Composed 1950-1

“I would describe this music as ugly…I see this as a formalist fugue…Are these the images of Soviet reality?” The speaker with the delicate ears was a secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, a position of power in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Shostakovich had just spent two evenings, in May 1951, playing his latest composition, the 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87, for a gathering of composers, functionaries and invited guests in the Union’s cramped recital hall. Now, Soviet officialdom, acting as a jury, savagely criticized the 140-minute work, motivated by political opportunism and—in the words of its unofficial dedicatee, the 27-year-old pianist Tatyana Nikolayeva—‘black envy.’

Just six months earlier, Shostakovich had received the Stalin Prize (First Class) and a generous financial award for two highly political works: a film score for The Fall of Berlin and the oratorio The Song of the Forests, which praised Stalin as “the great gardener” for his plans to reforest the Russian steppes. That same year, he was sent abroad as a Soviet delegate to conferences in New York and Warsaw, and in July 1950, he served as a juror at the Bach bicentennial celebrations in Leipzig. There, he heard Tatyana Nikolayeva perform a Bach recital, and a competition performance of the F-sharp minor Prelude and Fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I—a performance that helped her win first prize. Inspired, Shostakovich returned to Moscow and began composing a deeply personal homage to Bach. Over four months, from October 1950 to February 1951, he composed the 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87. Nikolayeva became his trusted confidante. “He would play them to me and ask what I thought,” she later recalled. “But I always had the feeling he knew exactly what he wanted, and he didn’t need approval.” She gave the full première in Leningrad in December 1952. The intellectual integrity—the work’s seriousness and artistic honesty—stand in sharp contrast to the propaganda-driven pieces that had earned the beleaguered composer the Stalin Prize.

“I regard Bach as a benevolent god,” Shostakovich once said. His Preludes and Fugues, like Bach’s, offer clarity through formal discipline. The 24 pieces are arranged in a sequence of ascending fifths, and their fugues vary widely in character—some rigorously structured, others more freely treated. Themes are inverted, stretched, fragmented, or embedded in dense harmonic textures. Despite their contrapuntal design, the works never feel academic. The cycle’s emotional breadth and introspective depth foreshadow the late string quartets and sonatas. As his friend Lev Lebedinsky observed, “The Preludes and Fugues are a kind of spiritual diary. In them, Shostakovich reveals his inner world more fully than in any other work.”