Word: leningrader
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Last winter, as he listened to the roar of German artillery and watched the sputtering of German incendiaries from the roof of Leningrad's Conservatory of Music, Fire Warden Shostakovich snapped: "Here the muses speak together with the guns...
...Western Hemisphere its first chance to hear what Shostakovich's Marxist muse, now 25 years older, has to say in his Seventh Symphony,* his biggest, most ambitious orchestral work to date-the work that he wrote last year between tours of duty digging trenches in the outskirts of Leningrad and fire-watching on the roof of the Conservatory...
...this very musical amorphousness is expressive of the amorphous mass of Russia at war. Its themes are exultations, agonies. Death and suffering haunt it. But amid bombs bursting in Leningrad Shostakovich had also heard the chords of victory. In the symphony's last movement the triumphant brasses prophesy what Shostakovich describes as the "victory of light over darkness, of humanity over barbarism...
...Composer. Dmitri Shostakovich's father was an engineer. His mother, a student of the St. Petersburg (later Leningrad) Conservatory of Music, believed that children should never be taught music before the age of nine, otherwise they become pedantic. But Dmitri Shostakovich had other ideas...
...After one hearing he could and did sing long passages from the opera. Sometimes he would sit at the piano, strike a chord and lisp: "That's the stars." Sometimes he struck a treble note, said: "That's somebody looking out the window." At 13, he entered Leningrad Conservatory. At 19, he composed his First Symphony (one of the most popular) as part of his course...