Shostakovich, a little crazy, but still one of the great ones.
If you listen to classical music radio as much as I have been recently (I'm doing some interior painting projects), you're well aware that this week marked the centennial of Demetri Shostakovitch's birth on September 25, 1906 in what was then St. Petersburg, Russia.
A neoclassical composer of huge emotional power and range, he lived through the Stalinist purges and the siege of Leningrad by the Germans. He was also banned several times by the Soviet censors, and at one point was so convinced that the KGB was going to arrest him that he slept on the stoop of his apartment building so that when they came to get him his family wouldn't be molested. And he wasn't so much crazy as obsessive. He was, according to his daughter, a neat freak who used to compulsively synchronize the clocks in their apartment and send himself cards in the mail to see how long it would take them to get delivered. He was also a little obsessed with death and his own mortality, but having lived thorough the Stalinist "great terror" when many of his friends and relatives were either killed or imprisoned, perhaps it's understandable.
His work was denounced twice by the communist party, and was largely banned from public performance for several years on each occasion. Why, you ask, did they ban his music? For the sin of being "formalist" and "political", which means to say that his work had such a majestic feel to it that the Soviets censors worried that it made them look like the small minded idiots that they were. He also had a habit of taking little melodic lines from other banned composers like Mahler and slipping them into his work just to see if the censors were paying attention.
He was kind of a geeky looking little guy (he's the one on the left in the photo), but his music showed an inner life and passion that is truly striking. And his courage in not renouncing his own music to get off the list of banned composers and to eliminate the risk of his own arrest and imprisonment says a lot about his character and devotion to the integrity of his music.
I've added two CD's to the Amazon links section of the lens that I'd recommend. One has his famous 5th and less well known 9th symphonies, and the other has a selection of his surprisingly good jazz compositions. You can hear audio clips of the pieces at amazon.
Overall, he's an inspiring composer, and and inspiration in his dedication to artistic freedom in an oppressive society.
A neoclassical composer of huge emotional power and range, he lived through the Stalinist purges and the siege of Leningrad by the Germans. He was also banned several times by the Soviet censors, and at one point was so convinced that the KGB was going to arrest him that he slept on the stoop of his apartment building so that when they came to get him his family wouldn't be molested. And he wasn't so much crazy as obsessive. He was, according to his daughter, a neat freak who used to compulsively synchronize the clocks in their apartment and send himself cards in the mail to see how long it would take them to get delivered. He was also a little obsessed with death and his own mortality, but having lived thorough the Stalinist "great terror" when many of his friends and relatives were either killed or imprisoned, perhaps it's understandable.
His work was denounced twice by the communist party, and was largely banned from public performance for several years on each occasion. Why, you ask, did they ban his music? For the sin of being "formalist" and "political", which means to say that his work had such a majestic feel to it that the Soviets censors worried that it made them look like the small minded idiots that they were. He also had a habit of taking little melodic lines from other banned composers like Mahler and slipping them into his work just to see if the censors were paying attention.
He was kind of a geeky looking little guy (he's the one on the left in the photo), but his music showed an inner life and passion that is truly striking. And his courage in not renouncing his own music to get off the list of banned composers and to eliminate the risk of his own arrest and imprisonment says a lot about his character and devotion to the integrity of his music.
I've added two CD's to the Amazon links section of the lens that I'd recommend. One has his famous 5th and less well known 9th symphonies, and the other has a selection of his surprisingly good jazz compositions. You can hear audio clips of the pieces at amazon.
Overall, he's an inspiring composer, and and inspiration in his dedication to artistic freedom in an oppressive society.
posted by Richard in NY at 4:09 PM
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