Download or read book Shostakovich written by Elizabeth Wilson and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 631 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edition draws on many new writings about Shostakovich, providing both a more detailed and focused image of his life, and a wider view of his cultural background. A particular aspect of Shostakovich which is revealed is his sardonic and witty sense of humour, displayed in many of his letters to close friends.
Download or read book Shostakovich A Life Remembered written by Elizabeth Wilson and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2011-03-03 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shostakovich: A Life Remembered is a unique study of the great composer, drawn from the reminiscences and reflections of his contemporaries. Elizabeth Wilson sheds light on the composer's creative process and his working life in music, and examines the enormous and enduring influence that Shostakovich has had on Soviet musical life.'The one indispensable book about the composer.' New York Times
Download or read book Shostakovich written by Laurel E. Fay and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2000 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Shostakovich's life is a fascinating example of the paradoxes of living as an artist under totalitarian rule. Alone among his artistic peers, he survived successive Stalinist cultural purges and won the Stalin Prize five times, yet in 1948 he was dismissed from his conservatory teaching positions, and many of his works were banned from performance. He prudently censored himself, in one case putting aside a work based on Jewish folk poems. Under later regimes he balanced a career as a model Soviet - holding government positions and acting as an international ambassador - with his unflagging artistic ambitions."--Jacket.
Download or read book Shostakovich written by Elizabeth Wilson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2006-09-03 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This new edition, produced to coincide with the centenary of Shostakovich's birth, draws on many new writings on the composer. In doing so, it provides both a more detailed and focused image of Shostakovich's life, and a wider view of his cultural background."--P. [4] of cover.
Download or read book Dmitry Shostakovich written by Pauline Fairclough and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2019-09-15 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dmitry Shostakovich was one of the most successful composers of the twentieth century—a musician who adapted as no other to the unique pressures of his age. By turns vilified and feted by Stalin during the Great Purge, Shostakovich twice came close to succumbing to the whirlwind of political repression of his times and remained under political surveillance all his life, despite the many privileges and awards heaped upon him in old age. Through it all, Shostakovich showed a remarkable ability to work with, rather than against, prevailing ideological demands, and it was this quality that ensured both his survival and his musical posterity. Pauline Fairclough’s absorbing new biography offers a vivid portrait of Shostakovich. Featuring quotations from previously unpublished letters as well as rarely seen photographs, Fairclough’s book provides fresh insight into the music and life of a composer whose legacy, above all, was to have written some of the greatest and most cherished music of the last century.
Download or read book Shostakovich and Stalin written by Solomon Volkov and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Music illuminates a person and provides him with his last hope; even Stalin, a butcher, knew that.” So said the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose first compositions in the 1920s identified him as an avant-garde wunderkind. But that same singularity became a liability a decade later under the totalitarian rule of Stalin, with his unpredictable grounds for the persecution of artists. Solomon Volkov—who cowrote Shostakovich’s controversial 1979 memoir, Testimony—describes how this lethal uncertainty affected the composer’s life and work. Volkov, an authority on Soviet Russian culture, shows us the “holy fool” in Shostakovich: the truth speaker who dared to challenge the supreme powers. We see how Shostakovich struggled to remain faithful to himself in his music and how Stalin fueled that struggle: one minute banning his work, the next encouraging it. We see how some of Shostakovich’s contemporaries—Mandelstam, Bulgakov, and Pasternak among them—fell victim to Stalin’s manipulations and how Shostakovich barely avoided the same fate. And we see the psychological price he paid for what some perceived as self-serving aloofness and others saw as rightfully defended individuality. This is a revelatory account of the relationship between one of the twentieth century’s greatest composers and one of its most infamous tyrants.
Download or read book Testimony written by Dmitriĭ Dmitrievich Shostakovich and published by . This book was released on 2005-07-01 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the composer's consent, the manuscript was smuggled out of Soviet Russia - but Shostakovich, fearing reprisals, stipulated that the book should not appear until after his death. Ever since its publication in 1979 it has been the subject of controversy, some suggesting that Volkov invented parts of it, but most affirming that it revealed a profoundly ambivalent Shostakovich which the world had never seen before - his life at once triumphant and tragic. Either way, it remains indispensable to an understanding of Shostakovich's life and work. Testimony is intense and fiercely ironic, both plain-spoken and outspoken.
Download or read book A Shostakovich Casebook written by Malcolm Hamrick Brown and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of writings analyzing the controversial 1979 posthumous memoirs of the great Russian composer at their significance. In 1979, the alleged memoirs of legendary composer Dmitry Shostakovich (1906–1975) were published as Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitry Shostakovich As Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov. Since its appearance, however, Testimony has been the focus of controversy in Shostakovich studies as doubts were raised concerning its authenticity and the role of its editor, Volkov, in creating the book. A Shostakovich Casebook presents twenty-five essays, interviews, newspaper articles, and reviews—many newly available since the collapse of the Soviet Union—that review the “case” of Shostakovich. In addition to authoritatively reassessing Testimony’s genesis and reception, the authors in this book address issues of political influence on musical creativity and the role of the artist within a totalitarian society. Internationally known contributors include Richard Taruskin, Laurel E. Fay, and Irina Antonovna Shostakovich, the composer’s widow. This volume combines a balanced reconsideration of the Testimony controversy with an examination of what the controversy signifies for all music historians, performers, and thoughtful listeners. Praise for A Shostakovich Casebook “A major event . . . This Casebook is not only about Volkov’s Testimony, it is about music old and new in the 20th century, about the cultural legacy of one of that century’s most extravagant social experiments, and what we have to learn from them, not only what they ought to learn from us.” —Caryl Emerson, Princeton University
Download or read book Charles Ives Remembered written by Vivian Perlis and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through their reminiscences, Ives's relatives, friends, colleagues, and associates reveal aspects of his life, character, and personality, as well as his musical activities.
Download or read book The New Shostakovich written by Ian MacDonald and published by Random House. This book was released on 2006 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the posthumous publication in 1979 of alleged memoirs by Shostakovich, the controversy about the composer and his music has escalated. This book presents the case for the dissident view, arguing that the meaning of the composer's music cannot be appreciated without a knowledge of the terrible times he lived through under Soviet Communism.
Download or read book Symphony for the City of the Dead written by M.T. Anderson and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published: Somerville, Massachusetts: Candlewick Press, 2015.
Download or read book Story of a Friendship written by Dmitriĭ Dmitrievich Shostakovich and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This choice by the composer's close friend Isaak Glikman brought the tormented feelings of the musical genius into public view. Now those feelings resound in the first substantial collection of Shostakovich's letters to appear in English.
Download or read book How Shostakovich Changed My Mind written by Stephen Johnson and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful look at the extraordinary healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness, including author Stephen Johnson's struggle with bipolar disorder. BBC music broadcaster Stephen Johnson explores the power of Shostakovich’s music during Stalin’s reign of terror, and writes of the extraordinary healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness. Johnson looks at neurological, psychotherapeutic and philosophical findings, and reflects on his own experience, where he believes Shostakovich’s music helped him survive the trials and assaults of bipolar disorder. There is no escapism, no false consolation in Shostakovich’s greatest music: this is some of the darkest, saddest, at times bitterest music ever composed. So why do so many feel grateful to Shostakovich for having created it—not just Russians, but westerners like Stephen Johnson, brought up in a very different, far safer kind of society? The book includes interviews with the members of the orchestra who performed Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony during the siege of that city.
Download or read book Rostropovich written by Elizabeth Wilson and published by Ivan R. Dee Publisher. This book was released on 2008 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mstislav Rostropovich, a legendary musician of the 20th century, died just a month after the English edition of this book was published in April 2007. Wilson, a British author and former student of Rostropovich, gained access to a great deal of archival information about his years as a faculty member at the Moscow State Conservatory. The book proceeds chronologically through Rostropovich's life and career, with several interpolated chapters devoted to reminiscences from other former pupils. Wilson explores Rostropovich's teaching philosophies and methods and details his warm relationships with several leading composers of the day, notably Benjamin Britten and Dmitry Shostakovich. Unfortunately, Wilson ends her narrative in 1974, the year of Rostropovich's forced departure from the Soviet Union. She acknowledges that a study of the remaining 33 years of his life--during which he was principal conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, DC, and taught and performed around the globe--could fill several volumes, and one hopes that she will rise to the challenge of completing the biography of this great musician, humanist, and pedagog. Recommended for all music collections.
Download or read book The Noise of Time written by Julian Barnes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending comes an extraordinary fictional portrait of the relentlessly fascinating Russian musician and composer Dmitri Shostakovich and a stunning meditation on the meaning of art and its place in society. • “Brilliant…. As elegantly constructed as a concerto.” —NPR 1936: Dmitri Shostakovich, just thirty years old, reckons with the first of three conversations with power that will irrevocably shape his life. Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has suddenly denounced the young composer’s latest opera. Certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or, more likely, shot dead on the spot), Shostakovich reflects on his predicament, his personal history, his parents, his daughter—all of those hanging in the balance of his fate. And though a stroke of luck prevents him from becoming yet another casualty of the Great Terror, he will twice more be swept up by the forces of despotism: coerced into praising the Soviet state at a cultural conference in New York in 1948, and finally bullied into joining the Party in 1960. All the while, he is compelled to constantly weigh the specter of power against the integrity of his music.
Download or read book Shostakovich Reconsidered written by Allan Benedict Ho and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 796 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Shostakovich Reconsidered Allan Ho and Dmitry Feofanov systematically address all of the accusations levelled at Testimony and Solomon Volkov, Shostakovich's amanuensis, amassing an enormous amount of material about Shostakovich and his position in Soviet society and burying forever the picture of Shostakovich as a willing participant in the communist charade.
Download or read book Europe Central written by William T. Vollmann and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-11-14 with total page 834 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A daring literary masterpiece and winner of the National Book Award In this magnificent work of fiction, acclaimed author William T. Vollmann turns his trenchant eye on the authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR in the twentieth century to render a mesmerizing perspective on human experience during wartime. Through interwoven narratives that paint a composite portrait of these two battling leviathans and the monstrous age they defined, Europe Central captures a chorus of voices both real and fictional— a young German who joins the SS to fight its crimes, two generals who collaborate with the enemy for different reasons, the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich and the Stalinist assaults upon his work and life.
