Dmitri Shostakovich was born in Russia in 1906. He grew up in a musical family, and his own musical gifts manifested themselves in early childhood, nourished by piano lessons from his mother. He began composing in 1915, notably piano pieces, and in the autumn of 1919, entered the prestigious Petrograd Conservatory, where the influence of Rimsky-Korsakov was still strong in the person of the Conservatory’s director, Alexander Glazunov. There, Shostakovich studied piano, harmony, fugue, counterpoint, music history, orchestration, and composition with professors such as Maximilian Steinberg, Alexandra Rozanova, Nikolay Sokolov, and Leonid Nikolayev.

In 1923, Shostakovich became a piano accompanist for silent films, a job that created ties with dance, theatre, and cinema in the feverish cultural scene that characterized Moscow and Leningrad in the late 1920s. In 1925, the year he completed his first symphony (which, embraced by many Western conductors in 1926, brought him international renown), he met Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who would become his patron and who would introduce him to many key people in his career as a composer. In 1927, he received an honorable mention at the first International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw (this disappointment put a definitive end to his aspirations for a career as a pianist), and met Sergei Prokofiev, the director Vsevolod Meyerhold (who hired him in his Moscow theater in 1928), and Alban Berg at a performance of Wozzeck in Leningrad, which would have tremendous impact on him.

Shostakovich by this time had achieved a level of notoriety that drew the attention of the Soviet government, and in 1927, he received a number of commissions from the Communist Party to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. This forced Shostakovich into two seemingly opposing roles: first, that of official composer for the state, required to toe the Party line, and that of an avant-garde composer, which was what he aspired to be. The tension between these two roles caused him constant anguish and injected a kind of schizophrenia into his composing. By the 1930s, his position with regard to Stalin, who had held power with an iron fist since 1928, was faltering. He joined the Union of Soviet Composers in 1932, and in 1934 he was elected a deputy of the October District in Leningrad, but on 28 January 1936 Pravda published an article on his opera Lady Macbeth of the District of Mzensk with the headline “Muddle Instead of Music,” accusing the work of being “anti-realist,” against the people, vulgar, and atonal – despite the fact that it had had successful premieres in Leningrad and Moscow in January 1934 and then in 1935 in New York and Stockholm, notably. Shostakovich’s two children, Galina and Maxim, were born against this difficult backdrop of Stalinist terror, in 1935 and 1938, respectively. Shostakovich accepted a post teaching at the Leningrad Conservatory in 1937, and then, after moving to Moscow, began teaching at its conservatory in 1943.

In 1941, the German-Soviet pact of non-aggression came to an end when the German Army attacked the Soviet Union without warning and began advancing on Leningrad. Shostakovich attempted to join the army and ended up as a firefighter in the Home Guard, writing musical arrangements to be played on the front. On 1 October 1941, he and his family were evacuated from Leningrad (after he appeared on the cover of Time magazine wearing a firefighter’s helmet). Away from Leningrad, he completed his Seventh Symphony, which was performed in the besieged city on 9 August 1942 and was quickly adopted as a patriotic hymn to the resistance of the Soviet people and the USSR’s victory over the Nazi Army.

In February 1948, a violent anti-formalist campaign led by Tikhon Khrennikov, whom Andrei Zhdanov had appointed head of the Union of Soviet Composers, led to the blacklisting of several of Shostakovich’s pieces, forcing him to abandon his teaching positions in August 1948. In March 1949, he was appointed a member of the Soviet Delegation to the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace in New York, where he returned in 1959 and 1973. In the 1950s and 1960s, Shostakovich held official posts and participated in electoral politics, but also traveled abroad extensively, once he had been rehabilitated by Nikita Khrushchev. His travel included a trip to Leipzig in 1950 for the 200th anniversary of Bach’s death, and to Paris in 1958, to preside over the first International Tchaikovsky Competition. While in Paris he recorded two piano concertos and other short works for piano, and he experienced the first symptoms of what would later be diagnosed as Motor Neurone Disease. In 1960, during a trip to London, he became friends with Benjamin Britten; in 1962, the city of Edinburgh dedicated a music festival to him.

By this time his health, which had always been frail, began declining rapidly. In 1966, he was named a Hero of Socialist Labor and suffered from a heart attack, after which he was hospitalized for two months. A second heart attack in September 1971 left him partially paralyzed. He was hospitalized again in December 1972 for lung cancer treatment, and died of the illness in August 1975.