Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-5xszh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T12:29:02.444Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - Personal integrity and public service: the voice of the symphonist

from PART I - Instrumental works

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2011

Pauline Fairclough
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
David Fanning
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
Get access

Summary

To the European mind, no less than fifteen symphonies from the pen of a single composer might seem excessive in the light of a tradition that has taken its bearings from the nine symphonies of Beethoven. But the revolutionary culture that nurtured Shostakovich experienced something of a rebirth of symphonic commitment, and in this connection the ideological climate of Socialist Realism (first proclaimed in 1934) was to prove a potent factor. Far from creatively inhibiting, the Beethoven canon, with its fresh post-revolutionary optimism, could be viewed as positively enabling. The Soviet symphony – a genre that Shostakovich's own Fifth Symphony served memorably to define – became for Shostakovich, as for his colleagues, a medium through which to appear to meet the sociopolitical expectations of Soviet ideology. At the same time, his symphonies, string quartets and concertos encoded a more personal vision that was to remain suspect in orthodox Soviet circles. As a captive yet independently minded artist working in a totalitarian regime, Shostakovich invented for himself a moral persona that would construct, Dostoyevskylike, a polyphonic discourse wherein, to quote Victor Terras on Bakhtin, ‘multiple individual voices, inner dialogue, parody, inter-textual echoes, irony, and ambiguity interact dialogically, independently of a controlling monologic narrative voice’.

Although not all of Shostakovich's symphonies sit comfortably within the traditional parameters of the genre, taken as a whole his symphonic oeuvre gravitates towards the four-movement sonata-cycle prototype, and embraces the several different types – instrumental/absolute, narrative/programmatic, cyclic, vocal-instrumental – that go to make up the main-stream repertoire of the genre in the post-Beethoven era. The content and form of these symphonies, as well as their social context, are linked to Shostakovich’s well-known dilemma as a Soviet composer: the conflictridden burden of responsibility he carried towards his genius, his public and, as a professional artist, the Soviet cultural bureaucracy.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×