Shostakovich

Shostakovich PDF Author: Elizabeth Wilson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571220502
Category : Composers
Languages : en
Pages : 631

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Book Description
This edition draws on many new writings about Shostakovich, providing both a more detailed and focused image of his life, and a wider view of his cultural background. A particular aspect of Shostakovich which is revealed is his sardonic and witty sense of humour, displayed in many of his letters to close friends.

Shostakovich

Shostakovich PDF Author: Elizabeth Wilson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571220502
Category : Composers
Languages : en
Pages : 631

Get Book Here

Book Description
This edition draws on many new writings about Shostakovich, providing both a more detailed and focused image of his life, and a wider view of his cultural background. A particular aspect of Shostakovich which is revealed is his sardonic and witty sense of humour, displayed in many of his letters to close friends.

Shostakovich: A Life Remembered

Shostakovich: A Life Remembered PDF Author: Elizabeth Wilson
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571261159
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 612

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Book Description
Shostakovich: A Life Remembered is a unique study of the great composer, drawn from the reminiscences and reflections of his contemporaries. Elizabeth Wilson sheds light on the composer's creative process and his working life in music, and examines the enormous and enduring influence that Shostakovich has had on Soviet musical life.'The one indispensable book about the composer.' New York Times

Shostakovich

Shostakovich PDF Author: Elizabeth Wilson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691128863
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 672

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Book Description
"This new edition, produced to coincide with the centenary of Shostakovich's birth, draws on many new writings on the composer. In doing so, it provides both a more detailed and focused image of Shostakovich's life, and a wider view of his cultural background."--P. [4] of cover.

Shostakovich

Shostakovich PDF Author: Laurel E. Fay
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195182514
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
"Shostakovich's life is a fascinating example of the paradoxes of living as an artist under totalitarian rule. Alone among his artistic peers, he survived successive Stalinist cultural purges and won the Stalin Prize five times, yet in 1948 he was dismissed from his conservatory teaching positions, and many of his works were banned from performance. He prudently censored himself, in one case putting aside a work based on Jewish folk poems. Under later regimes he balanced a career as a model Soviet - holding government positions and acting as an international ambassador - with his unflagging artistic ambitions."--Jacket.

Shostakovich and Stalin

Shostakovich and Stalin PDF Author: Solomon Volkov
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307427722
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
“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.

Testimony

Testimony PDF Author: Dmitriĭ Dmitrievich Shostakovich
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571227921
Category : Composers
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
With the composer's consent, the manuscript was smuggled out of Soviet Russia - but Shostakovich, fearing reprisals, stipulated that the book should not appear until after his death. Ever since its publication in 1979 it has been the subject of controversy, some suggesting that Volkov invented parts of it, but most affirming that it revealed a profoundly ambivalent Shostakovich which the world had never seen before - his life at once triumphant and tragic. Either way, it remains indispensable to an understanding of Shostakovich's life and work. Testimony is intense and fiercely ironic, both plain-spoken and outspoken.

A Shostakovich Casebook

A Shostakovich Casebook PDF Author: Malcolm Hamrick Brown
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025305625X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
A collection of writings analyzing the controversial 1979 posthumous memoirs of the great Russian composer at their significance. In 1979, the alleged memoirs of legendary composer Dmitry Shostakovich (1906–1975) were published as Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitry Shostakovich As Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov. Since its appearance, however, Testimony has been the focus of controversy in Shostakovich studies as doubts were raised concerning its authenticity and the role of its editor, Volkov, in creating the book. A Shostakovich Casebook presents twenty-five essays, interviews, newspaper articles, and reviews—many newly available since the collapse of the Soviet Union—that review the “case” of Shostakovich. In addition to authoritatively reassessing Testimony’s genesis and reception, the authors in this book address issues of political influence on musical creativity and the role of the artist within a totalitarian society. Internationally known contributors include Richard Taruskin, Laurel E. Fay, and Irina Antonovna Shostakovich, the composer’s widow. This volume combines a balanced reconsideration of the Testimony controversy with an examination of what the controversy signifies for all music historians, performers, and thoughtful listeners. Praise for A Shostakovich Casebook “A major event . . . This Casebook is not only about Volkov’s Testimony, it is about music old and new in the 20th century, about the cultural legacy of one of that century’s most extravagant social experiments, and what we have to learn from them, not only what they ought to learn from us.” —Caryl Emerson, Princeton University

Dmitry Shostakovich

Dmitry Shostakovich PDF Author: Pauline Fairclough
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789141907
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Dmitry Shostakovich was one of the most successful composers of the twentieth century—a musician who adapted as no other to the unique pressures of his age. By turns vilified and feted by Stalin during the Great Purge, Shostakovich twice came close to succumbing to the whirlwind of political repression of his times and remained under political surveillance all his life, despite the many privileges and awards heaped upon him in old age. Through it all, Shostakovich showed a remarkable ability to work with, rather than against, prevailing ideological demands, and it was this quality that ensured both his survival and his musical posterity. Pauline Fairclough’s absorbing new biography offers a vivid portrait of Shostakovich. Featuring quotations from previously unpublished letters as well as rarely seen photographs, Fairclough’s book provides fresh insight into the music and life of a composer whose legacy, above all, was to have written some of the greatest and most cherished music of the last century.

The New Shostakovich

The New Shostakovich PDF Author: Ian MacDonald
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 184595064X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
Since the posthumous publication in 1979 of alleged memoirs by Shostakovich, the controversy about the composer and his music has escalated. This book presents the case for the dissident view, arguing that the meaning of the composer's music cannot be appreciated without a knowledge of the terrible times he lived through under Soviet Communism.

Story of a Friendship

Story of a Friendship PDF Author: Dmitriĭ Dmitrievich Shostakovich
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801439797
Category : Composers
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
This choice by the composer's close friend Isaak Glikman brought the tormented feelings of the musical genius into public view. Now those feelings resound in the first substantial collection of Shostakovich's letters to appear in English.