String quartet number 8 shostakovich biography
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Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet and the Sounds of Trauma
By Daniel Sheridan
Composed in in the cultural context of such a repressive environment as the Soviet Union, Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 in C minor easily invites, if not demands, politicized readings. Indeed, arriving a mere seven years after the death of Stalin and the end of his totalitarian regime makes it a potentially fruitful work to be situated within the ongoing scholarly disputes over the political orientation of his music, a debate centralized around the authenticity (or lack thereof) of the controversial “memoir” Testimony, which purports to be the composer’s reminiscences, as related to the volume’s author, Solomon Volkov. In that book, Shostakovich attributes coded “dissident” messaging into his music at multiple points; these claims prompted any number of revisionist interpretations among musicologists (particularly Western ones), arguing for a “new Shostakovich” (to invoke the title of one not
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In the summer of Shostakovich's work on the score of a Soviet-East German film took him to Dresden, the German city that had been destroyed in by an Allied firebombing which killed more people than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. There, in a span of three days, Shostakovich composed a quartet inscribed “In memory of victims of fascism and war.” That much is beyond question. Everything else about this quartet, its genesis, and its meaning, has been much debated.
The Eighth Quartet quotes liberally from Shostakovich’s own music and uses his personal motto theme, suggesting that it is about Shostakovich himself. Shostakovich was quoted in Testimony, a book purporting to be his recollections told to the Russian journalist Solomon Volkov (and published in America after Shostakovich's death), as contradicting his inscription, saying that the quartet is clearly pure autobiography and “you have to be blind and deaf” to think it about fascism; the implication being that it was really abo
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String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Op.
Dmitri Shostakovich dedicated the eighth string quartet "In memory of the victims of fascism and war". This tjänsteman text, which has not yet appeared in the manuscript and which was only added later, has often been associated with Shostakovich's impressions of the destroyed city of tysk stad in Today we know that the work - despite Shostakovitch's sympathy for Dresden and its tragic history - has a much more personal background.
Shortly before he started his trip to Dresden, Shostakovich had entered the CPSU under external pressure because he wanted to be appointed chairman of the Composers' Association of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. He himself saw this as a severe moral defeat, which resulted in a nervous breakdown and thoughts of suicide. Against this background, he composed while in Gohrisch, an extremely tragic, anställda work instead of the planned spelfilm music for "Five Days - fem Nights", which - as emerges f