(Dimitri or Dmitri Shostakovich; Saint Petersburg, 1906 - Moscow, 1975) Soviet composer. His production encompasses all genres: opera, musical comedy, miniature symphony for piano, concertante music, cantata, string quartet and music for the cinema. A prolific author, he wrote a total of 147 opus numbers, many of them corresponding to works that today are among the most performed and recorded pages of the repertoire.

However, despite being considered, along with Prokofiev, the most representative composer of the former Soviet Union, his career was not easy: awards and decorations -among which were the State and Lenin Awards and the distinction of People's Artist of the USSR , alternated with heavy criticism from the Soviet goverment that honored him, under the accusation of performing anti-popular and excessively modern music. All of this left its mark on the style of his later compositions, characterized by a bitter and somber tone, as well as a rawness that contrasts with the jovial and carefree spirit of the former.

Born into a family in which culture played an important role, Shostakovich received his first musical lessons from his mother, a professional pianist, at a relatively late age, nine years. Faced with his great progress, in 1919 he entered the Leningrad Conservatory, where he had Aleksandr Glazunov as his main teacher. Fatherless since 1922, Shostakovich continued his studies at the same time that, to support his family, he played in various cinemas as an accompanying pianist.

The 1926 premiere of his astonishing Symphony No. 1, written on the occasion of his graduation from the conservatory, immediately attracted the attention of the musical world. The immediately subsequent works, such as the opera The Nose or the ballet The Golden Age, only confirmed the talent of a young composer especially gifted for satire.

Shostakovich's ascending career suffered an unexpected setback with the premiere in 1934 of his second opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: enthusiastically received by the public, both in Leningrad and in its subsequent staging in Moscow, it was withdrawn from the poster after the appearance of a criticism in the official Pravda newspaper, entitled Chaos instead of music, in which the composer was accused of having written a "howling concert", alien to the presuppositions of socialist music, which had to be clear and easily accessible.

Thus began a long and contradictory relationship with the Soviet goverment: while in the West he was considered the official Soviet composer, in his own country Shostakovich had to suffer the interference of his cultural authorities, despite which, and despite his apparent acceptance tacit of the precepts of socialist realism, he always managed to maintain his creative independence.

The premieres of the classic Symphony no. 5 and, above all, of the patriotic Symphony no. 7 "Leningrad", symbol of the struggle of the Russian people against the Nazi invader, rehabilitated a composer who in 1948 again saw the performance of his works prohibited under the stigma of formalism.

After Stalin's death in 1953, Shostakovich's music became more personal, and was translated into a long series of scores presided over by the idea of ​​death. This is the case of the last three symphonies and his string quartets, a genre that the composer turned into the ideal medium in which to express his concerns and fears in a private way, without the need to resort to masks or disguises. His music, especially that of these later years, has had a considerable influence on that of his younger compatriots, such as Alfred Schnittke or Edison Denisov, among others.

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This Friday 29th of october we are gonna watch an old movie The King of Comedy 1982 :joker-gaming: what if John Oliver was the Joker?,

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