The Study
The study, the largest room in the apartment, served as a place for home rehearsals and composing music. Here items, sheet music, books, manuscripts and papers were kept in meticulous order, just like Shostakovich’s daily routine.
Steinway & Sons cabinet grand piano, serial no. 351789, manufactured in 1955. Production: Hamburg - New York
Presented by M. L. Rostropovich on September 25, 1966, on the day of D. D. Shostakovich's 60th birthday.
A Blüthner grand piano, aliquot, professional. Leipzig, Germany, 1912.
The grand piano was bought by the composer in the second half of the 1930s in Leningrad, and was transported to a Moscow apartment in the late 1940s.
The peculiarity of Blütner's “aliquot” grand pianos is that they have additional fourth strings in the middle and high registers in addition to the usual standard triple choruses of strings. They are just above the three main treble strings and are tuned after tuning the main strings of the grand piano one octave above the main chorus strings.
D. D. Shostakovich appreciated this instrument for its deep rich timbre and “soft” keyboard.
The Working Desk.
Russia, 1900s. Pine, mahogany veneer, leather.
Acquired by Dmitri Shostakovich in 1930 for a fee from the production of the opera The Nose at the Leningrad MALEGOT (Small State Opera House), transported from the Leningrad apartment to Moscow. The desk was the main workplace for composing music - for almost forty years it always stood in Dmitry Dmitrievich's office.
Shostakovich adhered strictly to his habits and everyday “rituals” (such as going to the hairdresser’s every second Thursday of the month). His ability to compose music, his life’s main work, required order and a regular daily routine. “He had an insatiable need to create; he got bored, despondent and nervous if he had not been composing for a long time” (S. Khentova, Shostakovich in Moscow, Moscow, 1986, in Russian).
Perhaps that is why Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s study, which looked very much like his study in his previous apartment on Mozhaiskoye Shosse, remained essentially the same after moving into the new flat. “In this unfamiliar space, Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s study looked very like his studies on Pushkarskaya and Kirovskaya streets... Pianos? There was a large desk, which, according to family legend, was bought with the money he earned for the opera The Nose in the early 1930s” (B. Schwartz, Remembering Shostakovich, Kompozitor, St. Petersburg, 2006, in Russian). Dmitri Dmitriyevich valued the antique Blüthner, transported from Leningrad, for its mellow and augustly warm sound. A second grand piano, a baby Steinway, which Mstislav Rostropovich gave the composer on his 60th birthday in 1966, stands nearby. On the wall above the pianos is an extensive display of glass framed international diplomas and certificates, arranged by the composer’s son Maxim.