Egyptologist. Then there were two cousins, with a claim to certain notoriety, Shura Rozenfeld and one of the Bronstein boys – in other words the sons of the Bolshevik leaders Lev Borisovich Kamenev and Lev Davydovich Trotsky. Mitya was not on friendly terms with either of these boys, and particularly not with the latter. During the spring of 1918, during Trotsky’s rise to power, Mitya never so much as hinted at any kind of sympathy with the ‘existing regime’, and I can vouch that this was the case until 1922. Gleb, Alexander Kerensky’s younger son, studied in the class below Mitya. But, most important, there was Irina Kustodieva, who was able to initiate a friendship between the boy composer and her father, the artist Boris Kustodiev. Kustodiev was tied to a wheel-chair through illness; but despite the disparity in ages they had a touching and tender relationship. Kirill, Irina’s elder brother, studied in the class above mine; he, like his father, was to become a well-known painter. He teased us smaller boys in those years and was a real hooligan. Also in his class was the elder Kerensky son, Oleg, and the elder Pozner boy, Vova, who became a poet, and after emigrating to France won renown as a French communist writer. In the years of the old Tsarist regime he expressed his revolutionary sympathies through his inspired rendering of the Marseillaise, which was tolerated then only as France was our ally in the war. All this gives you the atmosphere of the Shidlovskaya School’s predominantly ‘intellectual’ make-up. After the nationalization of all private schools in summer 1918, the Shidlovskaya Gymnasium became, in all probability, the ‘Soviet School of Labour No. 108’.
In the autumn of 1917 my parents, on the advice of Mitya’s mother, decided to send me to study the piano at the Glyasser Courses, which Mitya had already been attending for two years. I clearly remember him playing Beethoven’s C minor Sonata (no. 5) at the examination concert in April 1918. I can still hear the music sounding in my head as he played it. Through his reflective and introspective performance he showed a remarkable quality of concentration.
I also remember attending a concert with Glyasser and his class in the Hall of the Nobleman’s Assembly (today the Large Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic) on Mikhailovsky Square. We sat on the right side of the hall behind the pillars on a velvet-upholstered bench which was reserved for Ignati Albertovich Glyasser and his pupils. Beethoven’s 8th and 9th Symphonies were played by the Philharmonic Orchestra under the inspired direction of Serge Koussevitsky. Mitya and his classmate, Lyonya Diderichs, sat on either side of Glyasser, avidly following the score laid out on his knees. Then, during the interval, they went up to the stage to examine all the instruments of the orchestra, hazarding guesses as to their names.
I think that, sadly for Glyasser, plans were already afoot for both Mitya and Musya to leave his courses and to transfer to the Conservatoire class of Alexandra Rozanova, their mother’s former teacher. This occurred at the very end of the year (1918). Sofiya Vasilyevna felt forced to take this decision because of Glyasser’s irritable temper (which I had also experienced on many occasions) and his impatient demands. Many of his pupils used to arrive home in tears after lessons. After this the Shostakoviches did not maintain their relationship with Glyasser.
In Shostakovich’s ‘Life-Description’ dated 16 June 1926 he recalls that he studied with Rozanova from 1917. Whether his lessons started then or a year later, Dmitri remained with Rozanova until the end of his first year at the Conservatoire.31
Alexandra Alexandrovna Rozanova (1876–1942) was a much-loved and well-respected piano teacher. She had been a pupil of Balakirev before training at the St Petersburg Conservatoire, where she joined the staff in 1905; Sofiya Vasilyevna Kokaoulina [Shostakovich] was among her first students there. A full professor from 1912, Rosanova taught at the Leningrad Conservatoire until dismissed in 1928 because of her dubious social origins – her father had been a priest. Rozanova continued to teach privately; she perished during the siege of Leningrad.32
In contrast to Glyasser, who was sceptical of child prodigies, whether pianists or composers, Rozanova encouraged the young Mitya both as a pianist and composer. In gratitude he presented her with three piano pieces written at the time (Prelude, Minuet and Intermezzo). Zoya recalled Rozanova (she taught all three Shostakovich children) as a kind, well-meaning soul who stimulated their knowledge of repertoire, giving them a new work at every lesson.33 She did not concentrate on technique in the way Glyasser had, but she was a meticulous teacher, paying great attention to interpretative detail.
Nevertheless Sofiya Vasilyevna felt that Mitya’s talents needed greater stimulation and engineered his transfer to Leonid Nikolayev’s class in his second year at the Conservatoire in the autumn of 1920.
As regards his general education Shostakovich wrote in the abovementioned ‘Life-Description’ that after leaving the Shidlovskaya Commercial School in 1918 he attended the Gymnasium no. 13 for a year before transferring to the School of Labour no. 108, where he finished middle school.34 There remains some confusion regarding facts and dates, compounded by Shostakovich’s own various accounts.
In 1918 all schools were nationalized by Bolsheviks and renamed. The Shidlovskaya School was renamed 108th Soviet School but closed altogether in 1919. Whether or not Dmitri attended an intermediary school (‘Gymnasium no. 13’), in 1919 he transferred to his sisters’ school, the Stoyunina Gymnasium on Kabinetskaya Street, where he had already appeared in concerts. By this stage he was already enrolled at the Conservatoire. In 1921 he abandoned his school studies altogether, apparently without achieving any form of final certificate.
The Stoyinina Gymnasium was a private school run by Boris Lossky’s grandmother, although from 1915 she had effectively handed over her position to the maths and physics teacher Boris Afanasyev. Nevertheless she remained very much the driving force of the Gymnasium until the Lossky family was expelled from the USSR in 1922.
EKATERINA ALEKSEEVNA UMOVA knew the Shostakovich family from 1915. Her sister attended and taught at the Stoyunina Gymnasium, which she describes as follows:
The Stoyunina Gymnasium was a democratic institution with wonderful teachers. The brother of Zinaida Gippius, Vladimir, taught literature, and the zoology teacher was Konstantin Yagodovsky who spoke incredibly poetically about animals.
The Gymnasium was in a five-storey building, and Stoyunina herself lived on the top floor. She treated all the students as if they were her own children. In the great hall they held dances, and on Sundays the students gathered there to make music. […]
Mitya Shostakovich became our private pupil. Although he was studying at the Conservatoire and at the Stoyunina Gymnasium (which was renamed after the Revolution as School of United Labour Formation), his mother Sofiya Vasilyevna wanted to widen his horizons. I coached him in maths, and my sister in history and literature. He came to our house. […] Although poorly dressed he always looked clean and tidy. He was extremely attentive in lessons, restrained and shy, although he found it difficult to sit still; he was both serious and fidgety.
He made good progress and didn’t really need this extra coaching. But it seemed that I was able to infect him with my love of maths,35 and my sister was thrilled by his great interest in literature.’36
Boris Lossky also confirmed Shostakovich’s early love of literature.
Mitya possessed an amazingly lively mind and a refined literary perception. He had an unusually wide knowledge and love of Russian prose and poetry. With his innate humour and large vocabulary, he was very inventive with words.
I remember how we used to amuse ourselves by inventing an absurd imagined dynasty. Many of the names derived from Gogol’s story ‘The Overcoat’, or from Ivan Turgenev or Alexander Ostrovsky: Akaki, Moki, Sossi, Khozdozaty, Guli Ivlich, Sysoi Psoich, Pstoy Stakhich, and so on.
Once I met Mitya in front of his home on Nikolayevskaya Street. He invited me up, and we spent a pleasurable hour together before his mother’s return. First of all he started to recount to me the subject of an Alexander Kuprin story that had obviously made a great impression on him. It concerned a Japanese spy who was able to pass himself off as a Russian despite his oriental looks. ‘A sheep’s mug, but a human soul,’ was Mitya’s witty comment. Then he sat at the piano and sang in a somewhat hoarse voice Khivrya’s aria from Mussorgsky’s Sorochinsky Fair, gaily accentuating the refrain ‘The Devil take you’.
This was in sharp contrast to his performance of Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’ Sonata, which he gave at my grandmother’s Gymnasium sium that same winter. It was remarkable for its overall grasp of the work, rather than any depth of inner passion.
I heard Mitya again as a performer of his own works when he was a guest in our house. That was in 1921. He played a suite of either preludes or variations. Grandmother, who had been brought up on Glinka and regarded Tchaikovsky as an unredeeming modernist, remarked after each piece, ‘Interesting …’ No doubt she meant well, but she didn’t sound all that convinced.37
The artist Boris Kustodiev left several fine portraits of the young Shostakovich children. He developed a touching friendship with the young composer. Here his daughter, IRINA KUSTODIEVA, describes their first meeting in 1918:
Mitya Shostakovich, a small boy with a shock of hair, gave Papa a list of works that he had learnt, and sat down at the piano. The success of the occasion exceeded all expectations, and he won Papa over with his playing. That day was the beginning of a deep and tender friendship between our family and that of Shostakovich …
Even in those years of hunger and devastation, our parents tried as far as possible to give us young every chance of enjoyable entertainment. They held dances and parties, and family celebrations. Mama used to bake cakes, concocted from black rusks and cranberries. Our guests, naturally, included Marusya and Mitya Shostakovich, and also my brother’s friends, the Dobuzhinskys. We would dress up, dance and play charades. Papa helped us to think up funny charades; he would chuckle, pretend to be an oracle, and then tell our fortunes, each more ridiculous than the last. He also played forfeits with us. It was such fun, and we were all truly happy.38
The actress N. L. Komarovskaya describes her impressions of this relationship:
They would put at the piano a small pale youth with a disobedient lick of hair on his forehead. He sat down and started to improvise. ‘Mitya,’ Irina would shout, ‘don’t invent anything – just play us a foxtrot!’ Mitya was, of course, Dmitri Shostakovich … He submitted to the general chorus of dissatisfied voices, but in the music of his foxtrot all kinds of unexpected rhythms and intonations suddenly broke through. Kustodiev wheeled his chair closer to the piano and, bending forward to the pianist, whispered: ‘Just take no notice of them, Mitya, play your own thing.’39
In the space of ten years, Shostakovich’s native city of St Petersburg was to change its name twice: firstly, it was russified into Petrograd as a patriotic gesture when the country went to war with Germany in 1914; and secondly, after Lenin’s death in 1924, the city assumed the name of Leningrad.
If the events of World War I seemed far removed from Petrograd, the city became the main stage for Russia’s revolutions. The first ‘bloodless’ revolution of 1917, the one that finally toppled the Romanov monarchy, broke out on 18 February (5 March, new-style calendar). A provisional government was formed, which came to be headed by Alexander Kerensky, giving the Russians a taste of democracy. The Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, operating from a hidden base in the Finnish Gulf, organized the military coup in Petrograd on 25 October (7 November, new-style calendar) by which the Bolsheviks seized power. However, the Bolsheviks remained in a minority in the elected body, the Constituent Assembly. On 5 January 1918, Lenin gave orders to dissolve it with the use of force. This action served as a sure sign to other political parties that no compromise could be reached with the Bolsheviks. Opposition to the new Soviet (Workers’ and Peasants’) government rapidly gained ground. The ensuing Civil War (1918–21) brought terrible suffering and hardships to Russia’s people, and saw the birth of organized terror.
NADEJDA GALLI-SHOHAT gives a vivid description of the atmosphere of revolutionary Petrograd:
The precarious balance of a ‘bloodless Revolution’ could not be kept for long. The victims of violence on both sides grew steadily in number, and soon funerals for those who had died for the Revolution in its first days were being held throughout Russia. A gigantic funeral procession filled the streets and avenues of Petrograd on the way to the Marsovo Field, where the bodies were to be put into one common grave. A great sea of people moved solemnly up the Nevsky Prospect – soldiers, sailors, workmen, students and the new ‘free citizens’ of the capital; on their shoulders rocked the coffins covered with brilliant red banners. The procession moved slowly between the packed lines of spectators to the strains of the revolutionary funeral song ‘You Fell Victims in the Fatal Struggle’. Platforms had been erected at the street corners, and here the procession stopped while men made speeches in the name of freedom, revolution and the dead. Clinging to trees and lamp-posts, leaning from windows and balconies, perched on roofs and on fences, men and women watched the impressive parade; they lifted their children to their shoulders so that they, too, might see. They had been gathering since early morning, and many of them had stood shivering in the cold dawn wind of that grey March day, awaiting the procession.
The Shostakovich family was there in the crowd and the children had climbed to the top of an iron fence surrounding an old churchyard. The sad air of the funeral song filled their hearts with a strange pain and pride.
When the tired family returned home that evening, Mitya went to the piano and played quietly for a long time; he might have been thinking of a tragic incident he had witnessed a few days before and which had left a deep impression on him – the brutal killing of a small boy by a policeman. Then he played to them the piece he had just composed, his ‘Funeral March for the Victims of the Revolution’. This and his ‘Hymn to Liberty’40 were the two things he was always asked to play when anyone came to the house.41
The young Shostakovich’s ‘revolutionary’ sympathies were given excessive prominence in all Soviet biographical literature (with a certain amount of encouragement from the composer himself). Nowadays there are doubts about the matter, and about some of the ‘legendary’ events of the composer’s childhood.
It is alleged, for instance, that the young Shostakovich was present at the Finland Station when Lenin arrived in Petrograd in April 1917, and that this incident had a formative influence on the young composer. Without actually denying it, the Shostakovich of Solomon Volkov’s book Testimony disclaims any specific memory of being there.
On the other hand, Zoya Shostakovich claims that her brother did witness Lenin’s arrival, whereas Shostakovich’s daughter Galina and son-in-law Evgeni Chukovsky42 had no memory of the composer ever giving them an account of this event. It is worth pointing out that many who knew Shostakovich really well recall his love of mystification and invention just for the sake of a good story.
Chukovsky, however, recalled that the composer occasionally talked of other incidents from this period. For instance, in the years immediately after the Revolution lists of the names of ‘Enemies of the People’ who had been ‘liquidated’ were pinned up on the street pillars which normally served as theatre billboards in Petrograd. The names were given in alphabetical order. The scale of this calculated slaughter was horrifying. The pillar with the ‘A’s’ list on it usually only had room for the ‘B’s’ as well.
Certainly, the turbulent events of 1917 must have left their mark on an impressionable ten-year-old. Most probably, if the young Mitya did indeed witness the arrival of Lenin, he would have been taken to the Finland Station by his Bolshevik uncle, Maxim Lavrentyevich Kostrykin.43 Kostrykin had suffered arrest and exile for his part in the 1905 Uprising. He subsequently escaped from Siberia, and returned to St Petersburg to finish his studies using the pseudonym of Sokovnitsky. On occasion, he was given refuge in the Shostakovich family flat in the years preceding the Revolution. The Kostrykin family lived in Moscow, and during his student years Shostakovich often visited them there. Like so many old Bolsheviks, Maxim Kostrykin was arrested in 1937 and perished.
BORIS LOSSKY claims that these childhood incidents of ‘formative ideological influence’ are more often than not mere legend:
The story of Shostakovich’s walk along Nevsky Prospect in the first days of the events of February 1917 has been given much credence. Allegedly, while the police were attempting to disperse the demonstration of workers, a little boy was slashed by a sabre in front of the young Shostakovich’s very eyes. According to Volkov’s account in Testimony, ‘He rushed home to tell them all about it.’ I should point out that Mitya was only ten years old at the time, I was eleven, and that it was inconceivable that my parents, or his, would have allowed us on to the streets unchaperoned. And all the more unlikely during those particular days, when schools were closed and life disrupted because of the shooting in the streets. I ask myself if, in reality, the boy’s death that impressed Mitya actually refers to another incident witnessed slightly earlier by his elder sister Musya (Mariya). She was a pupil at the Stoyunina Gymnasium. One day, as the pupils were dispersing after lessons were over, they watched a demonstration of workers emerging on to the streets from the nearby Bogdanov tobacco factory. One of its youngest participants, still only a lad, was slashed to death by a policeman’s sabre in front of them.
I regard with even greater scepticism the second episode which is supposed to be of such important formative influence on the development of Shostakovich’s revolutionary ideology: Mitya’s alleged presence at Lenin’s famous speech delivered from the armoured train on arrival at the Finland Station on 3 April 1917.44 The arrival was in the evening, which precludes the idea that a group of boys ran along to the station after school. Evidently Shostakovich did not dare refute the authenticity of this story in the predominantly candid memoirs Testimony. From this I permit myself to conclude that if the first of these episodes is to a large extent a ‘stylized’ account, then the second is sheer invention by the guardians of this Soviet composer’s ‘ideological purity’.45
The cinema director LEO (LYOLKA, LYOLIK) ARNSHTAM’S close friendship with Shostakovich started in their student years and continued till the composer’s death. Arnshtam studied piano at the Petrograd/Leningrad Conservatoire. Lydia Zhukova described him at the age of sixteen as a virtuoso pianist who dazzled with his incredible tempi ‘the speed of light’, and his powerful chord technique: ‘He hammered away flamboyantly, but he did not live the music.’46 Here is Arnshtam’s account of conditions at the Conservatoire:
‘Mariya Nikolayevna, they’ve brought the cabbages.’ I heard someone whisper conspiratorially behind my back.
Lost in the sensuous sonorities of a Chopin nocturne, I didn’t take my hands off the keyboard straight away, but when I turned my head I saw the ‘Classic of Russian Music’, Alexander Glazunov, bending over Mariya Barinova, my piano teacher. She sat by the piano, her legs crossed in their frayed felt boots. Even when dressed in these tattered boots and several layers of warm woollies, Mariya Nikolayevna somehow succeeded in preserving an artistic elegance. Her eyes lit up at this interesting piece of information. Within seconds she shot out of the class, with Glazunov lumbering heavily after her. Her head reappeared for an instant round the door. Recalling her duty as a teacher, she hurriedly instructed me, ‘Repeat that passage one hundred times.’
So they had brought the cabbages! Of course the cabbage was pickled, maybe sprinkled with the odd cranberry, and preserved in small barrels. It was intended as a supplement to the food ration, and maybe not just for the teachers and world-famous musicians, but also for us humble students. After all, the Petrograd Commune was, despite its limited resources, concerned about us as well, the musicians of the future. It was the winter of 1919, the second hard winter after the Great October Revolution.
The Conservatoire smelled of sour cabbage soup. In the canteen we were fed on this cabbage soup or a watered-down porridge – and this thanks to the charity of the Petrograd Commune. Towards one o’clock, a hungry queue started to form, consisting of our revered teachers and students ranging in age from thirteen to thirty.
A student of thirteen, you ask? This may seem incredible, but the old Conservatoire of the pre-revolutionary and transitional years was in no way similar to what it has become today. There were no preparatory music schools, and people were accepted on one of the three courses (lower, middle, and upper) according to their level of achievement and regardless of age. So it happened that you might find a ‘mature’ student approaching thirty on the lower course, and some gifted adolescent on the upper course.
The Conservatoire of my youth smelled of cabbage, but despite everything it breathed inspiration!
From the unheated, icy classrooms music sung out as always. The cold piano keyboard singed your fingers. In the concert hall the angel on the ceiling strummed a lyre covered in a tracery of hoar-frost. Before sitting at the piano, we would warm our hands on a contraption invented by some ingenious student: smooth little tin boxes filled with a couple of pieces of smouldering charcoal.47
Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky looked down on us in aloof contempt from the Conservatoire walls, as if urging us to ignore the pangs of hunger.
Music triumphed. And not just the music that we played on our instruments, but the music of revolution!
Submerged under snowdrifts, the city of Petrograd lived an intense artistic life. In the Hall of the former Nobleman’s Assembly, a newly created symphony orchestra played the cycle of Beethoven Symphonies. At the last concert, where the Ninth Symphony was performed, the hall was packed. The audience consisted not only of seasoned music-lovers, but sailors from the Baltic Fleet. A detachment of sailors went straight on to the front lines from the concert hall. It was hellishly cold! The conductor wore his traditional tails, but underneath his ‘bourgeois’ attire, one could discern several formless layers of thermal underwear. It would seem that the icy brass mouthpieces of the trumpets and trombones were about to freeze directly on to the players’ lips. Schiller’s words came out of the singers’ mouths together with clouds of steam. And steam swirled in thick gusts over the heads of the chorus….
‘The streets are our brushes, the squares are our palettes,’ declaimed Mayakovsky in his ‘Instruction to the Armies of Art’ … He goes on to insist, ‘Drag the pianos out on the streets.’
This last demand, unusual even by the standards of those times, was fulfilled literally. Grand or upright pianos, requisitioned from the homes of the bourgeois, were heaped on to jolting old lorries which had long seen their day. Each lorry was allocated, apart from its chauffeur, a pianist, a singer and, less commonly, a violinist or cellist. These ‘artists’ were often students from the Conservatoire. The musical lorries would trundle over to the Red Army quarters and the workers’ suburbs; sometimes they drove right into the factories on the Vyborg Side, or stopped at the drill grounds where the Red Guard workers’ brigades were instructed in the science of vanquishing its enemies. The musical department (Muzo) of the Commissariat for Enlightenment required that serious repertoire, mostly selected from the classics, be played. Usually the audience was well disposed to ‘the artists’, sometimes even sharing its meagre rations and donating them a stale crust of bread.
… I attempt to convey the flavour of those unrepeatable times when Dmitri Shostakovich started his career. He enrolled at the Conservatoire in 1919. In that hungry, but nevertheless happy year, he was thirteen years old. This thin and apparently fragile adolescent was exceptionally animated and always in rapid motion.
His sharp profile, crowned by a jaunty lick of hair, would flash past me at different corners of the Conservatoire. His outward appearance and behaviour did not lead one to suspect the artist in him. People spoke of him as a gifted pianist, and his amazing ear and phenomenal musical memory were already a legend within the Conservatoire. When he played at auditions and exams, one was struck by his musical maturity and a particular enhanced rhythmic sense in his performance. But this heightened rhythmic pace was inherent to his spirit and the intensity with which he perceived the outside world. This rhythmic sense lay at the very core of Shostakovich’s world, and it was forged by the rhythm and pace of the Revolution.48
After the Revolution and the onset of civil war, life in Soviet Russia became increasingly difficult for one and all. Material conditions eased only slightly when Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, which effectively authorized a free market policy. Consumer goods became available and peasants were allowed to grow and sell their own produce, thereby putting an end to the worst food and fuel shortages. This concession to the realities of a bankrupt economy was interpreted by many communists (and indeed ordinary people) as a sell-out. As prices were uncontrolled and inflated, many families continued to experience great hardship.
But in the preceding years, not only were food and firewood hard to come by, but other ‘essentials’ like clothes, books and manuscript paper. Some institutions closed down in 1918 and 1919 because of the general chaos and lack of supplies and fuel. It says much of its Director, Glazunov, that the Petrograd Conservatoire kept its doors open in those hard times; he did so through constant badgering of the new political administrators for essential funds, and, incidentally, at great cost to his own health. He also spared no effort in helping needy students. Glazunov personally interceded on behalf of the young Shostakovich during his years at the Conservatoire, thereby gaining him ration cards and funds for study. In 1921 he appealed to Maxim Gorky prior to his departure for Italy so as to procure the so-called ‘academic’ ration which Gorky helped to administer.
Glazunov also petitioned the Commissar for Enlightenment, A. V. Lunacharsky:
We have at the Petrograd Conservatoire a most gifted pupil studying piano and theory of composition. He will undoubtedly be a composer in the future. His name is Dmitri Shostakovich. He is making outstanding progress, but unfortunately his sickly organism is much affected, weakened as it is by malnutrition. I humbly ask you not to refuse my request on his behalf to provide the means of feeding this most talented boy and building up his strength.49
Fortunately Lunacharsky took a personal interest in the fate of talented artists, on the assumption that they would bring credit to the young Soviet regime.
The composer VALERIAN BOGDANOV-BEREZOVSKY became Shostakovich’s closest friend during his early years at the Petrograd/Leningrad Conservatoire. This friendship was gradually replaced by others, notably with the Muscovite group of composers and slightly later with Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinsky.
We met in the class of Maximilian Oseyevich Steinberg during the first-year courses in the winter of 1919/20, when the Conservatoire building was completely unheated. Our classes were continuously interrupted because of the cold, and everyone sat in their coats and galoshes; gloves or mitts were removed only so as to write in the harmony of a choral on the blackboard, or to play some modulation on an icy keyboard. The first-year class was initially very large, but quite quickly its numbers melted away; but the youngest of all its members, a calm, polite, even-tempered and modest boy in glasses, obstinately attended all the lessons, and was streets ahead of the others in his progress.
What struck one then about Shostakovich? His quick and thorough assimilation of everything that concerned music, from the laws of polyphony, the principles of harmony, techniques of modulation and specifics of musical texture. We usually practised sight-reading of four-hand transcriptions of symphonic and chamber works in the late autumn and the spring when the temperature in the classrooms was tolerable for music-making.
Shostakovich undoubtedly outstripped everyone else in this art, as well as in aural dictation. One could already compare his hearing in its refinement and precision to a perfect acoustical mechanism (which he later was to develop still further), and his musical memory created the impression of an apparatus which made a photographic record of everything he heard.
Once while waiting for a lesson to begin, we met in the corridor and sat down together by the window and started talking. We both got so carried away that after lessons were over we continued our conversation outside on the street. This marked the start of a close and intimate friendship of many years standing. I frequently visited the Shostakovich family. We attended symphonic concerts together at the Philharmonia, and chamber music concerts at the Circle of Friends of Chamber Music, and went to the opera and ballet at the so-called GATOB.50
As Valerian recalled, he and Dmitri often went to see the Sleeping Beauty together:
This was the period of his enormous enthusiasm for Tchaikovsky’s scores. We sat up in the gods looking through binoculars at the dancers far below, and shared our delight over the orchestration of the epilogue of this fairy tale, particularly enjoying the ogre’s dance, in which the theme is broken up and scattered amongst various instruments at wide intervals of the register.
Almost every day we made music together, showed each other what we had written, and played through virtually the whole four-hand piano literature – everything that we could lay hands on. We went for walks about town, often making long ‘diversions on foot’ from the Conservatoire to Nikolayevskaya Street (now renamed Marat Street) where Shostakovich lived.51
The Shostakovich family shared in the general deprivation and hunger of the population at large. Despite the issue of ration cards, food was very scarce – the children received only four spoons of sugar a month. Dmitri Boleslavovich was fortunate in finding employment with the Central Co-operative Guild, as well as holding a position on the directive management of the Petrograd Factories of Mass Production. But his salary was not enough to buy bread for the family at the inflated prices of the day. Sofiya Vasilyevna boosted the family income by giving piano lessons for payment in bread.
When Dmitri Boleslavovich died suddenly in February 1922, it was nothing short of a disaster for the family. Sofiya Vasilyevna, like most women of her generation, had never before had to go out to work. She found employment as a shop-cashier, but was soon dismissed. She managed to find other work (including a clerical job at the Palace of Weights and Measures) but suffered dismissal again in January 1925. In any case, she only earned a pittance, so the elder children went out to work to help make ends meet.
Thus from November 1923, Dmitri started ‘service’ on and off in the cinema, illustrating silent films at the piano. He resented the time away from his studies and composition, missing evening concerts, and most of all the dishonesty of some of his employers. In desperation, he took the manager of the ‘Piccadilly’ cinema to court for non-payment and won the case. Shostakovich described the family’s desperate financial plight in a letter to Lev Oborin, his close friend in their student years, dated 3 October 1925:
Life is really bad with me. Especially in the material sense. My debts equal 244 roubles. From Tuesday I shall start the drudgery of a job at the ‘Splendid Palace’. I will earn 100 roubles 50 kopecks. If I work there for two months then I will have earned 200 roubles. If I use them to pay my debts, I’ll still be 44 roubles in the red. And one has to eat …? and [one needs] manuscript paper? One just spins around like a squirrel on a wheel. It would be a good thing if all my creditors just dropped dead. But there’s very little hope of that. They are a tenacious lot. I’ve come to a slight halt with my composing.52
After his father’s death, the young Dmitri regarded it as a sacred duty to give his mother every support, financial and moral. As it was, Sofiya Vasilyevna’s most persistent worry was the children’s health. Dmitri in particular was a fragile boy whose physique had been undermined by constant cold and hunger. His godmother, Klavdia Lukashevich, gave this account of his pitiful physical condition:
From lack of nutrition – he almost never has any milk, eggs, meat, sugar, and only very rarely butter – our dear young boy is very pale and emaciated. He shows signs of nervous disorder, and, what is more terrible, he has severe anaemia. The hard Petersburg autumn is approaching, and he has no strong footwear, no galoshes and no warm clothes. It is terrible to think what future awaits him. Despite their love and best intentions, neither his parents nor close friends are in a position to give him the bare essentials for his survival and the development of his talent. He gets a school ration, the so-called ‘talented’ ration, but lately it has been so miserable that it cannot possibly save him from hunger … he is issued with two spoons of sugar and half a pound of pork every fortnight. Besides his exceptional musical gifts, I can testify that Mitya Shostakovich, whom I have known since birth, has a timid and noble character and an elevated, pure and childish heart. He loves reading and all that is beautiful, and he is exceptionally modest. In the field that is dear to him, music, he does not miss a single concert of serious music; he follows the music with a score, and always welcomes every good performance with special delight. His brain is working without tire and to excess.53
Illness heaped further burdens on the family. Sofiya Vasilyevna’s family had a history of tuberculosis – two of her siblings had died of it. When Mitya was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the lymphatic system, his mother became extremely anxious. The young Shostakovich underwent an operation in the spring of 1923, and undeterred, immediately afterwards insisted on taking all his Conservatoire exams, his neck swathed in bandages. As Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky recalled, he even helped out some of his comrades, slipping them notes of paper with information. The family sold one of their pianos to raise money for his and his elder sister’s convalescence in the Crimea.
The Shostakovich family seemed to be incessantly in debt, struggling to survive cold and hunger. Nevertheless, in the best Russian liberal intellectual traditions, education always took priority, and there was never any question that the children should cease their studies.
Through the intercession of friends and colleagues, sufficient material support was found for Dmitri in the form of various study scholarships. However, from 1923 onwards the increasing political pressures in educational institutions inevitably influenced the attitudes of the Conservatoire authorities towards Shostakovich. There was talk of dismissal and Shostakovich’s personal stipends were under threat. The composer M. F. Gnessin described how:
the assistant director of the Conservatoire decided to deprive Shostakovich of his stipend, saying, ‘The name of this student means nothing to me.’
‘If this name means nothing to you,’ replied the outraged Glazunov, ‘then what are you doing here with us? This is no place for you – Shostakovich is one of the best hopes for our art.’54
According to Galli-Shohat, in the early spring of 1924 a group of students tried to oust Shostakovich and have his ‘personal’ stipend suspended:
Glazunov, since it was a gift in his own name, prevented this … Mitya did not belong to any party, nor did Sonya [Sofiya Vasilyevna, his mother]; and Sonya had lost her job partly on account of it. It was clear that Mitya’s position in the conservatory during this winter was only tolerated.55
On the other hand, however, certain of his politically motivated fellow students were no doubt envious of the ‘special’ treatment accorded to the young star.
In September of 1924 things went from bad to worse, as Shostakovich wrote to his friend Lev Oborin: be done. They’ve taken it away. We’re left with our time-honoured piano, which, after many years of use, emits a sound like an old pot. Maybe I’ll grow rich all of a sudden and can put two new pianos in my flat. At the moment, such hope of sudden riches is very dim.56
By the way our piano was taken away. Muzpred refuses to continue the free loan of pianos. However much we remonstrated, there was nothing to
Nevertheless, the young Shostakovich possessed a remarkably resilient spirit. However difficult the circumstances, he got the most he could out of life, enjoying the company of his friends and teachers, eagerly absorbing impressions of the concerts and ballets that he attended as frequently as possible. He was a disciplined student, but, more than that, he was keenly aware that his life’s work was music.
Here is BORIS LOSSKY on these difficult times, and particularly on the death of Shostakovich’s father:
Mitya’s parents, and particularly his mother, belonged to the liberal traditions of the Russian intelligentsia. But at the same time the family was of a fairly conservative nature. They observed at least the most common of the Church customs, as was evident at the time of the death of Mitya’s father in February 1922. Dmitri Boleslavovich had caught a cold on a trip to the provinces in quest of food for the family. His cold developed into pneumonia with fatal consequences.57 These trips were made on provision trains which certain categories of workers had the right to use so as to acquire food products against barter of goods in the villages. In reality the trains were only open goods wagons which hardly merited the name of teplushka (heated goods van).
I attended the funeral services for Dmitri Boleslavovich and also the subsequent burial service with my elder brother, Vladimir, and Shura Shalnikov. The latter had to help the grave diggers take the measurements from the dead man. Expense was not spared at the funeral service, which was held at home. The priest Vertogradsky officiated. He was a family friend, the father of one of the girls who attended the Glyasser Courses. The service was accompanied by the singing of two or three nuns from the Novodevichi Convent. Sofiya Vasilyevna demonstrated her hardy spirit and powers of endurance, remaining on her knees for far longer than the requirements of the service. In response to somebody’s verbose expressions of condolence, I remember her saying, ‘Now I feel like a stone.’ I happened to overhear a snatch of her conversation with the priest who advised her to hold another service (this time in a church) for her dead husband prior to the burial. I remember his words to her, ‘Well, you could hold just the one service, but somehow it would be a bit lonesome for his soul.’
These words evidently did not go unheeded, since, the next day, a choir of five or six monks met the funeral procession with singing as it approached the gates of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. Then a full service for the dead was held in one of the baroque side chapels. I remember the children collapsing on to the face and hands of their dead father just before the coffin lid was closed and nailed down. The burial followed at the Lazarevsky Cemetery (later to be renamed ‘The Necropolis of the Eighteenth Century’). At the graveside a speech was given by the wife of the surgeon Ivan Grekov. The Grekovs were family friends, and Dr Grekov had attended Dmitri Boleslavovich in his last illness. Madame Grekov had literary pretensions, and although her intentions were of the best, her speech was somewhat out of place, addressing the gathering in a burst of flowery rhetoric as ‘the thinning ranks of the intelligentsia’.
Lossky describes his last meeting with the Shostakovich family:
My brother and I were invited to a party at their home shortly before our family was expelled from the USSR in November 1922. My brother had on several other occasions attended these lively ‘balls’, as these homely festivities were called. Because of the restricted space in the apartment, the guests were seated in two separate rooms. The adults sat in the dining room, presided over by the prodigious figure of Glazunov with a carafe of vodka placed in front of him. The young people were in the sitting room, and we too were served with the ‘Russian nectar’. With the advent of NEP58 vodka, after a long absence, had reappeared on our tables.
As for such newcomers to the drink as Mitya and myself, one could have compared us to the proverbial siskin, ‘who drank one glass, then another, and lost his head altogether’. Therefore I have a somewhat blurred memory as to how Mitya persuaded the foregathered that he was absolutely sober. This didn’t thwart our high spirits, and we reached an agreement to enter into a sort of stylized ‘united brotherhood’. We had to pass each other three times in various outlandish poses, in imitation of Egyptian and Assyrian reliefs, then we grasped each other and soon tumbled on to the floor, rolling over and over on the carpet until we landed under the piano. I then noticed that Mitya’s face was as white as a sheet, without a fleck of colour on it; it was soon apparent that he had fainted. The anxious Sofiya Vasilyevna came to the rescue, and in answer to my no doubt incoherent explanations and reassurances that everything was all right, she fixed me with a glare that was far from her customary welcoming expression. After this, my brother and I, heeding the voice of reason, forsook the gathering. That was the last friendly contact I had with Mitya Shostakovich.59
NADEJDA GALLI-SHOHAT describes perhaps the same occasion – Mitya’s sixteenth birthday party, which Glazunov attended:
Glazunov’s weakness for alcohol was well known to everyone, and although there was no wine to be had, Sonya managed to find some vodka for him. Mitya proudly played host and, while keeping his guest’s glass filled, he added to his own. Glazunov first proposed a toast to Mitya, and one of the guests immediately followed this with one to the composer of Scheherazade – raising her glass and indicating Glazunov. The fact that Scheherazade was written by Rimsky-Korsakov did not bother Glazunov in the least, for the toast merely meant to him a chance to have his glass refilled.
Mitya, partly from embarrassment at this mistake and partly from an exaggerated courtesy to Glazunov, was all this time keeping up with his famous guest glass for glass. It soon became evident that the host was not feeling very well; he was rather green in the face and his mother took him hastily into the music room.
There he lay throughout the rest of the party with cold compresses on his head. He had for the first time ‘looked upon the wine when it was red’.60
Bogdanov-Berezovsky admired the Shostakovich household’s ability to make the most of things:
After the untimely death of her husband, this courageous woman, Sofiya Vasilyevna, had to take a job, yet she still managed to maintain an exemplary household and take endless pains to secure her children’s education. Her firm guiding influence played an important part in Mitya’s upbringing.
Mitya’s sisters were of sharply contrasted character. Mariya, the elder, a pianist and student in Professor Alexandra Rozanova’s class at the Conservatoire, was very vivacious, but gentle and amenable. The younger sister, Zoya, was then an angular schoolgirl with a mischievous character; she was somewhat of an eccentric. I remember how, despite the protests of the family, she insisted on hanging all the pictures in her small room to the left of the entrance hall at strange angles.
The hospitable and cheerful atmosphere in the Shostakovich household attracted a wide circle of friends. The parents’ friends, such as the Grekovs, the Kustodievs, Klavdia Lukashevich, mixed with those of the children. This circle was always on the increase. Originally it consisted mainly of the Conservatoire contemporaries of the elder children, but soon people were irresistibly drawn to this house, which became a magnet for the city’s intelligentsia. As the young composer rapidly started to acquire fame, he could count among his new friends such luminaries as Ivan Sollertinsky, Nikolai Malko, Alexander Gauk, Leonid Nikolayev, Leo Arnshtam, Grigori Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg, Sergei Yutkevich, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Evgeni Zamyatin, Nikolai Radlov, Anatoly Marienhoff and Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky.
However, despite the family’s intense social life and the constant stream of visitors, a regime of work was strictly and systematically observed, first and foremost by Dmitri Dmitriyevich, who was always totally absorbed in some creative idea, if not several at once. He was meticulous in observing a sequence and order of work, and assiduously conscientious in its execution. To be the ‘architect’ of one’s life, to plan and construct on an enormous scale, and to carry out one’s aims systematically – all this was striking in one so young. Shostakovich was not only determined to succeed, but possessed the most remarkable powers of endurance. This attribute, already evident in his youth, later helped him to live through many bitter experiences.61
Little survives of the young Shostakovich’s pre-Conservatoire compositions. His Opus 1, the Scherzo in F sharp minor, his first orchestral piece, was written in the autumn of 1919 and dedicated to Maximilian Steinberg, his composition teacher. Much of what he composed next was for his own instrument, the piano: Eight Preludes Op. 2, Five Preludes, the Suite for Two Pianos Op. 6, and notably his Three Fantastic Dances Op. 5. While the latter was his most original piece to date, the four-movement Suite for Two Pianos, written in March 1922, had acquired greater depth, no doubt also serving as an outlet for the grief felt at his father’s recent death. In 1923 he wrote three works which can be regarded as preparation for his single most important student work, the First Symphony: the one-movement Piano Trio (or Poème), Three Cello Pieces and his second orchestral Scherzo, Op. 7. The Trio at least was heartily approved of by Steinberg.
Steinberg happened to be Rimsky-Korsakov’s son-in-law; not surprisingly he indoctrinated his students in the canons of the Korsakov School, giving them a thorough but arid training. Students were first subjected to a rigid course on Form and Analysis before being allowed to move on to a slightly less inflexible two-year ‘academic’ course of ‘free composition’.
Although Glazunov was a follower of Rimsky-Korsakov, he recognized the need to introduce changes in the Conservatoire curriculum. In 1923 he invited the composer Vladimir Shcherbachov on to the staff. Under his radical influence, and that of the composer Boris Asafiev, the composition and theoretical courses were reformed.
The composer and musicologist YURI TYULIN taught at the Petrograd/ Leningrad Conservatoire during Shostakovich’s student years. He was a follower of Shcherbachov, and hence a ‘reformer’:
When after a long absence I returned to Petrograd in the spring of 1921, the composer Vladimir Shcherbachov told me of a small circle of composers which met every Monday to make music together.62 He spoke with great warmth about the younger members of the circle, who formed its nucleus, and in particular about the youngest and most talented of them all, Mitya Shostakovich. In those years there was no course of practical composition at the Conservatoire, and the formative part of young people’s musical education derived from friendly discussion and debate. The circle had a small membership, mostly consisting of young people. Apart from Shcherbachov, its frequenters included his pupils Khristofor Kushnarov and Pyotr Ryazanov, the composers Vladimir Deshevov, Boris Asafiev, and the conductor Nikolai Malko. Once or twice we were visited by a small group of friendly Muscovites, amongst whom I clearly remember Vissarion Shebalin and Lev Oborin. When I joined in 1921, the circle had already been in existence for three or four years, and was so well known that Rachmaninov himself once sent some scores as presents. There was no defined programme or study schedule. Each of us talked uninhibitedly of his current work, and we all were delighted to share in each other’s creative projects. Apart from new composition, which in fact wasn’t shown that often, we also enjoyed making music and listening to familiar repertoire. We were much interested in contemporary foreign music, and we got to know scores by Stravinsky, Hindemith, Křenek, Schoenberg and the composers of Les Six. Our reactions to it differed from whole-hearted acceptance to censure.
The participation of Shcherbachov, one of the most fascinating and erudite musicians that I have ever encountered, much enhanced these discussions. But our attention was focused on the circle’s youngest member, the fourteen-year-old Mitya Shostakovich. We watched him grow as a composer and as a pianist before our very eyes.
Glazunov followed his extraordinary progress with close attention, which is not to say that he necessarily understood or approved of Mitya Shostakovich’s innovations. After all, he was a representative of a completely different musical culture, and new fashions were alien to him. One has only to remember his outraged reactions earlier in the century to the work of Stravinsky and Prokofiev. All the more remarkable that Glazunov, who had no patience with Prokofiev, and who did not understand Shostakovich’s early style, supported his talent during his Conservatoire years. Furthermore, he retained faith in Shostakovich the artist till the end of his days, and in addition nurtured a special respect for his person. And indeed, Mitya Shostakovich was a youth quite unlike any other.
Not only did he possess an incredible memory and perfect ear, but he was a superb sight-reader. But it was his powerful intellect that provided the basis for the growth of his talent. He possessed amazing powers of musical observation and, while he remembered everything he heard, he knew how to use his memory selectively. Apart from his official academic studies, he avidly absorbed all the music he came across in concerts or through reading scores. This is what enabled him to master the art of orchestration so early, of which his First Symphony was living proof.
As befitting his youth, Mitya Shostakovich had a lively spirit. But his serious attitude to his work was unique and extraordinary. He was exacting in his professionalism and discipline, and possessed an unusual capacity for hard work. His ability to concentrate was an example to us all, and had a beneficial influence on his elder as well as his younger colleagues. Despite the pressure of combining his Conservatoire studies with his general education, he always managed to do all that was required of him. In this he showed a maturity far beyond his years.
One must remember that at that time the Conservatoire teaching of compositional technique was still very backward. Only in 1925 were radical reforms introduced. Harmony was studied according to rigid and restrictive rules, and strict-style Counterpoint was taught on the basis of the outmoded methods of Fuchsian combinations. The second-year free-style composition course was as inhibiting as the harmony course. One could not talk of anything approaching a modern technique.
During this time of crisis, when the split between the teaching of a scholastic dogma and real compositional practice was at its most extreme, Mitya Shostakovich felt as free as a fish in water. He absorbed only what was useful to him, both within his study course and outside it. I maintain that it was through his stubborn insistence that he gained a high degree of professional mastery without compromising his artistic principles. By following his own path he achieved creative freedom.63
Some years later Shostakovich wrote that the Conservatoire composition course had been
an unavoidable evil, which in part I submitted to passively. […] Nevertheless my attitude to the scholastic canons was not always passive. For instance in 1922 I wrote a Suite for Two Pianos. Professor Steinberg had a rather negative opinion of the piece and ordered me to correct it. I did not do so. Then he insisted on my making certain changes, which I did according to his instructions. I performed it in this version at a student concert at the LGK [Leningrad Conservatoire]. But after the concert I destroyed this revised score and fixed the work in its original version.64
In view of his extreme youth, it was natural that the student Shostakovich should seek guides and mentors amongst his Conservatoire teachers. Both his composition teacher, Maximilian Steinberg, and piano teacher, Leonid Nikolayev, exhibited a touching paternal interest in their protégé, taking trouble on his behalf that went far beyond a teacher’s usual obligations. The young composer also attended counterpoint classes with Nikolai Sokolov,65 violin lessons with Victor Walter and conducting classes with Nikolai Malko.
Shostakovich nurtured a particular respect for his piano teacher Leonid Nikolayev, a versatile musician and also a prolific composer. Nikolayev had attended the Moscow Conservatoire as a piano student of Safanov, while simultaneously studying composition under Ippolitov-Ivanov and Taneyev and taking a Law Degree at the University. Bogdanov-Berezovsky described him as ‘a musician and performer with a composer’s conception and wide intellectual and cultural horizons. He educated his students not just as pianists but first and foremost as thinking musicians.’66 Nikolayev’s school embraced wide stylistic variety; he had that rare gift of knowing how to encourage every pianist to develop his own individuality. When Shostakovich considered leaving Leningrad for Moscow, it was Nikolayev rather than Steinberg whom he did not wish to abandon. Thus he wrote to Oborin: ‘You say that in Moscow I will work with real musicians – Myaskovsky and Igumnov.67 Of course Myaskovsky is 100,000 times better than ‘Oatsovich’,68 but I don’t agree with you about Igumnov. Nikolayev is a much finer musician than Igumnov.’69
A remarkable event at the Conservatoire in 1921 was the graduation of two star Nikolayev pupils, Mariya Yudina and Vladimir Sofrinitsky. They both presented the Liszt Sonata at their diploma concert, and Shostakovich remembered this as one of the strongest impressions of his student years. Shostakovich also profited from his contacts with Yudina:
[Yudina and I] would sometimes play four-hand music together. The thing was our Professor was very often late. He would schedule the class, say, for eleven o’clock, and then only arrive at three, or even four. Most of the students dispersed – times were hard, and people had enough cares and worries. But Mariya Yudina and I were the most persistent of his pupils; we would get some music out of the library and sight-read it while waiting for Nikolayev’s arrival…. I would show her my works and she was very encouraging to me! And she in turn acquainted me with works by Hindemith, Bartók and Křenek.
Yudina advised me to play the ‘Hammerklavier’. ‘Why do you keep playing the Moonlight and Appassionata?’ she once reproached me. ‘Why don’t you tackle the Hammerklavier?’ Nikolayev gave his approval and before taking it to him I played it several times to her.70
In the spring of 1922 Shostakovich performed the Hammerklavier at a class concert, and impressed his listeners by the maturity of his interpretation, putting his technique at the service of the music, a remarkable achievement for a sixteen-year-old. LYDIA ZHUKOVA wrote about his performance [of the Hammerklavier], although she mistakenly attributed it to his diploma examination. Quite possibly she was referring to the above-mentioned concert:
Two weeks beforehand he still didn’t know what he would play. Eventually he chose Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata. He said that it was inconceivably difficult, and that some of the ninths and tenths were unperformable. The evening before the exam I dropped by around nine o’clock at his house on Marat Street. He played for me. He was a wonderful pianist, with strong hands and his own precise and somewhat dry manner of playing. But I felt quite sick at heart. This was only a sketchy performance. How could he be ready in time? But at the exam next day he played with authority and maturity, displaying a symphonic grasp of the whole grandiose work. Already then he thought in massive symphonic boulder-like sections…. Then with his sister, Marusya, he played his Suite for Two Pianos, one of his earliest works, which was still boyish, prickly and rumpled in style.71
Shostakovich graduated as pianist in late June 1923. His recital programme consisted of Bach’s F sharp minor Prelude and Fugue from Book 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier, Beethoven’s Sonata no. 21 (the Waldstein), Mozart’s C major Variations, Chopin’s Third Ballade, and Liszt’s ‘Venice and Naples’ from the Années de Pélerinages. On the grounds of ill health he would have been entitled to put off the exam till the following year, but he chose to play, his neck swathed in bandages in the wake of his operation for the removal of lymphatic glands.
The conductor GAVRIIL YUDIN was born in Vitebsk. At the instigation of his cousin, the remarkable pianist Mariya Yudina, he came to study composition and conducting at the Leningrad Conservatoire in 1921:
Already at that time the recognized leader of the younger generation of composers was Shostakovich. I remember for instance the exams in aural harmony, as it was then called. We all clustered around the door of Glazunov’s study when Shostakovich went in to take the exam. Most of us could cope with the task of playing a modulation into some distant key at a more or less sedate moderato speed. But then Shostakovich’s turn came. After a short pause while he was being told what to play, the silence from behind the closed doors was suddenly broken by a cascade of chords played at prestissimo speed. This tempo was so fantastic that we were left suspended in disbelief and awe. Shostakovich then ran out of Glazunov’s study and here started the real fireworks. After the decorous atmosphere of the examination room, he relaxed and displayed his ferocious wit and lively spirit. We witnessed all kind of pranks, jokes and improvised parodies which tumbled out of him in rich abundance.
I often played four-hand piano music with Shostakovich. We installed ourselves in classroom no. 30, the ‘Rimsky-Korsakov’, now used by Steinberg, where there was an excellent instrument. There was also another covered piano which nobody could touch – it was the piano Rimsky-Korsakov himself had played during lessons. Sometimes Steinberg himself appeared unexpectedly and grumbled in dissatisfied tones that we would destroy the poor piano if we continued to pound on it so long and so energetically. At that Mitya would pronounce the hallowed words, ‘Well, so that’s it then, let’s be off to lead a life of luxury! We’ll down a couple of beers and treat ourselves to a portion of sausage each.’72
Shostakovich soon started to resent the limitations of the Leningrad Conservatoire’s formal teaching methods. He found Steinberg’s dogmatic approach sterile and inhibiting, although later in life he was to credit Steinberg for professional thoroughness as a teacher. At the same time he kept his distance from Shcherbachov and the ‘reformers’, although he developed an important, if somewhat uneasy relationship with Boris Asafiev.
In the spring of 1924, the Conservatoire Council refused to take Shostakovich on the post-graduate piano course because of ‘his youth and immaturity’. Nikolayev, in protest against Shostakovich’s suspension, continued to give his pupil private piano lessons without charging a fee. Shostakovich’s mother was mortified at once more being forced to accept charity: ‘And how should I feel now that I have landed a pupil on you and am in no position to pay you a single penny … Mityusha and I live in the hope that one day we may be able to repay our immense debt to you.’73
It was at this point that Shostakovich seriously considered a transfer to the Moscow Conservatoire. In Moscow there were many musicians sympathetic to him, notably a group of young composers calling themselves ‘The Six’, Lev Oborin, Vissarion Shebalin, Mikhail Starokadomsky, Yuri Nikolsky, Mikhail Cherimukhin and Mikhail Kvadri, most of whom he had met in September 1923 on his way home from the Crimea. Oborin and Kvadri were particularly insistent that Shostakovich should transfer his studies to Moscow.
In the spring of 1924 Shostakovich went to Moscow, and on 3 April he filed his application to enter the Conservatoire there. The following day he wrote to his mother assuring her that with Kvadri’s help he had fulfilled all the formalities and had also succeeeded in fixing the material side of things, as he had promised her before his departure. On 8 April he was able to report to her:
Yesterday a sort of exam was arranged at the Conservatoire by Professors Myaskovsky, Vasilenko, Konyus and the assistant director Bryusov. I played my cello pieces and my Piano Trio. I played the cello pieces myself, and the Trio with the violinist Vlasov and the cellist Klevensky. They played disgustingly … but the result was completely unexpected. I would never have imagined it. They decided to regard the Trio as my sonata-form piece, and immediately I was accepted on the free composition course … Konyus, an official old chappie, asked Myaskovsky, ‘Will you take him in your class?’ Myaskovsky replied, ‘Without question.’ Konyus: ‘You accept him in the class of Form?’ (That is what I have been studying this year with Oatsovich.) Myaskovsky: ‘Why Form, when he already is a complete master of form? I’ll take him immediately on the free composition course. What he has just played can be considered his test piece for sonata form.’ … I listened to this dialogue and was bursting with joy. Mishka [Kvadri] was in transports of delight. In Leningrad they would never have accepted the Trio as my sonata-form test piece. What stupid formalists.74
But reluctantly Shostakovich had to abandon the idea of Moscow, principally because of his mother’s (no doubt justified) worry over his poor health.
Back in Leningrad, Shostakovich got down to work at his graduation piece, his Symphony. Although conceived in 1923, he wrote most of it between December 1924 and February 1925, with intermittent interruptions while he earned money working in the cinema.
By the spring of 1925, Shostakovich was again pressing to leave ‘Peter’ and move to Moscow. By now he had met the brilliant music theorist and composer, Boleslav Yavorsky, and already in February 1925 he told his friend Tatyana Glivenko that if he moved to Moscow he would do so on account of Yavorsky. He wrote to Oborin: ‘What attracts me to Moscow is Yavorsky, and not the Moscow State Conservatoire with its distinguished composers [Alexander] Gedike and Myaskovsky. After all they’re old and I’ll not get anything new out of them … In fact since I met Yavorsky my whole musical perception has changed.’75
In the meantime, Shostakovich had met a powerful patron, MARSHAL MIKHAIL TUKHACHEVSKY, who promised to help with any material problems involved in the move:
In Moscow there lives a very famous person. He occupies a high position, has his own car, but like so many famous people he has a weakness. He adores music and himself plays the violin a little. Kvadri introduced me to this person, whose name is Tukhachevsky. I played for him and he asked if I wanted to come to Moscow. I answered, ‘I want, but …’ ‘Well, what?’ ‘How can I arrange things here?’ ‘It’s enough for you only to want it, and it won’t be difficult to arrange for such a person as you.’76
Again it was Sofiya Vasilyevna that held Dmitri back. He wrote to Yavorsky that the matter was not merely:
a question of material support; my mother says she will on no account allow me to go to Moscow, if she can’t be certain that I will be looked after and provided for. I understand her. It will be hard for her to think that in Moscow I will not drink milk and eat porridge regularly, and do all that is essential to conquer the tuberculosis bacillus that sits in me.77
Indeed Shostakovich was divided between the desire to acquire his freedom and leave home, and a sense of duty towards his family, especially his widowed mother, however much he resented her control.
So it was that Shostakovich graduated from the Leningrad and not the Moscow Conservatoire. On 21 April 1926 he was unanimously accepted on the Post-graduate Composition Course. Steinberg wrote in his Dean’s Report:
Shostakovich had commended himself for his remarkable conscientiousness and effort in his academic work. At the same time Shostakovich is undoubtedly the most talented of the young composers of Leningrad …
Now a fully fledged professional, Shostakovich was quick to show his independence as a composer, although formally he remained under the wing of the Conservatoire until 1929.
1 This date is according to the old-style calendar. The new-style date is 25 September.
2 Dmitri Shostakovich was baptised in the Orthodox religion on 26 September (or 10 October new-style calendar) by Father Vissarion Nekrasov at the church of Saint Nicholas the Miraculous. This small chapel was located two blocks away from the Shostakoviches’ family apartment, inside the building no. 1, Pervaya Rota Izmailovskogo Polka (The First Company of the Izmailov Regiment Street), today known as no. 1 Krasnoarmieskaya Ulitsa (Red Army Street), which at the time housed a charitable asylum for the care and education of poor children. In Soviet times the building was modified considerably, and today it houses the Baltic State Technical Military University, and no trace of the chapel remains. The Church register records that Dmitri’s godparents were the ‘widow of State Counsellor Klavdiya Lukashevich’ and ‘the mining engineer Pyotr Polevoy’. It may be that the baptism actually did take place at the Shostakovich home by special arrangement (as the composer’s aunt writes), given that it is probable that Dmitri Boleslavovich was on friendly terms with Father Vissarion, a priest well known for his liberal views. Source: G. Kopytova, ‘About D. Shostakovich’s Birth and Baptism’ in Dmitri Shostakovich: Research and Material, ed. Yakubov and Kovnatskaya (DSCH, Moscow, 2005), pp. 8, 9.
3 The composer’s elder sister Mariya remembered the birth of her brother at the family home on Podolskaya Street, no. 2, apartment 2: ‘The maid came rushing into the sitting room shouting “Dmitri Dmitriyevich has just been born” … Mother was superstitious and thought it bad to have two identical names in the family … She wanted to name him Yaroslav. But Dmitri is a favourite name in our family.’ From interview with M. D. Shostakovich in Khentova, In Shostakovich’s World (Kompozitor, Moscow, 1996), p. 49.
4 Victor Seroff in collaboration with Nadejda Galli-Shohat, Dmitri Shostakovich: The Life and Background of a Soviet Composer, pp. 37–8.
5 Land and Will, a radical group active in the early 1860s that was influenced by the ideas of Nikolai Chernyshevsky. It maintained close links with the Polish revolutionary movement. After the arrest of its most active members in the autumn of 1863, the organization ceased to exist, although its project to release the revolutionary Dombrovsky was carried out by a splinter group, of which Boleslav Shostakovich was a member.
6 On 12 February 1903.
7 The Lukashevich family were close neighbours, living on Nikolaevskaya, no. 16.
8 I have not attempted to translate the replies (in Siberian dialect!).
9 From interview with D. A. Popov in Khentova, In Shostakovich’s World (Kompozitor, Moscow, 1996), pp. 55–9.
10 Interview with M. D. Shostakovich in Khentova, In Shostakovich’s World (Kompozitor, Moscow, 1996), p. 50.
11 Lydia Zhukova, Epilogues: First Book, p. 30.
12 Zoya’s maternal grandfather died in 1911, predeceased by his wife in 1905. Her paternal grandmother was survived by her paternal grandfather, who died in 1919. However, as they lived in distant Siberia, it is unlikely that they met their grandchildren.
13 The village of Irinovka is situated to the north-east of St Petersburg, not far from Lake Lagoda. The Rennenkampf Estate made money from peat extraction.
14 ‘Chernosotintsy’ were the ‘Black Hundreds’, the name of a reactionary, anti-Semitic group.
15 Sofiya Vasilyevna maintained her courageous humanity to the end. After her death in 1954 Lev Lebedinsky wrote a letter of condolence to Shostakovich in which he recalled an incident when she had taken pity on a ZEK (a prisoner from the camps, or ‘victim of repression’) whom she had caught in the act of stealing. She invited him up to her flat, feeding him lunch and giving him some money. Shostakovich had reacted by saying, ‘That was risky, he could have stolen your fur coat, you know.’ Sofiya Vasilyevna retorted, ‘And he would have been right to do so …’
16 Lapta is a game similar to rounders or softball.
17 In fact Bogdanov-Berezovsky was only three years older than DDS.
18 The medal in question was awarded during the graduation exams. Both DDS and his sister Mariya graduated as pianists from the Conservatoire in spring 1924.
19 In her interview Zoya actually said, ‘was abroad in Hungary’, but she was mistaken.
20 Actually, some of the correspondence has survived, and many of the early letters of DDS to his mother are in private family archives. A few have been published in Soviet journals.
21 Recorded interview with EW.
22 D. D. Shostakovich, ‘Autobiography’, p. 24.
23 I. A. Bobykina, Dmitri Shostakovich in Letters and Documents (Glinka State Central Museum of Musical Culture, Moscow, 2000), p. 476.
24 His studies with Bruni took place during the spring and summer of 1919. Simultaneously Shostakovich took lessons of composition and theory with Professor A. Petrov in preparation for his Conservatoire Entrance exams.
25 Seroff in collaboration with Galli-Shohat, Shostakovich, p. 59.
26 This date should be given as 1915.
27 Seroff in collaboration with Galli-Shohat, Shostakovich, pp. 64–5.
28 D. D. Shostakovich, ‘Autobiography’, I. A. Bobykina, Dmitri Shostakovich in Letters and Documents (Glinka Museum, Moscow, 2000).
29 D. D. Shostakovich, ‘Description of Life’, written in June 1926 for his curriculum vitae, in I. A. Bobykina, Dmitri Shostakovich in Letters and Documents (Glinka Museum, Moscow, 2000).
30 There remains some confusion as to the new names of private schools following the enforced nationalization of all educational institutions after 1917. The institutions were usually given a number, and the names and numbers of different sources do not coincide with one another.
31 Boris Lossky believed that this change of teacher took place in the autumn of 1918, given that the Glyasser class photo shown on plate 4 of the illustrations in this book can be dated to April 1918, implying that Mitya was still a student of Glyasser’s then.
32 Sofia Moshevich, Dmitri Shostakovich, Pianist (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), pp. 11–12.
33 Interview from Khentova, In Shostakovich’s World (Moscow, 1996), p. 53
34 I. A. Bobykina, Dmitri Shostakovich in Letters and Documents (Glinka Museum, Moscow, 2000), p. 469.
35 Given from the accounts of his sister Zoya and Boris Lossky that Dmitri was considered weak in maths and found himself in conflict with his maths teacher at the school, this encouragement was much to Umova’s credit.
36 Interview with Ekaterina Alexeevna Umova in Khentova, In Shostakovich’s World (Moscow, 1996), p. 65.
37 Boris Lossky, ‘New Facts about Shostakovich’, p. 9.
38 Irina Kustodieva, ‘Dear Memories’, in V. A. Kapralov (ed.), Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev, pp. 324–5.
39 N. L. Komarovskaya, ‘My Meetings with B. M. Kustodiev’, in ibid., p. 388.
40 These two pieces are usually dated to spring 1917, although some sources state that ‘Hymn to Liberty’ was composed a year or even two years earlier.
41 Seroff in collaboration with Galli-Shohat, Shostakovich, pp. 72–3.
42 Private conversation with EW, Moscow, March 1989.
43 It is often stated that the composer’s son was named in honour of this uncle. Maxim Shostakovich, in a private interview with EW (Turin, December 1991), denied that this was so.
44 Or 16 April according to the new-style calendar. This date fell during the period of the Easter holidays, so it is unlikely that schools would have been open.
45 Lossky, ‘New Facts’, p. 9.
46 Zhukova, Epilogues, p. 24.
47 Lydia Zhukova recalled ‘once running home after a concert. It was frosty and a biting wind blew from the Neva – we shared one glove between four hands, and we took turns to stuff our numbed fingers into it, as we sprinted along, laughing’ (ibid., p. 30).
48 Leo Arnshtam, ‘Immortality’, in G. Shneerson (ed.), D. D. Shostakovich: Articles and Materials, pp. 105–9.
49 Dated 16 August 1921. This was the first of several appeals that Glazunov addressed to Lunacharsky.
50 State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet, previously known as the Marinsky Theatre.
51 Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky, ‘Adolescence and Youth’, in G. M. Shneerson (ed.), D. D. Shostakovich: Articles and Materials, pp. 133–6.
52 G. M. Kozlova (ed.), Letters to Lev Oborin, p. 249.
53 Letter to Anatoly Lunacharsky, 16 August 1921 (N. S. Zelov, ‘Grant Recipients of the Commissariat of Enlightenment’, pp. 101–2).
54 Mikhail Gnessin, My Thoughts and Reminiscences about Rimsky-Korsakov, p. 250.
55 Seroff in collaboration with Galli-Shohat, Shostakovich, p. 121.
56 Letter dated 27 September 1924 (G.M. Kozlova [ed.], Letters to Lev Oborin, p. 85).
57 According to Galli-Shohat’s account in Seroff’s book, D. B. Shostakovich died of a heart ailment, and not of pneumonia (Seroff with Galli-Shohat, Shostakovich, p. 85).
58 The acronym for the New Economic Policy.
59 Compiled from Boris Lossky’s ‘New Facts’ (p. 9), and from his unpublished ‘Reactions of a Schoolmate of Mitya Shostakovich to Sofiya Khentova’s “Shostakovich’s Young Years”’.
60 Seroff in collaboration with Galli-Shohat, Shostakovich, pp. 93–4.36
61 Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky, ‘Adolescence and Youth’, in G. M. Shneerson (ed.), D. D. Shostakovich: Articles and Materials, pp. 133–6.
62 This circle met at the apartment of Anna Fogt; hence it is usually referred to as ‘the Fogt Circle’. Shostakovich also attended another circle made up of Conservatoire students.
63 Yuri Tyulin’s article ‘The Youthful Years of D. D. Shostakovich’ from Dmitri Shostakovich (Moscow, 1967), compiled by L. Danilevich, pp. 73–8.
64 D. Shostakovich, from ‘A Questionnaire on the Psychological Aspect of the Creative Process’ in Bobykina, Dmitri Shostakovich in Letters and Documents (Glinka State Central Museum of Musical Culture, Moscow, 2000), p. 473.
65 Sokolov died in 1922 and DDS dedicated his Theme and Variations Op. 3 for orchestra to his memory.
66 V. M. Bogdanov-Berezovsky, The Roads of Art, p. 50.
67 The pianist, Konstantin Igumnov (1873–1948).
68 A nickname for M. O. Steinberg, a play of words on his patronymic.
69 Letter dated 17 March 1924. (Kozlova, Letters to Lev Oborin, p. 241).
70 A. Kuznetsov (ed.), D. D. Shostakovich, from ‘Reminiscences of Friends and Relatives’, M. V. Yudina: Articles, Reminiscences and Materials, pp. 39–40.
71 Lydia Zhukova, Epilogues: First Book, p. 27.
72 Gavriil Yudin, ‘Beyond the Frontiers of Past Years’, Muzykalnoeye Nasledie (Moscow, 1966), Issue ii, p. 270.
73 Letter dated 12 March 1924 (from I. Schwarz, L. V. Nikolayev: Articles and Reminiscences of His Contemporaries) (L. Sov. Komp., 1972), p. 256.
74 D. D. Shostakovich, ‘Letters to Mother’, pp. 169–70.
75 Letter dated 17 April 1925 (Kozlova, Letters to Lev Oborin, p. 247).
76 Letter to Boleslav Yavorsky, 16 April 1925 (D. D. Shostakovich, Letters to Boleslav Yavorsky).
77 Letter dated 16 April 1925 (ibid.).