Talk like a Shostakovich
Sep. 19th, 2006 01:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacI'm working from home today, still indexing, so I have no-one to talk like a pirate to, but I can report that my editors liked my article on Shostakovich enough that, rather than cutting it to fit their length standards, they divided it into two parts. Part one, on the fall and rise of the composer's reputation, is out today, and part two comes next week.
Shostakovich is sufficiently well-regarded today that I put a lot of emphasis on how little was thought of his work in the midst of his career. I had great fun collecting nastygrams from famous names about his "Leningrad" Symphony, which to be fair was rather overhyped at the time of its release. But there was much more. I was sorry not be able to include record producer Charles O'Connell's complaint about "the same trivialities, the same bombast, the same mockeries, the same cold, mechanical, self-conscious tricks with which previous works have familiarized us and with which subsequent works have nauseated some of us." In the 1950s a British writer providing potted one-sentence summaries of noted composers described him as "a bolshevist composer, who believes music must have a political basis." See wha he was up against? As late as 1979, the year Volkov's Testimony was published, an admiring writer on Shostakovich could complain that he "is little appreciated and little heralded in the West ... Interest in his music grows among a limited following." Well, at least that's changed.
I came across his work in 1971 or 1972 and liked it immediately. I liked it when everyone thought he was a Soviet lackey and I liked it when everyone thought he was a secret rebel. It's the same music.
Shostakovich is sufficiently well-regarded today that I put a lot of emphasis on how little was thought of his work in the midst of his career. I had great fun collecting nastygrams from famous names about his "Leningrad" Symphony, which to be fair was rather overhyped at the time of its release. But there was much more. I was sorry not be able to include record producer Charles O'Connell's complaint about "the same trivialities, the same bombast, the same mockeries, the same cold, mechanical, self-conscious tricks with which previous works have familiarized us and with which subsequent works have nauseated some of us." In the 1950s a British writer providing potted one-sentence summaries of noted composers described him as "a bolshevist composer, who believes music must have a political basis." See wha he was up against? As late as 1979, the year Volkov's Testimony was published, an admiring writer on Shostakovich could complain that he "is little appreciated and little heralded in the West ... Interest in his music grows among a limited following." Well, at least that's changed.
I came across his work in 1971 or 1972 and liked it immediately. I liked it when everyone thought he was a Soviet lackey and I liked it when everyone thought he was a secret rebel. It's the same music.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-09-20 08:49 am (UTC)Part of the problem back in those days was a sort of Leavisite modernism among musicians like my flatmate - if it didn't hurt, it wasn't working. Specifically, the fact that I could love Bartok's quartets for simple pleasure in the sounds, or even the Schoenberg and Berg quartets, meant that I wasn't listening seriously enough. Part of my lasting resentment is that, when I did eventually fall in love with Pli Selon Pli and Harawi, it was pretty much on the same basis: oh gosh, I found myself thinking, everyone told me this was tough and intellectually gritty and actually they are art songs in a solid French tradition that includes Chausson and Roussel.
A propos of which, do you know Roussel's songs? They really are a guilty pleasure.