The Presidential Library will get the epoch-making music by Dmitry Shostakovich digitized

September 25, 2017, marks 111 years since the birth of Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich (1906-1975), a great Russian and Soviet composer, who was destined to become one of the most performed authors in the world and the creator of the musical symbol of the fortitude of our city — the Seventh (Leningrad) Symphony.

On the 75th anniversary of the first performance in the besieged Leningrad of the Seventh Symphony by Dmitry Shostakovich, the Presidential Library signed a cooperation agreement with the St. Petersburg Academic Philharmonic, which bears the composer’s name. As part of the agreement, on September 14, 2017, the performance of the Seventh Symphony (Leningrad Symphony) at the Great Hall of the St. Petersburg Academic Philharmonic was videotaped. The recording of the concert after processing by the specialists of the library will be handed out to the Philharmonic in the electronic format and at the same time will add to the Presidential Library stock. Besides, there is a program of the concert of The Seventh Symphony of Dmitry Shostakovich for August 9, 1942, on the Presidential Library website. This day the premiere of this work took place in the Leningrad Academic Philharmonic. An excerpt from an article by the writer Alexei Tolstoy is used as an epigraph in the program: “The seventh symphony originated from the conscience of the Russian people, who without hesitation accepted a mortal battle with the black forces. Written in Leningrad, it reached a masterpiece level of the world’s high art, understandable in all latitudes and meridians, because it tells the truth about a man in the time of his unprecedented calamitousness and an ordeal.”

…The Shostakovich family was musical both matrilineal and on the paternal side. Home concert evenings were often organized in their house. It is not surprising that Dmitry Shostakovich presented his debut work — a piano piece — at the age of nine. And at the age of thirteen he enrolled the Petrograd Conservatory in a piano and a composition classes.

They spoke of him there as about an exceptionally gifted student. The director of the Conservatory A. K. Glazunov especially admired him, and subsequently, after the sudden death of Shostakovich's father, he obtained a personal scholarship for Dmitry. The family needed, and the fifteen-year-old genius found a job as a taper in a cinema, where he enjoyed the opportunity to improvise.

His first symphony, Dmitry Shostakovich composed at the age of 18, in 1926 it was performed on a large stage in Leningrad. And a few years later it was performed in the concert halls of America and Germany. It was an incredible for those times success.

Beginning in the 30s of the last century, the composer was looking for his own style and experimenting a lot, including in the field of avant-garde art. I tried my hand at everything: in the opera (“The Nose” and “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”), songs (“The Song about the Countermoveing”), music for cinema and theater, piano pieces, ballets (“Bolt”), symphonies (“Pervomayskaya”).

Contemporaries of the composer had been noticing an inexplicable attractiveness of this short man of plain appearance, who was also always incredibly shy. Everyone who ever wrote about Shostakovich pointed on his everyday inappropriateness and unpretentiousness to working conditions. He could write in almost any situation, without requesting silence or any other comfort.

Herbert Rappaport, film director of based on the operetta “Moscow, Cheryomushki” movie remembered: “I came to him in the evening at the “European” hotel. There were some guests over at his place. Shostakovich was writing something at the table, replying to the jokes. Everyone was having fun, but I was sad, because the hope of getting music for my movie was melting down. Shostakovich continued to write and to talk. I got up to leave. “Where are you going?” — Shostakovich asked, and handed out to me the notes, which he just had written down — there is some new fragments for Cheryomushki.”

However, Shostakovich's personal life and artistic way cannot be called straight and prosperous. In early 1936, his work falls under the wave of criticism. Stalin does not like operas and all these “incomprehensible” ballets of the composer. A devastating article “Confusion instead of Music” came out in Pravda in early 1936, where the opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District” was recognized anti-artistic and directed against the people, and the composer was accused of “extreme formalism,” “gross naturalism” and “melodic misery.” After the war, a new barrage of criticism came against him, accusing him of “bourgeois decadence” and “groveling before the West.” Shostakovich was deprived of the titles of professor of the Moscow and Leningrad Conservatoires and fired from them. Only 13 years later the composer was able to return to teaching work at the Leningrad Conservatory.

A world figure in music, People's Artist of the USSR, Hero of Socialist Labor, Lenin Prize and five Stalin Prizes Winner, Dmitry Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was repeatedly attacked for “formalism in music.” And only his all-conquering, highly valued at home and abroad talent helped him to rise again and again, and, overcoming all the contradictions of time and society, encouraged him to move on. Made him keep going and create.