Word: shostakovich
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...Seventh Symphony's proportions are heroic, most obviously so in the 27-minute first movement. The deceptively simple opening melody, suggestive of peace, work, hope, is interrupted by the theme of war, "senseless, implacable and brutal." For this martial theme Shostakovich resorts to a musical trick: the violins, tapping the backs of their bows, introduce a tune that might have come from a puppet show. This tiny drumming, at first almost inaudible, mounts and swells, is repeated twelve times in a continuous twelve-minute crescendo. The theme is not developed but simply grows in volume like Ravel...
...most of Shostakovich's later music, there are traces of Beethoven, Berlioz, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mahler, moderns like Poulenc and Busoni. The Seventh Symphony has been described by those who have already heard it as a modern Russian version of Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique. It has also been called a sound-track for a psychological documentary film on Russia today...
...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...
...Russian Revolution destroyed many things, but it did nothing to destroy this nationalist musical heritage. Shostakovich admits his debt to "The Five." But he is far too much of an eclectic to stay in the nationalist groove. He is also too much of a revolutionist. His Second Symphony he subtitled October (after the October Revolution). His Third Symphony he called...
...also nearly ruined Composer Shostakovich. At the height of the Purge, when Russian nerves were badly frayed and people were plopping into prison like turtles into a pond, Stalin decided to hear Lady Macbeth. He did not like it, walked out before it was over. Murder from boredom struck him as a bourgeois idea. Besides, Stalin's musical taste runs to simple, more tuneful things, zigzags between Beethoven's Eroica and Verdi's Rigoletto. Also, he had a seat directly above the brasses...