riddle Shostakovich

[karlhenning]

They asked me how I knew
His label for Shostakovich was untrue;
I was realist to realize
His smoke gets in your eyes.

[greg]

They asked me how I knew
His label for Shostakovich was untrue;
I was realist to realize
His smoke gets in your eyes.

Would be more bizarre if you wrote this in haiku form...

[CD]

Labels are for scientists.
Real art eludes
Such simplistic thinking

[quintett op.57]

When I first listened to Shostakovich...hem..no...when I first listened to Mahler (7th), my first thought was that they were strong similarities with Shostakovich's sounds.

But :
1. Mahler is not for me a symbol of romanticism as Berlioz, Liszt or Wagner are. His worked remained partly classicist.
2. Shostakovich's form is strongly classically structured, more than Mahler. There is more Haydn than Berlioz in it.

He's probably regarded as a romanticist because of the emotions inherent to his music.
But emotions did not commence with romanticism. Romanticism was a new way to write music which was usually not applied by Shostakovich, Brahms or Mendelssohn.

My conclusion is that Shosty's a classicist

[False_Dmitry]

"Just you leave my cloud-dweller alone!"
Said Joe Stalin - and slammed down the phone.
With his operas all banned
Dima played a new hand
And made abstract music his own.

[karlhenning]

Not asking for every work, smokemeister, I asked only for 40.  I figured that 40 works out of 147 might justify a label.

Here, I'll lend a helping hand. I have found the archetypal "realist" work in Shostakovich's oeuvre!

The Nose, je-je-je!

[Scarpia]

Labels are for scientists.
Real art eludes
Such simplistic thinking

Labels are for stamp collectors, not scientists.

[CD]

You can't expect a silly joke to be a source of verity!

[greg]

Labels are for scientists.
Real art eludes
Such simplistic thinking

Haha- sounds nice!

[Dana]

1. Mahler is not for me a symbol of romanticism as Berlioz, Liszt or Wagner are. His worked remained partly classicist.
2. Shostakovich's form is strongly classically structured, more than Mahler. There is more Haydn than Berlioz in it.

1. Curious, as I've most often heard Mahler referred to as a post-romantic, due mostly to the emotional content of his music - the presence of irony, satire, and his tendency to deny happy endings. Your line of thinking is also somewhat valid - I personally wouldn't go so far as to say that there is a strong classicist influence in his work - which shows the difficulty in labeling. If we use the "use of classical forms make the composer classical," argument, than that makes Brahms - pretty much the poster child of romanticism -  inarguably a classical composer.

2. This is not quite true. There are classical tendencies in his compositions - he generally has clearly identifiable theme groups, often recapitulates, and some of his compositions could almost be termed neoclassical - such as the 3rd string quartet, or the 9th symphony - by and large, he does not stick to classical blueprints. At any rate, you'd be hard pressed to find very many clear-cut examples of the sonata-allegro form in his output, and the later you go in his career - I'd say he starts veering off the path by about the 5th string quartet - the harder it is to categorize his forms. By the time you get to the 9th string quartet, it's all but impossible.

[False_Dmitry]

2. This is not quite true. There are classical tendencies in his compositions - he generally has clearly identifiable theme groups, often recapitulates, and some of his compositions could almost be termed neoclassical - such as the 3rd string quartet, or the 9th symphony - by and large, he does not stick to classical blueprints. At any rate, you'd be hard pressed to find very many clear-cut examples of the sonata-allegro form in his output, and the later you go in his career - I'd say he starts veering off the path by about the 5th string quartet - the harder it is to categorize his forms. By the time you get to the 9th string quartet, it's all but impossible.

And of course, there are very understandable reasons why all of this was the case.  DSCH already had a chequered career with the Kremlin,  whose ever-changing ideological caprices set an impossible benchmark.  Lenin was the only soviet leader until Gorbachev who had any kind of valid tertiary education - the rest were hotheads and fools,  whose appreciation of "culture" was merely a public affectation to avoid looking like the knuckleheads they were.  Yet as DSCH discovered to his cost with Lady Mac,  the appointment of allegedly "qualified" burocrats to manage the USSR's cultural programs didn't offer composers the slightest protection from kneejerk Kremlin lunges if they ventured too far from the genre of 4-square patriotic march-tunes and tub-thumpers.

Shostakovich had the technical ability, and the creative integrity, to shroud his later work in forms which were too complex for the Kremlin's rumpty-tum-loving oafs to penetrate...   but which occupied an intellectual plane they dared not criticise for fear of revealing their philistine tendencies.   However, if at one end of the spectrum there was the potential charge of failing to write "accessible" music,  the charge of "formalism" (whatever this blithering piece of soviet-speak really meant?) was another possible risk.  Works written within the terms of identifiable "forms" were also - incredibly - subject to official censure.  Shostakovich steered neatly clear of all this in his later works...    he simply showed a clean pair of heels to those waiting to tear into his work.

[Franco]

This morning I listened to the Shostakovich Cello Concerto and was struck at just what a great work this is.  Peter Wispelwey brought a rugged warmth to the solo part - and aside from the regular complaint I have with Shostakovich (the relentless sequences building building to a climax) this is one of his better works, IMO.

[karlhenning]

Opus 107 or Opus 126?

[Franco]

Opus 107 or Opus 126?

107 - I did not even know he wrote two.

[karlhenning]

They're both very good!