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Much has been written on the professional and personal trajectories of the two luminaries of Soviet/Russian music, Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich. Their true relationship, however, has yet to be seriously explored. Many writers have focused on the composers’ alleged personal and professional antagonisms, caused by their supposed individual claims to the title of “the greatest Soviet composer,” referencing anecdotes of questionable reliability. This chapter compares the two composers’ contributions to certain genres; their typical compositional procedures; their collaborations with other highly regarded exponents of Soviet cultural life, and their common predecessors. It also contrasts the two composers’ written assessments of one another’s compositions, and compares their works, in which we can observe not only how Prokofiev influenced his younger contemporary but also how each composer might have inspired the other.

This chapter offers an account of a recently discovered exchange of letters dating from the 1920s between the young Shostakovich and his close friend Valeryan Bogdanov-Berezovsky (1903–1971), who subsequently emerged as one of the leading Soviet musicologists and critics of his generation. The correspondence between the two men is of exceptional interest, as it offers a unique insight into Shostakovich’s character and artistic outlook at a crucial formative period. Unlike the composer’s later correspondence, in which he expressed himself with far greater circumspection, these letters are wholly free from self-censorship and reveal his innermost thoughts about life, love, and art with unusual frankness. The exuberant personality that they reveal stands in marked contrast to the ‘official’ public persona that Shostakovich adopted subsequently in his dealings with the outside world.

This chapter examines Shostakovich's musical composition Fourth Symphony. It suggests that despite the controversy surrounding the composition, it was the composition that marked a watershed in Shostakovich's development as a composer and can be considered as the conclusion of his early period which was marked by a radical avant-garde style and bold experimentation with genres and musical forms. It also contends that Shostakovich's work is thick with dramatic tensions and oratorical pathos and discusses how his music became entangled in a Manichaean dual perspective which reduced its interpretation to a simple choice of labeling it either pro- or anti-Soviet.

Intentionally nationalist works are often discussed in pejorative terms in historical accounts of twentieth-century music. But during World War II such compositions flourished, including so blatantly obvious a piece of Americana as Morton Gould’s still popular American Salute (1943). Americana also conjured up a much broader set of signifiers, especially in more commemorative works such as Bernard Herrmann’s For the Fallen. Presenting these works at the end of my journey allows for a deeper contextualization that goes beyond their facile dismissal as nationalist trifles or bombast, showing instead that for all their topicality, they also responded to more sophisticated and long-standing concerns about musical and national identities in the United States, and in various ways to the massive popular reception in the United States of Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 7 (“Leningrad”). Three types of musical Americana are discussed in this chapter: first, patriotic and commemorative works such as William Grant Still’s In Memoriam and Roger Sessions’s “Turn O Libertad”; secondly, compositions drawing on signal moments of U.S. history with the Revolutionary and Civil Wars: Randall Thompson’s Testament of Freedom (on words by Thomas Jefferson), Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, and Roy Harris’s Symphony no. 6, “Gettysburg”; and thirdly, the “Great American Symphony,” renewed interest in the concept of which was spurred by World War II and for which contenders included Harris’s Fifth Symphony, Copland’s Third, and Blitzstein’s Airborne Symphony.

This chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the history of Jewish musicians in late Russian Empire. It considers the broader Jewish musical legacy in one of the most important Russian–Jewish cultural encounters of the twentieth century: the post-World War II friendship of composers Dmitri Shostakovich and Mieczyslaw Weinberg. The chapter also discusses the lives of actual Russian Jewish musicians who looked past conventional politics and religion to culture as the foundation of modern Jewish identity.

In this chapter, Maya Plisetskaya talks about her husband, Rodion Shchedrin, and his music. Shchedrin composed music for such works as The Little Humpbacked Horse, Anna Karenina, The Seagull, and Lady with the Dog. He was always in the shadow of the spotlight of Maya's success, but never suffered from it. Maya admits that it is complicated when two artists live side by side, but they supported each other. She attended the premiere of Shchedrin's The Old-Time Music of Russian Circuses in Chicago, performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Loren Maazel. She was also at the premiere of the Fourth Piano Concerto at the Kennedy Center with Nikolai Petrov and Slava Rostropovich. Shchedrin became chairman of the Union of Composers of Russia, founded by Dmitri Shostakovich who was also its first chairman, and was a member of the Moscow Tribune as well as the Interregional Group of Deputies.

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about the influence of literary and historical texts on musical composition in Russia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This volume examines the problem arising from the relation between the voice of Russian music and its message and the consequences of the ideological and textual dependence of Russian music on historical and literary consciousness. It analyzes several relevant works. These include Mikhail Glinka's Ruslan and Ludmila, Modest Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina and Boris Godunov, Pyotr Ilyich's Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades, and Dmitri Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony.

In 1940, Nabokov took up a new position at St. John’s College, Annapolis, where he taught the “Great Books Course,” first in tandem with Carter. In Washington, he became close to a circle of young diplomats and Russian specialists which included Charles Bohlen and George Kennan. He formed a solid friendship with Isaiah Berlin, through whom he met W. H. Auden, also frequenting the exiled Alexis Léger (the poet Saint-John Perse). He made his debut as a music critic, writing on Soviet music. His disparaging comments on Shostakovich won him praise from Stravinsky, with whom friendship was renewed.

Cultural contexts for the starting conditions of contemporary are explored, with a particular focus on the responses of composers who finished their training and entered the profession just as its practices were changing radically, around 1910. Their situation is analyzed according to Edward Hall’s definition of high- and low-context cultures, Kenneth Burke’s concept of “piety,” and the psychological stress of “choice anxiety.” These lead to behaviors that can be read in musical compositions according to a few heuristic binaries: (1) attitudes to historical practice (ironic, sincere); (2) preferences about appeal (popular, rarefied); and (3) identification with communities (local, global). Essays on compositions by Shostakovich, Hindemith, Bernstein, Wilson, Chen, Martin, Barber, Shire, and Prokofiev illustrate pertinent analytic techniques.

In spite of modernism’s aesthetics of objectivity, both the projection and the perception of subjectivity have endured. Having grown accustomed to hearing composers in their works over the course of multiple generations, beginning in the 1830s, listeners could not and did not suddenly change their assumptions about the nature of musical expression. The belief that music—particularly instrumental music—comes from deep within the human psyche was too firmly rooted in Western thought to be dislodged altogether. Composers’ claims of self-expression have nevertheless become considerably more muted and ambiguous. Critics, in turn, have become far more cautious about drawing direct connections between an artist’s works and inner self, even if the nature of that connection continues to fascinate, particularly in the realm of popular music.