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This chapter chronicles Prokofiev's relocation to Moscow in the spring of 1936, his reaction to the denunciation of Shostakovich in Pravda; the composition of the ballet Romeo and Juliet and the Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of October; the censorship of those two works, and Prokofiev's service as a cultural representative for the Soviet regime during his last two trips abroad. The chapter addresses his collaborations with the director Sergey Radlov (who conceived a happy ending for Romeo and Juliet) and Nataliya Sats (who commissioned Peter and the Wolf for the Moscow Children's Theater), his fraught relationship with the Chairman of the Committee on Arts Affairs Platon Kerzhentsev, and his speeches at the Union of Soviet Composers. The description of his last trip to the United States corrects inaccuracies in the historical record concerning his interest in Hollywood film composition. Prokofiev was monitored throughout the trip by Soviet officials working for the VOKS organization and the Embassies in London and Washington.

This chapter argues that the logically proper way to see the spate of recent attempts to put narrative interpretations on the works of absolute music, accepted as such in the canon, is to see them as attempts to demonstrate that these works are not works of absolute music at all but, in reality, programmatic works mistakenly taken to be works of absolute music. To do otherwise — in particular, to describe these interpretations as imparting narrative content to absolute music, as defined — is a logical howler. It is further argued that the bar for successful narrative interpretation of the absolute music canon — which is to say, the successful demonstration that an alleged work of absolute music is in reality program music a clef — must be raised.

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.

Although Dmitri Shostakovich repeatedly spoke at various points during his life of writing a musical work on the life and legacy of Lenin, it never materialised—leading some commentators to suggest that this was merely a ruse adopted by the composer to placate the authorities. The present chapter draws on the author’s extensive archives researches in the Shostakovich Archive to demonstrate that the contrary appears to be the case—and that Shostakovich appears to have made several serious attempts to realise this project, including an abandoned version of the Twelfth Symphony. She also examines the veracity of the colourful memoirs by the Soviet composer Lev Lebedinsky, who claimed that Shostakovich had intended to write a satirical work about the Bolshevik leader.

This chapter explores the works and achievement of the music composer Dmitry Shostakovich. The achievement was not his alone, but was the convolute result of the enormous talent that he was dealt, the all-too-interesting times in which he lived, the nature of the medium in which he worked, and his capacity for maintaining a poker face. The Historic Document, namely the famous and ominously unsigned editorial “Muddle Instead of Music,” ended the brilliant two-year career of his opera The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, during which time it had gone around the world. Until that point, Shostakovich had himself been a spoiled brat of sorts. His preeminence among the first generation of Soviet-educated composers was assured by the première of his First Symphony, when he was nineteen. Shostakovich's musical style during this period is often called satirical. Its satire arose out of a play of incongruities, a rhetorical doubleness that undermined eloquence and seriosity. In Shostakovich's early symphonies and concertos, the lyogkiy zhanr (light genre) itself became the incongruous marker, with or without wrong notes.

This chapter portrays the great composer Dmitry Shostakovich as a fictional hero. The catastrophic loss of prestige since the 1960s has made it harder for composers of contemporary classical music to indulge the old canard that serious artists live only in history, not in society. There is a new impulse to seek solidarity with listeners, and Shostakovich is suddenly a role model. The pact he forged with a great audience is what now impresses musicians and wins him new admirers, and music acutely resonated with the needs and aspirations of a public traumatized by autocracy and war. More importantly, however, more people began listening to a greater number of his works. The Fourth and Eighth Symphonies began appearing on as many concert programs as the Fifth and Seventh. The quartet cycles began. Recordings proliferated. Pretty much all of Shostakovich is now available. In 1960, by which time his international fame might have offered him a shield, Shostakovich gave in to pressure and joined the Communist Party.

In the ashes of world war and revolutionary terror, the Beethovenian art of profundity and power began to look more like an art of violence and psychopathology, and composers sought refuge in what seemed the saner, more orderly, world of Bach. This chapter explores the emergence of the musician Bach in Russian music. Bach became the new ecumenical patriarch, and for Stravinsky and the other Parisians, represented an art that wishes to be plain, brisk, nondescriptive, and even non-expressive, in the words of the composer Charles Koechlin. Embracing him meant above all renouncing the Romantic nationalism that had brought about the world disaster. Dmitry Shostakovich's imagined Bach was a consoling pastor who could lead him beside the still waters and restore his soul. Buffeted by the world in its games of power as no mere composer had ever been, Shostakovich was desperately seeking a neutral corner.

This chapter focuses on the Soviet composer of Jewish origin Mieczyslaw Weinberg and a recital of his music by cellist Yosif Feigelson. The recital included the U.S. première of Weinberg's Twenty-four Preludes for Unaccompanied Cello (op. 100). Weinberg was born in a family of a Jewish violinist and theater composer in Warsaw, Poland and fled to Minsk, Soviet Russia in 1939, where he studied music. Later, he fled to Tashkent, where he composed a ballet called Fighting for the Fatherland, and also a symphony, which he dedicated to the Red Army. The chapter further offers information on the music career and life of the composer from the 1940s to the 1970s. By 1992, Weinberg was the author of seven operas, twenty-one symphonies, seventeen string quartets, a host of concertos, and much else besides. For most of his career, Weinberg, like most Soviet composers of his generation, remained hidden, as far as the West was concerned, in the colossal shadow of his friend, composer Dmitry Shostakovich.

This chapter focuses on Dmitry Shostakovich's behaviour as a member of the Stalin Prize Committee (KSP). Shostakovich started attending meetings of the Music Section in March 1947. When the plenary sessions of the KSP began in April, Shostakovich and Nikolai Myaskovsky clashed over the latter's former student, Yevgeny Golubev, whose oratorio The Immortal Heroes (Geroi bessmertnï) was under discussion. This chapter first considers the conflicting accounts of Shostakovich's criticism of Golubev before discussing what his colleagues deemed to be Shostakovich's undiplomatic behaviour in various instances, including his stance regarding Anatoly Aleksandrov's opera Bela. It then examines Shostakovich's removal from the KSP in February 1948 and his reinstatement in December 1951. It argues that Shostakovich's interventions at the KSP reflect his fiery public temperament that went against professional etiquette or delicacy as well as hypocrisy or tedium.

This chapter examines the Soviet manipulation of international copyright law over an American film studio's fair use of music written by Soviet composers in an anti-Soviet film. At issue was the use of music written by Dmitry Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, and Aram Khachaturian in what American film scholars consider the first Hollywood Cold War film, William Wellman's The Iron Curtain. Soviet objections to the use of the music in the film eventually resulted in two court fights, one in New York and the other in Paris. Though the Soviet effort to stop the film screening in the United States failed, a strategic adjustment that included assigning distribution rights to a French publisher resulted in a major Soviet victory when subsequent distribution in Europe ceased.

This chapter examines the visit to New York of the Soviet composer, Dimitri Shostakovich, in 1949. At Stalin’s insistence he attended a peace conference held at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel and experienced political humiliation and personal anguish. The Waldorf conference spawned the anti-Stalinist Americans for Intellectual Freedom, which prefigured the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

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.

This chapter focuses on the Ninth Sonata, which was not published until after Prokofiev's death. These unusual delays are indicative of the composer's changed political fortunes. In the campaign against formalism launched by Communist Party officials in the early months of 1948, Prokofiev, along with Shostakovich, was implicated as one of the principal culprits. The Ninth Sonata is notable for the simplicity of its style, as well as for the conciseness and clarity of its structure. It lacks the dramatic conflicts, complexity, and energy of the preceding group of “War Sonatas.” The conservative musical language may be attributed partly to Prokofiev's premonition of the politically repressive times. The dramatic worsening of his health may also have contributed to the relative lack of sheer motoric energy so typical of his music.