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Word: shostakoviches (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
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...death in 1975, Dmitri Shostakovich was regarded by many Western critics as the quintessential Communist Party musical apparatchik. The thin- lipped, bespectacled composer presented a bland face to the world, periodically bowing his head to the artistic dictates of Soviet authority and writing propagandistic tub thumpers to cloak his occasional forays into modernism. Or so it seemed...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Music: I Am the Enemy You Loved | 12/12/1988 | See Source »

With the 1979 publication of Testimony, the composer's memoirs secretly narrated to his friend, editor Solomon Volkov, a different picture emerged. This Shostakovich was a pragmatist, who learned to keep his head down after he was denounced in Pravda and saw his friends and colleagues persecuted and purged by Stalin during the Great Terror. This Shostakovich was a survivor, who saved his innermost feelings for his work. "Words are not my genre," he once said to Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose poem Babi Yar he set in the brutal Symphony No. 13. "I never lie in music...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Music: I Am the Enemy You Loved | 12/12/1988 | See Source »

...British director Tony Palmer's new film, Testimony, dramatizes the view that Shostakovich was a closet dissident who was bitterly resentful of the system that shackled him. In David Rudkin's elegant screenplay, Shostakovich (Ben Kingsley) negotiates his artistic salvation through public acquiescence, gratefully accepting his humiliation at a 1948 Soviet Composers' Union meeting and ritualistically denouncing Stravinsky at a conference the next year in New York City. Always he is haunted by the doom- laden specter of Stalin (Terence Rigby), who is seen thumbing through dossiers while sitting by the telephone, dispatching his opponents to their graves simply...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Music: I Am the Enemy You Loved | 12/12/1988 | See Source »

...pretense to literalism, preferring to relate the composer's spiritual odyssey through stark images. Shot mostly in gritty black and white, the film often turns phantasmagorical; near the end, the ghost of * Stalin appears to the dying composer and tells him, "I am the enemy you loved." For all Shostakovich's hatred of the dictator, Palmer seems to be saying, without Stalin there would have been no intimate, brooding string quartets, no enigmatic, valedictory Fifteenth Symphony. By giving Shostakovich something to hate and fear, Stalin turned him into a great composer. The symphonies dedicated to the state and the choral...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Music: I Am the Enemy You Loved | 12/12/1988 | See Source »

...surprising, given the hostility to innovation that has marked the long reign of conservative Composer Tikhon Khrennikov, 74, since 1948 the iron chancellor of the state Composers Union. The tough-minded, politically agile Stalinist, who was a point man for the infamous Resolution of 1948 that ripped Shostakovich and Prokofiev for modernism, Khrennikov brought a generation of composers to heel in the name of socialist realism...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Music: High Spirits, Dead Souls | 3/28/1988 | See Source »

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