Dmitri Shostakovich – reading notes I

from my reading of Shostakovich by Norman Kay

Early Career

- Lenin is in power

- influences: Schumann, Prokofiev, Stravinsky

- new Soviet state was liberal, open to even Western composers, jazz

- early style was conservative

- “I was pursuing abstract experimentation – the pieces were an erroneous striving after originality” – Shostakovich on his Ten Aphorisms for piano

- comedic opera The Nose, about Major Kovalev’s nose that is lost and then found

- The Nose confuses the timeline by having the first scene occur again as the 9th scene and then moving beyond that

- Soviet commentators believed he wanted to pull one past the audience and became known as “the enfant terrible of Russian music” (Kay, Norman 1971)

- Stalin comes to power

- Five Year Plan – expansion of Russian industry

- Western music is banned

- Association of Proletarian Musicians – issued “official edicts” judging all Russian music

- APM made him feel self-concious

- was conflicted in his composing: 1. continued as his early works, 2. neo classical

- government attacked his Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Muddle Instead of Music)