Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich & His Fifteen Quartets by Wendy Lesser
Requirements: PDF Reader, 900 MB
Overview: This work looks at Shostakovich through the back door, as it were, of his 15 quartets, the works which his widow characterized as a ‘diary, the story of his soul’.
The title is aptly chosen; while his symphonies were often carefully written to avoid disfavor with the Communist regime, Shostakovich felt no such need to censor or disguise himself in the fifteen string quartets he composed during the last four decades of his life. Shostakovich’s Russia was a country defined by its government – a gray, faceless world of ministries and bureaucrats. The brilliant composer suffered the indignity of having his work criticized and even suppressed by Stalin and his stooges, if the powers-that-be decided that the work failed to adequately promote nationalistic ideals.
Such a completely irrational set of rules and restrictions silenced some, but not all, of Shostakovich’s voice. Of necessity in order to have his music heard at all, he made sometimes major concessions in his large-scale writing. But the composer’s quartets allowed him to create music that was often darker, but somehow more personal.
Genre: Non-Fiction/General
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