Word: shostakovich
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...both Russians and Americans, the supreme symbol of the Soviet Union at war was the "Leningrad" Symphony, Dmitri Shostakovich's Seventh. In 1942, when Arturo Toscanini and the NBC orchestra performed it on radio for the first time in America, the New York Times music critic remarked that "the ballyhoo has never been surpassed in history for the scope of the publicity and the distribution of the music." In the U.S.S.R., performances of the symphony were said to have exerted "a profound influence on the psyche of the Soviet people in the struggle against the Nazi invader...
...late '40s Shostakovich's symbolic value had accrued so dramatically that he was used to add luster to Generalissimo Joseph Stalin's postwar policies. In 1949 Shostakovich was dispatched to New York City as the star Soviet delegate to a Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, an event sponsored by such luminaries as Leonard Bernstein, Lillian Hellman and Charlie Chaplin. The conference was part of a vast Soviet-sponsored peace campaign that was conveniently distracting attention from Stalin's resumption of hostilities against his own people...
...destruction of Jewish cultural life in the Soviet Union and the arrest of leading Jewish intellectuals. A purge of the arts was under way that mortally threatened those writers and composers who had survived the Great Terror of the mid-'30s. In music the principal target was Shostakovich. Though laden with Stalin Prizes, he was now being termed the author of "un-Soviet, unwholesome, eccentric, tuneless" works. He knew what to do. In 1936 he had nearly lost his life after receiving a public "whipping" for an opera that had displeased Stalin. Following a Central Committee resolution condemning...
Seen close up at the Waldorf in the wake of these events, Shostakovich scarcely looked fit for his assigned role as Stalin's propagandist. He cut a surprisingly frail figure on the dais at the Starlight Roof, where he was seen to light cigarette after cigarette with trembling hands. His face was at the mercy of twitches and tics, his lips were drawn in an unconvincing smile. A translator read his speech for him; it attacked both U.S. warmongers and Igor Stravinsky, and praised the "unheard-of scope and level of development reached by musical culture in the U.S.S.R...
...planned in his head before the war; the so-called invasion theme, with its fearsomely swelling fortissimo, has nothing to do with the Nazi attack. "I was thinking of other enemies of humanity [namely Stalin and his killers] when 1 composed the theme." His Fifth Symphony, which established Shostakovich's reputation in the Soviet Union, was meant to describe Stalin's Great Terror of 1936-37. In the post-Stalin era, his Thirteenth Symphony was intended as a protest against antiSemitism, and his Fourteenth was an evocation of the horrors of the Gulag...