Shostakovich's Later Life
In March of 1949,
Stalin tried once more to woo Shostakovich by ‘asking’ that he attend the Cultural and
Scientific Conference for World Peace in New York as the leading Soviet artist
representative. At Stalin’s death in 1953, Shostakovich’s life made a turn for the
better and he was given more creative and physical freedom. Shostakovich’s Tenth
Symphony, was a musical look at the tyrannic autocrat and was performed
following Stalin's death. The Tenth contains a movement, the second, which is a
musical whirlwind of violent chords and chaos. This is how Shostakovich viewed the
life of Stalin. Shostakovich took
advantage of this newfound liberty to help his country politically by helping to freethose
imprisoned musicians and helping them to find jobs and homes.
Shostakovich's wife Nina died in 1957,
leaving him in his own isolated world. His children grew independent and he was
left alone. The Eleventh Symphony, written in 1957,
is “about the people, who have
stopped believing because the cup of evil has run over”(Testimony, 8), another political
message that the masses refused to hear, but it was also a message of sadness for the loss of his wife.
He withdrew from the spotlight, making no response when workers wrote
angry letters questioning his love of country or schoolchildren were taught to view
him as an enemy of Soviet art. Dmitri got married to Margarita Kainova soon after
Nina’s death, but the marriage was more for companionship than for love, and it
quickly ended in divorce.
He continued to compose, but composed his music
privately, letting his anger and frustration with the Soviet system come out in his
music. He wrote pieces that reflected the lack of sanity in the Stalinist regime and
also that condemned the growing anti-Semitic movement in Russia. 
In 1960,
Shostakovich joined the Communist Party so that he could receive the position of
first secretary of the ‘Russian’ Division of the National Composers Union. As Shostakovich got older, his music became
more introverted, more to satisfy himself than to educate the masses on the immorality
of the Stalinist tyranny.
His later music also has overtones of death, which shows
Shostakovich’s inner battle with his fear of death. “His music of this final period
expressed fear before death, a numbness, a search for a final sanctuary in the memory
of future men; explosions of impotent and heartbreaking anger. Sometimes Shostakovich
seemed most to fear that people would think he was repenting, asking for forgiveness.
He was a dying ‘underground man’”(Testimony, xli).
Dmitri progressively got weaker, never having that strong of a constitution to
start with, and began suffering from heart problems in 1966. His last years were spent
quietly composing, with his third wife, Irina Supinskaya there to help him with daily
tasks. When his right arm gave out, he learned to write with his left so that he could
continue composing. Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich, alternately enemy and
champion of the USSR, died in the Kremlin Hospital in Moscow on August 9th, 1975.
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