Word: sovietism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This was the time of the destruction of Jewish cultural life in the Soviet Union and the arrest of leading Jewish intellectuals. A purge of the arts was under way that mortally threatened those writers and composers who had survived the Great Terror of the mid-'30s. In music the principal target was Shostakovich. Though laden with Stalin Prizes, he was now being termed the author of "un-Soviet, unwholesome, eccentric, tuneless" works. He knew what to do. In 1936 he had nearly lost his life after receiving a public "whipping" for an opera that had displeased Stalin. Following...
...called invasion theme, with its fearsomely swelling fortissimo, has nothing to do with the Nazi attack. "I was thinking of other enemies of humanity [namely Stalin and his killers] when 1 composed the theme." His Fifth Symphony, which established Shostakovich's reputation in the Soviet Union, was meant to describe Stalin's Great Terror of 1936-37. In the post-Stalin era, his Thirteenth Symphony was intended as a protest against antiSemitism, and his Fourteenth was an evocation of the horrors of the Gulag...
...composer-historian offers an unexampled picture of some 55 years of Soviet musical life. His tender and witty evocation of his teacher Alexander Glazunov constitutes one of the most affecting portraits of a composer in the literature of music. Shostakovich muses over the fates of his close friends, the director Vsevolod Meyerhold, the Red Army Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and others more obscure: composers, an organist, a musicologist. All died in the Gulag. "When I started going over the life stories of my friends and acquaintances," he told Volkov, "all I saw was corpses, mountains of corpses...
Perhaps the most moving passage mourns the extinction of folk music in the Soviet Union. Shostakovich tells a story about the blind folk singers, called lir-niki and banduristy, who from time immemorial had wandered along the roads of the Ukraine. In the mid-'30s, the singers were summoned to an official congress of folk music in the Ukraine. Several hundred in all assembled from all over the Ukraine, from tiny forgotten villages. Says Shostakovich: "It was a living museum, the country's living history. All its songs...
Shostakovich wrote the score for the superb Soviet film of Hamlet. It was one of his favorite plays, and there was a line of Hamlet's he particularly liked: "Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon...