Dmitri Shostakovich
Waited on the landing at night with a packed suitcase so his family would not see him arrested
Dmitri Shostakovich was born in St Petersburg and was a student at its conservatory through the hunger of the civil war years, earning money by playing piano for silent films. His First Symphony, written as a graduation piece at nineteen, was played around the world within two years. He seemed to have an easy road ahead.
In January 1936 Stalin attended a performance of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, then two years into a successful run, and left before the end. Two days later Pravda published an unsigned editorial headed Muddle Instead of Music, calling the work crude and warning that things could end badly for the composer. In a country where the purges were beginning, it was close to a death sentence. He withdrew his Fourth Symphony during rehearsals, and friends and relatives began to disappear. For a period he slept in his clothes and waited on the landing by the lift at night with a small suitcase, so that when the secret police came his family would not have to watch.
The Fifth Symphony, in 1937, restored him to favour, and the Seventh, performed in besieged Leningrad in 1942, made him a wartime hero. In 1948 he was denounced again, sacked from his teaching posts and had his works banned. He wrote film scores to eat and put his string quartets in a drawer.
He was made to join the Party in 1960 and reportedly wept. He died in Moscow in 1975.