Word: shostakovich
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...Shostakovich, music was indeed the last hope and final refuge of a man perpetually thwarted in the expression of his moral outrage. But the notion that his music's meaning could be made intelligible to Stalin, or to anyone else, was only a comforting illusion. Stalin, like all Russia's other tyrants, held an attitude toward the arts that was best summed up by a bureaucrat in a story by the 19th century satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin: "What I do not understand is dangerous for the state...
...composer-historian offers an unexampled picture of some 55 years of Soviet musical life. His tender and witty evocation of his teacher Alexander Glazunov constitutes one of the most affecting portraits of a composer in the literature of music. Shostakovich muses over the fates of his close friends, the director Vsevolod Meyerhold, the Red Army Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and others more obscure: composers, an organist, a musicologist. All died in the Gulag. "When I started going over the life stories of my friends and acquaintances," he told Volkov, "all I saw was corpses, mountains of corpses...
Perhaps the most moving passage mourns the extinction of folk music in the Soviet Union. Shostakovich tells a story about the blind folk singers, called lir-niki and banduristy, who from time immemorial had wandered along the roads of the Ukraine. In the mid-'30s, the singers were summoned to an official congress of folk music in the Ukraine. Several hundred in all assembled from all over the Ukraine, from tiny forgotten villages. Says Shostakovich: "It was a living museum, the country's living history. All its songs...
...Shostakovich answers: "Just like that, so that they wouldn't get un derfoot." The blind men's songs had not been passed by the censor. "Mighty deeds were being done there," he adds with fu rious sarcasm. "Complete collectivization was under way, they had destroyed ku laks as a class, and here were these blind men, walking around singing songs of dubious content." Shostakovich vows that some day, the people who were respon sible for this and similar "evil deeds" will be brought to account, if only before their descendants. "If I didn't believe in that...
...Shostakovich wrote the score for the superb Soviet film of Hamlet. It was one of his favorite plays, and there was a line of Hamlet's he particularly liked: "Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon...