| has gloss | eng: The Sonata in D minor op.40 for Cello and Piano was one of Shostakovich’s early works, composed in 1934 just prior to his censure by Soviet authorities of his music, notably the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, that was deemed too bourgeois and decadent for the Soviet people. It was also a period of emotional turmoil in his life, as he had fallen in love with a young student at a Leningrad festival featuring his Lady Macbeth. Their affair resulted in a brief divorce from his wife Nina, and it was in August, during their period of separation, that he wrote the cello sonata, completing it within a few weeks and giving its premiere in Moscow on 25 December with his close friend the cellist Viktor Kubatsky its dedicatee. By the next Autumn Shostakovich and Nina had remarried, with her being pregnant with their daughter, who was born in 1936. |