Shostakovich - String Quartet No. 8 Mov. 1 and 2

September 25/Dmitri Shostakovich -- Born in St. Petersburg on this date in 1906, Dmitri Shostakovich was one of the most celebrated composers of the 20th century. He began his career as a child prodigy on the piano and began composing very early in life. His earliest great achievement as a composer was his first symphony written at the age of nineteen. He went on to write fifteen symphonies in total over the course of his long and, at times, quite difficult career. The continuous challenge for him throughout his life was trying to exercise artistic freedom under the severe restrictions of the communist government. He was forced (according to him) to sign his allegiance to the party, and asked to limit his individualism as a composer as it was counterproductive to the Soviet cause. Several newspaper articles were written in his name denouncing artistic individualism, which Shostakovich later stated had been planted by the authorities. He did his best to circumvent these limitations on his compositional output, and one method was through his use of musical codes -- pitch name messages, and sly employment of melodic quotations for example. One of his greatest works is the String Quartet Number 8, which Shostakovich treated as a subversively autobiographical piece and even snuck in an anagram for his name with the pitch names in the melodic theme. This is Dmitri Shostakovich's String Quartet Number 8, movement 1 and 2, as played by the Emerson String Quartet.