Dmitry Shostakovich came from a music-loving family. Upon starting piano at age nine, he immediately displayed a level of innate talent, including perfect pitch, advanced sight-reading and, most important, a nearly “photographic” musical memory. At 13 he entered the Leningrad Conservatory, unsure whether he wanted to become a pianist or a composer. However, conditions were so dire in the struggling new Soviet regime that the slight, nearsighted prodigy suffered from anemia and malnutrition, despite special food rations for talented students.

Shostakovich’s outstanding composition teacher Maximilian Steinberg encouraged him and contributed to his meteoric rise to fame. It was for the graduation project for Steinberg’s composition class in December 1925 that Shostakovich composed his First Symphony. He had been working on it for a year and a half, but his efforts were continually interrupted when the death of his father and economic necessity forced him to earn money by accompanying silent films on the piano. Although the Symphony was technically a student work, it flew in the face of both the Russian academic tradition and the style established by the last generation of Russian masters, the “Mighty Five.”
The premiere in May 1926 by the Leningrad Philharmonic created a sensation; the Scherzo had to be encored. Conductor Bruno Walter shortly thereafter conducted the work in Berlin, and two years later Leopold Stokowski programmed it with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

With its combination of musical irony and intense pathos, the First Symphony foreshadows many of the composer’s subsequent works. Shostakovich himself called the music of the first two movements “Symphonie-grotesque,” poking fun at academic tradition. Later in his career, the “grotesque” elements would come to represent the repressive forces of Soviet politics, particularly the figure of Joseph Stalin. Even if his “hidden” musical symbolism was not recognized, his musical acerbity and dissonant harmony periodically got him into trouble with the Soviet authorities. With the third movement, Lento, however, the mood turns somber, and in the last movement – threatening and tragic. 

The question remains as to what it was about Shostakovich’s world at age 19 that contributed to the creation of such a personally prescient piece. Spurious reports of the ten-year-old Dmitry witnessing the brutal slaying of a child by a policeman at a workers’ demonstration made their way into the composer’s “official” biography. Yet, even if such a single incident cannot be verified, the boy certainly was witness – if even indirectly – to the human carnage of the early years of the Revolution, where lists of “Enemies of the People” who had been executed were plastered on billboards throughout Petrograd (later Leningrad). The melancholy oboe theme and trumpet fanfare in the third movement and, in the fourth, the mournful introduction with its bass drum “gunshots,” the solo violin and saxophone laments, the trumpet calls and the funereal timpani tattoo bear musical witness to a life of menace and deprivation. 

On the other hand, the composer, who later in life described in detail his extra-musical symbolism and coded language, never spoke of any political significance for his First Symphony. Perhaps the dismal finale merely reflected the young composer’s state of mind at the moment. He wrote in a letter:
“I am in a terrible mood. I cannot find a room in Moscow. I cannot find work...The horrid town of Moscow doesn’t want to nurture me in its cradle. Its teeming masses make a terrible impression on me...but nevertheless, I want to go there with all my soul. So there. Sometimes I just want to shout. To cry out in terror. Doubts and problems, all this darkness suffocate me. From sheer misery, I’ve started to compose the Finale of the Symphony – it’s turning out pretty gloomy…”

Whatever the extra-musical meaning embedded in the Symphony, it is clear that even at this early stage, Shostakovich’s musical language of despair was already well formed.