Shostakovich Irina Antonovna year of birth. British linguistics

Antonov has fire, but there is no law
So that the fire always belongs to Anton...
Kozma Prutkov

May your years last!
Many years! Many years! Many years!
With love and kisses,

Joseph Raiskin,
together with the editors
"St. Petersburg
musical messenger"
Saint Petersburg
November 30, 2014

“We met Dmitry Dmitrievich long before we began to live together... Our acquaintance was connected with my work as a literary editor of the libretto of the operetta “Moscow - Cheryomushki.” The librettists made some amendments that had to be agreed upon with the author of the music. And so, one spring day, I went to Dmitry Dmitrievich with a heavy folder. He looked at everything very quickly and said that everything was fine...
And then I saw Dmitry Dmitrievich at the publishing house, at concerts. I remember this episode - I wanted to listen to Kara-Karaev’s miniatures for the film “Don Quixote”, which were performed at the plenum of the Union of Composers... And it so happened that Dmitry Dmitrievich took me to this concert, sat with me during the concert - for some reason more Not a single person sat in this row, we sat alone the entire concert - and after the concert we were escorted home and taken by taxi. This was the first step, expressing either good manners or sympathy... Then we didn’t see each other for a long time, and there was no talk of anything like that... After some time, Dmitry Dmitrievich broke his leg, and they treated it badly for him. They said that they broke his leg again and rebuilt it without anesthesia, and when I heard this, I just felt bad. I wrote him a note and passed it through the pass office at the hospital. Dmitry Dmitrievich called me the next day and said that he had already come to his senses.
Then I don’t even remember how it all happened. But, in any case, Dmitry Dmitrievich was a man of the old upbringing. He proposed to me, then introduced me to his friends, introduced me, and we made post-wedding visits. Well, that’s how we began to live and live” (from Irina Antonovna’s interview with Oksana Dvornichenko, author of the book “Dmitry Shostakovich. Journey”).
Illnesses plagued Shostakovich. Here are the lines from his letter to one of his closest friends, I. D. Glikman: “Dear Isaac Davydovich! Thank you for your letter. Now I'm in the hospital. Once again they are trying to heal my hand. Being in the hospital doesn't make me happy. Especially during the honeymoon. My wife's name is Irina Antonovna. I've known her for more than two years. She has only one negative quality: she is 27 years old. In all other respects she is very good. She is smart, funny, simple and pretty. She visits me every day and it makes me happy... I think that we will live well with her” (letter dated June 24, 1962).
A week later, Shostakovich continues: “Irina is very embarrassed when meeting my friends. She is very young and modest... She is short-sighted, she cannot pronounce “R” and “L”. Her father is Polish, her mother is Jewish. They are not alive. My father suffered from the cult of personality and the violation of revolutionary legality. Mother died... She was originally from Leningrad... She was also in childhood. home, and in special det. home. In general, a girl with a past” (from a letter to I. D. Glikman from
July 2, 1962).
Let’s take another look at O. Dvornichenko’s book to get acquainted with one of the pages in the life of a “girl with a past.” In besieged Leningrad, Irina Antonovna lived just a few blocks from Shostakovich's house. “I remember a lot. It was a shock, because it seems to a child that the adult world is unshakable and stable. It turned out that this is a very fragile thing, that human life is worth nothing at all. We lived in the Mikhailovsky Garden because my father worked at the Russian Museum before his arrest, and we lived in the house of the Russian Museum employees on the corner of Inzhenernaya and Sadovaya. And there, in the Engineering Castle, there was some kind of military headquarters. And on Italianskaya Street there was a tank school.
They dug trenches in the Mikhailovsky Garden and installed anti-aircraft guns. And there were such battles - the Germans, apparently, really wanted to get into this Engineering Castle and into the school - shrapnel rained down, there was such shooting that it was terrible... And if you were late for the shelter - and sometimes we were late - the winter was very cold, you had to cross the yard this was a big problem. Well, the shrapnel... A shrapnel hit, there was just a person - and there was such a pile of rags, and no force could lift it... And then we were driven across the ice - they bombed there, there cars fell through the ice...” (from an interview with the author of the book) .
And then in the same book, Irina Antonovna recalls: “The premiere of the Thirteenth Symphony and the whole story that preceded it made a crushing impression on me, because this is the first premiere that I attended... It seemed to me that the composer had finished the composition and then pure pleasure began - rehearsals , premieres, interviews, success, congratulations and so on. It turned out that everything was wrong - it was a very difficult and nervous premiere.”
In the Thirteenth the composer called
the word is the daring journalistic poems of Yevgeny Yevtushenko. And the first among these poems was “Babi Yar,” published in Literary Gazette in September 1961, twenty years after the tragedy of the Kyiv Jews. Let me remind you that by the end of 1961, Khrushchev’s “thaw” was slowly giving way to new ideological frosts. Attempts to restore Stalinism have revived; under the pretext of the fight against Zionism, anti-Semitism was revived again, which became a state doctrine in the last years of Stalin’s life. All this affected the attitude of the authorities towards Yevtushenko’s poem and predetermined the difficult fate of Shostakovich’s new symphony.
For the first time since the Second and Third Symphonies, Shostakovich again violates the “purity” of the genre by turning to the choir. But the finales of “Dedication to October” and “May Day” are essentially posters. Soviet posters! In the Thirteenth
it's a real tragedy. And in a real tragedy, according to Joseph Brodsky, “it is not the hero who dies, the choir dies.” The innocent victims of Babyn Yar are dying - tens of thousands of Kiev Jews, mowed down by machine guns on the edge of a ravine: “I am every old man here shot, / I am every child here shot”... But the Thirteenth Symphony is not only about the millions of victims of the Nazi Holocaust or Jewish pogroms. It is also about the Stalinist genocide - tens of millions of tortured and executed peasants, workers, military men, intellectuals... It is about the monstrously twisted destinies of creators - scientists, artists, poets, composers... It is about the fears that shackled a great country and its people with ice. About humor - the “courageous man” laughing at tyrants. About Russian women - “the good gods of the family”: “They endured everything / They will endure everything”... About talent and its persecutors: “Those who cursed are forgotten, / but those who were cursed are remembered”...
... At the end of December 1962, I was returning home from a business trip. The path from Lvov to Leningrad ran through Moscow - I could not miss the premiere of “Katerina Izmailova” at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater. Dmitry Shostakovich's opera emerged from a quarter-century of disgrace and exile, albeit in the second, so to speak, permitted edition. Today's reader may ask - who is allowed? I will answer: the powerful Agitprop, no matter what name he acts under - whether the reviewer of Pravda, who defamed Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in January 1936, or the department of culture of the CPSU Central Committee, who creakingly sanctioned the premiere of Katerina Izmailova on December 26, 1962. The premiere, by the way, was hanging by a thread until the very last moment... During the intermission, I dared to offer Dmitry Dmitrievich the “epitaph” of the long-suffering opera:
There is no sadder story in the world,
Than the hard times that “Lady” has faced.

That's when I first saw Irina Antonovna next to Shostakovich. Later, I couldn’t count how many times I happened to see them together in the Big Hall, in a box near the stage, or in the Small Hall, in the fifth row to the left of the aisle. When Dmitry Dmitrievich passed away, on the days when his compositions were performed, there were always flowers on “his” chair.
...Recently I looked on the Internet, typed the name I. A. Shostakovich into the Google search window -
immediately, along with serious materials (biography, interviews), such an important definition popped up: individual entrepreneur Shostakovich Irina Antonovna. Various details are provided: INN, OGRNIP, OKPO, OKATO... You laugh - in vain: Irina Antonovna is the general director of the Moscow publishing house "DSCH" (composer's monogram in German: D. SCHostakowitsch), which publishes the academic complete works of Shostakovich. A publishing house that opens unknown pages of his work (the latest example: the unfinished opera “Orango”). Under the same roof as the publishing house is the Dmitry Shostakovich Archive. Neither the city nor the Ministry of Culture takes any part in their activities. And they exist on the money of the late Master - royalties from the performance and publication of his works.
Irina Antonovna is vice-president of the International Association “Dmitry Shostakovich”, founded in 2000 on her initiative in Paris.
The president of the association is French musicologist Emmanuel Whitwiller, a collector and custodian of a unique music library of the composer's works.
Among the concerts regularly organized by the Association, I remember the author’s evening of Boris Tishchenko in 2009, when Shostakovich’s favorite student turned
70 years old. “The teacher and the student,” says Irina Antonovna, “were brothers in spirit. Both professed Bach’s life principle: “Music is a conversation between the soul and God.”
Dear Irina Antonovna! I would like to address to you the words of the poet addressed to the widow of another great Master, whose fate echoes the fate of Dmitry Shostakovich:

It is not enough for a writer to have
A good wife
A writer must have
A good widow...
You have assembled a power,
All, until the last chapter,
You and posthumous glory -
His two faithful widows.

Joseph RAISKIN

Childhood and family of Dmitry Shostakovich

The boy's father, Dmitry Boleslavovich, was a chemical engineer and a passionate music lover. Mother, Sofya Vasilievna, studied at the conservatory at one time, was a good pianist and piano teacher for beginners.

In addition to Dmitry, there were two more girls in the family. Mitya's older sister Maria later became a pianist, and the younger Zoya became a veterinarian. When Mitya was 8 years old, the First World War began. Listening to the constant conversations of adults about the war, the boy wrote his first piece of music, “Soldier.”

In 1915, Mitya was sent to study at the gymnasium. During the same period, the boy became seriously interested in music. His mother became his first teacher, and a few months later little Shostakovich began studying at the music school of the famous teacher I. A. Glyasser.

In 1919 Shostakovich entered the Petrograd Conservatory. His piano teachers were A. Rozanova and L. Nikolaev. Dmitry graduated from the conservatory in two classes at once: in 1923 in piano, and two years later in composition.

Creative activity of composer Dmitry Shostakovich

The famous conductor Bruno Walter was delighted with the symphony and asked Shostakovich to send him the score of the work to Berlin.

On November 22, 1927, the symphony premiered in Berlin, and a year later in Philadelphia. The foreign premieres of Symphony No. 1 made the Russian composer world famous.

Inspired by success, Shostakovich wrote the Second and Third Symphonies, the operas “The Nose” and “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” (based on the works of N.V. Gogol and N. Leskov).

Shostakovich. Waltz

Critics received Shostakovich’s opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” with almost enthusiasm, but the “leader of the peoples” did not like it. Naturally, a sharply negative article immediately comes out - “Confusion instead of music.” A few days later, another publication appears - “Ballet Falsity”, in which Shostakovich’s ballet “The Bright Stream” is subjected to devastating criticism.

Shostakovich was saved from further trouble by the appearance of the Fifth Symphony, which Stalin himself commented on: “The Soviet artist’s response to fair criticism.”

Leningrad Symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich

Leningrad Symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich

On August 9, the symphony was performed in besieged Leningrad. This work by the composer became a symbol of the fight against fascism and the resilience of Leningraders.

The clouds are gathering again

But in 1948, in the Resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, which spoke about the opera “The Great Friendship” by composer Vano Muradeli, the music of Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Khachaturian was recognized as “alien to the Soviet people.”

Submitting to party dictates, Shostakovich “realizes his mistakes.” Works of a military-patriotic nature appear in his work and “friction” with the authorities ceases.

Personal life of Dmitry Shostakovich

In 1923, the aspiring composer met his peer Tanya Glivenko. A seventeen-year-old boy fell madly in love with a beautiful, well-educated girl. The young people began a romantic relationship. Despite his ardent love, Dmitry did not think of proposing to Tatyana. In the end, Glivenko married another admirer. Only three years after this, Shostakovich invited Tanya to leave her husband and marry him. Tatyana refused - she was expecting a child and asked Dmitry to forget about her forever.

Realizing that he could not return his beloved, Shostakovich married Nina Varzar, a young student. Nina gave her husband a daughter and a son. They lived in marriage for more than 20 years, until Nina’s death.

After the death of his wife, Shostakovich married two more times. The marriage with Margarita Kayonova was short-lived, and the third wife, Irina Supinskaya, took care of the great composer until the end of his life.

The composer's muse ultimately became Tatyana Glivenko, to whom he dedicated his First Symphony and Trio for piano, violin and cello.

The last years of Shostakovich's life

The composer's last work was the Sonata for viola and piano.

At the end of his life, Shostakovich suffered from lung cancer. In 1975, illness brought the composer to his grave.

Shostakovich was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow.

Dmitry Shostakovich Awards

The composer was awarded the titles of Honored Artist of the RSFSR and the USSR, People's Artist of the USSR. Shostakovich received the Lenin and five Stalin Prizes, State Prizes of the Ukrainian SSR, RSFSR and the USSR. He was a laureate of the International Peace Prize and the Prize named after. J. Sibelius.

Shostakovich was an honorary doctor of music from Oxford and Evanston Northwestern universities. He was a member of the French and Bavarian Academies of Fine Sciences, the English and Swedish Royal Academies of Music, the Santa Cecilia Academy of Arts in Italy, etc. All these international awards and titles speak about one thing - the worldwide fame of the great composer of the 20th century.

Two world premieres to the music of Dmitry Shostakovich - the opera-ballet Orango and the ballet Conditionally Murdered - took place in Perm at the opening of the Diaghilev Festival 2015.

For many years, the unfinished opera “Orango” was considered lost, but in 2004 its score was discovered in the archives of the Museum. Glinka. “Conditionally Killed” is also a rarity: the phantasmagoric story about the teachings of Osoaviakhim was shown in full only once - in 1931 in the form of a circus revue in which Klavdiya Shulzhenko and Leonid Utesov shone.

In Perm, these performances (both were directed and choreographed by Alexey Miroshnichenko, chief choreographer of the Perm Opera House) were included in a single “Shostakovich Project”, which presented the audience with two unknown works by the outstanding composer. After the premiere, his widow, an honorary guest of the festival, gave an exclusive interview to AiF-Prikamye.

What took Perm?

Vera Shuvaeva, “AiF-Prikamye”: - Irina Antonovna, why did you turn to our theater with the proposal to stage performances based on Shostakovich’s newly acquired scores?

I think yes. I also liked the production. Fresh, bright. And the director turned out to be very talented as a choreographer. Happy for him.

The increased interest in Shostakovich's music in recent years - what is it connected with, in your opinion?

Perhaps with time itself. Do you know with what interest the public received the inclusion of his Eleventh Symphony, dedicated to the revolution of 1905, in the symphony subscription at the Bolshoi Theater?! Many, having listened to her, agreed: the similarity between that and today’s situation is obvious. Thank God they don’t shoot at our people yet...

Four decades have passed since the death of Dmitry Shostakovich. Very different, contradictory for our country. Which of them could he call “his”?

I won’t undertake to answer for him here. My view on these years? (Pause.) When perestroika began, everyone was so hopeful that time would return to the “thaw” (until Khrushchev began persecuting the intelligentsia), that everything would change for the better, but... In a word, we are waiting for changes, as Tsoi sang.

Some worthy things are certainly appearing in both culture and industry. But not thanks to the authorities - the course of life requires it. That is, I think there is some kind of forward movement, except for the events in Ukraine. Kyiv is a wonderful city. And in general, the Ukrainian people are very close to us. And turning him into our enemy all at once is a completely futile effort. This is impossible, such connections cannot be broken.

What would you call the era...

Akhmatova’s words are well known: “Shostakovich is a genius. And our era, of course, will be called the era of Shostakovich.” I wonder if he himself was aware of the extent of his genius?

Dmitry Dmitrievich did not like conversations on this topic. But I always wanted to be the best in my profession. And to Boris Tishchenko, who studied with him in graduate school, he once wrote: “Let your rivals not be your contemporaries-colleagues, but Beethoven, Mahler, etc.” As for Akhmatova: yes, she made such a dedication to Shostakovich on one of her books. Although Anna Andreevna herself was a person of the era.

Photo: Perm Opera and Ballet Theater / Marina Dmitrieva

Whose name would you name the current era?

- (Thoughts.) Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

The world premiere of the opera “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” based on his story also took place in Perm, at the Diaghilev Festival 2009. His widow came, who is now working on the publication of the 30-volume collected works of Solzhenitsyn... How are things going at your publishing house? DSCH?

I began publishing Shostakovich’s works and orchestral materials when, after his death, people began to contact me and ask for sheet music. Financially, DSCH relies on the 1/3 of the copyright I own. I wanted this to be a family publishing house, but Dmitry Dmitrievich’s children, Maxim and Galina, realizing that this required an investment of money, refused. To date, we have released our catalog, which includes 15 genre series; published 70 volumes - half of what is needed. The crystal dream is to release 10 titles a year.

Unfortunately, in Russia the publishing house has neither orders nor income. Here, musicians use sheet music that is more than 40 years old, tattered, torn, with errors and marks (there was no computer typesetting back then), but they are in no hurry to update them, since they have to pay, even if only a little. I will work in this direction - so that the old notes are copied and ours are taken.

I heard that you also created the Shostakovich Museum.

Rather, it is a center that unites the apartment in which we lived and his huge archive, which I placed on the same floor. Quite a lot of people come to work at the archive, and for some reason everyone asks to see the apartment. It would seem, what’s special about it? But the people treat this place with such respect... I want to offer the state to purchase all this, but whether the state wants it is a big question.

Do you have any desire to write memoirs about your great husband?

In my opinion, in memoirs they write mainly about themselves: I was the only one close to this person, the only one who knew everything about him, etc. I don't see any benefit in this! There is correspondence between Dmitry Dmitrievich and his close friend Glikman. The book “Letters to Sollertinsky” was published. Also his friend, a Leningrad musicologist. When leaving for evacuation to Novosibirsk, he did not take anything with him, not even his works, but he took Shostakovich’s letters. This is pre-war correspondence between two still young people. Today this may seem strange: living in the same city and corresponding. But for them it was in the order of things. As well as, say, writing a letter on the way to the south and dropping it in the mailbox at a bus stop... This will never happen again. Unfortunately.

Girl with a biography

Irina Antonovna, Shostakovich dedicated a suite to you based on poems by Michelangelo. Surely this gift is the most expensive for you?

Certainly. I remember he was working as usual, and suddenly asked me to come over. I say: “I don’t know the notes.” In response: “But you’re literate!” I came up and saw: he was writing a dedication to me. (Smiles.) I knew that such a suite was being prepared: he asked me to print Michelangelo’s poems on cards, which he then laid out somehow, building the concept.

True, I must say that that gift also placed a huge responsibility on me. It all ends there with two epitaphs. And when a living person writes an epitaph for himself, it’s scary.

Photo: Perm Opera and Ballet Theater / Marina Dmitrieva

He suffered so many blows, bans, persecutions...

When we met, I didn’t know either his music or his fate. But I immediately felt that he was not like the others. We lived together for 13 years and were always very close to each other. Although back in 1942, as it turned out later, Dmitry Dmitrievich and I lived on the same street. Yes, in Kuibyshev! The Bolshoi Theater was evacuated there, and his famous Seventh Symphony was performed there for the first time. And I, taken from besieged Leningrad, went to first grade there.

Nothing other than a sign of fate!

After 10 years, my father was released from the camp, but with his rights lost, without work - how could he take me with him? And I was so looking forward to this... In general, as a child, I did not know how to run, play, or scream at all. I couldn't do anything. Then she studied, worked in a publishing house, and was the literary editor of the first edition of two Prokofiev operas and some romances that deserve attention. So by the time I was 26, when I married Shostakovich, I was a girl with a biography.

And yet: was it difficult for you to live up to the level of such a person?

Difficult. But I tried. And now I’m trying to do everything to help. Not for him, but for his music. For a composer, the most important thing is for his music to sound.

People's Artist of the USSR (1954)
State Prize Laureate (1941, 1942, 1946, 1950, 1952, 1968, 1974)
Laureate of the International Peace Prize (1954)
Lenin Prize laureate (1958)
Hero of Socialist Labor (1966)

His father Dmitry Boleslavovich Shostakovich was a chemical engineer and a passionate music lover. Mother Sofia Vasilievna Shostakovich was a gifted pianist.

Contemporaries recalled that Mitya, as his relatives called him, was “a thin boy, with thin, pursed lips, a narrow, slightly humped nose, glasses, old-fashioned framed with a shiny metal thread, an absolutely speechless, angry beech... When did he... .. sat down at a huge piano... the thin boy at the piano was reborn into a very daring musician...". At the age of twelve, young Shostakovich wrote on January 8, 1918, a funeral march in memory of the leaders of the cadet party, Shingaryov and Kokoshkin, killed the day before by sailors and soldiers.

At the age of thirteen, the future composer, in love with a ten-year-old girl, Natalia Kube, wrote and dedicated a short prelude to her. And in 1919, after studying at a private music school, Shostakovich was accepted into the piano class at the Petrograd Conservatory, and later began to seriously study composition.

The professors and students who surrounded Shostakovich were always amazed by his unusually bright and versatile talent, brilliant musical memory, ability to perfectly sight-read not only piano literature, but also complex orchestral scores, an inquisitive and sharp mind, capable of quickly perceiving and evaluating everything he heard in conservatory classes and at concerts.

But soon, to all these youthful impressions and hobbies, a serious responsibility was added - financial care for the family. In 1922, when Shostakovich was entering his final year at the conservatory, his father died. After the death of his father, it was necessary not only to study hard, but also to work, and in October 1923, Shostakovich passed the exam at the Union of Artists for the position of pianist-film illustrator.

Foreign melodramatic and adventure films, which then formed the main repertoire of cinemas, provided rich and varied material for improvisation. The game in front of the screen lasted about an hour while the session was ongoing. During this time, the tempo and sound strength changed many times, the pianist sought to diversify his accompaniment as much as possible. Following the events on the screen, the pianist constantly composed musical pictures, constructed episodes, found leading melodies for the characters, immediately checked and modified them. What was found remained and developed in the next session; he refused what was random. Subsequently, while working on symphonies, concerts, operas and ballets, the composer used the experience gained, from time to time recalling what he had previously found and tested.

Shostakovich first played in the "Bright Ribbon" in November-December 1923, a year later in October-November 1924 - in the "Splendid Palace", and from February 15, 1925 he became a full-time pianist at the Piccadilly cinema. A few years later, Shostakovich played in Warsaw at the First International Chopin Piano Competition and received an honorary diploma.

At that time, the director of the conservatory was composer Alexander Glazunov. In the first post-revolutionary years, talented students who received scholarships were given food support. The decision on the scholarship was sometimes made by Lunacharsky himself. Glazunov turned to Maxim Gorky, who communicated with Lunacharsky, with a request to arrange a meeting with him. And so a conversation took place between Glazunov and Lunacharsky about Shostakovich.

Lunacharsky:

Who is he? Violinist? Pianist?

Glazunov:

Composer.

Lunacharsky:

How old is he?

Glazunov:

Fifteenth. Accompanying films. Recently the floor under him caught fire, and he played to avoid panic... He is a composer...

Lunacharsky:

Like?

Glazunov:

Disgusting.

Lunacharsky:

Why did you come?

Glazunov:

I don't like it, but that's not the point. Time belongs to this boy.

In 1923, Shostakovich graduated from the conservatory in piano, and in 1925 in composition. At the same time, a girl appeared in the life of the aspiring composer. Tatyana Glivenko was the same age as Shostakovich, pretty, well educated and distinguished by a lively and cheerful disposition. Shostakovich fell in love with a visiting Muscovite, and the new acquaintances began a romantic and long-term acquaintance. In the year of his meeting with Tatyana, the impressionable Dmitry began to create the First Symphony.

Experiencing the most tender feelings for his beloved girl, Shostakovich, nevertheless, did not even want to think about the upcoming marriage. Inexplicable contradictions lived inside him, about which the writer Mikhail Zoshchenko said: “It seemed that he was a “fragile, brittle, self-absorbed, infinitely spontaneous and pure child.” This is so... But, if it were only so, then a huge art... it wouldn’t have worked out. He’s exactly that... plus, he’s tough, caustic, extremely smart, perhaps strong, despotic and not entirely kind.”

Dmitry Shostakovich avoided touching on the topic of marriage and family, and in one of his letters to his mother he explained his own indecision: “Love is truly free. A vow made before the altar is the most terrible side of religion. Love cannot last long... my goal is not will tie the knot." But Tatyana, who was already almost twenty-eight years old, wanted children and a legal husband. And she openly told Dmitry that she was leaving him, having accepted a marriage proposal from another admirer, whom she soon married. Three years later, Shostakovich asked Glivenko to leave her husband and become his wife, but she gave birth to a son in April 1932 and asked Shostakovich to delete her from his life forever. Having finally become convinced that his beloved would never return to him, in May of the same year the composer married a young student Nina Varzar. This woman was to spend more than twenty years with Dmitry Dmitrievich, give birth to a daughter and son to the composer, and die before her adored husband.

After Nina's death, Shostakovich married two more times: to Margarita Kayonova, with whom he lived for a short time, and to Irina Supinskaya, who surrounded her husband with warmth and care that remained in their family until the end of the composer's life.

His graduation work was "The First Symphony". In a tradition dating back to Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Prokofiev, Shostakovich intended to pursue a career both as a concert pianist and as a composer. However, in 1927, at the 1st International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, hoping in advance for victory, he ended up receiving only an honorary participant’s diploma. Shostakovich included a sonata of his own composition into the competition program. The musician’s unusual talent was noticed by one of the competition jury members, the Austro-American conductor and composer Bruno Walter, who invited Shostakovich to play something else for him on the piano. Having heard the First Symphony, Walter immediately asked Shostakovich to send the score of the symphony to him in Berlin, and then performed the symphony in the current season, thereby making the name of the Russian composer famous.

In 1927, two more significant events occurred in the life of Shostakovich. In January, the Austrian composer, representative of the Second Viennese School, Alban Berg, visited Leningrad. Berg's arrival was prompted by the Russian premiere of his opera "Wozzeck", and it inspired Shostakovich to begin writing the opera "The Nose" based on Gogol's story. Another important event was Shostakovich’s acquaintance with Ivan Sollertinsky, who, during his many years of friendship, introduced Shostakovich to the work of great composers. So, after studying the score of Hindemith's "Kammermusik No.2, op.36", Shostakovich created his First Piano Concerto, famous today.

His opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” based on Leskov’s story, initially received with enthusiasm and having already existed on stage for a season and a half, was unexpectedly destroyed in the official Soviet press in the article “Confusion instead of music” in the newspaper “Pravda”, and was removed from the repertoire.

In the same 1936, the premiere of the 4th Symphony, a work of a new, monumental style, combining heroic pathos with lyrical episodes, was to take place. However, Shostakovich suspended rehearsals of the Symphony before the December premiere, realizing that in the atmosphere of state terror that had begun in the country, when representatives of the creative professions were arrested every day, its performance could be perceived by the authorities as a challenge. The 4th Symphony was first performed only in 1961.

He was reproached for destroying the traditions of the classics, that his music was not similar to what was written before. It took professionals and music lovers many years to understand what seemed so clear, so obvious to the composer. “We often paint the classics,” Shostakovich wrote, “as icons, smoothing out precisely those features in them that made them great people. We forget that the art of the classics was always searching, restless. They always broke virgin soil, went against routine and philistinism, boldly raising in art the burning, painful problems of his time, boldly creating for him new means of artistic expression."

Shostakovich once said: “If my hands were cut off, I would still write with the pen in my teeth.” And students at the music school cheerfully answered in class that Shostakovich wrote the opera “Lady Macbeth of the Nevsky District,” and the music turned out to be so bad that it turned out to be “Confusion instead of music,” as the Pravda newspaper wrote in 1936. And they believed the newspaper. Nobody argued with this opinion. Although the opera was performed with great success in Leningrad for two years, and it was conducted by the famous Samuil Samosud, who claimed that “Lady Macbeth is a brilliant opera” and expressed confidence that the future would justify this description.

Maxim Gorky, who defended the young Shostakovich, wrote that the article in Pravda hit him like a brick on the head: “Confusion,” and why? What and how is this expressed? Here criticism must give a technical assessment of Shostakovich’s music, he wrote. “And what the Pravda article gave gave permission to a pack of mediocre people, hacks of all kinds, to poison Shostakovich...”

In May 1937, Shostakovich released the 5th Symphony, a work deliberately created in the generally accepted form: 4 movements with a sonata allegro, a scherzo and a triumphal finale, with a predominance of classical harmonies, prefacing the symphony with the phrase: “The Soviet composer’s response to fair criticism of the Party.” . After the premiere of the work, a laudatory article was published in Pravda, and the symphony’s fame as “an example of a work of socialist realism in symphonic music” was officially secured. And Shostakovich’s relations with the Kremlin improved for a while. The conductor and friend of Shostakovich, the first performer of many of Shostakovich’s works, Yevgeny Mravinsky, later recalled: “I still can’t understand how I dared to accept such an offer... After all, not only my reputation was at stake, but, more importantly, my fate a new unknown work." It was not only about this particular work, but also about the fate of the composer himself. The success was stunning. The ovation lasted half an hour.

From 1937, Shostakovich taught a composition class at the Leningrad Conservatory, and from 1939 he became a professor.

While in Leningrad during the first months of the Great Patriotic War, until the evacuation to Kuibyshev in October, Shostakovich began working on the 7th symphony - "Leningrad". The symphony was first performed on the stage of the Kuibyshev Opera and Ballet Theater on March 5, 1942, and on March 29, 1942 - in the Column Hall of the Moscow House of Unions. On August 9, 1942, the work was performed in besieged Leningrad. The organizer and conductor was the conductor of the Leningrad Radio Committee orchestra, Karl Ilyich Eliasberg. The performance of the symphony became an event not only in the life of the fighting city and its inhabitants. The premiere of the symphony was broadcast by all radio stations in the USA, Canada, and Latin America - about 20 million people listened to it. This symphony was performed more than 60 times on the American continent over the course of several months in 1942.

A year later, Shostakovich wrote the 8th Symphony, in which, as if following Mahler’s behest that “the whole world should be reflected in the symphony,” he painted a fresco of what was happening around him. In it, as if in a mirror, the horror of Russian everyday life with its hypocrisy and gigantomania, and the tragedy of the war, and the worries of the ordinary person, and his hope for better times were visible.

In 1943, the composer moved to Moscow and taught at the Moscow Conservatory until 1948. V.D.Bibergan, R.S.Bunin, A.D.Gadzhiev, G.G.Galynin, O.A.Evlakhov, K.A.Karaev, G.V.Sviridov, B.I.Tishchenko studied with him , K.S. Khachaturyan, B.A. Tchaikovsky and A.G. Chugaev.

To express his ideas, thoughts and feelings, Shostakovich used the genres of chamber music. In this area, he created such masterpieces as the piano quintet in 1940, the piano trio in 1944, String Quartets No. 2 in 1944, No. 3 in 1946 and No. 4 in 1949.

In 1945, after the end of the war, Shostakovich wrote the 9th Symphony, filled with irony and satire in relation to the Soviet life around him. In this “easy”, at first glance, symphony, the composer returned to one of the main themes of his work - the denunciation of vulgarity. Articles by perplexed reviewers appeared in the Soviet press, expecting a thunderous anthem to victory from the country's main musical "socialist realist", but instead received a chamber siphon about Soviet reality.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Shostakovich composed music for films. One of his small masterpieces that remained from that time was the well-known melody for “Song of the Oncoming One” (“The morning greets us with coolness,” to the verses of the Leningrad poet Boris Kornilov). In 1945, this work became the UN anthem. During the war years, he willingly undertook to instrument famous vocal works for front-line needs. In addition to the fact that Shostakovich loved music very much, he really wanted to help his warring homeland, and went to dig trenches and learned to extinguish incendiary bombs.

The thunder that thundered first in 1946, during the “exposure” of the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad”, followed by the persecution of writers, including Zoshchenko and Akhmatova, continued in 1948, when the Kremlin took up the Union of Composers , accusing the great masters Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Khachaturian of “formalism”, “bourgeois decadence” and “groveling before the West”. Shostakovich was accused of professional incompetence and expelled from the Moscow Conservatory.

The main accuser was the secretary of the CPSU Central Committee and a close ally of Stalin, Andrei Zhdanov. Despite the imminent death of Zhdanov, repression in the country continued to flare up, which greatly affected Shostakovich’s work. Again “at the wrong time”, in 1948, he created the vocal cycle “From Jewish Folk Poetry”, and during the massive anti-Semitic state campaign organized by the head of the NKVD Abakumov in January 1949, which lasted until Stalin’s death in 1953, Shostakovich again found himself under attack , this time as “a panderer of rootless cosmopolitans and enemies of the people.” The First Violin Concerto, written in 1948, was hidden by the composer in connection with these events, and its first performance took place only in 1955.

Mstislav Rostropovich said: “In 1948, when we arrived at the Conservatory, we saw an order on the notice board: “Shostakovich D.D. is no longer a professor in the composition class due to inadequacy of professorial qualifications..." I have never experienced such humiliation."

Shostakovich's works were removed from the repertoire and theaters refused them. He responded to this bacchanalia in the only way accessible to him - he created a large, acutely satirical work in his own words and called it “Anti-formalistic Paradise” - a kind of greeting to his most beloved composer - Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, who also had a satirical work called “Raek”. Shostakovich wrote without the slightest hope that it would ever be performed. It was heard for the first time in Moscow almost half a century later.

In March 1949, the All-American Congress of Scientists and Culture was to take place. And one day there was a call in the apartment that shocked everyone. Stalin spoke. Shostakovich was invited to go to the United States for the Waldorf Conference as part of the Soviet delegation. At the Waldorf conference, composer Nikolai Nabokov was present from a competing organization, and after the speech of Shostakovich, who, timidly and stammering, read some official text from a piece of paper, Nabokov asked him just one question: what do you think about what the Soviet press writes about modern composers Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Hindemith? Do you agree with this criticism? A completely confused Shostakovich said that he agreed with what the Soviet press was writing. Solomon Volkov, who told this story in his book “Shostakovich and Stalin” (and there are many similar ones in this book, which makes it fascinatingly interesting and easy to read), summed up the episode this way: “The attack of Nabokov and his friends, one might say, torpedoed the Waldorf Conference ", but at the same time it undermined Shostakovich's reputation in America. From that moment on, regardless of his real emotions and beliefs, he began to be increasingly perceived in the West as a mouthpiece of communist ideology, and his music as Soviet propaganda. Such was the inevitable logic " Cold War." Hostility toward Shostakovich's music in the United States continued, with minor variations, for thirty years."

Therefore, in America, the book of Shostakovich’s memoirs “Testimony”, published by Solomon Volkov, became a real bomb, in which the composer appeared as who he was: if not an anti-Soviet artist, then at least an anti-Stalinist. "Testimony" was filled with Shostakovich's seething hatred of Stalin. It was, first of all, a document, so to speak, rough material, which was what impressed me most. This book shook up stereotypes so much that some commentators and musicologists in the United States considered it a fraud. Solomon Volkov, one might say, lit the fire, but over time his concept has more and more supporters.

Volkov's book "Shostakovich and Stalin" differed from the memoirs "Testimony" in that it depicted Shostakovich against the broadest possible background of Soviet cultural life throughout the years of the composer's life. This is a book not only about Shostakovich, but also about Mayakovsky, Zoshchenko, Pasternak, Bulgakov, Mikhoels, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky, Eisenstein, Meyerhold and Babel. For Americans, much in the book became a real revelation.

One more date. In 1958, a party resolution was issued to repeal the previous resolution adopted in 1948. Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya said: “We were scared that we had accidentally looked into the volcano bubbling in his soul...” Only creativity was his salvation. In his letters and in his statements, he was always extremely stingy: “...Through my music, people will understand much more what I thought and felt...” he once said in a conversation with Mstislav Rostropovich.

The fifties began with a very important project for Shostakovich. Participating as a jury member at the Bach Competition in Leipzig in the autumn of 1950, the composer was so inspired by the atmosphere that after arriving in Moscow he began composing 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano, a work paying tribute to the great German.

With the short-lived thaw, like many of his contemporaries, the composer pinned hopes for freedom in society and independence from those in power. Many works of the second half of the decade are imbued with optimism and joy that was previously uncharacteristic of Shostakovich. These are the 6th String Quartet in 1956, the Second Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in 1957, and the operetta “Moscow-Cheryomushki”. At the same time, the composer subjected a serious revision to key moments in the country's history, created the 11th symphony in 1957, calling it "1905", and continued to work in the instrumental concert genre: the First Concert for Cello and Orchestra in 1959. In 1957, Shostakovich became secretary of the Union of Composers of the USSR, in 1960 - of the Union of Composers of the RSFSR (in 1960-1968 - first secretary). In 1958, Anna Akhmatova wrote a dedication on the title page of her book, donated to the composer: “To Dmitry Dmitrievich Shostakovich, in whose era I live on earth.”

Shostakovich, as the elected First Secretary of the Union of Composers of the RSFSR, was forced to join the party. In letters to his friend Isaac Glickman, he complained about the disgusting nature of this compromise and revealed the real reasons that prompted him to write his later famous String Quartet No. 8 in 1960. In 1961, Shostakovich completed the second part of his revolutionary duology: he wrote Symphony No. 12 “1917” - a work in which the composer painted musical pictures of Petrograd, Razliv and the October events themselves.

The Kuibyshev Orchestra has the honor of the first performance of another 12th symphony. Director and artistic director of the Philharmonic Mark Viktorovich Blumin talked about how this happened. During a business trip to Moscow, he learned that the composer had completed work on the Twelfth Symphony. Calling Shostakovich, he asked him to give the honor of the premiere to the Kuibyshev orchestra under the baton of conductor Abram Stasevich. Consent was obtained. As it turned out later, that same evening the Twelfth was performed in Leningrad. But - an hour later. The Eleventh and Twelfth are related by theme. One is called "1905", the other - "1917". If the Soviet press was unanimous in its warm approval of both, then abroad, on the contrary, a cold shower was poured out on them. The composer was accused of hypocrisy and double-mindedness. Today we know how long and painfully the composer resisted political pressure. His name was too famous throughout the world, too much attention was focused on him, for him to be given the opportunity to live only in the world of his spiritual needs. Once, after being hospitalized due to a broken leg, he said to a friend: “God probably punished me for my sins, for example, for joining the party.”

Shostakovich set himself a new task when he turned to the poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, first writing the symphonic poem “Babi Yar”, and then adding four more parts to it from the life of modern Russia and its recent history, thereby creating another symphony, the Thirteenth, which after Khrushchev's dissatisfaction, was nevertheless executed in November 1962. The USSR authorities did not want to recognize the genocide of Jews, even when it was written about in such a veiled form as Yevtushenko’s

With the removal of Khrushchev from power and the beginning of a new era of political repression in Russia, the tone of Shostakovich's works again acquired a gloomy character. His quartets No. 11 in 1966 and No. 12 in 1968, Second cello concerts in 1966 and violin concerts in 1967, Violin Sonata in 1968, romances to the words of Alexander Blok, are imbued with anxiety, pain and inescapable melancholy. In the Fourteenth Symphony in 1969, Shostakovich used poems by Apollinaire, Rilke, Küchelbecker and Lorca. All these poems are connected by one theme - death, they talked about unfair or early death. The symphony was created during the KGB persecution of dissidents.

During these years, the composer created vocal cycles based on poems by Tsvetaeva and Michelangelo, the 13th in 1969-1970, the 14th in 1973 and the 15th in 1974, string quartets and Symphony No. 15, a work characterized by a mood of thoughtfulness and memories . Shostakovich used in the music of the symphony quotes from Rossini's William Tell overture and the theme of fate from Wagner's opera Das Rheingold, as well as musical allusions to the music of Glinka, Mahler and his own. The symphony was created in the summer of 1971 and premiered on January 8, 1972. Shostakovich's last composition was the Sonata for viola and piano.

Grigory Kozintsev, who worked with the composer for forty years, wrote: “It is never offensive for Shostakovich to write music exactly for 1 minute 13 seconds, and, moreover, at the 24th second the orchestra plays more quietly, since the dialogue begins, at 52- and louder because the cannon is firing."

The amazing features of Shostakovich, according to many, were his curiosity and interest in “low” and “light” genres - from urban romances to operetta. He instilled in his students that music can only be good or bad. Maybe that’s why he was so good at his “trademark” sarcasm. Suffice it to recall the simplest and “grassroots” examples - the motive from “Roast Chicken” in “Moscow-Cheryomushki” or the balalaika song in the opera “The Nose” to the words of Smerdyakov’s idiotic “love” song from “The Brothers Karamazov” with the endless chorus “Lord, have mercy” her and me."

Shostakovich considered his work in cinema to be the most important thing, as, indeed, everything he did. He was always fully one of the authors of the picture. This was well understood by his friends, directors Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, Friedrich Ermler, Leo Arnstam, Sergei Yutkevich, Mikhail Shapiro, who grew up watching Lenfilm and worked with him in Moscow, Sergei Gerasimov, Mikhail Kalatozov. Kozintsev, who made 10 films with Shostakovich, understood this most of all. In one of his last speeches, Kozintsev said: “Speaking about Shostakovich’s music, I wanted to say that it cannot in any way be called music for cinema. In general, it seems to me that Shostakovich’s music cannot be for something. It exists on its own. "may be connected with something. It could be the inner world of the author, who is talking about something that is inspired by some phenomena of life or art."

In the last few years, the composer was very ill, suffering from lung cancer. Dmitry Shostakovich died in Moscow on August 9, 1975 and was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery.

In 2011, an author’s program “Station of Dreams. In honor of Dmitry Shostakovich” was prepared about Dmitry Shostakovich, which was created by Shostakovich Prize laureates of different years Valery Gergiev, Gidon Kremer, Victor Tretyakov, Anna-Sophie Mutter, Olga Borodina, Natalya Gutman, Evgeniy Kissin, Maxim Vengerov, Efim Bronfman, Denis Matsuev, as well as Irina Antonova and Alexey Ratmansky.

A television program from the series “How the Idols Died” was prepared about Dmitry Shostakovich.

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Text prepared by Andrey Goncharov

INTERVIEW WITH IRINA SHOSTAKOVICH.

When I first met, I said that you were pretty, and suddenly I came across the same word in Dmitry Dmitrievich’s description: “My wife’s name is Irina Antonovna... she is very good, smart, cheerful, simple, pretty. She wears glasses, doesn’t pronounce the letters “l” and “r...” Also: “She has only one big drawback: she is twenty-seven years old.” The shortage has passed. How does it feel that your husband is a hundred years old?

Nothing special. Only that he is not there. Or it could be.

- Living next to him, did you realize that he was a tragic figure?

I realized, but whoever is not a tragic figure in our country, whoever you take, everyone is a hero of our time.

- There is a scale of personality. Did he talk to you about what he was experiencing?

Sometimes something happens in the course of life, but in such a way as to confess - no. He was a rather reserved person. I didn’t like to talk about myself.

- You didn’t ask...

I probably didn't ask. Once I asked, rather unsuccessfully, about joining the party. Because I was at that meeting in the House of Composers where this happened. He said: if you love me, never ask about it, it was blackmail. We lived quite closely with each other. He was sick, and his life passed through me, he needed me all the time. Actually, what kind of conversations are there between husband and wife? Take a look and everything is clear. Even on the back. By the expression of the back.

-Did you ever cry when you were married to him?

No, I didn't cry.

-You don't cry at all?

No, I think I'll cry someday. The Germans were making a film about him, I began to tell them about the “Aesopian language”, they did not understand, I began to explain, began to remember and realized that I was just crying.

- He cried...

Once, I was shocked when he was called to the Central Committee from the rehearsal of the Thirteenth Symphony, we arrived home, and he threw himself into bed and cried. He said that he would be forced to film the premiere. This was the day after Khrushchev’s famous meeting with the intelligentsia, Dmitry Dmitrievich was a famous composer, and the Central Committee was weighing whether to ban the premiere or allow it. By the time he arrived at the Central Committee, they decided that it was better to allow it. And then ban it.

He cried when he was forced to join the party. A friend wrote how, having come to him early in the morning, he witnessed severe hysteria. Shostakovich cried loudly, loudly, repeating: “They have been pursuing me for a long time, chasing me...” A friend recalled how often Shostakovich said that he would never join a party that creates violence. In response, Shostakovich announced his firm decision not to attend the meeting. “It still seems to me that they will come to their senses, take pity on me and leave me alone.” He, however, did not show up on the appointed day. Appeared in another. Reading from a piece of paper: “I owe everything that is good in me...” - instead of “the party and the government,” he dramatically shouted: “... to my parents!”

- Was this your first love?

The real one is the first.

- Did he love you at first?

I think it's mutual. We knew each other for five or six years. There was some kind of attraction.

- How did you meet?

I worked as a literary editor at the Soviet Composer publishing house when his operetta “Moscow, Cheryomushki” was published there. One of the authors of the libretto made amendments at my request, I came to coordinate them and submit another text with the author’s proposal to write an additional number. Dmitry Dmitrievich said: I won’t write anything else. A lot of time has passed. There was a plenum of composers, symphonic miniatures by Kara-Karaev were played there, I wanted to listen and asked a colleague, a member of the Union of Composers, to guide me. He promised, and then he called: I can’t go, I’ll ask Dmitry Dmitrievich to escort me. He spent. I thought he would go about his business, but he walked with me into the hall, we sat down, and no one else sat in this row, which amazed me, everyone walked along the aisle and looked at us.

- Once there was an empty row when it was subjected to a crushing attack, and no one wanted to sit next to it.

It was a different story. And then he called me to come to him on Kutuzovsky. I came. And he explained. And he quickly proposed to me, and I just as quickly said that it was impossible.

- Why?

Because his children are almost my age. Because a celebrity will say: caught... Another year passed when we did not see each other. And then they met, and immediately both went towards each other.

- How did the children receive you?

He, I don’t know how, made it clear that if they offended me, they would offend him.

- And it didn’t bother you that he was twice his age?

You know, he was very charming. It is clear that such people do not suddenly appear in the world.

The first time he was going to get married very young. They met Tanya Glivenko, the daughter of a famous philologist, in Crimea. Mom, with whom Mitya was extremely close, did not allow the marriage. She also did not favor Mitya’s second love Nina Varzar, the daughter of a famous lawyer. Mitya's hesitations were so strong that he did not come to his own wedding. Six months later they reconciled and got married, Galya and Maxim were born. He dedicated the sensual music of Lady Macbeth to Nina (“Shostakovich is undoubtedly the main creator of pornographic music in the history of opera,” wrote not the Soviet, but the American press).

Three years after Nina Vasilievna’s death, at some event, he approached Margarita Andreevna Kainova, a worker of the Komsomol Central Committee, and asked if she wanted to become his wife. In a couple of years he will run away from her. When they reproached her that she always has guests, and her husband is a musician, he must work, she answered: so what, he’s a musician, my first husband was also a musician - he played the button accordion.

- And a gambling card player at that!

Why not? He even told me that in his youth he won a significant sum in preference to buy a cooperative apartment.

- Did you have an open house?

Yes, there were a lot of people. We had a very good housekeeper, Marya Dmitrievna Kozhunova. Before the war there was her godmother Fedosya Fedorovna, then she, and until the end. She was cooking. When they stopped playing Dmitry Dmitrievich’s music in 1948, there was no money in the family at all, Fedosya Fedorovna and Marya Dmitrievna collected everything they had earned in this life and came to Dmitry Dmitrievich: take it, there will be money, you’ll give it back.

- And then Stalin gave him one hundred thousand...

But Dmitry Dmitrievich funnyly told how he was riding on a tram, a descendant of Rimsky-Korsakov entered and shouted to the entire tram: is it true that Stalin gave you a hundred thousand so that you would not be upset? Dmitry Dmitrievich turned and jumped out of the tram at the nearest stop.

When a competition for the anthem was announced, in which 40 poets and 165 composers took part, Stalin decided that five anthems would reach the finals: General Alexandrov, the head of the Red Banner Choir of the Red Army, the Georgian composer Jonah Tuski, separately Shostakovich and separately Khachaturian and theirs - together. This was a special order from Stalin, and, apparently, it was the last anthem that had the chance. Stalin proposed minor amendments, asking whether three months would be enough for the authors. Shostakovich quickly replied that five days was enough. Stalin did not like the answer. He apparently believed that long, painstaking work was needed. And the anthem was chosen by the general.

Stalin played cat and mouse with Shostakovich, just as he did with Bulgakov and Pasternak. In 1949, the leader needed the composer to travel to the USA as part of a group of cultural figures. The composer flatly refused. The leader himself called him: why are you refusing? Having heard the reference to health, he promised to send a doctor. Then Shostakovich said: why should I go when my music is banned? Literally the next day, a resolution appeared reprimanding the General Repertoire Committee and lifting the ban. At the direction of Stalin, Shostakovich was provided with a new large apartment, a winter dacha, a car and money in the amount of 100,000 rubles.

When, after Stalin’s death, the Decree of 1948 was completely repealed, Shostakovich, with his characteristic nervous humor, called Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya to come to him as soon as possible to drink vodka for the “great historical decree” on the abolition of the “great historical decree”.

Zoshchenko spoke of him as a man of deep internal conflict: yes, he is sincere, open, but at the same time tough, caustic, smart, strong, despotic, very contradictory, but only contradictions give birth to a great artist. Was it folded in the dorm?

For me no. He was different with different people. As for the internal conflict, the director came to me: what image of Leningrad should he choose in order to convey the character of Dmitry Dmitrievich. I would say that not only Dmitry Dmitrievich, but all of us lived in the wind, in Leningrad there are such piercing winds, they don’t seem to be strong, but they are very cold. Life is in the wind and, accordingly, tension. Leningrad generally shapes a person, Leningraders are a certain type. Even Putin is a typically Leningrad man in terms of showing emotions. And Dmitry Dmitrievich was still from St. Petersburg upbringing, this presupposes politeness, restraint, precision in behavior.

-Dmitry Dmitrievich asked about your life?

He knew. In outline. The ring tightened around Shostakovich himself. When, after the removal of the opera “Lady Macbeth” and the ballets “The Golden Age”, “Bolt” and “Bright Stream” from the repertoire, he was labeled an “enemy of the people”, there was only one step left before physical violence. The father-in-law was sent to a camp near Karaganda. The husband of Maria's elder sister, Baron Vsevolod Fredericks, was arrested. Maria was exiled to Central Asia.

Adrian Piotrovsky, who headed Lenfilm, summoned Shostakovich to his place and offered to write about his relationship with the arrested Marshal Tukhachevsky. It was on Saturday. “The most terrible thing was,” admitted Shostakovich, “that I still had to live through Sunday.” When he arrived on Monday, he saw a tear-stained secretary: Piotrovsky had been taken.

And on June 13, 1937, a message appeared in the press about the execution of Tukhachevsky, with whom Shostakovich was friends.

- Do you consider yourself a happy woman?

While he was alive - yes, of course. Very. He took everything upon himself.

- There is another version: that he was like a child.

No. He determined our lives - where we will go, where we will go, what we will do.

- How did he treat you? How to treat a friend, how to treat a younger one?

Like a part of yourself.

- So it was a very close union?

I think yes. There was such a solid foundation. The foundation is strong. No matter what happened, we knew we stood firm. Reliability in relationships. And there were many joys.

Having finished the stunning Eighth Quartet, he, in his characteristic darkly ironic manner, told a friend: “... he wrote a quartet that no one needed and was ideologically vicious. I thought that if I ever died, it would be unlikely that anyone would write a work dedicated to my memory. So I decided to write one myself. One could have written on the cover: “Dedicated to the memory of the author of this quartet”...

In fact, it’s terrible when in the last part there are two epitaphs, and one of them is for me. Here he sits, a lively, warm person, and writes this.

- He named the themes of the suite: Wisdom, Love, Creativity, Death, Immortality. Did he play it for you?

Played. And he showed dedication.

- How did you react?

I thanked him.

- I understand, but what about inside?

I was scared.

- I was thinking about one quality that is rarely found - sarcasm in music. Where did Shostakovich get this from?

Since his youth, Mitya loved Gogol, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Zoshchenko, this is the first. And secondly... I was once in Lado Gudiashvili’s apartment, his widow was showing drawings covered with a cloth, saying that she doesn’t show them to anyone. Then, when there were “historical resolutions,” Gudiashvili also went to these meetings. And when he returned home, he gave himself free rein to satirical drawings. For example, a beautiful woman is lying down, and men with knives are crawling all over her: they are destroying her beauty. All from terrible irritation. And Dmitry Dmitrievich composed “Anti-Formalistic Paradise” for the table, to take his breath away, he didn’t think that it would ever be performed.

In the introduction to the score, Opostolov is mentioned, under which is one of Shostakovich’s unscrupulous persecutors, musicologist-apparatchik (today they would say: political strategist) Pavel Apostolov. Music and life come together - as farce and as drama. June 21, 1969 in the Small Hall of the Conservatory - public listening to the extraordinary Fourteenth Symphony. Shostakovich, already very unwell, suddenly appears on stage to preface the performance with a few words. Including a quote from Ostrovsky, which sounded like this: “Life is given to us only once, which means we need to live it honestly and with dignity in all respects and never do anything that we would be ashamed of.” Shostakovich’s biographer describes what follows: “During this performance, a noise suddenly arose in the auditorium: a chalk-pale man left the hall... And when the words “Death is omnipotent” were heard in the last part. She’s on guard...”, in the corridor of the Conservatory lay only the remains of a man who, half an hour earlier, having gathered his last strength, managed to leave the hall. It was Pavel Apostolov.”

- How did Dmitry Dmitrievich leave?

He was ill for many years, but they could not find the source of the disease. They said it was something like chronic polio. They put me in the hospital. They stuffed me with vitamins and forced me to do physical exercise. Six months will pass - again. The right arm and right leg became weaker. Dmitry Dmitrievich suffered greatly because he could not play the piano. When they looked at him, he became nervous and moved worse. Two heart attacks. Then cancer. The tumor was in the mediastinum; they could not see it. For some time I gave him medicine on the roots of aconite, Solzhenitsyn advised, they made a tincture in Kyrgyzstan, and I asked Aitmatov to bring it. This does not cure, apparently, but it stops the development of the tumor. The famous radiologist Tager looked at the tomograms and said that everything was fine, there was nothing, I stopped giving the medicine, and very soon the doctors got together and said: oh, nothing can be done. He was at home, then in the hospital. When they said that everything was bad, I asked to be discharged. Then he felt bad and was taken away again.

- And how are you?

What am I? I stayed. When he was gone, I decided that I would probably live as if he existed, as if there were two of us, and I should figure out as much as possible what was best for him. Better in music, because that's the main thing for him.

- Don’t you want to write memoirs?

Don't want.

- Why?

He once said: if you write memories about me, I will appear from the other world. Who cares how we lived. They lived as best they could.

- Are you dreaming about him?

No. He said that the dead dream of a change in the weather. I had the same dream twice, as if I was in the Leningrad apartment of my childhood, it was dark outside the windows, the lights were on in all the rooms, the wind lifted the curtains, and there was no one.

Text prepared by Olga Kuchkina

DMITRY SHOSTAKOVICH: “LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL!”

The true scale of the composer Dmitry Shostakovich, widely known not only in Russia, but also beyond its borders, can only be defined by the words “great, talented.” The more talented a person is, the less behind all his achievements we notice the person himself. Critics and musicologists write long articles about what the composer wanted to show in one or another of his works. What emotions or experiences were seething in him while writing the work. But, by and large, these are just guesses. Behind the dry phrases: a talented composer, pianist, conductor and public figure, we lose the image of a person, and see only his outer, shabby outer shell. no exception to the rule...

Flowers

The composer's personal life is of interest to many biographers, musicians, art critics and numerous fans. It is curious that, having an amazing musical talent, the gift of a virtuoso pianist, having achieved fame and recognition, Dmitry Dmitrievich Shostakovich was very insecure and timid with women.

Shostakovich born in St. Petersburg in 1906 in the family of a chemist and pianist and from an early age became interested in playing the piano. Dmitry was a thin, dumb boy, but at the piano he was reborn into a daring musician.

At the age of 13, the young composer fell in love with 10-year-old Natalia Kube. The admirer dedicated a little foreplay to her. Then Dmitry it seemed that this feeling would remain with him for the rest of his life. However, his first love gradually faded away, but the composer’s desire to compose and dedicate his works to his beloved women remained throughout his life.

Berries

After studying at a private school, the young man entered the Petrograd Conservatory and successfully graduated in 1923. At the same time, a girl appeared in the life of the aspiring composer, with whom he fell in love with a new, already youthful passion. Tatyana Glivenko was the same age Shostakovich, good-looking, well-educated and had a lively and cheerful disposition. A romantic and long-term acquaintance began. In the year of his meeting with Tatyana, the impressionable Dmitry began to create the First Symphony.

Three years later, the premiere of this musical work took place in St. Petersburg, and many years later it spread all over the world. The depth of feelings that the young composer expressed in the symphony was also caused by the onset of illness Dmitry, which appeared as a result of sleepless nights, love experiences and severe depression developing against this background. Experiencing the most tender feelings for my beloved, Shostakovich I didn’t think about the upcoming marriage even after several years of dating.

The hidden passions of Dmitri Shostakovich

Tatyana wanted children and a legal husband. And one day she openly told Dmitry that she was leaving him, having accepted a marriage proposal from another admirer, whom she soon married.

The composer did not even try to stop the girl from such a decisive step, and then Tatyana chose to no longer maintain any relationship with him. But it was impossible to forget Tatyana: the composer continued to meet her on the street, write passionate letters, and talk about love to the wife of another man. Three years later, having finally plucked up courage, he asked Glivenko to leave her husband and become his wife, but she did not accept the offer Shostakovich seriously. In addition, she was already expecting a child at that time. In April 1932, Tatyana gave birth to a son and asked Shostakovich erase her from your life forever.

Having finally become convinced that his beloved would never return to him, in May of the same year the composer married a young student Nina Varzar. This woman had to spend with Dmitry Dmitrievich more than twenty years, to give birth to a daughter and a son to the composer, to survive her husband’s infidelities and his infatuation with other women, and to die before her adored husband.

After Nina's death Shostakovich married two more times: to Margarita Kayonova, with whom he lived for a short time, and to Irina Supinskaya, who surrounded her already aging husband with warmth and care, which remained in their family until the end of the life of the great Russian composer.

Shostakovich the musician

Matters of the heart did not interfere, but on the contrary always helped the composer to create. However, it is very difficult to intertwine the two branches of life, because in each of them he is both very different and the same. The same in achieving the goal, but the difference is that in relations with music Shostakovich was more decisive.

So, having graduated from the conservatory in piano and composition classes, Shostakovich As a thesis, he submitted the already well-known First Symphony. Dmitry was going to continue his career and both as a concert pianist and as a composer. In 1927, at the First International Piano Competition in Warsaw, he received an honorary diploma (the composer played a sonata of his own composition). Fortunately, the musician’s unusual talent was noticed by one of the competition jury members, the Austro-American conductor and composer Bruno Walter, who suggested Shostakovich play him something else on the piano. Upon hearing the First Symphony, Walter immediately asked Shostakovich send the score to him in Berlin, and then performed the Symphony in the current season, thereby making the Russian composer famous.

In 1927, two more significant events occurred in life Shostakovich. Meeting the Austrian composer Alban Berg inspired Dmitry Dmitrievich start writing according to Gogol. After one more meeting Shostakovich created his First Piano Concerto, now famous.

At the same time, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the next two symphonies were written Dmitry Shostakovich.

Persecution of Dmitry Shostakovich

The opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” was staged in Leningrad in 1934. Initially it was received with enthusiasm, but after a season and a half unexpectedly suffered defeat in the official Soviet press and was removed from the repertoire.

In 1936, the premiere of the 4th Symphony was to take place - a work of much more monumental scope than all previous symphonies Shostakovich. However, the composer wisely suspended rehearsals of the Symphony before the December premiere, realizing that in the atmosphere of state terror that had begun in the country, when representatives of the creative professions were arrested every day, its performance could be perceived by the authorities as a challenge. The 4th Symphony was first performed in 1961.

And in 1937 Shostakovich released the 5th Symphony. Pravda commented on the work with the phrase: “The Soviet artist’s business-like creative response to fair criticism.” Relations with the authorities improved for a while, but from that moment life Shostakovich has acquired a dual character.

And then there was a war...

While in Leningrad during the first months of the Great Patriotic War, Shostakovich begins work on the 7th symphony - “Leningrad”. It was first performed on the stage of the Kuibyshev Opera and Ballet Theater on March 5, 1942.

wearing a fireman's helmet on the cover of Time magazine in 1942

In 1943, the composer moved to Moscow and taught at the Moscow Conservatory until 1948. After the end of the war, the composer writes the 9th Symphony. Articles by perplexed reviewers appeared in the Soviet press, expecting a thunderous anthem to victory from the country's main musical "socialist realist", but instead received a small-sized symphony of "dubious" content.

After the thunder that first thundered in 1946 over a number of famous writers, in 1948 the Stalinist authorities began to “restore order” in the Union of Composers, accusing many masters of “formalism”, “bourgeois decadence” and “creeping before the West”. Shostakovich was accused of professional incompetence and expelled from the Moscow Conservatory. Once again the vocal cycle “From Jewish Folk Poetry” was created “at the wrong time,” and again the composer found himself under attack as “an accomplice of rootless cosmopolitans and enemies of the people.” The first violin concerto was hidden by the composer in connection with these events, and its first performance took place only in 1955.

As before, the situation is again saved by the timely release of the “correct” piece of music.

There is no end

It was on such waves that almost my entire creative life passed. Shostakovich. What happened next was forced joining the party and many other experiences and downs, but there were still more ups (in terms of the success of the composer’s works in his native country and abroad).

In the last few years of his life, the composer was very ill, suffering from lung cancer. died in Moscow in 1975 and was buried at the capital's Novodevichy cemetery.

Today Shostakovich- one of the most performed composers in the world in general, and the first among composers of the 20th century in particular. His creations are true expressions of the inner human drama and a chronicle of the terrible suffering that befell the 20th century, where the deeply personal is intertwined with the tragedy of humanity.

The most notable genres in creativity Shostakovich- symphonies and string quartets - in each of them he wrote 15 works. While symphonies were written throughout the composer's career, most quartets Shostakovich wrote towards the end of his life. Among the most popular symphonies are the Fifth and Eighth, among the quartets are the Eighth and Fifteenth.

son Maxim

In one of his letters to his mother he wrote: “Love is truly free. The vow taken before the altar is the most terrible aspect of religion. Love cannot last long... my goal will not be to tie myself to marriage.”

“I want listeners to leave the symphony with the thought: life is wonderful!” – .

Updated: April 14, 2019 by: Elena