The compositional style of Shostakovich can be difficult to tie down or neatly explain. His “chameleon-like” (Classic FM) compositional style encompasses many things, “[A] semantic minefield, laced with irony and punctuated with hollow triumphs trotted out to keep Stalin at bay.”

One staple of his work is his musical motto: DSCH. These four letters are borrowed from the German transliteration of his name: Dmitri SCHostakovich. In German notation, “S” means E-flat, and “H” means B natural, resulting in the eerie four-note sequence D - E-flat - C - B, found in works like String Quartet No. 8 and Symphony No. 10.

May 12, 1926 marks the “artistic birthday” of Shostakovich – the day his Symphony No. 1 was first performed and he became a new hero for Russian music. However, Shostakovich would experience a lifetime of artistic struggle with the government under which he tried to compose.

Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, mandated that composers create music that was overall positive and patriotic in nature in order to promote Russian patriotism and nationality. Dark motifs and moments were permitted as long as they were resolved or a triumph was declared by the end of the piece. This demand contradicted Shostakovich’s tendency to explore the personal, the complex, the ridiculous, and even the dark.

From 1927 to 1930 he composed Symphony No. 2 and Symphony No. 3, which contained “bombastic” choral endings, fitting into a young, revolutionary society. However, his 1930 opera The Nose was not. Instead, it was a harsh operatic fantasy, with avant-garde sounds filled with wry humor. The musical inventions contained within The Nose are described by Paul Griffiths as Shostakovich using his“gift of grotesque” for “satirical purpose.” This work was often criticized as being “bourgeois decadence.”

The follow-up opera, Lady MacBeth in Mtsensk District, was well-loved by audiences but ripped to shreds by Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party: “This bedlam of noise quacks, grunts, growls and suffocates itself in an orgy of depravity.” (More information about this article and its impact on Shostakovich can be found in the following section, Muddle Instead of Music.)

“Sometimes the struggle for a simple language is understood somewhat superficially,” Shostakovich said in a newspaper article in April 1935. “But to speak simply doesn’t mean that one should speak as they spoke 50 to 100 years ago. This is a trap that many [Russian] composers fall into.”

Shostakovich launched into composing the Modernist Symphony No. 4.  The work was scheduled to be performed, and had gone through several rehearsals, but with Shostakovich under a threat of arrest, he put the composition away, not to be premiered until 1961. In the meantime, he wrote Symphony No. 5, which bursts with triumphant energy through adversity. The aim was to please the demands of Stalinism while maintaining his own artistic vision and integrity.

Wanting to stay on the “right side” of the state, he wrote his First String Quartet, widening his breadth of scope and expression. He wrote fifteen quartets, his Symphony No. 6. Next he composed his well-known Symphony No. 7, the “Leningrad Symphony,” in which the ironic “grinding” motif went over Soviet officials’ heads. Written during the Siege of Leningrad, it became a symbol of wartime struggle. In 1940, he won the Stalin Prize for his piano quartet.

Following Symphony No. 8, in 1946 the neoclassical Symphony No. 9 was banned due to a “failure to reflect the spirit of the Soviet people.” Two years later, in 1948, Shostakovich was among the list of composers warned about their “decadent formalism” by Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s “propagandist-in-chief.” The composer offered an insincere official apology. In private, he continued to compose works that were more true to his vision, including the String Quartet No. 4 and the Violin Concerto No. 1, hidden away to be premiered at a later time.

In 1953, the strict musical edict was recanted in Pravda, allowing composers more expressive freedom. Shostakovich, in turn, composed Symphony No. 10, which was an “indictment of life under Stalinism.” His work became increasingly concerned with darkness and death, particularly after the passing of his wife Nina. In 1959 he composed his Cello Concerto No. 1 and in 1960, his String Quartet No. 8. In both pieces, Shostakovich further distorts the DSCH motif. Amongst these works, however, were some lighter works, including Piano Concerto No. 2.

In 1962, he was censored by authorities for his Symphony No. 13, which condemned Soviet anti-semitism. Four years later, he suffered a heart attack and as a result his work became more and more inconsolable, as heard in Symphony No. 14. His last finished work was his viola sonata.