Wednesday, March 16, 2022 – Dmitri Shostakovich
- Mary Reed
- Mar 17, 2022
- 19 min read
The photo is of the cover of the program from a Dallas Chamber Symphony concert I attended last night. The conductor did apologize saying that the all-Russian program was planned over a year ago without knowledge of current politics. It featured Nocturne from his String Quartet No. 2 by Alexander Borodin (1833-1887) plus two pieces by Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) — String Quartet No. 2 and String Quartet No. 10. Borodin was the illegitimate son of a Russian prince who earned a doctorate in chemistry and spent most of his adult life teaching it. But he also studied music broadly, and his Second String Quartet was begun and finished while on summer holiday in 1881. It was dedicated to his wife as a 20-year anniversary gift. Dmitri Shostakovich was one of the major composers of the 20th century. One of his most troubling and unusual works is his Eighth Quartet. He composed it in three days, while staying in East Germany and preparing to write the score for a film about the bombing of Dresden. Unbeknownst even to his close friends at this time, he had given in to pressure from Khrushchev’s government and agreed to join the Communist Party, something he had always resisted before and which, as he knew in advance, would be regarded as a betrayal by many friends and colleagues. To one friend he moodily observed that this quartet was essentially an obituary for himself. The Tenth Quartet was written in the early summer of 1964 at the creative retreat of Dilizhan in Armenia. It was dedicated to his friend the distinguished composer Moisey Vainberg. Like Shostakovich, Vainberg had written nine quartets so far and Shostakovich joked that he had won the race to get to No. 10 first. Let’s learn more about the genius that is Dmitri Shostakovich.
According to Wikipedia, Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was a Soviet-era Russian composer and pianist. He is regarded as one of the 20th century’s most popular composers.
Shostakovich achieved fame in the Soviet Union under the patronage of the Soviet chief of staff Mikhail Tukhachevsky, but later had a complex relationship with the government, from which he earned state awards and privileges. Throughout his life he participated in bureaucratic functions and delegations, including serving in the Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR in 1947 and the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union from 1962 until his death.
Shostakovich combined a variety of different musical techniques into his works. His music is characterized by sharp contrasts, elements of the grotesque and ambivalent tonality; he was also heavily influenced by the neoclassical style pioneered by Igor Stravinsky and especially in his symphonies by the late Romanticism of Gustav Mahler.
Shostakovich's orchestral works include 15 symphonies and six concerti. His chamber output includes 15 string quartets, a piano quintet, two piano trios and two pieces for string octet. His solo piano works include two sonatas, an early set of 24 preludes and a later set of 24 preludes and fugues. Other works include three completed operas, three ballets, several song cycles and a substantial quantity of music for theatre and film. Of the latter genre, the waltz from “The First Echelon” in an alternate arrangement as the "Waltz No. 2" for the “Suite for Variety Orchestra,” the suite of music extracted from “The Gadfly” and the theme from “Counterplan” are especially well known.
Youth
Born at Podolskaya Street in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Shostakovich was the second of three children of Dmitri Boleslavovich Shostakovich and Sofiya Vasilievna Kokoulina. Shostakovich's paternal grandfather — originally surnamed Szostakowicz — was of Polish Roman Catholic descent — his family roots trace to the region of the town of Vileyka in today's Belarus, but his immediate forebears came from Siberia. A Polish revolutionary in the January Uprising of 1863–64, Bolesław Szostakowicz was exiled to Narym — 432 km from Tomsk on the highway — in 1866 in the crackdown that followed Dmitry Karakozov's assassination attempt on Tsar Alexander II. When his term of exile ended, Szostakowicz decided to remain in Siberia. He eventually became a successful banker in Irkutsk and raised a large family. His son Dmitri Boleslavovich Shostakovich, the composer's father, was born in exile in Narim in 1875 and studied physics and mathematics at Saint Petersburg University, graduating in 1899. He then went to work as an engineer under Dmitri Mendeleev at the Bureau of Weights and Measures in Saint Petersburg. In 1903, he married another Siberian transplant to the capital, Sofiya Vasilievna Kokoulina, one of six children born to a Siberian Russian.
Their son, Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich, displayed significant musical talent after he began piano lessons with his mother at the age of nine. On several occasions, he displayed a remarkable ability to remember what his mother had played at the previous lesson and would get "caught in the act" of playing the previous lesson's music while pretending to read different music placed in front of him. In 1918, he wrote a funeral march in memory of two leaders of the Kadet party murdered by Bolshevik sailors.
In 1919, at age 13, Shostakovich was admitted to the Petrograd Conservatory — then headed by Alexander Glazunov — who monitored his progress closely and promoted him. Shostakovich studied piano with Leonid Nikolayev after a year in the class of Elena Rozanova, composition with Maximilian Steinberg and counterpoint and fugue with Nikolay Sokolov, with whom he became friends. He also attended Alexander Ossovsky's music history classes. In 1925, he enrolled in the conducting classes of Nikolai Malko.
On March 20, 1925, Shostakovich's music was played in Moscow for the first time, in a program which also included works by his friend Vissarion Shebalin. To the composer's disappointment, the critics and public there received his music coolly. While Shostakovich visited the Russian capital, Mikhail Kvadri introduced him to Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who helped the composer find accommodation and work in Moscow and sent a driver around in "a very stylish automobile" to take him to a concert.
His musical breakthrough was the "First Symphony," written as his graduation piece at the age of 19. At first, Shostakovich aspired only to perform it privately with the conservatory orchestra and prepared to conduct the scherzo himself. By late 1925, Steinberg and Shostakovich's friend Boleslav Yavorsky brought the symphony to Malko's attention, whereupon he agreed to conduct its premiere with the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra. On May 12, 1926, Malko premiered the symphony, which was received enthusiastically by the audience, who demanded an encore of the scherzo. Thereafter, Shostakovich would celebrate the date of his symphonic debut for the rest of his life.
Early career
After graduation, Shostakovich embarked on a dual career as concert pianist and composer, but his dry playing style was often remarked upon negatively. Shostakovich maintained a heavy performance schedule until 1930; after 1933, he performed only his own compositions. Along with Yuri Bryushkov, Grigory Ginzburg, Lev Oborin and Josif Shvarts, he was among the Soviet contestants in the inaugural I International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 1927. According to the later reminiscences of Valerian Bogdanov-Berezhovsky:
The self-discipline with which the young Shostakovich prepared for the 1927 [Chopin] Competition was astonishing. For three weeks, he locked himself away at home, practicing for hours at a time, having postponed his composing, and given up trips to the theatre and visits with friends. Even more startling was the result of this seclusion. Of course, prior to this time, he had played superbly and occasioned Glazunov's now famous glowing reports. But during those days, his pianism, sharply idiosyncratic and rhythmically impulsive, multi-timbered yet graphically defined, merged in its concentrated form.
Natan Perelman — who heard Shostakovich play his Chopin programs before he went to Warsaw — said that his "anti-sentimental" playing, which eschewed rubato and extreme dynamic contrasts, was unlike anything he had ever heard. Arnold Alschwang called Shostakovich's playing "profound and lacking any salon-like mannerisms."
Shostakovich was stricken with appendicitis on the opening day of the competition, but his condition improved by the time of his first performance on January 27, 1927. (He had his appendix removed on April 25.) According to Shostakovich, his playing found favor with the audience. He persisted into the final round of the competition but ultimately earned only a diploma, no prize; Oborin was declared the winner. Shostakovich was upset about the result but for a time resolved to continue a career as performer. While recovering from his appendectomy, Shostakovich said he was beginning to reassess those plans:
When I was well, I practiced the piano every day. I wanted to carry on like that until autumn and then decide. If I saw that I had not improved, I would quit the whole business. To be a pianist who is worse than Szpinalski, Etkin, Ginzburg and Bryushkov — it is commonly thought that I am worse than them — is not worth it.
After the competition, Shostakovich and Oborin spent a week in Berlin. There he met the conductor Bruno Walter, who was so impressed by Shostakovich's First Symphony that he conducted its first performance outside Russia later that year. Leopold Stokowski led the American premiere the next year in Philadelphia and also made the work's first recording.
In 1927, Shostakovich wrote his “Second Symphony” —subtitled “To October” — a patriotic piece with a pro-Soviet choral finale. Owing to its modernism, it did not meet with the same enthusiasm as the First. This year also marked the beginning of Shostakovich's close friendship with musicologist and theatre critic Ivan Sollertinsky, whom he had first met in 1921 through their mutual friends Lev Arnshtam and Lydia Zhukova. Shostakovich later said that Sollertinsky "taught [him] to understand and love such great masters as Brahms, Mahler and Bruckner" and that he instilled in him "an interest in music, as they say, from Bach to Offenbach."
While writing the “Second Symphony,” Shostakovich also began work on his satirical opera “The Nose,” based on the story by Nikolai Gogol. In June 1929, against the composer's wishes, the opera was given a concert performance; it was ferociously attacked by the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians. Its stage premiere on January 18, 1930, opened to generally poor reviews and widespread incomprehension among musicians.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Shostakovich worked at TRAM, a proletarian youth theatre. Although he did little work in this post, it shielded him from ideological attack. Much of this period was spent writing his opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” which was first performed in 1934. It was immediately successful, on both popular and official levels. It was described as "the result of the general success of Socialist construction, of the correct policy of the Party" and as an opera that "could have been written only by a Soviet composer brought up in the best tradition of Soviet culture."
Shostakovich married his first wife, Nina Varzar, in 1932. Difficulties led to a divorce in 1935, but the couple soon remarried when Nina became pregnant with their first child, Galina.
First denunciation
On January 17, 1936, Joseph Stalin paid a rare visit to the opera for a performance of a new work, “Quiet Flows the Don,” based on the novel by Mikhail Sholokhov, by the little-known composer Ivan Dzerzhinsky, who was called to Stalin's box at the end of the performance and told that his work had "considerable ideological-political value". On January 26, Stalin revisited the opera, accompanied by Vyacheslav Molotov, Andrei Zhdanov and Anastas Mikoyan, to hear “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.” He and his entourage left without speaking to anyone. Shostakovich had been forewarned by a friend that he should postpone a planned concert tour in Arkhangelsk in order to be present at that particular performance. Eyewitness accounts testify that Shostakovich was "white as a sheet" when he went to take his bow after the third act.
The next day, Shostakovich left for Arkhangelsk, where he heard on January 28 that Pravda had published an editorial titled "Muddle Instead of Music," complaining that the opera was a "deliberately dissonant, muddled stream of sounds...[that] quacks, hoots, pants and gasps." Shostakovich continued his performance tour as scheduled, with no disruptions. From Arkhangelsk, he instructed Isaak Glikman to subscribe to a clipping service. The editorial was the signal for a nationwide campaign, during which even Soviet music critics who had praised the opera were forced to recant in print, saying they "failed to detect the shortcomings of ‘Lady Macbeth’ as pointed out by Pravda. There was resistance from those who admired Shostakovich, including Sollertinsky, who turned up at a composers' meeting in Leningrad called to denounce the opera and praised it instead. Two other speakers supported him. When Shostakovich returned to Leningrad, he had a telephone call from the commander of the Leningrad Military District, who had been asked by Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky to make sure that he was all right. When the writer Isaac Babel was under arrest four years later, he told his interrogators that "it was common ground for us to proclaim the genius of the slighted Shostakovich."
On February 6, Shostakovich was again attacked in Pravda, this time for his light comic ballet ”The Limpid Stream,” which was denounced because "it jangles and expresses nothing" and did not give an accurate picture of peasant life on a collective farm. Fearful that he was about to be arrested, Shostakovich secured an appointment with the chairman of the USSR State Committee on Culture, Platon Kerzhentsev, who reported to Stalin and Molotov that he had instructed the composer to "reject formalist errors and in his art attain something that could be understood by the broad masses" and that Shostakovich had admitted being in the wrong and had asked for a meeting with Stalin, which was not granted.
The Pravda campaign against Shostakovich caused his commissions, concert appearances and performances of his music to decline markedly. His monthly earnings dropped from an average of as much as 12,000 rubles to as little as 2,000.
Shostakovich's “Fourth Symphony,” which had been scheduled to be premiered on December 11, 1936, was withdrawn and remained unperformed in its orchestral guise until 1961. “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” was also suppressed. In the mid-1950s, Shostakovich composed a revised version with a new title, “Katerina Izmailova,” which premiered on January 8, 1963. More widely, 1936 marked the beginning of the Great Terror, in which many of Shostakovich's friends and relatives were imprisoned or killed. These included Tukhachevsky, executed June 12, 1937; his brother-in-law Vsevolod Frederiks, who was eventually released but died before he returned home; his close friend Nikolai Zhilyayev, a musicologist who had taught Tukhachevsky; his mother-in-law, the astronomer Sofiya Mikhaylovna Varzar, who was sent to a camp in Karaganda; his friend the Marxist writer Galina Serebryakova, who spent 20 years in the gulag; his uncle Maxim Kostrykin who died; and his colleagues Boris Kornilov and Adrian Piotrovsky who were executed.
Shostakovich's daughter Galina was born during this period in 1936; his son Maxim was born two years later.
Withdrawal of the “Fourth Symphony”
The publication of the Pravda editorials coincided with the composition of Shostakovich's “Fourth Symphony.” The work continued a shift in his style, owing to the influence of Mahler. The symphony gave Shostakovich compositional trouble, as he attempted to reform his style into a new idiom. He was well into the work when the Pravda article appeared. He continued to compose the symphony and planned a premiere at the end of 1936. Rehearsals began that December, but after a number of rehearsals, Shostakovich decided to withdraw the symphony from performance. According to Isaac Glikman, who had attended the rehearsals with the composer, the manager of the Leningrad Philharmonic persuaded Shostakovich to withdraw the symphony. Shostakovich did not repudiate the work and retained its designation as his “Fourth Symphony.” A reduction for two pianos was performed and published in 1946, and the work was finally premiered in 1961.
In the months between the withdrawal of the “Fourth Symphony” and the completion of the “Fifth” on July 20, 1937, the only concert work Shostakovich composed was the “Four Romances on Texts by Pushkin.”
“Fifth Symphony” and return to favor
The composer's response to his denunciation was the “Fifth Symphony” of 1937, which was musically more conservative than his earlier works. Premiered on November 21, 1937 in Leningrad, it was a phenomenal success. The “Fifth” brought many to tears and welling emotions. Later, Shostakovich's purported memoir, “Testimony,” stated: "I'll never believe that a man who understood nothing could feel the Fifth Symphony. Of course they understood, they understood what was happening around them and they understood what the Fifth was about."
The success put Shostakovich in good standing once again. Music critics and authorities alike — including those who had earlier accused him of formalism — claimed that he had learned from his mistakes and become a true Soviet artist. In a newspaper article published under Shostakovich's name, the “Fifth” was characterized as "A Soviet artist's creative response to just criticism." The composer Dmitry Kabalevsky — who had been among those who disassociated themselves from Shostakovich when the Pravda article was published — praised the “Fifth” and congratulated Shostakovich for "not having given in to the seductive temptations of his previous 'erroneous' ways."
It was also at this time that Shostakovich composed the first of his string quartets. His chamber works allowed him to experiment and express ideas that would have been unacceptable in his more public symphonies. In September 1937, he began to teach composition at the Leningrad Conservatory, which provided some financial security.
Second World War
In 1939, before Soviet forces attempted to invade Finland, the Party Secretary of Leningrad Andrei Zhdanov commissioned a celebratory piece from Shostakovich, the “Suite on Finnish Themes,” to be performed as the marching bands of the Red Army paraded through Helsinki. The Winter War was a bitter experience for the Red Army; the parade never happened. Shostakovich never laid claim to the authorship of this work. It was not performed until 2001. After the outbreak of war between the Soviet Union and Germany in 1941, Shostakovich initially remained in Leningrad. He tried to enlist in the military but was turned away because of his poor eyesight. To compensate, he became a volunteer for the Leningrad Conservatory's firefighter brigade and delivered a radio broadcast to the Soviet people. The photograph for which he posed was published in newspapers throughout the country.
His most famous wartime contribution was the “Seventh Symphony.” The composer wrote the first three movements in Leningrad and completed the work in Kuybyshev — now Samara — where he and his family had been evacuated. It remains unclear whether Shostakovich really conceived the idea of the symphony with the siege of Leningrad in mind. It was officially claimed as a representation of the people of Leningrad's brave resistance to the German invaders and an authentic piece of patriotic art at a time when morale needed boosting. The symphony was first premiered by the Bolshoi Theatre orchestra in Kuibyshev and was soon performed abroad in London and the United States. It was subsequently performed in Leningrad while the city was still under siege. The orchestra had only 14 musicians left, so the conductor Karl Eliasberg was forced to recruit anyone who could play an instrument as reinforcements.
The family moved to Moscow in spring 1943. At the time of the “Eighth Symphony's” premiere, the tide had turned for the Red Army. As a consequence, the public — and most importantly the authorities — wanted another triumphant piece from the composer. Instead, they got the “Eighth Symphony,” perhaps the ultimate in sombre and violent expression in Shostakovich's output. To preserve Shostakovich's image — a vital bridge to the people of the Union and to the West, the government assigned the name "Stalingrad" to the symphony, giving it the appearance of mourning of the dead in the bloody Battle of Stalingrad. But the piece did not escape criticism. Its composer is reported to have said: "When the Eighth was performed, it was openly declared counter-revolutionary and anti-Soviet. They said, 'Why did Shostakovich write an optimistic symphony at the beginning of the war and a tragic one now? At the beginning, we were retreating and now we're attacking, destroying the Fascists. And Shostakovich is acting tragic, that means he's on the side of the Fascists.'" The work was unofficially but effectively banned until 1956.
The “Ninth Symphony” in 1945, in contrast, was much lighter in tone. Gavriil Popov wrote that it was "splendid in its joie de vivre, gaiety, brilliance, and pungency!" But by 1946, it too was the subject of criticism. Israel Nestyev asked whether it was the right time for "a light and amusing interlude between Shostakovich's significant creations, a temporary rejection of great, serious problems for the sake of playful, filigree-trimmed trifles." The New York World-Telegram of July 27, 1946 was similarly dismissive: "The Russian composer should not have expressed his feelings about the defeat of Nazism in such a childish manner." Shostakovich continued to compose chamber music, notably his “Second Piano Trio Op. 67,” dedicated to the memory of Sollertinsky, with a bittersweet, Jewish-themed totentanz finale. In 1947, the composer was made a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the Russia SFSR.
Second denunciation
In 1948, Shostakovich, along with many other composers, was again denounced for formalism in the Zhdanov decree. Andrei Zhdanov, chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Russia SFSR, accused the composers — including Sergei Prokofiev and Aram Khachaturian — of writing inappropriate and formalist music. This was part of an ongoing anti-formalism campaign intended to root out all Western compositional influence as well as any perceived "non-Russian" output. The conference resulted in the publication of the Central Committee's Decree "On V. Muradeli's opera ‘The Great Friendship,’" which targeted all Soviet composers and demanded that they write only "proletarian" music or music for the masses. The accused composers, including Shostakovich, were summoned to make public apologies in front of the committee. Most of Shostakovich's works were banned, and his family had privileges withdrawn. Yuri Lyubimov says that at this time "he waited for his arrest at night out on the landing by the lift, so that at least his family wouldn't be disturbed."
The decree's consequences for composers were harsh. Shostakovich was among those dismissed from the Conservatory altogether. For him, the loss of money was perhaps the largest blow. Others still in the Conservatory experienced an atmosphere thick with suspicion. No one wanted his work to be understood as formalist, so many resorted to accusing their colleagues of writing or performing anti-proletarian music.
During the next few years, Shostakovich composed three categories of work: film music to pay the rent, official works aimed at securing official rehabilitation and serious works "for the desk drawer." The latter included “Violin Concerto No. 1” and the song cycle “From Jewish Folk Poetry.” The cycle was written at a time when the postwar anti-Semitic campaign was already under way with widespread arrests, including that of Dobrushin and Yiditsky, the compilers of the book from which Shostakovich took his texts.
The restrictions on Shostakovich's music and living arrangements were eased in 1949, when Stalin decided that the Soviets needed to send artistic representatives to the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace in New York City, and that Shostakovich should be among them. For Shostakovich, it was a humiliating experience, culminating in a New York press conference where he was expected to read a prepared speech. Nicolas Nabokov, who was present in the audience, witnessed Shostakovich starting to read "in a nervous and shaky voice" before he had to break off "and the speech was continued in English by a suave radio baritone." Fully aware that Shostakovich was not free to speak his mind, Nabokov publicly asked him whether he supported the then recent denunciation of Stravinsky's music in the Soviet Union. A great admirer of Stravinsky who had been influenced by his music, Shostakovich had no alternative but to answer in the affirmative. Nabokov did not hesitate to write that this demonstrated that Shostakovich was "not a free man, but an obedient tool of his government." Shostakovich never forgave Nabokov for this public humiliation. That same year, he was obliged to compose the cantata “Song of the Forests,” which praised Stalin as the "great gardener."
Stalin's death in 1953 was the biggest step toward Shostakovich's rehabilitation as a creative artist, which was marked by his “Tenth Symphony.” It features a number of musical quotations and codes — notably the DSCH and Elmira motifs, Elmira Nazirova being a pianist and composer who had studied under Shostakovich in the year before his dismissal from the Moscow Conservatory, the meaning of which is still debated, while the savage second movement, according to “Testimony,” is intended as a musical portrait of Stalin. The “Tenth” ranks alongside the “Fifth” and “Seventh” as one of Shostakovich's most popular works. 1953 also saw a stream of premieres of the "desk drawer" works.
During the 1940s and 1950s, Shostakovich had close relationships with two of his pupils, Galina Ustvolskaya and Elmira Nazirova. In the background to all this remained Shostakovich's first, open marriage to Nina Varzar until her death in 1954. He taught Ustvolskaya from 1939 to 1941 and then from 1947 to 1948. The nature of their relationship is far from clear: Mstislav Rostropovich described it as "tender." Ustvolskaya rejected a proposal of marriage from him after Nina's death. Shostakovich's daughter, Galina, recalled her father consulting her and Maxim about the possibility of Ustvolskaya becoming their stepmother. Ustvolskaya's friend Viktor Suslin said that she had been "deeply disappointed" in Shostakovich by the time of her graduation in 1947. The relationship with Nazirova seems to have been one-sided, expressed largely in his letters to her, and can be dated to around 1953 to 1956. He married his second wife, Komsomol activist Margarita Kainova, in 1956; the couple proved ill-matched, and divorced five years later.
In 1954, Shostakovich wrote the “Festive Overture, opus 96;” it was used as the theme music for the 1980 Summer Olympics. His '"Theme from the film Pirogov, Opus 76a: Finale" was played as the cauldron was lit at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece.
In 1959, Shostakovich appeared on stage in Moscow at the end of a concert performance of his “Fifth Symphony,” congratulating Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra for their performance — part of a concert tour of the Soviet Union. Later that year, Bernstein and the Philharmonic recorded the symphony in Boston for Columbia Records.
Joining the Party
The year 1960 marked another turning point in Shostakovich's life: he joined the Communist Party. The government wanted to appoint him General Secretary of the Composers' Union, but to hold that position he was required to attain Party membership. It was understood that Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party from 1953 to 1964, was looking for support from the intelligentsia's leading ranks in an effort to create a better relationship with the Soviet Union's artists. This event has variously been interpreted as a show of commitment, a mark of cowardice, the result of political pressure or his free decision. On the one hand, the apparat was undoubtedly less repressive than it had been before Stalin's death. On the other, his son recalled that the event reduced Shostakovich to tears, and that he later told his wife Irina that he had been blackmailed. Lev Lebedinsky has said that the composer was suicidal. From 1962, he served as a delegate in the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Once he joined the Party, several articles he did not write denouncing individualism in music were published under his name in Pravda. By joining the party, Shostakovich also committed himself to finally writing the homage to Lenin that he had promised before.
His “Twelfth Symphony,” which portrays the Bolshevik Revolution and was completed in 1961, was dedicated to Lenin and called "The Year 1917." Around this time, his health began to deteriorate.
Shostakovich's musical response to these personal crises was the “Eighth String Quartet,” composed in only three days. He subtitled the piece "To the victims of fascism and war," ostensibly in memory of the Dresden fire bombing that took place in 1945. Yet like the “Tenth Symphony,” the quartet incorporates quotations from several of his past works and his musical monogram. Shostakovich confessed to his friend Isaak Glikman, "I started thinking that if some day I die, nobody is likely to write a work in memory of me, so I had better write one myself." Several of Shostakovich's colleagues — including Natalya Vovsi-Mikhoels and the cellist Valentin Berlinsky — were also aware of the “Eighth Quartet's” biographical intent. Peter J. Rabinowitz has also pointed to covert references to Richard Strauss's “Metamorphosen” in it.
In 1962, Shostakovich married for the third time, to Irina Supinskaya. In a letter to Glikman, he wrote, "her only defect is that she is 27 years old. In all other respects she is splendid: clever, cheerful, straightforward and very likeable." According to Galina Vishnevskaya, who knew the Shostakoviches well, this marriage was a very happy one: "It was with her that Dmitri Dmitriyevich finally came to know domestic peace... Surely, she prolonged his life by several years." In November, he made his only venture into conducting, conducting a couple of his own works in Gorky; otherwise he declined to conduct, citing nerves and ill health.
That year saw Shostakovich again turn to the subject of anti-Semitism in his “Thirteenth Symphony,” subtitled “Babi Yar.” The symphony sets a number of poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the first of which commemorates a massacre of Ukrainian Jews during the Second World War. Opinions are divided as to how great a risk this was: the poem had been published in Soviet media and was not banned, but it remained controversial. After the symphony's premiere, Yevtushenko was forced to add a stanza to his poem that said that Russians and Ukrainians had died alongside the Jews at Babi Yar.
In 1965, Shostakovich raised his voice in defense of poet Joseph Brodsky, who was sentenced to five years of exile and hard labor. Shostakovich co-signed protests with Yevtushenko, fellow Soviet artists Kornei Chukovsky, Anna Akhmatova, Samuil Marshak and the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. After the protests, the sentence was commuted, and Brodsky returned to Leningrad.