Five Romances to Words from Krokodil Magazine written in 1965 were another example of caricature in the composer’s music. Here, Shostakovich who produced so many compositions of the kind in his youth, in the boiling ’twenties, once again laughs at stupidity and vulgarity to his heart’s content, as if shaking off the stupor that had lasted for decades.
The comic magazine Krokodil, throughout the decades of its publishing, was a quite official mouthpiece of the Soviet propaganda. Certain trifling drawbacks on the way to the bright Communist future required critical appraisal, and Krokodil whose weapons were satire and humour was created just for such ruthless criticism. Many things were permitted to the magazine. To an extent, it was the only one that dared speak openly about rudeness, drunkenness, and other ’minor sins’ of the Socialist society. Krokodil was quite popular with the broad public. It was read in the municipal transport, its anecdotes were retold to fellow workers, and scraps of its pages could always be found near beer outlets and in local trains.
For his songs, Shostakovich selected droll letters mailed by the readers and published in the magazine. The composer even marked the score of the opus with the date and number of the issue, “No. 24 of August 30, 1965”. Hardly can any translation, even the most precise one, convey the turns of speech and thought of the ’common working men’; even in Russian, the texts of the letters sound unbelievably idiotic. Moreover, the very situations told by the readers are rather understandable only by those who happened to be living in the same epoch as the composer. However, musically Shostakovich is so brilliant in implementing his plan (“…desire to try my abilities, and maybe to do something new…”), the images are so salient, and the vocal and the piano parts are written so astoundingly vivid, making use of the extreme divisions of the compass and extreme dynamics allowing performers to demonstrate themselves to the full - that the opus goes far beyond the scope of purely musical adaptation of funny absurdities, and the music becomes a full-scale character of this performance, a theatrical one indeed.
It is typical for a simplified approach to works of Shostakovich to directly relate tragic motifs in his music to dramatic milestones of Russian history. This idea, however, often does not stand a test with facts of the composer’s biography. Sometimes he composed his gloomiest music in times which seemingly did not suggest such a disposition. And vice versa, the brightness of Festive Overture (1954) should hardly be ascribed to joy about the recent (1953) death of Stalin. Still, his choice of verses for the string of songs dedicated to the 115th anniversary of Pushkin’s death clearly indicates the darkest impressions of the final years of the Stalinist era. In no other way can we explain this predomination of tragic, mournful colours so unusual for Pushkin, the sunniest of all Russian poets - in a composition already laden with anxiety and depression. Four Monologues To Words By A. Pushkin were written during the last act of the horrible regime that was about to go, and the echoing of epochs is most evident in the monologue In The Depth Of Siberian Mines. This ’anti-czarist’ poem by Pushkin, which everybody learnt at school by official reading-books, is perceived quite differently in the context of the year 1952: “The heavy chains will drop, // The prisons will fall, and freedom // Will meet you happily at the entrance // And your brothers will hand the sword back to you.”
Shostakovich made acquaintance with Evgeny Dolmatovsky soon after the war, in a compartment of the Moscow-Leningrad train. The poet was back from the Stalingrad steppe and was enthusiastic talking about saving forests from dry winds, the problem which was actively discussed in the USSR at the time. Shostakovich asked Dolmatovsky to write some poems which later formed the basis of his oratorio Song of the Woods composed in 1949. After that, they worked together at the film The Fall of Berlin, composed the cantata The Sun Shines Above Our Motherland, and a number of songs and romances. For Song of the Woods and the soundtrack for the film the composer was awarded the State Prize, the highest award for Soviet workers of culture. Joint work led to friendship between Shostakovich and Dolmatovsky. This latter remembers, “We were young, strenuous… work and life were a pleasure”.
In the terrible years of reaction of the late forties - early fifties, when Shostakovich’s music was banned again after the ordinances of the Party and the government, one of the few ways left for the composer to still write music and earn his living was making pompous oratorios and cantatas and soundtracks to official films. The unpretentious but sincere poetry of the man who, when a boy, recited his verses to Mayakovsky, who had gone through the trial of the gigantic constructions, who was bruised and wounded in the War, and who was entirely constituted by the system then existing - this poetry helped Shostakovich to go on composing in those years.
In 1954, Shostakovich received from Evgeny Dolmatovsky a few lyrical poems on love and friendship - a kind of “narrative” of feelings that have left tender memories. The theme clearly attracted the composer; he had not addressed love lyrics since the time of his songs to words by Japanese poets (1928-1932). The result was Five Songs to Lyrics by E. Dolmatovsky, an opus somewhat unusual even for the trend to simplify the music language typical for Shostakovich of the ’50s. It is not just the desire to be brief or clear, but even to avoid anything that requires any effort in listening. The composer seems to be pleased combining simple songlike tunes to subtle nuances of the Russian classical romance. Clear harmonies, catchy tunes, and nearly classical form, the use of easily identifiable waltz or march intonations - everything exposes the author’s wish (natural or enforced by the circumstances) to be understandable, to be “closer to the people”.
In 1956, the fifty-year-old composer suddenly got married for the second time. His young wife, a former Young Communist executive, soon got accustomed to the soft character of Shostakovich. So one day she praised songs by Solovyov-Sedoy (a most popular songwriter for masses) and added, “Would be great if you, Mitya, also wrote a song or two like these”.
Why, he was able to compose such songs too.
Dostoyevsky’s novel The Demons was first published in full in the Soviet Union as late as in 1957, due to ease-off attitudes of the political “thaw” that was felt after Stalin’s death. The Demons, which Dostoyevsky wrote with “hands trembling with rage” (Saltykov-Schedrin), was condemned by Soviet literary critics “a hatred-laden lampoon against the Russian liberation movement of the 1860s, against the ideas of Revolution and Socialism”.
Shostakovich read the novel in 1974, and it surely must have had a tremendous impression on him. Too many things in The Demons echoed his own, private trials and reflections. Shostakovich was intrigued by one of the most disgusting characters of the book: Captain Ignat Lebiadkin, or, better say, by his poetical opuses which were "immensely respected and valued" by the Captain himself. This is Dostoyevsky’s description of Lebiadkin: “…with a purple, somewhat swollen and sagging face, with cheeks quaking at each movement of the face, with small, bloodshot, and sometimes quite sly eyes; he had a moustache and whiskers”.
Four Poems of Captain Lebiadkin written in 1974 were to become the last vocal cycle of the composer. After Six Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva and Suite to Words by Michael Angelo Buonarroti which spoke of beauty, spirit, and joy of creativity, the composer now chooses not poetry but its parody. The poems of Lebiadkin are soaking with stupidity, vulgarity, rudeness, hatred, and self-conceit. The desire to speak his inner pains out typical for the composer in the last years of his creative work, the powerful anti-Socialist drive of The Demons, and new creative abilities inherent in the very stylistic features of Dostoyevsky’s poems - all this urged Shostakovich to compose a quite special opus, where literature, ideology, satire, parody, theatre, and music fuse into an absolutely new genre of vocal art.
Five Romances to Words from Krokodil Magazine written in 1965 were another example of caricature in the composer’s music. Here, Shostakovich who produced so many compositions of the kind in his youth, in the boiling ’twenties, once again laughs at stupidity and vulgarity to his heart’s content, as if shaking off the stupor that had lasted for decades.
The comic magazine Krokodil, throughout the decades of its publishing, was a quite official mouthpiece of the Soviet propaganda. Certain trifling drawbacks on the way to the bright Communist future required critical appraisal, and Krokodil whose weapons were satire and humour was created just for such ruthless criticism. Many things were permitted to the magazine. To an extent, it was the only one that dared speak openly about rudeness, drunkenness, and other ’minor sins’ of the Socialist society. Krokodil was quite popular with the broad public. It was read in the municipal transport, its anecdotes were retold to fellow workers, and scraps of its pages could always be found near beer outlets and in local trains.
For his songs, Shostakovich selected droll letters mailed by the readers and published in the magazine. The composer even marked the score of the opus with the date and number of the issue, “No. 24 of August 30, 1965”. Hardly can any translation, even the most precise one, convey the turns of speech and thought of the ’common working men’; even in Russian, the texts of the letters sound unbelievably idiotic. Moreover, the very situations told by the readers are rather understandable only by those who happened to be living in the same epoch as the composer. However, musically Shostakovich is so brilliant in implementing his plan (“…desire to try my abilities, and maybe to do something new…”), the images are so salient, and the vocal and the piano parts are written so astoundingly vivid, making use of the extreme divisions of the compass and extreme dynamics allowing performers to demonstrate themselves to the full - that the opus goes far beyond the scope of purely musical adaptation of funny absurdities, and the music becomes a full-scale character of this performance, a theatrical one indeed.
It is typical for a simplified approach to works of Shostakovich to directly relate tragic motifs in his music to dramatic milestones of Russian history. This idea, however, often does not stand a test with facts of the composer’s biography. Sometimes he composed his gloomiest music in times which seemingly did not suggest such a disposition. And vice versa, the brightness of Festive Overture (1954) should hardly be ascribed to joy about the recent (1953) death of Stalin. Still, his choice of verses for the string of songs dedicated to the 115th anniversary of Pushkin’s death clearly indicates the darkest impressions of the final years of the Stalinist era. In no other way can we explain this predomination of tragic, mournful colours so unusual for Pushkin, the sunniest of all Russian poets - in a composition already laden with anxiety and depression. Four Monologues To Words By A. Pushkin were written during the last act of the horrible regime that was about to go, and the echoing of epochs is most evident in the monologue In The Depth Of Siberian Mines. This ’anti-czarist’ poem by Pushkin, which everybody learnt at school by official reading-books, is perceived quite differently in the context of the year 1952: “The heavy chains will drop, // The prisons will fall, and freedom // Will meet you happily at the entrance // And your brothers will hand the sword back to you.”
Shostakovich made acquaintance with Evgeny Dolmatovsky soon after the war, in a compartment of the Moscow-Leningrad train. The poet was back from the Stalingrad steppe and was enthusiastic talking about saving forests from dry winds, the problem which was actively discussed in the USSR at the time. Shostakovich asked Dolmatovsky to write some poems which later formed the basis of his oratorio Song of the Woods composed in 1949. After that, they worked together at the film The Fall of Berlin, composed the cantata The Sun Shines Above Our Motherland, and a number of songs and romances. For Song of the Woods and the soundtrack for the film the composer was awarded the State Prize, the highest award for Soviet workers of culture. Joint work led to friendship between Shostakovich and Dolmatovsky. This latter remembers, “We were young, strenuous… work and life were a pleasure”.
In the terrible years of reaction of the late forties - early fifties, when Shostakovich’s music was banned again after the ordinances of the Party and the government, one of the few ways left for the composer to still write music and earn his living was making pompous oratorios and cantatas and soundtracks to official films. The unpretentious but sincere poetry of the man who, when a boy, recited his verses to Mayakovsky, who had gone through the trial of the gigantic constructions, who was bruised and wounded in the War, and who was entirely constituted by the system then existing - this poetry helped Shostakovich to go on composing in those years.
In 1954, Shostakovich received from Evgeny Dolmatovsky a few lyrical poems on love and friendship - a kind of “narrative” of feelings that have left tender memories. The theme clearly attracted the composer; he had not addressed love lyrics since the time of his songs to words by Japanese poets (1928-1932). The result was Five Songs to Lyrics by E. Dolmatovsky, an opus somewhat unusual even for the trend to simplify the music language typical for Shostakovich of the ’50s. It is not just the desire to be brief or clear, but even to avoid anything that requires any effort in listening. The composer seems to be pleased combining simple songlike tunes to subtle nuances of the Russian classical romance. Clear harmonies, catchy tunes, and nearly classical form, the use of easily identifiable waltz or march intonations - everything exposes the author’s wish (natural or enforced by the circumstances) to be understandable, to be “closer to the people”.
In 1956, the fifty-year-old composer suddenly got married for the second time. His young wife, a former Young Communist executive, soon got accustomed to the soft character of Shostakovich. So one day she praised songs by Solovyov-Sedoy (a most popular songwriter for masses) and added, “Would be great if you, Mitya, also wrote a song or two like these”.
Why, he was able to compose such songs too.
Dostoyevsky’s novel The Demons was first published in full in the Soviet Union as late as in 1957, due to ease-off attitudes of the political “thaw” that was felt after Stalin’s death. The Demons, which Dostoyevsky wrote with “hands trembling with rage” (Saltykov-Schedrin), was condemned by Soviet literary critics “a hatred-laden lampoon against the Russian liberation movement of the 1860s, against the ideas of Revolution and Socialism”.
Shostakovich read the novel in 1974, and it surely must have had a tremendous impression on him. Too many things in The Demons echoed his own, private trials and reflections. Shostakovich was intrigued by one of the most disgusting characters of the book: Captain Ignat Lebiadkin, or, better say, by his poetical opuses which were "immensely respected and valued" by the Captain himself. This is Dostoyevsky’s description of Lebiadkin: “…with a purple, somewhat swollen and sagging face, with cheeks quaking at each movement of the face, with small, bloodshot, and sometimes quite sly eyes; he had a moustache and whiskers”.
Four Poems of Captain Lebiadkin written in 1974 were to become the last vocal cycle of the composer. After Six Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva and Suite to Words by Michael Angelo Buonarroti which spoke of beauty, spirit, and joy of creativity, the composer now chooses not poetry but its parody. The poems of Lebiadkin are soaking with stupidity, vulgarity, rudeness, hatred, and self-conceit. The desire to speak his inner pains out typical for the composer in the last years of his creative work, the powerful anti-Socialist drive of The Demons, and new creative abilities inherent in the very stylistic features of Dostoyevsky’s poems - all this urged Shostakovich to compose a quite special opus, where literature, ideology, satire, parody, theatre, and music fuse into an absolutely new genre of vocal art.