Shostakovich met Tatyana Glivenko in 1923, when he was 16, while recuperating from tuberculosis at a Crimean sanatorium. His sister Mariya Shostakovich, who accompanied her brother on this trip, wrote home to their mother: “Mitya [Dmitri] has grown, got a suntan, is cheerful and has fallen in love. This is now clear to me. The girl in question is a bit strange, a flirt, and I don’t like her; but then it is hard to please your sister in such matters.” Upon his return to Leningrad, Shostakovich set about writing his First Piano Trio (or Poème, as he originally titled it), which he dedicated to Tatyana. The composer continued this long-distance relationship and thought about marrying her for about 10 years, until she married someone else and had children.

The composer was only 17 when he wrote the trio, and it bears the signs of a student work—the rambling form, the Romantic spirit mixed with chromatic moments and piano accompaniment that recalls Impressionism, the distinct influences of Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, and Glazunov. However, there are plenty of hints in the piece of the late Shostakovich we all know, hints that did not please all of his instructors. One of Shostakovich’s professors in the conservatory expressed his displeasure with the young composer’s “obsession with the Grotesque,” a comment that Shostakovich apparently took with some satisfaction.

The financial situation of the family had forced Dmitri to take a job as a pianist at a cinema, where he improvised a live piano score for the film showings. Perhaps this nighttime job influenced the form and surreal sudden changes of mood and texture of the First Piano Trio; we cannot know for sure. What we do know is that Shostakovich, together with a couple of friends, learned the piece by performing—or rather rehearsing—it, as an accompaniment to films.

In 1924, Shostakovich’s dissatisfaction with the limitations of the Leningrad Conservatory’s formal teaching methods became untenable, and he arranged an audition at the Moscow Conservatory, where he had found sympathetic musician friends. He performed some of his cello pieces and the piano trio with some colleagues who, in his own words, “played disgustingly…but the result was completely unexpected. [The school] decided to regard the Trio as my sonata-form piece, and immediately I was accepted on the free composition course.… In Leningrad they would never have accepted the Trio as my sonata-form test piece. What stupid formalists.”

—Milen Kirov