Youth Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was born on on Podolskaya Street in
Saint Petersburg, the
Russian Empire's capital. He was the second of three children born to Dmitri Boleslavovich Shostakovich and Sofiya Vasilievna Kokoulina. Shostakovich's immediate forebears came from
Siberia, but his paternal grandfather, , was of Polish and Lithuanian descent, tracing his family roots to the region of the town of
Vileyka in today's
Belarus. A Polish revolutionary in the
January Uprising of 1863–1864, Szostakowicz was exiled to
Narym 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 Narym in 1875 and studied physics and mathematics at
Saint Petersburg State 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 immigrant to the capital, Sofiya Vasilievna Kokoulina, one of six children born to a Siberian Russian.Shostakovich displayed musical talent after beginning piano lessons with his mother at the age of 9. 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 and Elena Rozanova, composition with
Maximilian Steinberg, and
counterpoint and
fugue with
Nikolay Sokolov, who became his friend. He also attended
Alexander Ossovsky's music history classes. In 1925, he enrolled in the conducting classes of
Nikolai Malko, where he conducted the conservatory orchestra in a private performance of
Beethoven's
First Symphony. According to the recollections of the composer's classmate, : Shostakovich stood at the podium, played with his hair and jacket cuffs, looked around at the hushed teenagers with instruments at the ready and raised the baton. ... He neither stopped the orchestra, nor made any remarks; he focused his entire attention on aspects of tempi and dynamics, which were very clearly displayed in his gestures. The contrasts between the "Adagio molto" of the introduction and "Allegro con brio" first theme were quite striking, as were those between the percussive accents of the chords (woodwinds, French horns, pizzicato strings) and the momentarily extended piano in the introduction following them. In the character given to the pattern of the first theme, I recall, there was both vigorous striving and lightness; in the bass part there was an emphasized pliancy of tenderly threaded articulation.... Moments of these sorts... were discoveries of an improvised order, born from an intuitively refined understanding of the character of a piece and the elements of musical imagery embedded in it. And the players enjoyed it. On 20 March 1925, Shostakovich's music was played in
Moscow for the first time, in a program that also included works by his friend
Vissarion Shebalin. To the composer's disappointment, the critics and public there received his music coolly. During his visit to Moscow, Mikhail Kvadri introduced him to
Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who helped the composer find accommodation and work there, and sent a driver to take him to a concert in "a very stylish automobile". Shostakovich's musical breakthrough was the
First Symphony, written as his graduation piece at the age of 19. Initially Shostakovich aspired to perform it only privately with the conservatory orchestra, and prepared to conduct the
scherzo himself. By late 1925, Malko had agreed to conduct its premiere with the
Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra after Steinberg and Shostakovich's friend
Boleslav Yavorsky brought the symphony to his attention. On 12 May 1926, Malko led the premiere of the symphony; the audience received it enthusiastically, demanding an encore of the scherzo. Thereafter, Shostakovich regularly celebrated the date of his symphonic debut.
Early career After graduation, Shostakovich embarked on a dual career as concert pianist and composer, but his dry keyboard style was often criticized. 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. Bogdanov-Berezhovsky later remembered: , 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. 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 27 January 1927. (He had his appendix removed on 25 April.) 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 in April 1927, Shostakovich said he was beginning to reassess those plans: 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 his 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 ... from
Bach to
Offenbach".
by Helikon Opera in 2014While 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 (RAPM). Its stage premiere on 18 January 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 initially 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 with his marriage led to a divorce in 1935, but the couple soon remarried when Nina became pregnant with their first child,
Galina.
First denunciation On 17 January 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 26 January, 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 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 28 January 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
Isaac 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 alright. 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 6 February 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 and 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. 1936 marked the beginning of the
Great Purge, in which many of Shostakovich's friends and relatives were imprisoned or killed. These included Tukhachevsky, executed 12 June 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, was executed; his mother-in-law, the astronomer , who was sent to a camp in
Karaganda and later released; his friend the Marxist writer
Galina Serebryakova, who spent 20 years in the
gulag; his uncle Maxim Kostrykin (died); and his colleagues
Boris Kornilov (executed) and
Adrian Piotrovsky (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, influenced by the music of
Mahler, and gave him problems as he attempted to reform his style. Despite the
Pravda articles, he continued to compose the symphony and planned a premiere at the end of 1936. Rehearsals began that December, but 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 20 July 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 recent works. Premiered on 21 November 1937 in Leningrad, it was a phenomenal success. The Fifth brought many to tears and welling emotions. Later, Shostakovich's disputed 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 the 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. 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, and 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. Shostakovich's most famous wartime contribution was his
Seventh Symphony. The composer wrote the first three movements in
Leningrad while it was under siege; he completed the work in Kuybyshev (now
Samara), where he and his family had been evacuated. According to a radio address he made on 17 September 1941, he continued work on the symphony to show his fellow citizens that everyone had a "soldier's duty" to ensure life went on. In another article written on 8 October, he wrote that the Seventh was a "symphony about our age, our people, our sacred war, and our victory". Shostakovich finished his Seventh Symphony on 27 December 1941. The symphony was premiered by the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra in Kuibyshev on 29 March 1942 and soon performed in London (June 1942) and the United States (July 1942), where several conductors vied to conduct its
first American performance. It was
performed in Leningrad in August 1942, while the city was still under siege. The city's orchestra had only 14 musicians left, which led conductor
Karl Eliasberg to reinforce it by recruiting anyone who could play an instrument. The Shostakovich family moved to Moscow in spring 1943, by which time the
Red Army was on the offensive. As a result, Soviet authorities and the international public were puzzled by the tragic tone of the
Eighth Symphony, which in the Western press had briefly acquired the nickname "
Stalingrad Symphony". The symphony was received tepidly in the Soviet Union and the West.
Olin Downes expressed his disappointment in the piece, but
Carlos Chávez, who had conducted the symphony's Mexican premiere, praised it highly. Shostakovich had expressed as early as 1943 his intention to cap his wartime trilogy of symphonies with a grandiose Ninth. On 16 January 1945, he announced to his students that he had begun work on its first movement the day before. In April, his friend
Isaac Glikman heard an extensive portion of the first movement, noting that it was "majestic in scale, in pathos, in its breathtaking motion". Shortly thereafter, Shostakovich ceased work on this version of the Ninth, which remained lost until musicologist Olga Digonskaya rediscovered it in December 2003. Shostakovich began to compose his actual, unrelated
Ninth Symphony in late July 1945; he completed it on 30 August. It was shorter and lighter in texture than its predecessors.
Gavriil Popov wrote that it was "splendid in its joie de vivre, gaiety, brilliance, and pungency!" By 1946 it was the subject of official 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 27 July 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, dedicated to the memory of Sollertinsky, with a Jewish-inspired finale. In 1947, Shostakovich was made a deputy to the
Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR.
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 RSFSR, 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 heaviest 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 last included the
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 Yuditsky, 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 composed 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 by [Shostakovich's] conspicuous silence" when her music faced criticism after her graduation from the Leningrad Conservatory. 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 1960 marked another turning point in Shostakovich's life: he joined the
Communist Party. The government wanted to appoint him Chairman of the RSFSR Union of Composers, but to hold that position he was required to obtain 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, and his free decision. On the one hand, the
apparat was 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. In 1960, he was appointed Chairman of the RSFSR Union of Composers; from 1962 until his death, he also served as a delegate in the
Supreme Soviet of the USSR. 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". 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 Isaac 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 conducted publicly for the only time in his life, leading 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. The symphony sets to music a number of poems by
Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the first of which memorializes the Jews massacred by Nazis at
Babi Yar 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 defence 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.
Later life In 1964, Shostakovich composed the music for the Russian film
Hamlet, which was favorably reviewed by
The New York Times: "But the lack of this aural stimulation—of Shakespeare's eloquent words—is recompensed in some measure by a splendid and stirring musical score by Dmitri Shostakovich. This has great dignity and depth, and at times an appropriate wildness or becoming levity". In later life Shostakovich suffered from chronic ill health, but he resisted giving up cigarettes and vodka. He also suffered heart attacks in 1966,1970,
reporter Don McMillan aboard the MS Mikhail Lermontov'', June 11, 1973|left
Death Beginning in 1958, Shostakovich experienced a decline in his motor functions. He was diagnosed with a rare form of
poliomyelitis, although according to his son,
Maxim, he was informed that it was
motor neurone disease. Nevertheless, Shostakovich insisted upon writing all his own correspondence and music, even when his right hand became virtually unusable. His last work was his
Viola Sonata, which was first performed officially on 1 October 1975. Shostakovich, a smoker since his youth, was forced to give up the habit after having his first heart attack in 1966. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1973. His death is variously attributed to lung cancer or heart failure.
Legacy Shostakovich left behind several recordings of his own piano works; other noted interpreters of his music include
Mstislav Rostropovich,
Tatiana Nikolayeva,
Maria Yudina,
David Oistrakh, and members of the
Beethoven Quartet. Shostakovich's influence on later composers outside the former Soviet Union has been relatively slight. His influence can be seen in some Nordic composers, such as
Lars-Erik Larsson. The
Shostakovich Peninsula on
Alexander Island, Antarctica, is named for him. == Music ==