Word: shostakoviches
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...young man of 27, Dmitry Shostakovich treated the Soviet Union to a feast of sex, murder and dissonance in his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (revised in 1962 and retitled Katerina Ismailovd). At its first performance in 1934, Joseph Stalin loathed every note of it. He and the Communist Party denounced Shostakovich for his bourgeois musical tastes and, ever since, the composer has been sliding in and out of party favor. Too talented and far too famous to be squelched, he produced symphonies, ballets, choruses, chamber music. He alternately soothed the ultraconservative ears of the commissars with "music...
That part of the world which cared more about music than politics watched Shostakovich's career with concern. Left to his own devices, there was clear evidence that Shostakovich might develop into a great composer. But would he ever be given a chance...
Grumpy Greeting. Boldly Shostakovich chose to compose his 13th symphony, basing it on Babi Yar. The 60-minute composition had five movements. Utilizing a large male chorus and a baritone soloist, Shostakovich used the complete poem for his first movement, choosing other Evtushenko verses for the remaining four. The 1962 Moscow premiere was an unequivocal public success. Government reaction was a different matter. Pravda treated the symphony with near silence-a grumpy one-line sentence to the effect that the performance had taken place. There were no reviews. The composition was withdrawn for ideological repairs. With a few lines added...
...almost. A tape recording of the 1965 performance, brought out by Everest Records, reached the U.S. in 1967. The American Record Guide gave it a review, tracing the symphony's troubled background. As a result, Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13 developed a tiny but devoted flock of listeners. It was only this month, however, that the original version of the symphony finally received a full-scale performance outside the Soviet Union...
...Communist world was predictably condemnatory. In Moscow, a statement was signed by 24 Soviet intellectuals, including Composer Dmitri Shostakovich and Nobel Physicist Nikolai Semenov. The words chosen by these brilliant men were singularly shrill: "The U.S. military followed in the tracks of the Nazi criminals." In East Germany, about 50,000 youths gathered to protest the American presence in Viet Nam. The Peking press made do with reprinting the official Hanoi government line berating the U.S. for killing "suckling babies and disemboweling pregnant women...