Dmitri Shostakovich

Shostakovich was officially denounced twice by Soviet authorities: first in a 1936 Pravda editorial titled "Muddle Instead of Music" attacking his opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk," and again in the 1948 Zhdanov Decree. During the Great Terror of 1937–38, he slept with a packed suitcase, expecting arrest at any time.

Premiered in November 1937 after his first denunciation, the Fifth Symphony carried the official subtitle "A Soviet Artist's Reply to Just Criticism." While the authorities accepted it as a penitent re-endorsement of socialist realism, many listeners—including the audience at the premiere, who wept during the Largo—heard it as an expression of suppressed grief and suffering under tyranny.

Shostakovich composed 15 symphonies and 15 string quartets, both of which are considered among the most significant cycles in 20th-century music. His final symphony, No. 15, was completed in 1971, and his last quartet, No. 15, dates from 1974.

Shostakovich began composing the Seventh Symphony before the Siege of Leningrad started and completed the first three movements while still in the city. He was evacuated in October 1941 and finished the symphony in Kuibyshev (now Samara), where it premiered in March 1942; a performance was later staged inside besieged Leningrad itself in August 1942, broadcast to German forces as an act of defiance.