Born in 1906 as the middle child to a comfortable family in Saint Petersburg, Shostakovich was to grow up to a whirlwind of change in the society around him. His parents, Dmitri Boleslavovich and Sofia Vasiliyevna, were both Siberian Russian immigrants to the capital city.

Sofia Vasiliyevna began piano lessons with her only son when he was nine, and found that he displayed an extraordinary aptitude to playing and to music, particularly a keen memory for pieces he had past played. Four years later, at thirteen, he was admitted to the Petrograd Conservatory (now the Rimsky-Korsakov Saint Petersburg State Conservatory) under Alexander Glazunov.

Initial 1925 reception to his very first publicly played compositions in Moscow was lukewarm, but it found Shostakovich a patron in General Mikhail Nikolaiyevich Tukhachevsky. The General wanted him to write and perform out of Moscow, but Sofia Vasiliyevna wished for him to stay in Leningrad– and he tended to follow what his mother wished.

A nineteen-year-old Shostakovich would write his First Symphony for his graduation piece, and received enthusiastic and lauding praise for the work upon its premiere– this was the beginning of a soaring career that he would enjoy afterwards. He also continued the performance pianist aspect of his life, however his style with the black and white keys was not quite as admired as his skill with staff and pen. Musical scholar Arnold Alschwang called his playing "profound and lacking any salon-like mannerisms" for its perceived dryness, impulsivity, lack of performing flair.

Yes, Shostakovich would enjoy success starting with his First Symphony. As he explored his own sound, what he could do with music, modernism and experimentation, public reception to each new piece he published would fluctuate, but he remained largely well-praised.

This was until his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which premiered in 1934. Lady Macbeth would enjoy high and immediate success, praise coming from both the common audience and the critics who wrote in magazines and papers. A wild and emotional work about a woman who commits murder over a love affair she commits, it was described as "could have been written only by a Soviet composer brought up in the best tradition of Soviet culture."

Then came late January 1936, when Joseph Stalin paid a rare visit to the opera. He and those he came with left before the end of the play, and without a word. When Shostakovich came onstage to bow, he was as white as a sheet.

Within the next couple of days, Shostakovich found out that an editorial had been published in the official newspaper Pravda. It was called Muddle Instead of Music: On the Opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and dismissed the opera as something formalist and bourgois, calling it course, primitive, and vulgar. Most dangerously, however, it insinuated a possibility that the opera, and Shostakovich as a composer, was a part of a potential degeneration in the Soviet arts to the petty bourgois and "leftist distortion." It implied, potentially deadly for Shostakovich, that an attempt to undermine Soviet values was present and intentional. "It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly."

Indeed, this was very, very dangerous for Shostakovich. This article, anonymous but surely agreed with enough by Stalin to appear in Pravda marked his fall into denunciation, making it dangerous not only for him to make his music but for others, friends, family, jobs, associates, admirers, to associate with him in any positive way. This was the beginning of a long struggle by Shostakovich to reckon with and deal with the impossible perception of an authority that had a very narrow view of what art was art worth existing, what art progressed rather than degenerated, what artists could remain alive.

Shostakovich wasn't the only one suffering, of course. After all, 1936 was the beginning of Stalin's Great Terror.

While often tonal, Shostakovich's music stands out from a more approachable orchestral style with his use of atonality, chromaticism, and the grotesque to create a sense of tension and energy in his sound. He is also known for drawing quotation and inspiration from himself and others, along with a strong draw from klezmer in some of his works.

There is a definite style change within his works: before and after his denunciations, along with pieces larger and more public versus more intimate chamber works. His symphonies, being grand works that will go under greater scrutiny by the party, seem to have less of an honest rawness than his small string quartets. Before his denunciation in 1936, his music was more outwardly experimental in feel, textures, techniques, and structures. We do not have to wonder what precipitated his slant away from experimentation.

Shostakovich could make a lot out of very little, a powerful and unique texture out of a small chamber group or a solo; however, his orchestral works could be full and rich, not unlike Mahler or Mussorgsky, whom he admired. Later in his life, the texture of his pieces seems to grow more bare, strained, sparse. Deathly.

However, for all of his struggle, Shostakovich's music is not devoid of emotion. In fact, quite the opposite. To quote pianist Boris Giltburg: "Shostakovich had an incredible ability to take very basic, raw human emotions– maybe not nuanced, maybe not multi-layered, but something which everyone can feel very deeply: hope, fear, anger, love. And he knew how to encapsulate these feelings in notes and throw them at the listener with such force that we sometimes shake from the shock of the impact."