Donald Macleod views Shostakovich through the prism of his string quartets - today, the 7th quartet, in memory of his wife Nina; and the 8th, in memory of himself.

After a long courtship, Dmitri and Nina Shostakovich had married in secret, in the face of opposition from both their mothers. It was a stormy relationship that quickly became an 'open' marriage, but it survived more than 20 years till Nina's sudden and unexpected death from cancer of the colon in December 1954. Shostakovich felt unequal to the task of bringing up two teenage children on his own, so he promptly set about finding a conjugal replacement. His first preference, Galina Ustvolskya, was a former composition student with whom he had become intimately involved; she turned him down. His second choice, a young woman called Margarita Kainova, accepted. Apparently the proposal was made by phone; perhaps nowadays he'd have sent a text. The marriage - which Shostakovich announced to his children after the event - failed within a few years. It probably didn't help that Margarita - who worked for the Soviet Youth Movement - appreciated neither Shostakovich's musical nor biological offspring. The year after the divorce, he wrote his ultra-concise, elliptical 7th String Quartet, to commemorate what would have been Nina's 50th birthday. Later the same year - 1960 - Shostakovich was staying in the spa town of Goerlitz, near Dresden, supposedly working on the score for a film by his friend Lev Arnshtam - Five Days, Five Nights. In the event, he made little headway with the film but was pitched headlong into a new quartet - his 8th - which he completed, in an extraordinarily concentrated burst of creative activity, in just three days. It's an explicitly autobiographical work that seems to have affected Shostakovich deeply. The tart filling in this quartet sandwich is his sardonic Satires, subtitled 'Pictures from the Past', to ensure that no-one could think the composer - who after years of resistance had finally, and with a colossal sense of self-disgust, joined the Communist Party - was intending to satirize the present state of Soviet society. Show less