Testimony The Memoirs Of Dmitri Shostakovich

  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Testimony Dmitriĭ Dmitrievich Shostakovich, 2003 (Limelight). This is the powerful memoirs which an ailing Dmitri Shostakovich dictated to a young Russian musicologist, Solomon Volkov. When it was first published in 1979, it became an international bestseller. This 25th anniversary edition includes a new foreword by Vladimir Ashkenazy, as well as black-and-white photos. Testimony changed the perception of Shostakovich's life and work dramatically, and influenced innumerable performances of his music. New Grove Dictionary
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Testimony Dmitriĭ Dmitrievich Shostakovich, Solomon Volkov, 2005-07-01 With the composer's consent, the manuscript was smuggled out of Soviet Russia - but Shostakovich, fearing reprisals, stipulated that the book should not appear until after his death. Ever since its publication in 1979 it has been the subject of controversy, some suggesting that Volkov invented parts of it, but most affirming that it revealed a profoundly ambivalent Shostakovich which the world had never seen before - his life at once triumphant and tragic. Either way, it remains indispensable to an understanding of Shostakovich's life and work. Testimony is intense and fiercely ironic, both plain-spoken and outspoken.
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Testimony Дмитрий Дмитриевич Шостакович, 1984 A serious indictment of some 55 years of Soviet musical life as witnessed by a major Russian artist--Dmitri Shostakovich.
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Shostakovich and Stalin Solomon Volkov, 2007-12-18 “Music illuminates a person and provides him with his last hope; even Stalin, a butcher, knew that.” So said the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose first compositions in the 1920s identified him as an avant-garde wunderkind. But that same singularity became a liability a decade later under the totalitarian rule of Stalin, with his unpredictable grounds for the persecution of artists. Solomon Volkov—who cowrote Shostakovich’s controversial 1979 memoir, Testimony—describes how this lethal uncertainty affected the composer’s life and work. Volkov, an authority on Soviet Russian culture, shows us the “holy fool” in Shostakovich: the truth speaker who dared to challenge the supreme powers. We see how Shostakovich struggled to remain faithful to himself in his music and how Stalin fueled that struggle: one minute banning his work, the next encouraging it. We see how some of Shostakovich’s contemporaries—Mandelstam, Bulgakov, and Pasternak among them—fell victim to Stalin’s manipulations and how Shostakovich barely avoided the same fate. And we see the psychological price he paid for what some perceived as self-serving aloofness and others saw as rightfully defended individuality. This is a revelatory account of the relationship between one of the twentieth century’s greatest composers and one of its most infamous tyrants.
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: A Shostakovich Casebook Malcolm Hamrick Brown, 2020-06-30 A collection of writings analyzing the controversial 1979 posthumous memoirs of the great Russian composer at their significance. In 1979, the alleged memoirs of legendary composer Dmitry Shostakovich (1906–1975) were published as Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitry Shostakovich As Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov. Since its appearance, however, Testimony has been the focus of controversy in Shostakovich studies as doubts were raised concerning its authenticity and the role of its editor, Volkov, in creating the book. A Shostakovich Casebook presents twenty-five essays, interviews, newspaper articles, and reviews—many newly available since the collapse of the Soviet Union—that review the “case” of Shostakovich. In addition to authoritatively reassessing Testimony’s genesis and reception, the authors in this book address issues of political influence on musical creativity and the role of the artist within a totalitarian society. Internationally known contributors include Richard Taruskin, Laurel E. Fay, and Irina Antonovna Shostakovich, the composer’s widow. This volume combines a balanced reconsideration of the Testimony controversy with an examination of what the controversy signifies for all music historians, performers, and thoughtful listeners. Praise for A Shostakovich Casebook “A major event . . . This Casebook is not only about Volkov’s Testimony, it is about music old and new in the 20th century, about the cultural legacy of one of that century’s most extravagant social experiments, and what we have to learn from them, not only what they ought to learn from us.” —Caryl Emerson, Princeton University
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Shostakovich Reconsidered Allan Benedict Ho, Dmitry Feofanov, 1998-01-01 Establishes beyond any doubt the enormous courage of one of the giants of the age
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Testimony Dmitry SHOSTAKOVICH, 1979
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Shostakovich Laurel E. Fay, 2000 For this biography the author has used many primary documents; Shostakovich's many letters, concert programmes, newspaper articles and diaries of his contemporaries. Showing his life as an example of the paradoxes of living as an artist in Russia.
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Dmitry Shostakovich Pauline Fairclough, 2019-09-15 Dmitry Shostakovich was one of the most successful composers of the twentieth century—a musician who adapted as no other to the unique pressures of his age. By turns vilified and feted by Stalin during the Great Purge, Shostakovich twice came close to succumbing to the whirlwind of political repression of his times and remained under political surveillance all his life, despite the many privileges and awards heaped upon him in old age. Through it all, Shostakovich showed a remarkable ability to work with, rather than against, prevailing ideological demands, and it was this quality that ensured both his survival and his musical posterity. Pauline Fairclough’s absorbing new biography offers a vivid portrait of Shostakovich. Featuring quotations from previously unpublished letters as well as rarely seen photographs, Fairclough’s book provides fresh insight into the music and life of a composer whose legacy, above all, was to have written some of the greatest and most cherished music of the last century.
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Testimony Dmitriĭ Dmitrievich Shostakovich, 1987
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: The New Shostakovich Ian MacDonald, 1990 What were Dmitri Shostakovich's views about his homeland? Until 1979 the Soviet Union's official composer was considered a staunch supporter of Joseph Stalin and his successors. This assumption was then challenged with the publication of Testimony, ostensibly the composer's memoirs as told to Solomon Volkov, in which Shostakovich emerged as a dissident. Serious reservations persist to this day about the integrity and validity of Testimony, but Volkov did reveal a new Shostakovich. Now, in the first important biographical work on Shostakovich to take Testimony into account, Ian MacDonald dispels some of the mystery surrounding the composer and his music. Declaring that Volkov painted a realistic picture of Dmitri Shostakovich: it just isn't a genuine one, MacDonald describes the ways in which the Soviet government used Shostakovich and other artists for propaganda purposes and examines the only authentic record of Shostakovich's personal and political beliefs that the composer left behind: his music. MacDonald argues that attempts to grasp the compositions of Shostakovich as pure music are doomed to failure because the composer's art can be understood only within the political-cultural framework of his time. Soviet institutions controlled artistic endeavors during Shostakovich's life, and he fought back through his compositions. Examining Shostakovich's music, MacDonald finds a sarcastic subterranean mind adopting ironic strategies designed to evade censorship. By looking anew at the life of Dmitri Shostakovich--and the nature of life in the pre-Gorbachev era--Ian MacDonald provides fresh insights into some of the greatest music of this century [Publisher description].
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Dmitri Shostakovich, Pianist Sofia Moshevich, 2004-03-19 She traces his musical roots, piano studies, repertoire, and concert career through his correspondence with family and friends and his own and his contemporaries' memoirs, using material never before available in English. This biographical narrative is interwoven with analyses of Shoshtakovich's piano and chamber works, demonstrating how he interpreted his own music. For the first time, Shoshtakovich's own recordings are used as primary sources to discover what made his playing unique and to dispel commonly held myths about his style of interpretation. His recorded performances are analysed in detail, specifically his tempos, phrasing, dynamics, pedal, and tonal production. Some unpublished variants of musical texts are included and examples of his interpretations are provided and compared to various editions of his published scores.
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Shostakovich Elizabeth Wilson, 1995 Shostakovich: A Life Remembered is a unique study of the great composer, drawn from the reminiscences and reflections of his contemporaries. Elizabeth Wilson sheds light on the composer's creative process and his working life in music, and examines the enormous and enduring influence that Shostakovich has had on Soviet musical life. 'The one indispensable book about the composer.' New York Times
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Testimony Dmitrij Dmitrievič Šostakovič, 1979
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich Pauline Fairclough, David Fanning, 2008-10-30 As the Soviet Union's foremost composer, Shostakovich's status in the West has always been problematic. Regarded by some as a collaborator, and by others as a symbol of moral resistance, both he and his music met with approval and condemnation in equal measure. The demise of the Communist state has, if anything, been accompanied by a bolstering of his reputation, but critical engagement with his multi-faceted achievements has been patchy. This Companion offers a starting point and a guide for readers who seek a fuller understanding of Shostakovich's place in the history of music. Bringing together an international team of scholars, the book brings research to bear on the full range of Shostakovich's musical output, addressing scholars, students and all those interested in this complex, iconic figure.
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Composing the Modern Subject: Four String Quartets by Dmitri Shostakovich Sarah Reichardt, 2017-07-05 Since the publication of Solomon Volkov's disputed memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, the composer and his music has been subject to heated debate concerning how the musical meaning of his works can be understood in relationship to the composer's life within the Soviet State. While much ink has been spilled, very little work has attempted to define how Shostakovich's music has remained so arresting not only to those within the Soviet culture, but also to Western audiences - even though such audiences are often largely ignorant of the compositional context or even the biography of the composer. This book offers a useful corrective: setting aside biographically grounded and traditional analytical modes of explication, Reichardt uncovers and explores the musical ambiguities of four of the composer‘s middle string quartets, especially those ambiguities located in moments of rupture within the musical structure. The music is constantly collapsing, reversing, inverting and denying its own structural imperatives. Reichardt argues that such confrontation of the musical language with itself, though perhaps interpretable as Shostakovich's own unique version of double-speak, also poignantly articulates the fractured state of a more general form of modern subjectivity. Reichardt employs the framework of Lacanian psychoanalysis to offer a cogent explanation of this connection between disruptive musical process and modern subjectivity. The ruptures of Shostakovich's music become symptoms of the pathologies at the core of modern subjectivity. These symptoms, in turn, relate to the Lacanian concept of the real, which is the empty kernel around which the modern subject constructs reality. This framework proves invaluable in developing a powerful, original hermeneutic understanding of the music. Read through the lens of the real, the riddles written into the quartets reveal the arbitrary and contingent state of the musical subject's constructed reality, reflecting pathologies ende
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Kirill Kondrashin Gregor Tassie, 2009-12-29 Kirill Kondrashin is regarded as one of the most brilliant Russian conductors of the 20th century and a great interpreter of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, and Mahler. In Kirill Kondrashin: His Life in Music, Gregor Tassie presents a full biography of the artist, from his humble background and early conducting experience at age 17, through his 20 years in Leningrad and at the Bolshoi Theatre; from his breaking with the Bolshoi and the expanded symphonic career that followed, through his defection in 1978, and his unexpected death of a heart attack in 1981. Using first hand accounts and previously unavailable archive materials from the Soviet Party and KGB sources, Tassie provides a detailed view of Kondrashin's life and work, including his appointment as the first Russian conductor to visit America and meet President Eisenhower and his associations with such artists as Emil Gilels, David Oistrakh, Mstislav Rostropovich, Van Cliburn, and Dmitri Shostakovich. The book also supplies insight and information on the nature of the society in which Kondrashin lived, including political life in the Soviet Union from the 1920s until the 1970s and relations between East and West. Twenty photos are included, as well as a full discography, bibliography, and index, making this a fascinating resource for anyone interested in 20th century music, as well as life in the USSR.
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Dmitry Shostakovich Composer D. Rabinovich, 2002-07-01 Dmitry Shostakovich has long been regarded as one of the leading modern composers, a reputation truly deserved. His talent is that of the bold explorer, the imaginative thinker, his individuality clear-cut and unmatched.His work covers practically every genre: operas and ballets, symphonies and concertos, orchestral suites and overtures, cantatas and oratorios, string quartets and chamber pieces with piano, incidental music for plays and films, popular songs and light music. His works exceed a hundred in number.
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Symphony for the City of the Dead M.T. Anderson, 2017-02-07 Originally published: Somerville, Massachusetts: Candlewick Press, 2015.
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Shostakovich, the Man and His Music Christopher Norris, 1982 This volume of essays by musicians, composers and critics embraces all his principal works, and discusses the historical circumstances and the political and cultural atmosphere of their composition. Among the contributors, Christopher Rowland and Alan George of the Fitzwilliam Quartet, whose recordings of Shostakovich's fifteen quartets have been widely praised, provide a unique, intimate guide to them, based on the Quartet's close personal collaboration with the composer. The pianist and composer Ronald Stephenson [Stevenson] writes on the piano music; Geoffrey Norris analyses the operas, discussing the libretti as well as the music and aspects of the production; Malcolm MacDonald concentrates on the vocal settings, focusing in particular on the late symphonies and song cycles; and Bernard Stevens discusses the influence of Shostakovich, particularly on British composers.
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Testimony Solomon Volkov, 1979
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Music for Silenced Voices Wendy Lesser, 2011-03-08 Most previous books about Dmitri Shostakovich have focused on either his symphonies and operas, or his relationship to the regime under which he lived, or both, since these large-scale works were the ones that attracted the interest and sometimes the condemnation of the Soviet authorities. Music for Silenced Voices looks at Shostakovich through the back door, as it were, of his fifteen quartets, the works which his widow characterized as a diary, the story of his soul. The silences and the voices were of many kinds, including the political silencing of adventurous writers, artists, and musicians during the Stalin era; the lost voices of Shostakovich's operas (a form he abandoned just before turning to string quartets); and the death-silenced voices of his close friends, to whom he dedicated many of these chamber works.Wendy Lesser has constructed a fascinating narrative in which the fifteen quartets, considered one at a time in chronological order, lead the reader through the personal, political, and professional events that shaped Shostakovich's singular, emblematic twentieth-century life. Weaving together interviews with the composer's friends, family, and colleagues, as well as conversations with present-day musicians who have played the quartets, Lesser sheds new light on the man and the musician. One of the very few books about Shostakovich that is aimed at a general rather than an academic audience, Music for Silenced Voices is a pleasure to read; at the same time, it is rigorously faithful to the known facts in this notoriously complicated life. It will fill readers with the desire to hear the quartets, which are among the most compelling and emotionally powerful monuments of the past century's music.
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Testimony Dmitrij Dmitrievič Šostakovič, Solomon Mojseevič Volkov, 1981
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Shostakovich in Context Rosamund Bartlett, 2000 This volume presents recent research into Dmitri Shostakovich's life (1906-1975) and work by leading British, American, Russian, and Israeli scholars. It is occasioned by the ever-growing interest in a composer whose significance in and for the history of twentieth-century music is, as Richard Taruskin has commented, immense, possibly unparalleled and above all, continuing. The authors of the thirteen articles are musicologists, Russian literature specialists, biographers, and cultural historians, whose diverse fields of expertise are reflected in the interdisciplinary nature of the materials collected here. The collection presents Shostakovich and his legacy in a variety of different contexts and its interdisciplinary nature will also serve to open up discussion. In this way, it breaks from previous tendencies to focus on the purely extrinsic qualities of the composers musical oeuvre, which has so often been interpreted in terms of autobiography. The chapters span the composer's entire career and contain substantial amounts of new information about Shostakovich and his musical legacy.
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: St. Petersburg Solomon Volkov, 1996 Solomon Volkov has written the definitive cultural biography of St. Petersburg. This book is a panorama of modern Russian history that puts St. Petersburg on the map alongside the other great centres of 20th century art, like Vienna, Paris & Berlin
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Leningrad: Siege and Symphony Brian Moynahan, 2014-10-14 The “gripping story” of a Nazi blockade, a Russian composer, and a ragtag band of musicians who fought to keep up a besieged city’s morale (The New York Times Book Review). For 872 days during World War II, the German Army encircled the city of Leningrad—modern-day St. Petersburg—in a military operation that would cripple the former capital and major Soviet industrial center. Palaces were looted and destroyed. Schools and hospitals were bombarded. Famine raged and millions died, soldiers and innocent civilians alike. Against the backdrop of this catastrophe, historian Brian Moynahan tells the story of Dmitri Shostakovich, whose Seventh Symphony was first performed during the siege and became a symbol of defiance in the face of fascist brutality. Titled “Leningrad” in honor of the city and its people, the work premiered on August 9, 1942—with musicians scrounged from frontline units and military bands, because only twenty of the orchestra’s hundred members had survived. With this compelling human story of art and culture surviving amid chaos and violence, Leningrad: Siege and Symphony “brings new depth and drama to a key historical moment” (Booklist, starred review), in “a narrative that is by turns painful, poignant and inspiring” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). “He reaches into the guts of the city to extract some humanity from the blood and darkness, and at its best Leningrad captures the heartbreak, agony and small salvations in both death and survival . . . Moynahan’s descriptions of the battlefield, which also draw from the diaries of the cold, lice-ridden, hungry combatants, are haunting.” —The Washington Post
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Conversations with Joseph Brodsky Solomon Volkov, 2002-01-15 Brodsky describes his post-Russian life in New York and reveals for the first time his active participation in one of the cold war's most noted cultural confrontations - the famous defection of the Bolshoi Ballet star Alexander Godunov. In this and all his tales recounted here, we meet a Brodsky his readers have not heard before, both contentious and gracious, breaking all the rules, never succumbing to the straitjacketing of literary or political cliques in New York or anywhere else. In these raw Russian conversations, superbly translated by Marian Schwartz, is the journey of a poet-hero around the world and through this century's most troubling and sensational times.
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: How Shostakovich Changed My Mind Stephen Johnson, 2019-05-14 A powerful look at the extraordinary healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness, including author Stephen Johnson's struggle with bipolar disorder. BBC music broadcaster Stephen Johnson explores the power of Shostakovich’s music during Stalin’s reign of terror, and writes of the extraordinary healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness. Johnson looks at neurological, psychotherapeutic and philosophical findings, and reflects on his own experience, where he believes Shostakovich’s music helped him survive the trials and assaults of bipolar disorder. There is no escapism, no false consolation in Shostakovich’s greatest music: this is some of the darkest, saddest, at times bitterest music ever composed. So why do so many feel grateful to Shostakovich for having created it—not just Russians, but westerners like Stephen Johnson, brought up in a very different, far safer kind of society? The book includes interviews with the members of the orchestra who performed Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony during the siege of that city.
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: I, Maya Plisetskaya Majâ Mihajlovna Pliseckaâ, 2001-01-01 Maya Plisetskaya rose to become a prima ballerina of Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet after an early life filled with tragedy. Here Plisetskaya reflects on her personal and professional odyssey presenting the life of a Soviet artist from the 1930s to 1990s.
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: The Rest Is Noise Alex Ross, 2007-10-16 Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Everyday Stalinism Sheila Fitzpatrick, 1999-03-04 Focusing on urban areas in the 1930s, this college professor illuminates the ways that Soviet city-dwellers coped with this world, examining such diverse activities as shopping, landing a job, and other acts.
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Shostakovich Studies David Fanning, 1995-11-09 These eleven essays lay a foundation for a proper understanding of Shostakovich's musical language and provide new insights into issues surrounding his composition.
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: A Shostakovich Casebook Malcolm Hamrick Brown, 2020-06-30 A collection of writings analyzing the controversial 1979 posthumous memoirs of the great Russian composer at their significance. In 1979, the alleged memoirs of legendary composer Dmitry Shostakovich (1906–1975) were published as Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitry Shostakovich As Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov. Since its appearance, however, Testimony has been the focus of controversy in Shostakovich studies as doubts were raised concerning its authenticity and the role of its editor, Volkov, in creating the book. A Shostakovich Casebook presents twenty-five essays, interviews, newspaper articles, and reviews—many newly available since the collapse of the Soviet Union—that review the “case” of Shostakovich. In addition to authoritatively reassessing Testimony’s genesis and reception, the authors in this book address issues of political influence on musical creativity and the role of the artist within a totalitarian society. Internationally known contributors include Richard Taruskin, Laurel E. Fay, and Irina Antonovna Shostakovich, the composer’s widow. This volume combines a balanced reconsideration of the Testimony controversy with an examination of what the controversy signifies for all music historians, performers, and thoughtful listeners. Praise for A Shostakovich Casebook “A major event . . . This Casebook is not only about Volkov’s Testimony, it is about music old and new in the 20th century, about the cultural legacy of one of that century’s most extravagant social experiments, and what we have to learn from them, not only what they ought to learn from us.” —Caryl Emerson, Princeton University
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: The Dancer Defects David Caute, 2003-09-04 The cultural Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West was without precedent. At the outset of this original and wide-ranging historical survey, David Caute establishes the nature of the extraordinary cultural competition set up post-1945 between Moscow, New York, London and Paris, with the most intimate frontier war staged in the city of Berlin. Using sources in four languages, the author of The Fellow-Travellers and The Great Fear explores the cultural Cold War as it rapidly penetrated theatre, film, classical music, popular music, ballet, painting and sculpture, as well as propaganda by exhibition. Major figures central to Cold War conflict in the theatre include Brecht, Miller, Sartre, Camus, Havel, Ionesco, Stoppard and Konstantin Simonov, whose inflammatory play, The Russian Question, occupies a chapter of its own based on original archival research. Leading film directors involved included Eisenstein, Romm, Chiarueli, Aleksandrov, Kazan, Tarkovsky and Wajda. In the field of music, the Soviet Union in the Zhdanov era vigorously condemned 'modernism', 'formalism', and the avant-garde. A chapter is devoted to the intriguing case of Dmitri Shostakovich, and the disputed authenticity of his 'autobiography' Testimony. Meanwhile in the West the Congress for Cultural Freedom was sponsoring the modernist composers most vehemently condemned by Soviet music critics; Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Hindemith among them. Despite constant attempts at repression, the Soviet Party was unable to check the appeal of jazz on the Voice of America, then rock music, to young Russians. Visits to the West by the Bolshoi and Kirov ballet companines, the pride of the USSR, were fraught with threats of cancellation and the danger of defection. Considering the case of Rudolf Nureyev, Caute pours cold water on overheated speculations about KGB plots to injure him and other defecting dancers. Turning to painting, where socialist realism prevailed in Russia, and the impressionist heritage was condemned, Caute explores the paradox of Picasso's membership of the French Communist Party. Re-assessing the extent of covert CIA patronage of abstract expressionism (Pollock, De Kooning), Caute finds that the CIA's role has been much exaggerated, likewise the dominance of the New York School. Caute challenges some recent, one-dimensional, American accounts of 'Cold War culture', which ignore not only the Soviet performance but virtually any cultural activity outside the USA. The West presented its cultural avant-garde as evidence of liberty, even through monochrome canvases and dodecaphonic music appealed only to a minority audience. Soviet artistic standards and teaching levels were exceptionally high, but the fear of freedom and innovation virtually guaranteed the moral defeat which accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union.
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: The Magical Chorus Solomon Volkov, 2009-03-10 From the reign of Tsar Nicholas II to the brutal cult of Stalin to the ebullient, uncertain days of perestroika, nowhere has the inextricable relationship between politics and culture been more starkly illustrated than in twentieth-century Russia. In the first book to fully examine the intricate and often deadly interconnection between Russian rulers and Russian artists, cultural historian Solomon Volkov brings to life the experiences that inspired artists like Tolstoy, Stravinsky, Akhmatova, Nijinsky, Nabokov, and Eisenstein to create some of the greatest masterpieces of our time. Epic in scope and intimate in detail, The Magical Chorus is the definitive account of a remarkable era in Russia's complex cultural life.
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Shostakovich and His World Laurel E. Fay, 2021-06-08 Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) has a reputation as one of the leading composers of the twentieth century. But the story of his controversial role in history is still being told, and his full measure as a musician still being taken. This collection of essays goes far in expanding the traditional purview of Shostakovich's world, exploring the composer's creativity and art in terms of the expectations--historical, cultural, and political--that forged them. The collection contains documents that appear for the first time in English. Letters that young Miti wrote to his mother offer a glimpse into his dreams and ambitions at the outset of his career. Shostakovich's answers to a 1927 questionnaire reveal much about his formative tastes in the arts and the way he experienced the creative process. His previously unknown letters to Stalin shed new light on Shostakovich's position within the Soviet artistic elite. The essays delve into neglected aspects of Shostakovich's formidable legacy. Simon Morrison provides an in-depth examination of the choreography, costumes, décor, and music of his ballet The Bolt and Gerard McBurney of the musical references, parodies, and quotations in his operetta Moscow, Cheryomushki. David Fanning looks at Shostakovich's activities as a pedagogue and the mark they left on his students' and his own music. Peter J. Schmelz explores the composer's late-period adoption of twelve-tone writing in the context of the distinctively Soviet practice of serialism. Other contributors include Caryl Emerson, Christopher H. Gibbs, Levon Hakobian, Leonid Maximenkov, and Rosa Sadykhova. In a provocative concluding essay, Leon Botstein reflects on the different ways listeners approach the music of Shostakovich.
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Dvorak's Prophecy: And the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music Joseph Horowitz, 2021-11-23 A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 A provocative interpretation of why classical music in America stayed white—how it got to be that way and what can be done about it. In 1893 the composer Antonín Dvorák prophesied a “great and noble school” of American classical music based on the “negro melodies” he had excitedly discovered since arriving in the United States a year before. But while Black music would foster popular genres known the world over, it never gained a foothold in the concert hall. Black composers found few opportunities to have their works performed, and white composers mainly rejected Dvorák’s lead. Joseph Horowitz ranges throughout American cultural history, from Frederick Douglass and Huckleberry Finn to George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and the work of Ralph Ellison, searching for explanations. Challenging the standard narrative for American classical music fashioned by Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, he looks back to literary figures—Emerson, Melville, and Twain—to ponder how American music can connect with a “usable past.” The result is a new paradigm that makes room for Black composers, including Harry Burleigh, Nathaniel Dett, William Levi Dawson, and Florence Price, while giving increased prominence to Charles Ives and George Gershwin. Dvorák’s Prophecy arrives in the midst of an important conversation about race in America—a conversation that is taking place in music schools and concert halls as well as capitols and boardrooms. As George Shirley writes in his foreword to the book, “We have been left unprepared for the current cultural moment. [Joseph Horowitz] explains how we got there [and] proposes a bigger world of American classical music than what we have known before. It is more diverse and more equitable. And it is more truthful.”
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Tchaikovsky David Brown, 2010-12-22 This volume uniquely combines a lively biography of one of the best-loved composers of the nineteenth century with a detailed chronological guide to much of his oeuvre, from the most popular - Swan Lake or the 1812 Overture - to the lesser known pieces. David Brown enthusiastically and sensitively guides the reader through Tchaikovsky's music in the context of his life. His writing on the music is accessible and informative, both for the professional musician and the keen amateur listener. The biographical writing includes fascinating quotations from the composer's letters, and those of his friends; the Tchaikovsky that emerges is, despite his periodic struggle with depression, a man with a positive attitude to life, and a kind and supportive friend to many around him. This is essential reading for anyone with an interest in Tchaikovsky, his music, or the culture of the time. 'One of the finest one-volume biographies to have appeared in recent years, written with such insight that it feels as though one is on a hot-line to the composer himself . . . by the end I felt I knew Tchaikovsky so much better. A classic.' Classic FM Magazine 'I can't imagine a more intelligently sympathetic treatment of the man and his music.' BBC Music Magazine
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Testimony Dmitri Sjostakovitsj, 1979
  testimony the memoirs of dmitri shostakovich: Prokofiev by Prokofiev Sergey Prokofiev, 1979 Excerpts from Prokofiev's diaries, letters, and early compositions are contained in the world-famous Russian composer's account of his childhood in the Ukraine and musical training at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.
LDS Youth
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LDS Youth
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