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Author :
Release : 2016
Genre :
Kind : eBook
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Book Synopsis Shostakovich under Stalin's shadow by :
Download or read book Shostakovich under Stalin's shadow written by . This book was released on 2016. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Author : Solomon Volkov
Release : 2007-12-18
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 722/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis Shostakovich and Stalin by : Solomon Volkov
Download or read book Shostakovich and Stalin written by Solomon Volkov. This book was released on 2007-12-18. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Music illuminates a person and provides him with his last hope; even Stalin, a butcher, knew that.” So said the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose first compositions in the 1920s identified him as an avant-garde wunderkind. But that same singularity became a liability a decade later under the totalitarian rule of Stalin, with his unpredictable grounds for the persecution of artists. Solomon Volkov—who cowrote Shostakovich’s controversial 1979 memoir, Testimony—describes how this lethal uncertainty affected the composer’s life and work. Volkov, an authority on Soviet Russian culture, shows us the “holy fool” in Shostakovich: the truth speaker who dared to challenge the supreme powers. We see how Shostakovich struggled to remain faithful to himself in his music and how Stalin fueled that struggle: one minute banning his work, the next encouraging it. We see how some of Shostakovich’s contemporaries—Mandelstam, Bulgakov, and Pasternak among them—fell victim to Stalin’s manipulations and how Shostakovich barely avoided the same fate. And we see the psychological price he paid for what some perceived as self-serving aloofness and others saw as rightfully defended individuality. This is a revelatory account of the relationship between one of the twentieth century’s greatest composers and one of its most infamous tyrants.
Author : Laurel E. Fay
Release : 2021-06-08
Genre : Music
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 199/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis Shostakovich and His World by : Laurel E. Fay
Download or read book Shostakovich and His World written by Laurel E. Fay. This book was released on 2021-06-08. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) has a reputation as one of the leading composers of the twentieth century. But the story of his controversial role in history is still being told, and his full measure as a musician still being taken. This collection of essays goes far in expanding the traditional purview of Shostakovich's world, exploring the composer's creativity and art in terms of the expectations--historical, cultural, and political--that forged them. The collection contains documents that appear for the first time in English. Letters that young "Miti" wrote to his mother offer a glimpse into his dreams and ambitions at the outset of his career. Shostakovich's answers to a 1927 questionnaire reveal much about his formative tastes in the arts and the way he experienced the creative process. His previously unknown letters to Stalin shed new light on Shostakovich's position within the Soviet artistic elite. The essays delve into neglected aspects of Shostakovich's formidable legacy. Simon Morrison provides an in-depth examination of the choreography, costumes, décor, and music of his ballet The Bolt and Gerard McBurney of the musical references, parodies, and quotations in his operetta Moscow, Cheryomushki. David Fanning looks at Shostakovich's activities as a pedagogue and the mark they left on his students' and his own music. Peter J. Schmelz explores the composer's late-period adoption of twelve-tone writing in the context of the distinctively "Soviet" practice of serialism. Other contributors include Caryl Emerson, Christopher H. Gibbs, Levon Hakobian, Leonid Maximenkov, and Rosa Sadykhova. In a provocative concluding essay, Leon Botstein reflects on the different ways listeners approach the music of Shostakovich.
Author : Laurel E. Fay
Release : 2000
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 389/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis Shostakovich by : Laurel E. Fay
Download or read book Shostakovich written by Laurel E. Fay. This book was released on 2000. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an authoritative English-language biography of Dmitriy Shostakovich (1906-75), the internationally acclaimed composer who was the foremost musical 'voice' of Soviet Russia. It includes never-before-published details on the composer's life, works, and times. A detailed worklist, a glossary of names, an extensive bibliography, and pictures are also supplied.
Author : Julian Barnes
Release : 2016-05-10
Genre : Fiction
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 25X/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis The Noise of Time by : Julian Barnes
Download or read book The Noise of Time written by Julian Barnes. This book was released on 2016-05-10. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending comes an extraordinary fictional portrait of the relentlessly fascinating Russian musician and composer Dmitri Shostakovich and a stunning meditation on the meaning of art and its place in society. • “Brilliant…. As elegantly constructed as a concerto.” —NPR 1936: Dmitri Shostakovich, just thirty years old, reckons with the first of three conversations with power that will irrevocably shape his life. Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has suddenly denounced the young composer’s latest opera. Certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or, more likely, shot dead on the spot), Shostakovich reflects on his predicament, his personal history, his parents, his daughter—all of those hanging in the balance of his fate. And though a stroke of luck prevents him from becoming yet another casualty of the Great Terror, he will twice more be swept up by the forces of despotism: coerced into praising the Soviet state at a cultural conference in New York in 1948, and finally bullied into joining the Party in 1960. All the while, he is compelled to constantly weigh the specter of power against the integrity of his music.
