Dmitri's Dacha

[Madiel]

Not only has the point been made repeatedly, any evidence to the contrary is ignored.

The composer of the Anti-Formalistic Rayok was NOT feeling well disposed to the regime at the time of that composition. The text makes fun of the leaders in very unflattering ways. He also kept it hidden in a drawer for decades because quite frankly it could have got him in serious trouble. There were other compositions that got hidden away for periods of time until the climate improved.

[ChamberNut]

Anymore political diatribes slung against Shostakovich by AnotherSpin and I feel it justifies a permanent ban. Full stop.

It has been going on for far too long and repeatedly.

[Der lächelnde Schatten]

Anymore political diatribes slung against Shostakovich by AnotherSpin and I feel it justifies a permanent ban. Full stop.

It has been going on for far too long and repeatedly.

If he was on the other forum, he would've already been banned as political discourse is discouraged.

[Karl Henning]

If he was on the other forum, he would've already been banned as political discourse is discouraged.

It's the nature of his behavior which I find objectionable. If he has a perverse obsession with badmouthing Shostakovich, that's his sorry affair. But acting as if the Shostakovich thread is your privileged spleen-venting outlet borders on narcissistic behavior. 

[Der lächelnde Schatten]

It's the nature of his behavior which I find objectionable. If he has a perverse obsession with badmouthing Shostakovich, that's his sorry affair. But acting as if the Shostakovich thread is your privileged spleen-venting outlet borders on narcissistic behavior.

Exactly. Well said, @Karl Henning.

[AnotherSpin]

@Madiel - He wrote "for the drawer" — yes. And yet, at the very same time, he was openly accepting awards, honors, and material favors from the regime, right in front of everyone. That's what really stands out.

I'm simply saying what I think. Of course, I don't expect everyone to agree with me. Let me say it again: If you enjoy this composer's music — great, by all means, listen to it. Just don't try to silence a different opinion. That's one of the basic freedoms, isn't it?

I don't see any point in continuing to post in this thread.

[ChamberNut]

@Madiel
I don't see any point in continuing to post in this thread.

You are free to post to your heart's content about Shostakovich's music.

[Der lächelnde Schatten]

@Madiel - He wrote "for the drawer" — yes. And yet, at the very same time, he was openly accepting awards, honors, and material favors from the regime, right in front of everyone. That's what really stands out.

I'm simply saying what I think. Of course, I don't expect everyone to agree with me. Let me say it again: If you enjoy this composer's music — great, by all means, listen to it. Just don't try to silence a different opinion. That's one of the basic freedoms, isn't it?

I don't see any point in continuing to post in this thread.

I guess you didn't see this post I made in response to your unwarranted and unnecessary political slights against Shostakovich:

And at what point do we forget about all of this and just enjoy the man's music?

This thread is about Shostakovich's music. Everyone here knows his history just like everyone here knows of your bias against that history.

If you don't have anything of substance to add about the music, then I ask you to kindly never post in this thread again.

[Brian]

First I'd like to thank the person who finally reported the last few pages of this thread to the mods.

The forum guidelines state the following:

"Religion or politics is not to be brought into threads in other categories unless it has a very definite and direct relation to the music being discussed." (emphasis added)

Some posts here clearly do align with the rules, e.g. discussion of the political reasons why DSCH would set Jewish poems. The forum would be worse if we did not discuss such things.

Other posts here clearly do not align with the rules, e.g. broad characterizations of DSCH's courage or cowardice or other such feelings.

I know this post will disappoint some users who wish the politics were entirely off-limits here. I also know it will disappoint the user who wants to repeat his views on DSCH's personal character. Maybe by disappointing everyone, we can calm down the temperature of activity in this thread. To help that along, I'll lock it for about 6 hours.

Any additional mod action will be private.

[Karl Henning]

 Cross-post:

This is from Elizabeth Wilson's Shostakovich: A Life Remembered.
Rumours that Shostakovich had written a work 'in secret' satirizing the Zhdanov Decree had been in circulation for some time after the composer's death.The existence of the satirical cantata Rayok (variously translated as The Peep-Show, The Gods, and A Learner's Manual) was finally confirmed when it received a first public performance in Washington in January 1989 by Mstislav Rostropovich. He used a copy made available to him by the musicologist Lev Lebedinsky. The Rayok was  a popular entertainment at traveling fares, where a booth housing a box which has specially made peepholes allowing viewing of a series of pictures turning on a revolving drum. The booth was manned by a 'Rayoshnik' whose running commentary was made in doggerel verse, using many invented and ridiculous diminutives. When young, Shostakovich had been fascinated by the Rayok and its language, as he informed his friend Oborin in a letter dated 26 September 1925. 'How are your delishki [diminutive of "dela," meaning "affairs, things"] [...], how go things with Shebalishki [Shebalin] and Mishki [Misha Kvadri]?  Forgive the last two phrases — I have recently begun to study rayoshni language.' This typically Russian form of musical satire has its roots in the centuries-old Skomorokhi lampoons. Shastakovich also knew and loved the satirical songs of the 19th-century classics such as Dargomyzhsky's The Worm and Mussorgsky's 'The Seminarist' and 'The Flea.' In Soviet times the most popular form of musical political satire could be found in the 'shastushki', a kind of limerick usually peppered with indecent puns and illusions, and also the kapustnik, a kind of home bred 'review'. Shostakovich's Rayok nevertheless has a direct antecedent in Mussorgsky's work of the same name. Whereas he created a caricature of the enemies of the 'New Russian School' (more commonly known as 'The Mighty Handful'), Shostakovich lampoons the cultural activists who launched the 'struggle with formalism'.

Shortly after the Washington performance Shostakovich's widow produced from the family archive the original manuscript(s) together with some preliminary sketches. They are written in the characteristic purple ink Shostakovich used until the early 1960s, and none of them are dated. The work was performed in the Soviet Union a few months after the Washington premiere in a slightly different version. Later that year an additional excerpt was found, constituting an extended concluding scene (which Venyamin Basner remembers Shostakovich playing to him around 1967.)  There is also disagreement about the time of Rayok's creation. The curator of the Shostakovich archive, Manashir Yakubov. who was responsible for finding all the rough sketches and various manuscript versions of it in the archive, claims that the work was conceived and partly written already in 1948 and that it was completed in two further stages, in 1957, then the late 1960s. This version of events is supported by Izaak Glikman. He alone of Shostakovich's friends claims that the composer played Rayok for him in the summer of 1948 from a rough sketch written on a single sheet of paper. Vissarion Shebalin's widow remembers Shostakovich playing it at their Moscow flat 'sometime in the 1950s', in any case after Shebalin fell ill. Shebalin's  advice to Shostakovich was to destroy all trace of the work, as 'you could be shot for such things'.
Lebedinsky dates Rayok to the time of the second Union of Composers' Congress, which took place between 28 March and 5 April 1957....

[Cato]

Shebalin's  advice to Shostakovich was to destroy all trace of the work, as 'you could be shot for such things'.

Wow, Bob!

Proof that composing music can be a dangerous, unmutual activity!!!

Thanks for the link!  It is on my list of things to hear!

[Cato]

Wow, Bob!

Proof that composing music can be a dangerous, unmutual activity!!!

Thanks for the link!  It is on my list of things to hear!

I am reminded of Elias Canetti's The Agony of Flies, which is a fascinating collection of one-sentence thoughts, anecdotes short and long, postulations, opinions, and other things.

One of them goes basically like this:

"A word which kills, and which everyone knows, but which no one dares to speak."

Imagine: Music that murders!   

(Why an I suddenly thinking of Alanis Morissette ?     )

[Karl Henning]

It's been too long since I listened to this piece:

[Cato]

I finally was able to hear this very dangerous (at the time) Singspiel by Shostakovich!, here in a one-man performance, which makes it a little different from a Singspiel.

One listener explained the jokes in the YouTube comments: check that commentary as well!

[Karl Henning]

It's been too long since I listened to this piece:

This is from Elizabeth Wilson's Shostakovich: A Life Remembered.
On 11 February 1944, Ivan Sollertinsky died suddenly in Novosibirsk at the age of 41. Shostakovich had spent much of November and December 1943 with him in Moscow; Sollertinsky had come to Moscow for the premiere of the Eighth Symphony, a work to which he lent his full support. Shostakovich was devastated by the news of his death, and he dedicated his Piano Trio Op. 67 to the memory of his dearest friend. The work however was conceived when Sollertinsky was still alive. Shostakovich had informed Izaak Glikman in his habitual laconic style in a letter dated 8 December 1943; 'I am now writing a trio for violin cello and piano.' The last three movements were written in Ivanovo, where Shostakovich spent his second summer undoubtedly Shostakovich would have read press reports about the discoveries of the atrocities committed in the Nazi concentration camps, and uncovered by the Soviet armies as they moved west into the territory of Poland. None was more moving than Vassily Grossman's disturbing account of the ruins of Treblinka concentration camp, which may have influenced Shostakovich's choice of thematic material with Jewish intonation. And Grossman's harrowing description of Jewish victims being forced to dance on the graves that they had just dug could well have been in the composer's mind in his treatment of the material, with the build-up and grotesque transformation of these themes towards the finale's culminating point. Completed on 13 August, the work belongs to that peculiarly Russian genre of Piano Trio 'In Memoriam'. (Tchaikovsky's was dedicated to the memory of Nikolai Rubenstein, Arensky's to the memory of Karl Davydov, and Rachmaninov's Second Elegiac Trio was in turn dedicated to Tchaikovsky.) The four-movement work's classical structure has strong links with the recent Eighth Symphony—the emotional core in both works lies in the slow movement Passacaglias, in each case preceded by a ferocious scherzo movement although the symphony's third movement is totally relentless in its anger and grotesque expression. Ivan Sollertinsky's sister claimed that the scherzo of the trio (marked Allegro con brio) is a precise portrait of her brother's brilliant and mercurial personality. Here Shostakovich had captured his manner of dialogue, his ways of expanding his views, leaving one subject for another, then returning and pursuing the original theme, elaborating and varying it. The Largo movement is a model of compact expression; the eight chords of the Passacaglia theme are repeated only six times, over which Shostakovich weaves the lament of the violin and cello as an intimate message of profound personal grief. The use of Jewish themes. appearing for the first time in the Trio, became a regular feature of the composer's work in the following years. Shostakovich, hyper-sensitive to all the issues of human cruelty and injustice, saw the Jews as symbols of centuries-long persecution, as well as victims of repression at this time. Almost immediately after completing the trio Shostakovich embarked on his Second String Quartet Op. 68, which he finished in under a month on 20 September.

[Karl Henning]

This is from Laurel Fay's Shostakovich: A Life.
On 11 February 1944, his closest friend and companion, the person he respected most, Ivan Sollertinsky, died suddenly in Novosibirsk at the age of forty-one—in preceding days he had been complaining of heart pains. The separation from Sollertinsky had been hard on Shostakovich during the war years. No sooner had he secured his own niche in Moscow in the spring of 1943 than he started plotting unremittingly for his friend to join him in the capital. Shostakovich eagerly awaited Sollertinsky's visits to Moscow in September, when he played him his just-completed Eighth Symphony, and again in November, when, among his other activities, Sollertinsky gave a nationally broadcast address commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Thikovsky's death. When he returned to Novosibirsk in mid-December, plans for his permanent move to Moscow had been finalized. Only a few days before his death, on the nights of 5 and 6 February 1944, he introduced the premiere performances of the Eighth Symphony in Novosibirsk. Shostakovich's loss was incalculable. He offered his condolences to Sollertinsky's widow: " It is impossible to Express in words. All the grief that engulfed me on hearing the news about Ivan Ivanovich's death. Ivan Ivanovich was my very closest and dearest friend. I am indebted to him for all my growth. To live with.
Out him will be unbearably difficult." His public eulogy was no less personal and poignant comma as were subsequent reminiscences. More than twenty years later, Shostakovich confessed in an interview, When I work on new compositions, I always think, "And what would Ivan Ivanovich have said about this?" If Shostakovich Felt unequal to the task of adequately paying tribute to his friend and words, He proved more than eloquent in music. He dedicated the first major work completed after Sollertinsky's death, the Piano Trio no. 2 in e minor, Op. 67, for piano, violin and cello, to the memory of his friend. Actually, he had started composing the trio late in 1943 and worked on it concurrently with his completion of the orchestration of Fleyshman's  opera, Rothschild's Violin. In one of his routine briefings on fourth coming works that October, he mentioned he had started writing a piano trio "on Russian folk themes," and in a letter dated 8 December Shostakovich alerted Glikman that he was working on a trio, so it seems more than likely he had also briefed Sollertinsky before he left Moscow two days earlier. In early January, he responded to a questionnaire elucidating his views on chamber music: "Chamber music demands of a composer the most impeccable technique and depth of thought. I don't think I will be wrong if I say that composers sometimes hide their poverty-stricken ideas behind the brilliance of orchestral sound. The timbral riches which are at the disposal of the contemporary symphony orchestra , are inaccessible to the small chamber on ensemble. Thus, to write a chamber work is much harder than to write an orchestral one." As a demonstration of his commitment to chamber music, Shostakovich noted that he was currently writing a trio.  Its first movement was completed in Moscow on 15 February, four days after Sollertinsky's death.

[Karl Henning]

This is from Laurel Fay's Shostakovich: A Life.

Shostakovich's health and handicaps demanded more and more of his attention and energy. He was obliged to give up smoking and drinking after his heart attack, deprivations he suffered out of fear. Unable to compose, he read extensively, but, as ever, the lengthy composer's block made him depressed and anxious. Eight months after his heart attack, in January 1967, he reported that he was trying to compose a little every day, without success. On 3 February, he wrote about his recent reflections on life, death, and his career, fretting that he might be burned out:
I have become disillusioned with myself. Rather that I am a very dull and mediocre composer. Looking back on "the path traversed" from the vantage of my sixty years, I can say that twice in my life great ballyhoo was made over me (Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and the Thirteenth Symphony). Ballyhoo with a very strong effect. However, after everything calms down and returns to normal, it turns out that both Lady Macbeth and the Thirteenth Symphony are "fuk" as they say in The Nose.... However, the composition of music—an affliction in the nature of a disease—haunts me. Today I completed seven romances on texts by A. Blok.
The completion of the new work went a long way toward reviving Shostakovich's spirits. Rostropovich had asked Shostakovich for some vocalises that he might perform together with his wife, Vishnevskaya. When the cycle was complete, the composer admitted that after having written the first piece, " Ophelia's Song," for soprano and cello as requested, he realized he did not have sufficient instrumental resources to continue and so added the violin and piano, producing a cycle of seven songs, each with a different combination of accompanying instruments. The verses he set were all from Alexander Blok's early poetry; he explained his choices as the poems that had made the greatest impression on him by their musicality and lyrical feel. His widow later noted that in preparation for his settings, Shostakovich had asked her to mark in the collection of Blok's poetry the poems she treasured most; She was initially disappointed to find out that the poems she had selected, ones from Blok's maturity, were not among the ones he had chosen. Shostakovich contributed the title of the final song, "Music"—Blok had left this particular poem untitled—and said he wanted to use that as the title of the cycle as a whole. Ultimately, he gave his vocal-instrumental suite the title Seven Verses of A. Blok, op. 127. He wrote the piano part for himself, taking into account his own physical limitations; he envisioned Vishnevskaya,  Oistrakh and Rostropovich as his ideal collaborators. A few days after the completion of his song cycle, an ebullient Shostakovich was visited by Veniamin Basner. Shostakovich told him He had conceived the idea for the composition in the hospital but had been unable to realize it. He had begun to doubt himself. The turnabout in his creative fortunes he attributed to a shot of brandy from a bottle he happened to chance upon while his wife was out of the house. The song cycle had then been completed in three days. Shostakovich demonstrated his new cycle to friends and colleagues, but it was not until mid-June, when the schedules of all the designated collaborators coincided, that they rehearsed the work for the first time. The experience afforded the composer.A great deal of joy.