Influenced or even dictated by Stalin, the article severely criticised the opera for its "screaming, neurotic music", and warned that all this "could end very badly". Shostakovich's labours there, however, brought him far worse reversals of fortunes.Lady MacBeth opened in Leningrad in January 1934, under the name of its heroine, Katerina Izmailova. On Ulitsa Marata, off Nevsky Prospect, I look up at number nine. In an apartment in this building Shostakovich lived from 1914 to 1934, writing both his triumphant First Symphony, with which he made his name, and his opera Lady MacBeth of the Mtsensk District. The cellist Mstislav Rostropovich bought the apartment hoping to turn it into a museum to its former inhabitant's memory, but difficulties with the neighbours have interfered with the plan.

He became a member of the Supreme Soviet, and died laden with honours, including that of having an Antarctic peninsula named after him.But all was not what it seemed. Did the composer himself not accept the verdict of one critic, that his Fifth Symphony was "the practical creative answer of a Soviet artist to just criticism"?In the Khrushchev era, when the accusation of formalism against him was dropped, he accepted the position of First Secretary of the Russian division of the National Composers' Union. Later, his public comments were taken at face value as those of an artist who wholeheartedly accepted the guidelines laid down by the state. Inspired by this experience, he wrote one of his first compositions, "Funeral March in Memory of the Victims of the Revolution".Shostakovich's early works were deemed pleasing by the Soviet regime; his Second Symphony celebrated Red October, and the Third "the festive mood of peaceful reconstruction". He ran home to tell his parents, who were inclined to the Narodnik, or "peasant democracy", school of thought. Two months before Lenin's arrival, during the February rising in Petrograd, he saw a boy murdered by a Cossack with his sabre in the street.

Shostakovich himself later claimed not to be able to remember anything about that momentous evening at the station. "If I had been told what a luminary was arriving," he said, "I would have paid more attention." But he was aware of, and concerned with, revolutionary events. When Shostakovich died in 1975, obituaries in Western newspapers saw this as a major point in his life, fitting conveniently into their view that he was, as The Times put it, "a committed believer in Communism". But in this of all years, Shostakovich's story must be told again. And wherever you go in St Petersburg, the city speaks of the terrible fear under which he had to labour and the compromises he had to make in order to survive, as so many of his friends and contemporaries did not.On Vyborg Side, north-east of the centre, the Finland Station looks down to the River Neva. Here, 10-year-old Dmitry and his classmates from the Shidlovskaya Gymnasium watched Lenin arrive in a sealed car in April 1917.

"We want to play it for people who have never experienced classical music before," he says.The maestro, who will take up the position of chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra next year, thinks the symphonies should be heard free of their historical baggage. Today, it is the base of Valery Gergiev, who is conducting all 15 of Shostakovich's symphonies at the Barbican in London to commemorate the centenary of his birth. Gergiev hopes to bring Shostakovich's music to "millions of people, or if not then hundreds of thousands". Across the street is the Mariinsky Theatre, which has also regained its pre-revolutionary title, having being renamed the "Kirov" in 1935 after Sergei Kirov, the Communist party chief of Leningrad.Shostakovich told a tale about the Mariinksy to explain the bachelor status of his mentor; Glazunov never married, he said, because he had contracted venereal disease from a ballerina who worked there. The conservatory's name has changed several times in the 100 years since Shostakovich was born in St Petersburg, as has that of the city itself, first to Petrograd, then Leningrad, before reverting to its original name. The composer's feelings about the propagandist dross for which he was required to supply suitably heroic soundtracks were distinctly ambivalent But Stalin himself took control of these projects.