Footage unearthed of actual Dmitri Shostakovich playing the piano

19 September 2024, 17:25

A video featuring the great composer at the keys has come to light, and his playing is as incredibly virtuosic and mind-blowingly fast as we had hoped.

A video has come to light, featuring the great composer Dmitri Shostakovich playing the piano.

The video, which was shared by Bastian Osis – who in turn cited pianist and musicologist Peter Laul as the video’s source – on Instagram, features Shostakovich playing an incredibly fast, and incredibly nimble rendition of his own piano arrangement of the opening of the third act of his his 1932 opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.

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The composer hammers frantically at the keys, which strike the piano to produce a nostalgically muffled sound, with a hint of untuned dissonance, and he remains exhilaratingly focused throughout the performance.

“I found a video of the ACTUAL Shostakovich playing piano”, the video’s caption reads. “I love how his playing has such a rudimentary and forceful nature. Just like his music.”

Not only is the video remarkable for capturing one of history’s most important 20th Century composers, but being from the earlier years of the 1900s, it’s rare in the fact it exists at all. Videos of classical composers – or anyone – in from those days are few and far between.

“Watching such influential composers play themselves never ceases to amaze me,” Osis, the author of the social media post, writes. “Makes me realise they were actual humans instead of these far away deities and there was an actual process… behind their pieces as well.”

Quite. Imagine if we could see Beethoven banging out his fiery symphonies on the piano; Mozart at the keyboard; the prodigious Fanny Mendelssohn… Just wonderful.

Read more: Rare footage of George Gershwin playing ‘I Got Rhythm’ on piano unearthed

Shostakovich plays Shostakovich: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, III act, Entracte

Born in 1906, Dmitri Shostakovich was a Russian composer and pianist, and one of the most celebrated composers of the 20th century.

His mother was a professional pianist and she started teaching her son the piano when he was nine. He entered Paris Conservatoire when he was 16, in 1919 when composer Alexander Glazunov was director of the institution.

Shostakovich produced his First Symphony when he was 19, but by 1936 he had upset the soviet establishment. In 1936, Joseph Stalin attended a performance of Shostakovich's operatic, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk – the same piece we hear in piano reduction in this video – and was angered by its lack of positivist flag-waving in favour of the state.

The composer was in and out of favour with the authorities, and never escaped the torture of soviet control, up until the very end of his life.