Cello Sonata and Piano in D minor, Op. 40

The Sonata for Cello and Piano in D minor, Op. 40, was one of Dmitri Shostakovich's early works, composed in 1934 just prior to the censure by Soviet authorities of his music, notably the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which 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, who was also the piece's dedicatee. By the next autumn Shostakovich and Nina had remarried, she being pregnant with their daughter, who was born in 1936.