DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH

(1906-1975)

Quartet No.8

"...  Where do you put the tombstones?  Only music can do that for them.  I'm willing to write a composition for each for each of the victims but that's impossible, and that's only why I dedicate my music to them all ..." Shostakovich

Symphony No.8

Shostakovich's Eight Symphony is undoubtedly the most uncompromising and intensely felt of his war-time symphonies.  It is cast in five movements, the last three of which are linker together.  This five-movement pattern seems to have appealed to him at this time in his life.  The 3rd movement in E minor, employs an insistent toccata-like rhythm that goes on pitilessly and over which there are explosive outbursts.  The movement generates tremendous excitement and there is a brilliant middle section with a trumpet fanfare before the relentless ostinato rhythm is resumed.  A tremendous climax leads into the next movement .......

"... I feel eternal pain for those who were killed by Hitler, but I feel no less pain for those killed on Stalin's orders.  I suffer for everyone who was tortured, shot, or starved to death.  There were millions of them in our country before the war with Hitler began...  The majority of my symphonies are tombstones.  Too many of our people died and were buried in places unknown to anyone, not even their relatives.  It happened to many of my friends.  Where do you put the tombstones?  Only music can do that for them.  I'm willing to write a composition for each for each of the victims but that's impossible, and that's only why I dedicate my music to them all...." - Dmitri Shostakovich

Dmitry Shostakovich belongs to the generation of composers trained principally after the Communist Revolution of 1917. He graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory as a pianist and composer, his First Symphony winning immediate favour. His subsequent career in Russia varied with the political climate. The initial success of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, based on Leskov, and later revised as Katerina Ismailova, was followed by official condemnation, emanating apparently from Stalin himself. The composer's Fifth Symphony, in 1937, brought partial rehabilitation, while the war years offered a propaganda coup in the Leningrad Symphony, performed in the city under German siege. In 1948 he fell foul of the official musical establishment with a Ninth Symphony thought to be frivolous, but enjoyed the relative freedom following the death of Stalin in 1953. Outwardly and inevitably conforming to official policy, posthumous information suggests that Shostakovich remained very critical of Stalinist dictates, particularly with regard to music and the arts. He occupies a significant position in the 20th century as a symphonist and as a composer of chamber music, writing in a style that is sometimes spare in texture but always accessible, couched as it is in an extension of traditional tonal musical language.

Some Interesting Sites: 

http://www.shostakovich.org/

http://www.siue.edu/~aho/musov/dmitri.html