in Myaskovsky's First Piano Sonata in D minor, Op. 6 (1907–10), described by Glenn Gould as "perhaps one of the most remarkable pieces of its time", and his Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Op. 15 of 1914, a turbulent and lugubrious work in two large movements. Myaskovsky graduated in 1911 and afterwards taught in Saint Petersburg, where he also developed a supplementary career as a penetrating musical critic. (He was one of the most intelligent and supportive advocates in Russia for the music of Igor Stravinsky, though the story that Stravinsky dedicated The Rite of Spring to Myaskovsky is untrue.) Called up during World War I, he was wounded and suffered shell-shock on the Austrian front, then worked on the naval fortifications at Tallinn. During this period he produced two diametrically opposed works, his Symphony No. 4 (Op. 17, in E minor) and his Symphony No. 5 (Op. 18, in D major). The next few years saw the violent death of his father, an ex-Tsarist general who was murdered by Red Army soldiers while waiting for a train in the winter of 1918–19, and the death of his aunt, to whom he was closely attached, in the winter of 1919–20. His brother-in-law, the husband of his sister Valentina Yakovlevna, had committed suicide before the War because of financial troubles. Myaskovsky himself served in the Red Army from 1917 to 1921; in the latter year he was appointed to the teaching staff of the Moscow Conservatory and membership of the Composers' Union. Thereafter he lived in Moscow, sharing an apartment with his widowed sister Valentina and her daughter. (He also had a married sister, Vera.) Middle years In the 1920s and 1930s Myaskovsky was the leading composer in the USSR dedicated to developing basically traditional, sonata-based forms. He wrote no operas—though in 1918 he planned one based on Dostoyevsky's novel The Idiot, with a libretto by Pierre Souvtchinsky; but he would eventually write a total of 27 symphonies (plus three sinfoniettas, two concertos, and works in other orchestral genres), 13 string quartets, 9 piano sonatas as well as many miniatures and vocal works. Through his devotion to these forms, and the fact that he always maintained a high standard of craftsmanship, he was sometimes referred to as 'the musical conscience of Moscow'. His continuing commitment to musical modernism was shown by the fact that along with Alexander Mosolov, Gavriil Popov