Quotes About Shostakovich

Real music is always revolutionary, for it cements the ranks of the people; it arouses them and leads them onward.

I planted some jokes in my wedding. Like, the organizers asked me to select music. So when I approached wife at the ceremony, they played the second movement from Shostakovich's 10th Symphony, which is usually known as the "portrait of Stalin." And then when we embraced, the music that they played was Schubert's "Death and the Maiden." I enjoyed this in a childish way! But marriage was all a nightmare and so on and so on.

Now I can't abide rudeness, even in so called great artists. Rudeness and cruelty are the qualities i hate most. Rudeness and cruelty are always connected, I feel. One example out of many is Stalin.

The Eighth [Quartet] is an autobiographical quartet, it quotes a song known to all Russians 'Exhausted by the hardships of prison'.

I know now, like drumbeats. Portentous, and a little sinister, like tympani strikes at the start of a gloomy symphony. Shostakovich, maybe.

The friendship of Shostakovich cast a brilliant light over my whole life and whose spiritual qualities captured my soul once and for all time.

I'm thankful to Deutsche Grammophon, our partners - we are going to record the complete Shostakovich symphonies and hopefully some other things as well.

When I was 20, Shostakovich was my favorite composer. I still find his Fifth Symphony wonderful, with its outstanding themes and rhythms. That's the piece that made me want to be a classical composer.

I love Shostakovich. We were good friends.

Cinnamon Girl" wasn't right for this day, for this time, for what was about to happen. If he were to have music, he thought, maybe Shostakovich, a few measures from the Lyric Waltz in Jazz Suite Number 2. Something sweet, yet pensive, with a taste of tragedy; Qatar was an intellectual, and he knew his music.

I was aware of Shostakovich's hidden code; the repeated, niggling act of subterfuge buried deep within the music: D - E-flat - C - B, played straight through, played backwards, flipped upside down; a tattoo on the soul of the music.

The friendship of Shostakovich cast a brilliant light over my whole life and whose spiritual qualities captured my soul once and for all time.

In 1948 the first severe crash occurred in my life when Stalin put out his decree on 'formalism.' There was a bulletin board in the Moscow Conservatory. They posted the decree, which said Shostakovich's compositions and Prokofiev's were no longer to be played.

I started with very tonal 19th-century music because I wanted to be a violinist as a child. So this was my first music, and then I was very much influenced by Stravinsky and Shostakovich in the 1950s. But I was starting to develop my own style.

There is no way to write a biography of Shostakovich without relying on hearsay and relaying the memories of people who have many private reasons to fabricate, mislead, and revise.

Shostakovich and another composer banged out trashy songs on the piano while people danced in the corridor.

This interpretation became popular many decades later, after the publication of Solomon Volkov's supposed memoirs of Shostakovich, Testimony. In that book, Volkov has Shostakovich say, The Seventh Symphony had been planned before the war and consequently it simply cannot be seen as a reaction to Hitler's attack.

There are several problems with this passage in the Volkov memoir, though. For one thing, only one page earlier, Volkov has Shostakovich say the opposite: "I wrote my Seventh Symphony, the 'Leningrad,' very quickly. I couldn't not write it. War was all around. . . .

A symphony is built not just by the composer, the conductor, and the musicians, but by the audience. The wartime audience heard the approach of the German Wehrmacht. A more recent post-Soviet audience wants to hear the cruel antics of Stalin and believe that Shostakovich was speaking in code.

So what were people getting so excited about? What was this symphony saying to them? We are still arguing about that a whole human lifetime later. Audiences are still trying to decipher the codes in Shostakovich's symphonies, trying to see under the masks he wore to the true face we expect to find beneath. "It's very difficult to speak through a mask," as the writer Viktor Shklovsky said, but "only a few can play themselves without it.

Except we don't know if Shostakovich actually meant what he said in this article. We don't even know if it was by him. Especially later in his life, the regime would send Shostakovich articles already written and tell him just to sign his name at the bottom.

As musicologist Richard Taruskin has said, "What made Shostakovich's music the secret diary of a nation was not only what he put into it, but what it allowed listeners to draw out.

In the light of recent scholarship, Shostakovich's anti-Stalinism no longer seems surprising or controversial, and was not unusual for the intelligentsia of Moscow and (in particular) Leningrad.

It meant different things to different people, but somehow it meant them all intensely. Shostakovich's words just confuse the issue. His symphony itself is what remains. Listen to it. It is your symphony to write with him.