Word: shostakovich
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Composer Dmitri Shostakovich was in Dutch again with his Russian masters. Earlier in the year he had been in the dialectic doghouse, then let out when Pravda praised his "clear, realistic and emotionally powerful music" for the movie Young Guard (TIME, Oct. 25). Now it looked as if Dmitri was back where he started: after thinking it over, the Union of Soviet Composers called a special audition to listen carefully for possible bourgeois discords in his Young Guard music...
...Dmitri Shostakovich, cramped in his doghouse, heard good news last week. Perhaps his Soviet masters were ready...
...hundred thousand moviegoers packed into 20 Moscow theaters in four days to see the new film success, Young Guard, with music by Shostakovich. Seventeen theaters in Leningrad were also jammed with fans, anxious to see the dramatization of Alexander Fadeev's best selling novel about Russian partisan heroes. Though the music wasn't what drew most of the crowds, Shostakovich could read his press notices and see, with a practiced eye, just where he stood...
Give 'em what they understand; don't try to elevate them." Adds Jule: "You gotta write for the people . . . Art is great, sure . . . but who can sing Shostakovich...
...Stravinsky had never put another eighth note on paper, he would still have been a greater innovator than Jean Sibelius, now 82, and Richard Strauss, 84, both of whom barely got into the century musically. Prokofiev and Shostakovich are both deep in Stravinsky's debt. Only one other living composer seriously challenges him as a contemporary influence: dour, 73-year-old Arnold Schönberg, spiritual leader of the atonalists, whose theoretical contributions are great, though his output is small...