That same year the October Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power. Civil war broke out soon afterward. Petrograd, no longer the capital (Lenin had moved the government to Moscow), slowly emptied. Shostakovich's family remained loyal to the new regime and did not leave the city as did many of the intelligentsia. The country was in chaos. Money had virtually lost its value. Food was beyond price. Factories closed, transportation stopped. "In glorious poverty Petropol is dying," wrote the poet Osip Mandelstam.
In 1919, in the midst of this tumult, Shostakovich came to the Petrograd Conservatory, which still enjoyed its reputation as the best musical academy in the country. He was thirteen. The building had no heat. When classes were able to meet, the professors and students huddled in coats, hats, and gloves. Shostakovich was among the most persistent of the students. If his piano teacher, the famous Leonid Nikolayev, did not come to the conservatory, Mitya headed for his house.
The family's circumstances grew more and more harrowing. In early 1922 his father died, succumbing to pneumonia as a result of malnutrition. Sofia Vasilyevna was left with three children: Mitya, then sixteen; the elder daughter, Maria, nineteen; and the you�ger, Zoya, thirteen. They had nothing to live on. They sold the piano, but the rent was still unpaid. The two older children went to work. Mitya xxii
found a job playing piano in a cinema, accompanying silent films. Historians like to say that this hack work was "beneficial" to Shostakovich, but the composer thought back on it with revulsion. In addition, he grew ill. The diagnosis was tuberculosis, and the disease ravaged him for almost ten years.
Perhaps a different person would have been broken by this, but not Shostakovich. He was stubborn and tenacious. He had had faith in his genius from early childhood, ·even though he kept this conviction to himself. His work was primary. At all costs, he was determined to remain a top student.
The earliest portrait we have of Shostakovich (done in charcoal and sanguine by the distinguished Russian artist Boris Kustodiev) communicates this stubbornness and inner concentration. It shows another quality as well. In the portrait Shostakovich's gaze resembles the poetic description made by a friend of his youth: "I love the spring sky just after a storm. That's your eyes." Kustodiev called Shostakovich Florestan; But young though he was, Shostakovich thought the comparison too romantic. Craft was all. He placed his faith in it as a child and he depended on it all his life.*
The gifted young Shostakovich seemed then to be a faithful adherent of the reigning musical traditions of the Rimsky-Korsakov school of composition. Though Rimsky had died in 1908, the key positions at the conservatory continued to be held by his associates and students.
Shostakovich's teacher of composition was Maximilian Steinberg, Rimsky's son-in-law. Shostakovich's first musical triumph was a confirmation of his affinity for the "Petersburg School." He was nineteen when he wrote a symphony for his graduation. It was performed that same year (1925) by a leading orchestra under a top conductor at the Leningrad Philharmonic. Its success was instantaneous and wild; everyone liked the work, which was striking, temperamental, and masterfully orchestrated, and at the same time traditional and accessible.
Its reputation spread rapidly. In 1927 the symphony had its Berlin premiere under the baton of Bruno Walter, in 1928 it was conducted by Leopold Stokowski and Otto Klemperer, and in 1931 the First be-
*In his mature years he told a student who complained that he couldn't find a theme for the second movement of his symphony: "You shouldn't be looking for a theme; you should be writing the second movement.'.' As late as 1972, in a letter to me, he was still emphasizing the importance of musical craft.
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came part of the repertoire of Arturo Toscanini. The reaction was enthusiastic almost everywhere. Shostakovich was alluded to as one of the most talented musicians of the new generation.
Yet at this moment of triumph, Shostakovich shied away from a future as a derivative composer. He decided he did not want to become the "lady pleasing in all respects" of Gogol's Dead Souls. He burned many of his manuscripts, including an opera based on a long Pushkin poem and a ballet on a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, thinking them nothing more than scribbling. He was afraid that if he used academic techniques he would lose his "own selr' forever.
Despite the conservatory tradition, the 1920s were a time when
"left" �t predominated in the new Russia's cultural life. There were many reasons for this, and one of the primary ones was the readiness of the avant-garde to cooperate with Soviet power. (The most prominent representatives of traditional culture had left Russia, or were sabotaging the new regime, or were waiting things out.) For a time the leftists seemed to be setting the tone of cultural politics. They were given the opportunity to realize several daring projects.
Outside influences added to this trend. As soon as life had settled a bit after the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, new music came in from the West and was eagerly learned and performed. In the mid 1920s in Leningrad there was an interesting premiere almost every week: the compositions of Hindemith, Krenek, Les Six, and the "foreign" Russians....:..Prokofiev and Stravinsky. Prominent avant-garde composers, including Hindemith and Bartok, came to Leningrad, and played their works. Shostakovich was excited by this new music.
The prominent visiting musicians, like many others, were awed by stories of how generously this new progressive state supported the new arts. But, in truth, there are no miracles. It soon proved that the state patrons of the arts were willing to support only those works that contained propaganda. Shostakovich received an important commission: to write a symphony for the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. He fulfilled this commission successfully. "A Symphonic Dedication to October" (his name for the work), with a chorus to the bombastic verses of the Komsomol poet Alexander Bezymensky, marked (with a few other works) Shostakovich's switch to modernist techniques. The score has a xxiv
part for a factory whistle (though the composer notes that it can be replaced by a unison sounding of French horn, trumpet, and trombone).
Shostakovich wrote several other major commissioned works then.
They were all generally well received by the press. Influential figures in musical administration supported the talented young composer.
They were obviously preparing the vacant post of official composer for him.
But Shostakovich was in no hurry to fill the vacancy, even though he wanted success and recognition very badly-and financial security as well. By the late 1920s the honeymoon with the Soviet government was over for genuine artists. Power had come to behave as it always must: it demanded submission. In order to be in favor, to receive commissions and live peacefully, one had to get into state harness and plug away. For a while, as a young and aspiring artist, Shostakovich had gone along with the new patrons' preferences, but as he matured in his work, the simple-minded' demands of Soviet officialdom became more and more difficult for him to endure.