Early Life and Education
Dmitri Shostakovich was born in 1906 to Dmitri Boleslavovich Shostakovich and Sofiya Vasilievna Shostakovich. He was the second of three children. Politically, his family was generally liberal, with some conservative relatives.

It was clear as soon as Shostakovich began piano lessons, at the age of nine years old, that he was a musical prodigy. In addition to his technical abilities as a pianist, he was a gifted composer as a child. At the ripe age of twelve, he wrote a funeral march commemorating two recently deceased politicians.

Shostakovich was admitted to the Petrograd Conservatory, a school of music composition, at the age of thirteen. (Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov are two notable composers who are associated with the Petrograd Conservatory.) His education was concluded by his First Symphony, composed as a graduation piece in 1925.

Marriage and the Formation of a Family
Shostakovich married three times. The first was an open marriage to Nina Varzar, with whom he had two children: his daughter Galina was born in 1936; his son Maxim, 1938. He then married Margarita Kainova in 1956; however, they were not a compatible couple, and divorced three years later. His third marriage was to Irina Supinskaya in 1962. She was 27 at the time of the wedding.

Maxim Shostakovich took after his father musically; he trained as a pianist and eventually became a conductor. He was often the first to play his father's works for piano.