Word: shostakoviches
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...Izvestia, the Communist house organ which has often belabored him for "groveling before the West," Soviet Composer Dmitri Shostakovich obligingly picked his own "rogue's gallery of warmongers": Novelists John (Grapes of Wrath) Steinbeck and oldtime Socialist
...years Dmitri Shostakovich had been trying to "reconstruct" his composing to make his music fall more sweetly on the Kremlin ear. It seemed that was not enough. Last week he was told how fast he should compose. Complained the Soviet Composers Union in Pravda: Shostakovich had not worked hard enough to finish his new opera on the 1917 Russian Revolution, October. While comradely criticisms were being passed around, piped Pravda, the Composers Union had shown too much "complacency" about the whole matter itself...
Ever since Dmitri Shostakovich was clapped into the doghouse by his Kremlin masters two years ago (TIME, Feb. 23, 1948), he had been slowly nuzzling his way out. He had publicly recanted his "bourgeois formalism" and promised to do what was expected of him. Ten months later, he finally got a friendly pat and a few kind words from Izvestia and Pravda for his score for the movie Young Guard. Last week, he was the top Soviet composer once again. For his oratorio, Song...
Owlish, talented little Dmitri Shostakovich, who intimately knows that a Russian composer must sing in tune with the Communist Party's harmonic scheme, last week gave faithful praise to the blower of the U.S.S.R.'s biggest pitch pipe: Joseph Stalin himself...
...Wrote Shostakovich in the magazine Ogonek: "Many workers in the arts meet Stalin, and every one of them has been surprised by his immense understanding of art and the delicacy and depth of his wisdom and judgment." Stalin, he reported, had listened to many works entered in competition for a hymn of the Soviet Union, and "with surprising exactitude" put his finger on precisely what was wrong with each of them. "For composers," said Shostakovich, ". . . these meetings with the leader were a real school which left lifetime traces in their consciousness...