Creativity D.D. Shostakovich

shostakovich composer musical art

Nature endowed Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich with a character of extraordinary purity and responsiveness. In a rare harmony, the beginnings merged in him - creative, spiritual and moral. The image of man coincided with the image of the creator. That painful contradiction between everyday life and the moral ideal, which Leo Tolstoy could not resolve, Shostakovich brought into unity not with declarations, but with the very experience of his life, becoming a moral beacon of effective humanism, illuminating the 20th century with an example of serving people.

A constant, unquenchable thirst for comprehensive coverage and renewal led him along the composer's path. Expanding the spheres of music, he introduced many new figurative layers into it, conveyed the struggle of a person with evil, terrible, soulless, grandiose, thus “solving the most urgent artistic task set by our time. But, having solved it, he pushed the boundaries of musical art itself and created a new type of artistic thinking in the field of instrumental forms, which influenced composers of different styles and was capable of embodying not only the content that is expressed in the corresponding works of Shostakovich. Recalling Mozart, who owned both instrumental and vocal music with equal confidence, bringing their specifics closer together, he returned music to universalism.

Shostakovich's work embraced all forms and genres of music, combined traditional foundations with innovative discoveries. An insightful connoisseur of everything that existed and appeared in composer's work, he showed wisdom, not submitting to the showiness of formal innovations. The presentation of music as an organic part of a diverse artistic process allowed Shostakovich to understand the fruitfulness at the present stage of combining different principles of composing technique, different means of expression. Leaving nothing unattended, he found a natural place for everything in his individual creative arsenal, creating a unique Shostakovich style in which the organization of sound material is dictated by the live process of intonation, live intonation content. Freely and boldly, he pushed the boundaries of the tonal system, but did not abandon it: this is how Shostakovich's synthetic modal thinking arose and developed, his flexible modal structures that correspond to the richness of figurative content. Adhering mainly to the melodic-polyphonic style of music, he discovered and strengthened many new facets of melodic expressiveness, became the ancestor of melos of exceptional power of influence, corresponding to the extreme emotional temperature of the age. With the same courage, Shostakovich expanded the range of timbre coloring, timbre intonations, enriched the types of musical rhythm, bringing it as close as possible to the rhythm of speech, Russian folk music. A truly national composer in his perception of life, creative psychology, in many features of style, in his work, thanks to the richness, depth of content and a huge range of intonational sphere, he went beyond national borders, becoming a phenomenon of universal culture.

Shostakovich had the good fortune to know world fame during his lifetime, to hear the definition of a genius about himself, to become a recognized classic, along with Mozart, Beethoven, Glinka, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky. This was firmly established in the sixties and sounded especially powerful in 1966, when the composer's sixtieth birthday was celebrated everywhere and solemnly.

By that time, the literature on Shostakovich was quite extensive, containing monographs with biographical information, but the theoretical aspect decisively prevailed. The developing new field of musicology was affected by the lack of a proper chronological distance that helps objective historical development, the underestimation of the influence of biographical factors on the work of Shostakovich, as well as on the work of other figures of Soviet culture.

All this prompted Shostakovich's contemporaries, even during his lifetime, to raise the question of the overdue multilateral, generalizing, documentary study. D.B. Kabalevsky pointed out: “I would like a book to be written about Shostakovich ... in which the creative PERSONALITY of Shostakovich would stand in front of the reader in full growth, so that no musical and analytical studies would obscure in it the spiritual world of the composer, born of the polysyllabic 20th century.” E.A. wrote about the same. Mravinsky: “Descendants will envy us that we lived at the same time as the author of the Eighth Symphony, could meet and talk with him. And they will probably complain about us for not being able to fix and preserve for the future many of the little things that characterize it, to see in everyday life the unique and therefore especially expensive ... " . Later V.S. Vinogradov, L.A. Mazel put forward the idea of ​​creating a major generalized work on Shostakovich as a task of paramount importance. It was clear that its complexity, volume, specificity, due to the scale, greatness of Shostakovich's personality and activity, would require the efforts of many generations of musician-researchers.

The author of this monograph began his work with the study of Shostakovich's pianism - the result was the essay "Shostakovich the Pianist" (1964), followed by articles about the revolutionary traditions of his family, published in 1966-1967 in the Polish magazine "Rukh Muzychny" and the Leningrad press, documentary essays in the books "Musicians about their art" (1967), "On music and musicians of our days" (1976), in the periodicals of the USSR, East Germany, Poland. In parallel, as accompanying books, summarizing the material from different angles, Stories about Shostakovich (1976), local history research "Shostakovich in Petrograd-Leningrad" (1979, 2nd edition - 1981) were published.

Such preparation helped to write a four-volume history of the life and work of D.D. Shostakovich, published in 1975-1982, consisting of the dilogy "The Young Years of Shostakovich", the books "D.D. Shostakovich during the Great Patriotic War” and “Shostakovich. Thirty years. 1945-1975".

Most of the research was created during the life of the composer, with his help, which was expressed in the fact that he allowed the use of all archival materials about him in a special letter and asked to contribute to this work, in conversations and explained in writing the questions that arose; having familiarized himself with the dilogy in the manuscript, he gave permission for publication, and shortly before his death, in April 1975, when the first volume came out of print, he expressed his approval of this edition in writing.

In historical science, the most important factor determining the novelty of a study is considered to be the saturation of documentary sources introduced for the first time into circulation.

The monograph was mainly based on them. In relation to Shostakovich, these sources seem truly immense, in their linkage, gradual development, a special eloquence, strength, and evidence are revealed.

As a result of many years of research, it was possible to investigate more than four thousand documents, including archival materials about the revolutionary activities of his ancestors, their connections with the families of the Ulyanovs, Chernyshevskys, the official file of the composer's father, D.B. Shostakovich, diaries of M.O. Steinberg, who recorded the training of D.D. Shostakovich, notes by N.A. Malko about the rehearsals and premieres of the First and Second Symphonies, an open letter to I.O. Dunayevsky about the Fifth Symphony, etc. For the first time, the associated with D.D. Shostakovich funds of special archives of art: the Central State Archive of Literature and Art - TsGALI (funds of D.D. Shostakovich, V.E. Meyerhold, M.M. Tsekhanovsky, V.Ya. Shebalin, etc.), the State Central Museum of Musical Culture named after M.I. Glinka-GTsMMK (funds of D.D. Shostakovich, V.L. Kubatsky, L.V. Nikolaev, G.A. Stolyarov, B.L. Yavorsky and others). Leningrad State Archive of Literature and Art-LGALI (funds of the State Research Institute of Theater and Music, the Lenflm film studio, the Leningrad Philharmonic, opera houses, the Conservatory, the Department of Arts of the Leningrad City Executive Committee, the Leningrad organization of the Union of Composers of the RSFSR, the Drama Theater named after A. S. Pushkin), archives of the Bolshoi Theater of the USSR, the Leningrad Theater Museum, the Leningrad Institute of Theater, Music and Cinematography-LGITMiK. (funds of V.M., Bogdanov-Berezovsky, N.A. Malko, M.O. Steinberg), Leningrad Conservatory-LGK. Materials on the topic were provided by the Central Party Archive of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU (information about the Shaposhnikov brothers from the funds of I.N., Ulyanov), the Institute of Party History under the Moscow City Committee and the Moscow Committee of the CPSU (personal file of CPSU member D.D. Shostakovich), the Central State archive of the October Revolution and socialist construction - TsGAOR, Central State Historical Archive - TsGIA, Institute of Metrology named after D.I. Mendeleev, Museum of N.G. Chernyshevsky in Saratov, the Museum of the History of Leningrad, the library of the Leningrad University, the museum "The Muses were not silent."

Shostakovich's life is a process of uninterrupted creativity, which reflected not only the events of the time, but also the very character, psychology of the composer. The introduction into the orbit of research of a rich and diverse music-autographic complex - autographs of finishing, secondary, dedicatory, sketches - expanded the idea of ​​​​the composer's creative spectrum (for example, his quest in the field of historical-revolutionary opera, interest in the Russian fair theater), about incentives, creating of this or that work, revealed a number of psychological features of Shostakovich’s composer’s “laboratory” (the place and essence of the “emergency” method with long-term nurturing of the idea, the difference in the methods of working on autonomous and applied genres, the effectiveness of short-term abrupt genre switches in the process of creating monumental forms, sudden intrusions in them by the emotional contrast of chamber compositions, fragments, etc.).

The study of autographs led to the introduction into life of unknown pages of creativity, not only through analysis in a monograph, but also by publishing, recording on records, editing and writing a libretto of the opera scenes "The Tale of the Priest and His Worker Balda" (staged at the Leningrad Academic Maly Opera Theater and ballet), the creation and performance of the piano suite of the same name, participation in the performance of unknown works, arrangements. Only a diverse scope, insight into sweaty documents "from the inside", a combination of research and practical action illuminates the personality of Shostakovich in all its manifestations.

Consideration of the life and work of a person who has become an ethical, social phenomenon of an era that had no equal in the 20th century in terms of the versatility of the spheres of music covered by it, could not but lead to the solution of some methodological issues of the biographical genre in musicology. They also touched upon the methodology of searches, organization, use of sources, and the very content of the genre, bringing it closer to a kind of synthetic genre that is successfully developing in literary criticism, sometimes called "biography-creativity". Its essence lies in a comprehensive analysis of all aspects of the artist's life. For this, it is precisely the biography of Shostakovich, in which creative genius is combined with the beauty of personality, that provides the broadest possibilities. It presents science with large layers of facts that were previously considered non-research, everyday, reveals the inseparability of everyday attitudes and creative ones. She shows that the trend of inter-genre connections, characteristic of modern music, can be fruitful for literature about it, stimulate its growth not only in the direction of specialization, but also complex works that consider life as creativity, a process that unfolds in a historical perspective, in stages, with a holistic panoramic coverage of the phenomenon. It seems that this type of research is in the tradition of Shostakovich himself, who did not divide genres into high and low and, transforming genres, merged their signs and techniques.

The study of the biography and work of Shostakovich in a single system, the inseparability of the composer from Soviet music, as its truly innovative avant-garde, require the use of data, and in some cases research methods of historical science, musical psychology, source studies, film studies, the science of musical performance, a combination of general historical, textual, musical and analytical aspects. The elucidation of complex correlations between personality and creativity, supported by an analysis of documentary sources, should be based on a holistic analysis of the writings, and taking into account the extensive experience of theoretical works on Shostakovich, using their achievements, an attempt was made in the monograph to establish by what parameters it is advisable to develop general characteristics for the historical biographical story. On the basis of both factual and musical-autographic material, they include the history of the idea and creation of the composition, the features of the process of working on it, the figurative structure, the first interpretations and further existence, the place in the evolution of the creator. All this makes up the "biography" of the work - an inseparable part of the composer's biography.

In the center of the monograph is the problem of "personality and creativity", considered more broadly than any reflection of the artist's biography in his works. Equally erroneous is the point of view of creativity as a direct biographical source and the recognition, as it were, of two independent biographies - worldly and creative. The materials of the activity of Shostakovich the creator, teacher, head of the composer organization of the RSFSR, deputy of the Soviets of People's Deputies, revealing many psychological and ethical personality traits, show that the definition of the line of creativity has always become the definition of the line of life: Shostakovich elevated the ideals of life to the ideals of art. Organic was the internal relationship between the socio-political, aesthetic and moral-ethical principles in his life, work and personality. He never protected himself from time, nor did he leave self-preservation for the sake of everyday joys. The type of person, the brightest personification of which was Shostakovich, was born from the youth of the time, the spirit of the revolution. The core that cements all aspects of Shostakovich's biography is ethics, close to the ethics of all those who from time immemorial fought for the perfection of man, and at the same time conditioned by his personal development, stable family traditions.

The importance in the formation of the artist of both immediate and more distant family sources is known: in the ancestors, nature takes “building material”, complex genetic combinations of genius are formed from centuries of accumulation. Not always knowing why and how a powerful river suddenly appears from streams, we still know that this river was created by them, contains their contours and signs. The ascendant family of Shostakovich should begin on the paternal side with Peter and Boleslav Shostakovich, Maria Yasinskaya, Varvara Shaposhnikova, on the maternal side - with Yakov and Alexandra Kokoulin. They have outlined the fundamental properties of the genus: social sensitivity, the idea of ​​duty to people, sympathy for suffering, hatred of evil. Eleven-year-old Mitya Shostakovich was with those who met V.I. Lenin in Petrograd in April 1917 and listened to his speech. He was not an accidental eyewitness to the events, but a person belonging to a family connected with the families of N.G. Chernyshevsky, I.N. Ulyanov, with the liberation movement of pre-revolutionary Russia.

The process of education and training D.D. Shostakovich, pedagogical appearance and methods of his teachers A.K. Glazunova, M.O. Steinberg, L.V. Nikolaev, I.A. Glyasser, A.A. Rozanova introduced the young musician to the traditions of the classical Russian music school, to its ethics. Shostakovich began his journey with open eyes and an open heart, he knew what to direct himself to, when at the age of twenty, as an oath, he wrote: "I will work tirelessly in the field of music, to which I will devote my whole life."

In the future, creative, everyday difficulties more than once became a test of his ethics, his desire to meet a person who is the bearer of goodness and justice. Public recognition of his innovative aspirations was difficult; the materials objectively reveal the crisis moments he experienced, their influence on his appearance and music: the crisis of 1926, disagreements with Glazunov, Steinberg, discussions of 1936, 1948 with a sharp condemnation of the composer's creative principles.

While maintaining a "reserve" of stamina, Shostakovich did not escape personal suffering and contradictions. The sharp contrast of his life was reflected in his character - compliant, but also adamant, intellect - cold and fiery, in his intransigence with kindness. Over the years, always strong feelings - a sign of moral height - were combined with ever deeper self-control. The unbridled courage of self-expression pushed aside the worries of every day. Music, as the center of being, brought joy, strengthened the will, but, giving himself to music, he understood the bestowal comprehensively, and the ethical destiny, illuminated by the ideal, raised his personality.

There are no documents preserved anywhere that could accurately record when and how the second spiritual birth of a person took place, but everyone who came into contact with the life of Shostakovich testifies that this happened during the creation of the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, the Fourth and Fifth symphonies: spiritual affirmation was inseparable from creative. Here is a chronological boundary: it is also adopted in the structure of this edition.

It was at that time that life acquired a stable core in clear and firm principles that no trials could shake. The Creator has established himself in the main thing: for everything that was given to him - for talent, childhood happiness, love - he must pay for everything, giving himself to humanity, to the Motherland. The feeling of the motherland guides creativity, which, by its own definition, is as if incandescent, exalted by a great sense of patriotism. Life becomes a continuous struggle for humanity. He never tired of repeating: “Love for man, the ideas of humanism have always been the main driving force of art. Only humanistic ideas created works that outlived their creators. From now on, the will consisted in the ability to always follow the ethics of humanism. All documentary evidence shows how effective his kindness was. Everything that affected the interests of people did not leave indifferent, wherever possible, he used his influence to elevate a person: his readiness to give his time to fellow composers, helping their creativity, the benevolent breadth of good assessments, the ability to see, find talented. The sense of duty in relation to each person merged with duty in relation to society and the struggle for the highest norms of social life, excluding evil in any guise. Trust in justice did not give rise to humble non-resistance to evil, but hatred of cruelty, stupidity, and prudence. All his life he straightforwardly solved the eternal question - what is evil? He persistently returned to this in his letters, autobiographical notes, as a personal problem, repeatedly determining the moral content of evil, did not accept its justifications. The whole picture of his relationship with loved ones, the selection of friends, environment was determined by his conviction that duplicity, flattery, envy, arrogance, indifference - "paralysis of the soul", in the words of his favorite writer A.P. Chekhov, are incompatible with the image of the creator-artist, with true talent. The conclusion is persistent: "All the outstanding musicians with whom I had the good fortune to be acquainted, who gave me their friendship, understood very well the difference between good and evil."

Shostakovich fought mercilessly against evil - both as a legacy of the past (the operas "The Nose", "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District"), and as with the force of reality (the evil of fascism - in the Seventh, Eighth, Thirteenth Symphonies, the evil of careerism, spiritual cowardice, fear - in the Thirteenth Symphony, lies - in the Suite on poems by Michelangelo Buonarroti).

Perceiving the world as a constant drama, the composer exposed the discrepancy between the moral categories of real life. Music each time decides and indicates what is moral. Over the years, the ethics of Shostakovich manifests itself in his music more and more nakedly, openly, with preaching earnestness. A series of essays is being created in which reflection on moral categories predominates. Everything is getting bigger. The need to sum up, which inevitably arises in every person, in Shostakovich becomes a generalization through creativity.

Without false humility, he turned to humanity, comprehending the meaning of earthly existence, raised to a great height: a genius spoke to millions.

The tension of passions was replaced by a deepening into the spiritual world of the individual. The highest life peak has been determined. The man climbed, fell, got tired, got up and walked indomitably. To the ideal. And the music, as it were, compressed the main thing from the experience of life with that laconic, touching truth and simplicity, which Boris Pasternak called unheard of.

Since the end of the publication of the first edition of the monograph, there has been a step forward.

Collected works with reference articles are published, works that previously remained out of the field of view of performers have entered the concert repertoire and no longer require musicological “protection”, new theoretical works have appeared, articles about Shostakovich are contained in most collections on contemporary music, after the death of the composer, memoirs have multiplied. literature about him. What was done for the first time and became the property of the mass of readers is used in some "secondary" books and articles. There is a general turn towards detailed biographical development.

According to distant legends, the Shostakovich family can be traced back to the time of Grand Duke Vasily III Vasilyevich, father of Ivan the Terrible: Mikhail Shostakovich, who occupied a rather prominent place at the Lithuanian court, was part of the embassy sent by the Prince of Lithuania to the ruler of Moscow. However, his descendant, Pyotr Mikhailovich Shostakovich, who was born in 1808, in the documents listed himself as a peasant.

He was an outstanding person: he was able to get an education, graduate from the Vilna Medical and Surgical Academy as a volunteer in the veterinary specialty, and was expelled for his involvement in the uprising in Poland and Lithuania in 1831.

In the forties of the 19th century, Pyotr Mikhailovich and his wife Maria-Josefa Yasinskaya ended up in Yekaterinburg (now the city of Sverdlovsk). Here, on January 27, 1845, their son was born, named Boleslav-Arthur (later only the first name was preserved).

In Yekaterinburg, P.M. Shostakovich gained some fame as a skilled and diligent veterinarian, rose to the rank of collegiate assessor, but remained poor, always lived on the last penny; Boleslav took up tutoring early. The Shostakovichs spent fifteen years in this city. The work of a veterinarian, which is necessary for every farm, brought Pyotr Mikhailovich closer to the surrounding peasants, free hunters. The way of the family was not much different from the way of life of the factory artisans, miners. Ros Boleslav in a simple, working environment, studied at the county school with the children of workers. The upbringing was harsh: knowledge was sometimes strengthened with rods. Subsequently, in his old age, in his autobiography, entitled "Notes of the Unlucky", Boleslav Shostakovich titled the first section - "Rods". This shameful painful punishment for the rest of his life aroused in him a fierce hatred for the humiliation of a person.

In 1858 the family moved to Kazan. Boleslav was assigned to the First Kazan Gymnasium, where he studied for four years. Mobile, inquisitive, easily assimilating knowledge, a faithful comrade, with early firm moral concepts, he became the leader of the gymnasium students.

The new symphony was conceived in the spring of 1934. A message appeared in the press: Shostakovich proposes to create a symphony on the theme of the defense of the country.

The topic was relevant. The clouds of fascism were gathering over the world. “We all know that the enemy is stretching out its paw to us, the enemy wants to destroy our gains on the front of the revolution, on the front of culture, of which we are workers, on the front of construction and on all the fronts and achievements of our country,” said Shostakovich, speaking to the Leningrad composers. - There can be no different points of view on the topic that we need to be vigilant, we need to be on the alert to prevent the enemy from destroying the great gains that we made during the time from the October Revolution to the present day. Our duty, as composers, is that with our creativity we must raise the defense capability of the country, we must use our works, songs and marches to help the soldiers of the Red Army defend us in the event of an enemy attack, and therefore it is necessary to develop our military work in every possible way.

To work on a military symphony, the board of the composer's organization sent Shostakovich to Kronstadt, on the cruiser Aurora. On the ship, he wrote down the sketches of the first part. The intended symphonic work was included in the concert cycles of the Leningrad Philharmonic in the 1934/35 season.

However, work has slowed down. The pieces didn't add up. Shostakovich wrote: “It must be a monumental program item of great thoughts and great passions. And, therefore, a great responsibility. I have carried it for many years. And yet, until now, I have not yet groped for its forms and “technology”. The sketches and blanks made earlier do not satisfy me. I’ll have to start from the very beginning.” 1. In search of the technology of a new monumental symphony, he studied Mahler’s Third Symphony in detail, which already amazed with its unusual grandiose form of a six-part cycle with a total duration of an hour and a half. I.I. Sollertinsky associated the first part of the Third Symphony with a giant procession, “opened by the relief theme of eight horns in unison, with tragic ups and downs, with pressures brought to climaxes of superhuman strength, with pathetic recitatives of horns or solo trombones…” . Such a characterization, apparently, was close to Shostakovich. The extracts he made from G. Mahler's Third Symphony testify that he paid attention to those features that his friend wrote about.

Soviet symphony

In the winter of 1935, Shostakovich participated in a discussion on Soviet symphonism that took place in Moscow for three days - from 4 to 6 February. It was one of the most significant performances of the young composer, outlining the direction of further work. Frankly, he emphasized the complexity of the problems at the stage of the formation of the symphonic genre, the danger of solving them with standard “recipes”, opposed exaggeration of the merits of individual works, criticizing, in particular, the Third and Fifth Symphonies of L.K. Knipper for "chewed language", wretchedness and primitive style. He boldly asserted that “…Soviet symphonism does not exist. We must be modest and admit that we still do not have musical works that in an expanded form reflect the stylistic, ideological and emotional sections of our life, and reflect them in a beautiful form ... It must be admitted that in our symphonic music we have only some tendencies towards the formation of a new musical thinking, timid sketches of the future style…”.

Shostakovich called to perceive the experience and achievements of Soviet literature, where close, similar problems have already found implementation in the works of M. Gorky and other masters of the word.

Considering the development of modern artistic creativity, he saw signs of convergence between the processes of literature and music, which began in Soviet music as a steady movement towards lyrical-psychological symphonism.

For him, there was no doubt that the themes and style of his Second and Third Symphonies were a past stage not only of his own work, but of Soviet symphony as a whole: the metaphorically generalized style had become obsolete. Man as a symbol, a kind of abstraction, left the works of art in order to become an individuality in new works. A deeper understanding of the plot was strengthened, without the use of simplified texts of choral episodes in symphonies. The question was raised about the plot of "pure" symphonism. “There was a time,” Shostakovich argued, “when he (the question of plot) was greatly simplified ... Now they began to say seriously that it was not just about poetry, but also about music.”

Recognizing the limitations of his recent symphonic experiences, the composer advocated expanding the content and stylistic sources of Soviet symphony. To this end, he drew attention to the study of foreign symphonism, insisted on the need for musicology to identify the qualitative differences between Soviet symphonism and Western symphonism. “Of course, there is a qualitative difference, and we feel and feel it. But we do not have a clear concrete analysis in this respect... Unfortunately, we know very little about Western symphonism.”

Starting from Mahler, he spoke of a lyrical confessional symphony with an aspiration to the inner world of a contemporary. “It would be nice to write a new symphony,” he admitted. - True, this task is difficult, but this does not mean that it is not feasible. Trials continued to be made. Sollertinsky, who knew better than anyone about Shostakovich's ideas, at a discussion about Soviet symphonism said: "We are expecting the appearance of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony with great interest" and explained definitely: "... this work will be at a great distance from those three symphonies that Shostakovich wrote before. But the symphony is still in an embryonic state…” .

Two months after the discussion, in April 1935, the composer announced: “Now I have a big work ahead of me - the Fourth Symphony ... All the musical material I had for this work has now been rejected by me. The symphony is being rewritten. Since this is an extremely difficult and responsible task for me, I want to first write several compositions in chamber and instrumental style.

In the summer of 1935, Shostakovich was absolutely unable to do anything, except for countless chamber and symphonic passages, which included the music for the film "Girlfriends".

In the autumn of the same year, he once again set about writing the Fourth Symphony, firmly deciding, no matter what difficulties awaited him, to bring the work to completion, to realize the fundamental canvas, promised in the spring as "a kind of credo of creative work."

Having started writing the symphony on September 13, 1935, by the end of the year he had completely completed the first and mostly the second movement. He wrote quickly, sometimes even convulsively, throwing out entire pages and replacing them with new ones; the handwriting of the clavier sketches is unstable, fluent: the imagination overtook the recording, the notes were ahead of the pen, flowing like an avalanche onto the paper.

In January 1936, together with the staff of the Leningrad Academic Maly Opera Theater, Shostakovich went to Moscow, where the theater showed two of its best Soviet productions - Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and Quiet Flows the Don. At the same time, "Lady Macbeth" continued to run on the stage of the branch of the Bolshoi Theater of the USSR.

The responses to the tour of the Maly Opera Theater that appeared in the press left no doubt about the positive assessment of the opera The Quiet Flows the Don and the negative assessment of the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, to which the article "Muddle Instead of Music", published on January 28, 1936, was devoted. Following it (February 6, 1936), the article "Ballet Falsity" appeared, sharply criticizing the ballet "The Bright Stream" and its production at the Bolshoi Theater.

Many years later, summing up the results of the development of Soviet music in the thirties in the History of the Music of the Peoples of the USSR, Yu.V. Keldysh wrote about these productions and the articles and speeches they caused: “Despite a number of correct critical remarks and considerations of a general principled order, the sharply categorical assessments of creative phenomena contained in these articles were unfounded and unfair.

The articles of 1936 served as a source of a narrow and one-sided understanding of such important fundamental issues of Soviet art as the question of the attitude to the classical heritage, the problem of traditions and innovation. The traditions of musical classics were considered not as a basis for further development, but as a kind of unchanging standard, beyond which it was impossible to go. Such an approach fettered innovative searches, paralyzed the creative initiative of composers...

These dogmatic attitudes could not stop the growth of Soviet musical art, but they undoubtedly complicated its development, caused a number of collisions, and led to significant shifts in assessments "1".

The sharp disputes and discussions of that time testified to the collisions and shifts in the assessment of the phenomena of music.

The orchestration of the Fifth Symphony is characterized, in comparison with the Fourth, by a greater balance between brass and string instruments, with a preponderance towards strings: in Largo, there is no brass group at all. Timbre highlights are subject to essential moments of development, they follow from them, they are dictated by them. From the irrepressible generosity of ballet scores, Shostakovich turned to the economy of timbres. Orchestral dramaturgy is determined by the general dramatic orientation of the form. The intonational tension is created by the combination of melodic relief and its orchestral framing. The composition of the orchestra itself is also steadily determined. Having gone through different trials (up to the quadruple in the Fourth Symphony), Shostakovich now adhered to the triple composition - he was established precisely from the Fifth Symphony. Both in the modal organization of the material and in orchestration without breaking, within the framework of generally accepted compositions, the composer varied, expanded the timbre possibilities, often due to solo voices, the use of the piano (it is noteworthy that, having introduced it into the score of the First Symphony, Shostakovich then dispensed with the piano during Second, Third, Fourth symphonies and again included it in the score of the Fifth). At the same time, the importance of not only timbre dismemberment increased, but also timbre fusion, the alternation of large timbre layers; in the climactic fragments, the technique of using instruments in the highest expressive registers, without bass or with insignificant bass support (there are many examples of such in the Symphony) prevailed.

Its form marked the ordering, systematization of previous implementations, the achievement of strictly logical monumentality.

Let us note the features of shaping typical of the Fifth Symphony, which are preserved and developed in the further work of Shostakovich.

The value of the epigraph-entry increases. In the Fourth Symphony it was a harsh, convulsive motive; here it is the harsh, majestic power of the chant.

In the first part, the role of the exposition is put forward, its volume and emotional integrity are increased, which is also set off by the orchestration (the sound of the strings in the exposition). Structural boundaries between the main and side parties are overcome; they are opposed not so much as significant sections both in the exposition and in the development. "The reprise changes qualitatively, turning into the climax of dramaturgy with the continuation of thematic development: sometimes the theme acquires a new figurative meaning, which leads to a further deepening of the conflict-dramatic features of the cycle.

Development does not stop in the code either. And here the thematic transformations, modal transformations of themes, their dynamization by means of orchestration continue.

In the finale of the Fifth Symphony, the author did not give an active conflict, as in the finale of the previous Symphony. The final is easy. “With a big breath, Shostakovich leads us to a dazzling light in which all sorrowful experiences, all tragic conflicts of the difficult previous path disappear” (D. Kabalevsky). The conclusion sounded emphatically positive. “I put a man with all his experiences at the center of the idea of ​​my work,” Shostakovich explained, “and the finale of the Symphony resolves the tragically tense moments of the first parts in a cheerful, optimistic way” .

Such an ending emphasized classical origins, classical continuity; in his lapidarity, the tendency was most clearly manifested: creating a free type of interpretation of the sonata form, not deviating from the classical basis.

In the summer of 1937, preparations began for a decade of Soviet music to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution. The symphony was included in the program of the decade. In August, Fritz Stiedry went abroad. M. Shteiman, who replaced him, was not able to present a new complex composition at the proper level. The execution was entrusted to Evgeny Mravinsky. Shostakovich hardly knew him: Mravinsky entered the conservatory in 1924, when Shostakovich was in his last year; Shostakovich's ballets in Leningrad and Moscow were conducted by A. Gauk, P. Feldt, Y. Fayer, symphonies were "staged" by N. Malko, A. Gauk. Mravinsky was in the shadows. His individuality was formed slowly: in 1937 he was thirty-four years old, but he rarely appeared at the philharmonic console. Closed, doubting his own strength, this time he accepted the offer to present the new Shostakovich symphony to the public without hesitation. Remembering his unusual decisiveness, the conductor later himself could not explain it psychologically.

“I still cannot understand,” he wrote in 1966, “how I dared to accept such an offer without much hesitation and thought. If it were done to me now, then I would have thought for a long time, doubted, and, perhaps, in the end, did not dare. After all, not only my reputation was at stake, but also - what is much more important - the fate of a new, as yet unknown work by the composer, who recently was subjected to the most severe attacks for the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and withdrew his Fourth Symphony from performance.

For almost two years, Shostakovich's music was not heard in the Great Hall. Some of the musicians were wary of her. The discipline of the orchestra without a strong-willed chief conductor was declining. The Philharmonic's repertoire was criticized by the press. The leadership of the Philharmonic changed: the young composer Mikhail Chudaki, who became the director, was just entering the business, planning to involve I.I. Sollertinsky, composer and musical-performing youth.

Without hesitation M.I. Chudaki distributed responsible programs among three conductors who began active concert activity: E.A. Mravinsky, N.S. Rabinovich and K.I. Eliasberg.

Throughout September, Shostakovich lived only for the fate of the Symphony. Composition of music for the film "Volochaev days" pushed back. He refused other orders, citing employment.

He spent most of his time at the Philharmonic. Played the Symphony. Mravinsky listened and asked.

The conductor's consent to make his debut with the Fifth Symphony was influenced by the hope to receive help from the author in the process of performing work, to rely on his knowledge and experience. However, “the first meetings with Shostakovich,” we read in Mravinsky's memoirs, “delivered a strong blow to my hopes. No matter how much I asked the composer, I almost managed to “pull” nothing out of him” 2 ». The method of painstaking Mravinsky at first alarmed Shostakovich. “It seemed to me that he digs too much into the little things, pays too much attention to particulars, and it seemed to me that this would damage the overall plan, the overall idea. About every tact, about every thought, Mravinsky made me a real interrogation, demanding from me an answer to all the doubts that arose in him.

Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich is the greatest musician of the 20th century. No one in contemporary art can be compared with him in terms of the sharpness of perception of the era, responsiveness to its social, ideological and artistic processes. The strength of his music is in absolute truthfulness.

With unprecedented fullness and depth, this music captured people's life at critical stages - the 1905 revolution and the First World War, the Great October Socialist Revolution and the Civil War, the formation of a socialist society, the struggle against fascism in the Great Patriotic War, as well as the problems of the post-war world ... Shostakovich's work became both a chronicle and a confession of generations striving for a great future, shocked and withstood tragic trials.

“Music was not a profession for him, but the need to speak out, to express what people lived in his age, in his homeland. Nature endowed him with a special sensitivity of hearing: he heard people crying, he caught the low rumble of anger and the heart-cutting groan of despair. He heard the earth humming: crowds marched for justice, angry songs boiled over the suburbs, the wind carried the tunes of the outskirts, the penny harmonica squealed: a revolutionary song entered the strict world of symphonies. Then the iron clanged and gnashed in the bloody fields, the horns of strikes and war sirens howled over Europe. He heard groaning and wheezing: they put on a muzzle for a thought, cracked a whip, taught the art of jumping at the boot of power, begging for a handout and standing on their hind legs in front of the quarterly ... Once again, the horsemen of the Apocalypse rode into the flaming sky again. Sirens howled over the world, like the trumpets of the Last Judgment ... Times changed ... He worked all his life. Not only in music.

The purpose of creating a cycle of methodological developments in the discipline “National Musical Literature of the 20th – 21st Centuries” for fourth-year students of music schools was, first of all, the systematization of modern musicological literature, as well as the analysis of works that were not previously in the perspective of considering this discipline. Indicative in this context are the main areas of creative problems of D. D. Shostakovich and the cultural and historical atmosphere of the middle of the 20th century.

* * *

The given introductory fragment of the book Creativity of D. D. Shostakovich and Russian musical culture of the middle of the XX century. Volume IV of the training course “National Musical Literature of the 20th – First Half of the 21st Century” (S. V. Venchakova) was provided by our book partner, the LitRes company.

INTRODUCTION

The program of the course "Musical Literature" is aimed at forming the musical thinking of students, at developing the skills of analyzing musical works, at acquiring knowledge about the patterns of musical form, the specifics of the musical language.

The subject "Native Musical Literature of the 20th - the first half of the 21st centuries" is an essential part of the professional training of students of theoretical and performing departments of music and art schools.

In the process of studying the course, there is a process of analysis and systematization of various features of musical and artistic phenomena, the knowledge of which is of direct importance for the subsequent performing and pedagogical practice of students. Conditions are being created for scientific and creative understanding of artistic problems and understanding of various performing interpretations of modern musical styles. In general, a flexible system of specialized education is being created, without the criterion of "narrow specialization", which contributes to the deepening of professional skills and the activation of students' creative interest in work.

A holistic study of artistic and aesthetic trends, styles is based on the integration of students' knowledge in various fields: the history of foreign and Russian music (until the 20th - the first half of the 21st centuries), world artistic culture, analysis of musical works, performing practice, which ensures the formation of new professionally generalized knowledge .

Methodological development on the topic: “The work of D. D. Shostakovich. Some stages of creative style»

The purpose of the lesson: trace some stages of the creative style of the outstanding Russian composer of the twentieth century D. D. Shostakovich (1906 - 1975) in the context of tradition and innovation.

Lesson plan:

1. D. D. Shostakovich: artist and time

The work of D. Shostakovich is a very significant period both in art and in life. The works of any great artist can only be understood in the context of his era. But the time reflected in the art of the artist is difficult to understand outside of creativity. Art reveals its true essence, character and contradictions. Remaining an artist of his era, Shostakovich thinks, builds his artistic world in the forms and methods that take shape in culture.

Shostakovich, referring to all musical genres, rethought the poetics of musical expressive means. His music with equal force reflects both the outer and inner world of a person, opposition to evil in all manifestations, strength of mind - both an individual and a whole nation - through sharply contrasting comparisons, unexpected "invasions" and changes of plans. Shostakovich belonged to the artists who fully experienced the pressure of Soviet totalitarianism. What he expressed in music did not always correspond to his true thoughts and feelings, but this was the only opportunity to create and be heard. Shostakovich is a master of cryptic utterance, his music contains the truth about the past and the present that cannot be expressed in words.

2. To the problem of periodization of creativity of D. Shostakovich

The periodization of D. D. Shostakovich's work is one of the most important questions in musicological literature, which does not have a clear answer. In numerous monographic works about the composer, there are different opinions, the analysis of which allows us to discover the main criterion for their difference - the principle taken as the basis of periodization.

From the point of view of the formation and evolution of style, Shostakovich's art is usually divided into three phases: the formation of his own style, the maturity and skill of the artist, the last years of his life and work. However, musicologists who offer this periodization indicate different time frames. M. Sabinina singles out the 1920s - mid-1930s. (before the creation of the Fourth Symphony in 1936), 1936 - 1968 and 1968 - 1975. S. Khentova calls the thirtieth anniversary of 1945 - 1975 a late period. L. Danilevich adheres to a completely different position. Taking as a basis the ideological and semantic content of Shostakovich's music, the researcher presents seven stages: the early years - the 1920s; the humanist theme is introduced in the 1930s; years of the Great Patriotic War - 1941 - 1945 (creation of the Seventh and Eighth symphonies); post-war period - 1945 - 1954 (creation of the Tenth Symphony in 1953); history and modernity of the second half of the 1950s - early 1960s - until the creation of the Ninth Quartet in 1964; addressing the eternal problems of art from the second half of the 1960s and the last 1970s. Researcher L. Hakobyan, considering the creative path of the composer in the context of the Soviet era, substantiates the existence of eight periods of creativity:

1920s (before the Third Symphony; the key work is the opera The Nose);

The beginning of the 1930s - 1936 - the year of the appearance of the articles "Muddle instead of music" and "Ballet falsity" in "Pravda" (before the Fourth Symphony);

1937 - 1940 - a turning point and a crisis in creativity caused by ideological influence (from the Fifth Symphony to the Quintet);

1941 - 1946/47 - the war years (from the Seventh Symphony to the Third String Quartet);

1948 - 1952 - the first post-war years. In 1948, the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Composers took place, and a resolution was issued on the opera "The Great Friendship" by V. Muradeli, which served as the second public "destruction" of Shostakovich (from the First Violin Concerto to the Fifth String Quartet);

1953 - 1961 - "thaw" of the post-Stalin era (from the Tenth Symphony to the Twelfth);

1962 - 1969 - the culmination of creativity and the time of the composer's serious illness (from the Thirteenth Symphony to the Fourteenth);

1970 - 1975 - the end of the creative path.

Noting the politicization of the entire cultural life of the Soviet era, L. Hakobyan considers Shostakovich the only one who managed to "carry his gift ... through all the acute and chronic stages, shifts and remissions of his era" .

The listed approaches equally have the right to exist: their authors, considering the art of Shostakovich from various angles, cover the most important aspects of the artist's work.

A number of stages are also distinguished in the characterization of specific genres. So, M. Sabinina periodization symphonies connects with the peculiarities of its interpretation by the composer. As a result, the musicologist designates the following stages: the “formation” of the genre is associated with the creation of symphonies No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, No. 4; "search in the field of architectonics and the development of musical material" - the period of creation of symphonies No. 5, No. 6, No. 7, No. 8, No. 9, No. 10; intensive innovations in the field of interpretation of the genre - program symphonies No. 11, No. 12, No. 13, No. 14; The researcher classifies the Fifteenth Symphony as belonging to the second period.

3. List of works by D. D. Shostakovich

Or. 1. Scherzo for orchestra. 1919;

Or. 2. Eight Preludes for Piano. 1919 - 1920;

Op. 3. Theme and Variations for Orchestra. 1921 - 1922;

Op. 5. Three fantastic dances for piano. 1922;

Op. 6. Suite for two pianos. 1922;

Op. 7. Scherzo for orchestra. 1923;

Op. 8. First trio for violin, cello and piano. 1923;

Op. 9. Three pieces for cello and piano. Fantasy, Prelude, Scherzo. 1923 - 1924;

Op. 10. First symphony. 1924 - 1925;

Op. 11. Two Pieces for String Octet. Prelude, Scherzo. 1924 - 1925;

Op. 12. First sonata for piano. 1926;

Op. 13. Aphorisms. Ten Pieces for Piano. Recitative, Serenade, Nocturne, Elegy, Funeral March, Etude, Dance of Death, Canon, Legend, Lullaby. 1927;

Op. 14. Second symphony "Dedication to October". For orchestra and choir. 1927;

Op. 15. "Nose". Opera in 3 acts, 10 scenes. 1927 - 1928;

Op. 16. "Tahiti Trot". Orchestral transcription of the song by V. Yumans. 1928;

Op. 17. Two plays by Scarlatti. Transcription for brass band. 1928;

Op. 18. Music for the film "New Babylon". 1928 - 1929;

Op. 19. Music to the play by V. Mayakovsky "The Bedbug". 1929;

Op. 20. Symphony No. 3 "May Day". For orchestra and choir. 1929;

Op. 21. Six romances to the words of Japanese poets for voice and orchestra. "Love", "Before Suicide", "Indiscreet Look", "For the First and Last Time", "Hopeless Love", "Death". 1928 - 1932;

Op. 22. "Golden Age". Ballet in 3 acts. 1929 - 1930;

Op. 23. Two pieces for orchestra. Intermission, Final. 1929;

Op. 24. Music to the play by A. Bezymensky "Shot". 1929

Op. 25. Music to the play by A. Gorbenko and N. Lvov "Virgin Soil". 1930;

Or. 26. Music for the film "One". 1930;

Or. 27. Bolt. Ballet in 3 acts. 1930 - 1931;

Or. 28. Music to the play by A. Piotrovsky "Rule, Britannia". 1931;

Or. 29. “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” (“Katerina Izmailova”). Opera in 4 acts, 9 scenes. 1930-1932;

Or. 30. Music for the film "Golden Mountains". 1931;

Or. 31. Music for the variety and circus performance "Provisionally killed" by V. Voevodin and E. Ryss. 1931;

Or. 32. Music to the tragedy of W. Shakespeare "Hamlet". 1931 - 1932;

Or. 33. Music for the film "Counter". 1932;

Or. 34. Twenty-four preludes for piano. 1932 - 1933;

Or. 35. First concerto for piano and orchestra. 1933;

Or. 36. Music for the animated film "The Tale of the Priest and his Worker Balda". 1936;

Or. 37. Music for the play "The Human Comedy" by Balzac. 1933-1934;

Or. 38. Music for the film "Love and Hate". 1934;

Or. 39. "Light stream". Ballet in 3 acts, 4 scenes. 1934 - 1935;

Or. 40. Sonata for cello and piano. 1934;

Or. 41. Music for the film "Youth of Maxim". 1934;

Or. 41. Music for the film "Girlfriends". 1934 - 1935;

Op. 42. Five fragments for orchestra. 1935;

Or. 43. Symphony No. 4. 1935 - 1936;

Or. 44. Music to A. Afinogenov's play "Salute, Spain". 1936;

Or. 45. Music for the film "The Return of Maxim". 1936 - 1937;

Or. 47. Fifth symphony. 1937;

Or. 48. Music for the film "Volochaev days". 1936 - 1937;

Or. 49. First string quartet. 1938;

Or. 50. Music for the film "Vyborg Side". 1938;

Or. 51. Music for the film "Friends". 1938;

Or. 52. Music for the film "The Great Citizen" (first series). 1938;

Or. 53. Music for the film "Man with a gun". 1938;

Or. 54. Sixth symphony. 1939;

Or. 55. Music for the film "The Great Citizen" (second series). 1939;

Or. 56. Music for the animated film "Stupid Mouse". 1939;

Or. 57. Quintet for piano and string quartet. 1940;

Or. 58. Instrumentation of Mussorgsky's opera "Boris Godunov". 1939 - 1940;

Or. 58a. Music to Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear. 1940;

Or. 59. Music for the film "The Adventures of Korzinkina". 1940;

Or. 60. Seventh symphony. 1941;

Or. 61. Second sonata for piano. 1942;

Or. 63. "Native Leningrad". Vocal and orchestral suite in the play "Fatherland". 1942;

Or. 64. Music for the film "Zoya". 1944;

Or. 65. Eighth symphony. 1943;

Or. 66. Music for the play "Russian River". 1944;

Or. 67. Second trio for piano, violin and cello. 1944;

Or. 68. Second string quartet. 1944;

Or. 69. Children's notebook. Six Pieces for Piano. March, Waltz, "Bear", "Merry Tale", "Sad Tale", "Clockwork Doll". 1944 - 1945;

Or. 70. Ninth symphony. 1945;

Or. 71. Music for the film "Ordinary People". 1945;

Or. 73. Third string quartet. 1946;

Or. 74. "Poem about the Motherland" - for soloists, choir and orchestra. 1947;

Or. 75. Music for the film "Young Guard" (two series). 1947 - 1948;

Or. 76. Music for the film "Pirogov". 1947;

Or. 77. Concerto for violin and orchestra. 1947 - 1948;

Or. 78. Music for the film "Michurin". 1948;

Or. 79. "From Jewish Folk Poetry". Vocal cycle for soprano, contralto and tenor with piano accompaniment. "Cry for a dead baby", "Caring mother and aunt", "Lullaby", "Before a long separation", "Caution", "Abandoned father", "Song of need", "Winter", "Good life", "Song girls", "Happiness". 1948;

Or. 80. Music for the film "Meeting on the Elbe". 1948;

Or. 81. "Song of the forests." Oratorio for soloists, boys' choir, mixed choir and orchestra to words by E. Dolmatovsky. 1949;

Or. 82. Music to the film "The Fall of Berlin". 1949;

Or. 83. Fourth string quartet. 1949;

Or. 84. Two romances to words by Lermontov for voice and piano. "Ballad", "Morning of the Caucasus". 1950;

Or. 85. Music for the film "Belinsky". 1950;

Or. 87. Twenty-four preludes and fugues for piano. 1950 - 1951;

Or. 88. Ten poems for mixed choir without accompaniment to the words of revolutionary poets of the late XIX-early XX century. “Be brave, friends, let’s move forward!”, “One of many”, “On the street!”, “At a meeting during the transfer”, “Executed”, “The ninth of January”, “The belated volleys fell silent”, “They won”, "May Song", "Song". 1951;

Or. 89. Music for the film "Unforgettable 1919". 1951;

Or. 90. "The sun is shining over our Motherland." Cantata for boys' choir, mixed choir and orchestra to words by E. Dolmatovsky. 1952;

Or. 91. Four monologues on Pushkin's words for voice and piano. “Excerpt”, “What is in my name to you”, “In the depths of Siberian ores”, “Farewell”. 1952;

Or. 92. Fifth string quartet. 1952;

Or. 93. Tenth Symphony 1953;

Or. 94. Concertino for two pianos. 1953;

Or. 95. Music for the documentary film "Song of the Great Rivers". 1954;

Or. 96. Festive overture. 1954;

Or. 97. Music for the film "The Gadfly". 1955;

Or. 99. Music for the film "The First Echelon". 1955 - 1956;

Or. 101. Sixth string quartet. 1956;

Or. 102. Second concerto for piano and orchestra. 1957;

Or. 103. Eleventh Symphony 1957;

Or. 104. Two arrangements of Russian folk songs for unaccompanied mixed choir. “Venuli winds”, “As a baby, my husband beat me painfully.” 1957;

Or. 105. "Moscow, Cheryomushki". Musical comedy in three acts. 1958;

Or. 106. The film "Khovanshchina". Musical editing and instrumentation. 1959;

Or. 107. Concerto for cello and orchestra. 1959;

Or. 108. Seventh string quartet. 1960;

Or. 109. Satires (pictures of the past) - five romances for voice and piano on the verses of Sasha Cherny. "Criticism", "Spring Awakening", "Descendants", "Misunderstanding", "Kreutzer Sonata". 1960;

Or. 110. Eighth string quartet. 1960;

Or. 111. Music to the film "Five days - five nights". 1960;

Or. 112. Twelfth symphony. 1961;

Or. 113. Thirteenth symphony for soloist, male choir and orchestra to words by E. Yevtushenko. 1962;

Or. 114. "Katerina Izmailova". Opera in four acts, nine scenes. New edition. 1963;

Or. 115. Overture on Russian and Kirghiz folk themes. 1963;

Or. 116. Music for the film "Hamlet". 1963 - 1964;

Or. 117. Ninth string quartet. 1964;

Or. 118. Tenth string quartet. 1964;

Or. 119. "Execution of Stepan Razin". Poem for soloist, mixed choir and orchestra to words by E. Yevtushenko. 1964;

Or. 120. Music for the film "A Year, Like Life". 1965;

Or. 122. Eleventh string quartet. 1966;

Or. 123. “Preface to the complete collection of my works and reflection on this preface” - for voice (bass) with piano. 1966;

Or. 124. Orchestral edition of two choirs by A. Davidenko: “The street is worried” and “At the tenth verst”. 1966;

Or. 125. Instrumentation of R. Schuman's Cello Concerto. 1966;

Or. 126. Second concerto for cello and orchestra. 1967;

Or. 127. Seven romances on the verses of Alexander Blok. For voice, violin, cello and piano. "Song of Ophelia", "Gamayun - a prophetic bird", "We were together", "The city is sleeping", "Storm", "Secret signs", "Music". 1967;

Or. 128. Romance "Spring, spring" on Pushkin's verses. 1967;

Or. 129. Second concerto for violin and orchestra. 1967;

Or. 130. Funeral and triumphal prelude for the symphony orchestra in memory of the heroes of the Battle of Stalingrad. 1967;

Or. 132. Music for the film "Sofya Perovskaya". 1967;

Or. 133. Twelfth string quartet. 1968;

Or. 134. Sonata for violin and piano. 1968;

Or. 135. Fourteenth Symphony 1969;

Or. 136. "Loyalty" A cycle of ballads for male choir without accompaniment to the words of E. Dolmatovsky. 1970;

Or. 137. Music to the film "King Lear". 1970;

Or. 138. Thirteenth string quartet. 1970;

Or. 139. "March of the Soviet police" for brass band. 1970;

Or. 140. Orchestration of six romances on poems by Raleigh, Burns and Shakespeare (part 62) for bass and chamber orchestra. 1970;

Or. 141. Fifteenth Symphony 1971;

Or. 142. Fourteenth string quartet. 1973;

Or. 143. Six poems by Marina Tsvetaeva for contralto and piano. “My Poems”, “Where does such tenderness come from”, “Hamlet’s dialogue with conscience”, “The Poet and the Tsar”, “No, the drum was beating”, “Anna Akhmatova”. 1973;

Or. 143a. Six poems by Marina Tsvetaeva for contralto and chamber orchestra. 1975;

Or. 144. Fifteenth string quartet. 1974;

Or. 145. Suite for bass and piano on verses by Michelangelo Buonaroti. "Truth", "Morning", "Love", "Separation", "Anger", "Dante", "Exile", "Creativity", "Night", "Death", "Immortality". 1974;

Or. 145a. Suite for bass and symphony orchestra on verses by Michelangelo Buonarroti. 1974;

Or. 146. Four poems by Captain Lebyadkin. For bass and piano. Words by F. Dostoevsky. "Love of Captain Lebyadkin", "Cockroach", "Ball in favor of governesses", "Secular personality". 1975;

Or. 147. Sonata for viola and piano. 1975

4. Shostakovich and tradition

The art of Shostakovich is connected with the best traditions of Russian and world music. Possessing a kind of intuition, the artist sensitively reacted to world social conflicts, as well as psychological, ethical and philosophical conflicts, demonstrating in his work the most pressing problems of his era. Service to art was for him inseparable from service to man, society and the Motherland. This is where they come from validity most of his works publicity and citizenship topics. The assessment of the composer's work clearly reflects the contradictions of aesthetic and ideological positions characteristic of the 20th century. The creation of the First Symphony brought the author world fame, the Seventh Symphony was compared with the works of Beethoven in terms of the degree of emotional impact. Indeed, Shostakovich managed to revive the typical Beethoven type of symphonism, which has heroic pathos and philosophical depth.

The desire to effectively influence public life, listeners, awareness of the serious ethical purpose of music - all these principles are characteristic of major foreign composers, including P. Hindemith, A. Honegger, B. Bartok, C. Orff, F. Poulenc. Such trends in art are inevitably accompanied by reliance on classical traditions, the search for new opportunities in them, and the strengthening of ties with folk art, which concentrates the moral, philosophical and aesthetic experience of mankind. The focus of many of Shostakovich's works on classical art coincides with similar phenomena in the work of a number of foreign authors of this period. Thus, turning to the line of expressive means, forms and genres of Bach, Shostakovich found himself in the sphere of phenomena of modern Western musical art of the 20-30s of the XX century (among the Western composers of this period, the work of Hindemith should be especially noted). Some of the classic tendencies of Shostakovich's style echo the art of Haydn and Mozart. These same stylistic aspects are clearly manifested in the work of Prokofiev. On the whole, Shostakovich's "traditionalism" has its own stages of evolution and individual premises.

The main lines of continuity in the work of Shostakovich as a symphonist are clearly traced, first of all, through the work of Tchaikovsky and Mahler, as the largest representatives of post-Beethoven symphony. Shostakovich's First Symphony gave an updated interpretation of the genre, introducing psychological drama, the classic examples of which were presented by Tchaikovsky. It is this aspect that will later play an important role in Shostakovich's symphonism. The Fourth Symphony, with its complex philosophical and tragic concept, the special scale of form, and the sharpness of contrasts, testifies to the continuation of Mahler's traditions. The presence of a tragicomic element in Shostakovich's music and his use of everyday genres are characteristic (in this regard, the Piano Preludes op. 34, the score of the opera Katerina Izmailova, which use a variety of expressive effects emanating from banal rhythm intonations and genres - from humor to the tragic grotesque) are indicative) . It should be noted that Tchaikovsky also often resorted to this area of ​​musical art, but in a different form - without the use of a multifaceted context, irony and displacement of aesthetic planes. Like Tchaikovsky and Mahler, for Shostakovich the question of the originality of means has no self-contained significance.

The stylistic influences of the art of Bach, Beethoven and Mussorgsky are multidimensional in terms of the identity of figurative spheres and artistic ideas. Shostakovich's Fifth and Seventh Symphonies refract images of Beethoven's heroics; the use of the march genre (often used by Mahler), the images of a victorious march are also inherited from Beethoven. The continuation of the Bach traditions at a new historical stage should include the creation by Shostakovich of musical images associated with the immutability of moral duty. These are, first of all, choral episodes in symphonic cycles, passacaglia (intermission between the 4th and 5th scenes of "Katerina Izmailova"), which play the role of the philosophical center of the work. The composer also uses passacaglia and chaconnes as independent parts of the cyclic form or its internal sections (middle episode of the finale of the Seventh Symphony, 4th part of the Eighth Symphony, slow parts of the Piano Trio, Third Quartet, First Violin Concerto). In some cases, polyphonic samples of Shostakovich's music appear in synthesis with Russian song intonations under conditions of subvocal texture (Intermezzo from the Piano Quintet, op. 57).

Mussorgsky's influence is multifaceted and is enhanced by his own epic tendencies in Shostakovich's art. In this regard, it should be noted vocal, vocal-symphonic and instrumental genres - quartets and concertos. Among the works are symphonies No. 13 and No. 14, "Ten choral poems to the words of revolutionary poets", the poem "The Execution of Stepan Razin". Shostakovich and Mussorgsky also have in common the approach to Russian folklore and the choice of intonational material. Shostakovich was close to the very method of Mussorgsky - the creator of realistic folk characters and mass scenes, attitude to the history of the people. As you know, Mussorgsky embodied the image of the people in all its complexity. A similar dialectic is characteristic of Shostakovich (it should be noted the differentiated display of the people in the opera Katerina Izmailova, episodes from The Execution of Stepan Razin, which reveals internal contradictions, etc.).

“I revere Mussorgsky, I consider him the greatest Russian composer,” wrote Shostakovich. Mussorgsky largely predetermined the musical thinking of the 20th century. Musicologists already note the features of Mussorgsky's style in the early compositions of Shostakovich, in particular, in "Two fables on verses by Krylov for voice and orchestra" (op. 4, 1921). The principle of interaction between music and words, which Mussorgsky uses in the opera The Marriage, was implemented in Shostakovich's first opera The Nose, also created on the basis of N. Gogol's prose, like Mussorgsky's The Marriage.

Shostakovich highly appreciated Mussorgsky's ability to analytically comprehend the events of Russian history (which was reflected in the operas "Boris Godunov" and "Khovanshchina"), to find the sources of future social and moral problems.

The composer, brought up on the ideals of the revolution, witnessed the cruel pressure of the state machine, which depersonalized people. This idea is already veiled in the Second Symphony (“Dedication to October”, 1927), where, along with the display of large mass scenes typical of the first post-revolutionary years, the intonation-melodic turns of the tragic songs of convicts appear.

The theme of manipulation of mass consciousness, leading to unjustified cruelty, also makes Shostakovich related to Mussorgsky. One example is the scene of the jubilation of the crowd during the massacre of the folk hero in the poem "The Execution of Stepan Razin".

A special place in the work of Shostakovich is occupied by the study of the creative heritage of Mussorgsky - the orchestration and editing of the operas Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina, the vocal cycle Songs and Dances of Death. Both artists identically illustrate the eternal theme of Death in their art.

Shostakovich's connections with Russian classical literature are extensive. Among the writers, Gogol (the role of the grotesque) and Dostoevsky (psychologism) should be especially noted. Often the grotesque beginning in Shostakovich's music forms a synthesis of reliable realistic details with hyperbole (exaggeration). Such images grow into large-scale psychological generalizations. Like Gogol, Shostakovich uses the technique of "lowering" the level of pathos by bringing in the frankly rude. Also, both authors draw attention to the analysis duality of human nature. The individual originality of Shostakovich's style comes from a multitude of constituent elements with a high intensity of their synthesis.

The subject of a special study is the use of citation material by the composer. This method, as you know, always helps to "read the author's intent." On the rights of associative metaphors, the composer also introduces autoquotations (among such works is the Eighth Quartet). In art, the process of crystallization and consolidation of intonations-symbols has been going on for a long time. The range of such themes expands thanks to the composer's favorite method of polar transformations, metamorphoses. In this process, the technique of genre generalization actively participates, but in the case of generalization of elements of genre origin in any typed formula, Shostakovich then freely disposes of it as a characteristic stroke. Working with such techniques is maximally aimed at creating a reliable "environment".

According to many researchers, experimentation in the field of sound matter did not attract Shostakovich. Elements of seriality and sonoristics are used with extreme restraint. In the works of recent years (in symphonies No. 14 and No. 15, the last quartets, the Sonata for Viola, vocal cycles on texts by Akhmatova and Michelangelo), twelve-tone themes are found. In general, the evolution of Shostakovich's style in recent periods has been directed towards saving expressive means.

5. Some features of the style of D. D. Shostakovich: melody, harmony, polyphony

The largest researcher of the composer's work L. Danilevich writes: “Once during the lessons of Dmitry Dmitrievich, a dispute arose with his students: what is more important - the melody (theme) or its development. Some of the students referred to the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. The theme of this movement is elementary in itself, unremarkable, and Beethoven created a brilliant work on its basis! And in the first Allegro of the Third Symphony by the same author, the main thing lies not in the theme, but in its development. Despite these arguments, Shostakovich argued that the thematic material, the melody, is still of paramount importance in music.

Confirmation of these words is the entire work of Shostakovich. Among the important stylistic qualities of the composer is songliness, combined with other trends, and this synthesis is clearly manifested in instrumental genres.

First of all, the influence of Russian folklore should be noted. Some of Shostakovich's melodies have a number of similarities with drawn-out lyrical songs, lamentations and lamentations; epic epic, dance tunes. It is important that the composer never followed the path of stylization; he deeply reworked folklore melodic turns in accordance with the individual characteristics of his musical language.

The vocal implementation of the old folk song is manifested in many compositions. Among them: "The Execution of Stepan Razin", "Katerina Izmailova" (choirs of convicts), in the part of Katerina herself, researchers find intonations of the lyrical-everyday urban romance of the first half of the 19th century. The song "The Dirty Peasant" ("I had a godfather") is full of comic dance tunes and tunes.

The melody of the third part of the oratorio “Song of the Forests” (“Remembrance of the Past”) is reminiscent of the Russian folk song “Luchinushka”. In the second part - "Let's Dress the Motherland in Forests" - among the melodic intonations there is a similar turn with one of the motives of the Russian song "Hey, let's go"; the theme of the final fugue is reminiscent of the melody of the old song "Glory".

Mournful turns of laments and lamentations occur, in particular, in the third part of the oratorio, in the choral poem "The Ninth of January", in the Eleventh Symphony, in some piano preludes and fugues.

Shostakovich created many instrumental melodies related to the genre of folk lyrical song. Among them: the themes of the first part of the Trio, the finale of the Second Quartet, the slow part of the First Cello Concerto. The sphere of Russian folk dance is revealed in the finale of the First Violin Concerto, the Tenth Symphony (side part).

Revolutionary songwriting occupies a significant place in Shostakovich's music. Along with the heroic "active" intonations of the songs of the revolutionary struggle, Shostakovich used melodic ones, including the characteristic melodic turns of the songs of penal servitude and exile - smooth triplet moves with a predominance of downward movement. Such intonations are present in choral poems. The same type of melodic movement is found in the Sixth and Tenth Symphonies.

It is also important to note the influence of Soviet mass songs. The composer himself worked fruitfully in this area. Among the compositions that reveal a connection with this melodic sphere, one should name the oratorio "The Song of the Forests", the cantata "The Sun Shines Over Our Motherland", the Festive Overture.

The melodically rich recitative, which conveys not only conversational intonations, but also the thoughts and feelings of the characters, fills the musical fabric of the opera Katerina Izmailova. The cycle “From Jewish Folk Poetry” presents many examples of specific musical characteristics implemented with the help of vocal and speech techniques, and the vocal declamation is complemented by instrumental. This trend was developed in the late vocal cycles of Shostakovich.

Instrumental "recitativeness" clearly represents the composer's desire to convey the "music of speech" as accurately as possible, demonstrating great opportunities for innovative searches.

L. Dolzhansky notes: “When we listen to some of the symphonies and other instrumental works by Shostakovich, it seems to us that the instruments come to life, turning into people, characters in drama, tragedy, and sometimes comedy. There is a feeling that this is “a theater where everything is obvious, to laughter or to tears” (K. Fedin's words about Shostakovich's music). An angry exclamation is replaced by a whisper, a mournful exclamation, a groan turns into mocking laughter. Instruments sing, cry and laugh. Of course, this impression is created not only by the intonations themselves; the role of timbres is exceptionally great.

Declamation, as a special quality of Shostakovich's instrumentalism, is largely associated with the monologue of presentation. Instrumental "monologues", marked by rhythmic freedom, and sometimes improvisational style, are present in all symphonies, violin and cello concertos, quartets.

And one more area of ​​melos, in which the creative individuality of Shostakovich manifested itself - "pure" instrumentalism, far from both song and "conversational" intonations. These are themes characterized by the presence of "tense" intonations and wide melodic leaps (sixth, seventh, octave, none). Shostakovich's instrumental melodies are sometimes often brightly expressive; in a number of cases, it acquires features of motority, deliberately "mechanical" movement. Examples of such themes are: the theme of the fugue from the first part of the Fourth Symphony, the "toccata" from the Eighth, the theme of the piano fugue Des-dur.

In a number of cases, Shostakovich included melodic turns with intonations of fourths. These are the themes of the First Violin Concerto (the second theme of the side part of the Nocturne, Scherzo, Passacaglia); piano fugue theme B major; the theme of the V movement ("On the alert") from the Fourteenth Symphony; the theme of the romance "Where does such tenderness come from?" to the words of M. Tsvetaeva and others, Shostakovich interpreted these phrases in different ways, saturated with a certain semantics that has passed through the centuries. The quart move is the thematic grain of the Andantino lyrical melody from the Fourth Quartet. Moves similar in structure are also present in the composer's scherzo, tragic and heroic themes, thus acquiring a universal meaning.

Features of melos, harmony and polyphony of Shostakovich form a synthesis with the field of modal thinking. Even Rimsky-Korsakov rightly pointed out one of the characteristic national features of Russian music - the use of seven-step frets. Shostakovich continued this tradition at the present historical stage. In the conditions of the Aeolian mode, the theme of the fugue and the Intermezzo from the Quintet op. 57; the theme from the first part of the Trio also contains phrases of folklore origin. The beginning of the Seventh Symphony is an example of the Lydian mode. Fugue C major from the cycle "24 Preludes and Fugues" demonstrates various types of frets (black keys are never used in this fugue).

In Shostakovich, sometimes one mode is quickly replaced by another, and this happens within the framework of one musical structure, one theme. This technique gives a special personality. But the most significant in the interpretation of the mode is the frequent introduction of lowered (rarely elevated) steps of the scale. So, in the process of presentation, new modal types appear, and some of them were not used before Shostakovich. Such modal structures are manifested not only in melody, but also in harmony, in all aspects of musical thinking (an important dramatic role is played by one of these modes in the Eleventh Symphony, which determined the structure of the main intonational grain of the entire cycle, acquiring the value of leitinttonation).

In addition to other lower steps, Shostakovich introduces the VIII low step into use (it is in this mode, with the participation of the second low step, that the theme of the main part of the first part of the Fifth Symphony was created). The eighth low step affirms the principle of non-closure of octaves. The main tone of the mode (in the above example, the sound "d") an octave higher ceases to be the fundamental tone and the octave does not close. The replacement of a pure octave with a reduced one can also take place in relation to other steps of the mode.

In some cases, the composer resorts to bitonicity (simultaneous sounding of two keys). Similar examples: an episode from the first movement of the Second Piano Sonata; one of the sections of the fugue in the second part of the Fourth Symphony is written polytonally: four keys are combined here - d minor, es minor, e minor and f minor.

It should be noted interesting findings of Shostakovich in the field of harmony. For example, in the fifth scene of the opera "Katerina Izmailova" (a scene with a ghost) there is a chord consisting of all seven sounds of the diatonic series (the eighth sound in the bass is added to them). At the end of the development of the first part of the Fourth Symphony - a chord consisting of twelve different sounds. The composer's harmonic language presents examples of both very great complexity and, conversely, simplicity. Functionally simple harmonies are present in the cantata “The sun is shining over our Motherland”. Interesting examples of harmonic thinking are presented in later works, combining considerable clarity, sometimes transparency, with tension. By avoiding complex polyphonic complexes, the composer does not simplify the very logic of the harmonic language.

Shostakovich is one of the greatest polyphonists of the 20th century. For him, polyphony is one of the most important means of musical art. The composer's achievements in this area have enriched world musical culture; at the same time, they mark a new stage in the history of Russian polyphony.

As you know, the highest polyphonic form is the fugue. Shostakovich created many fugues - for orchestra, choir and orchestra, quintet, quartet, piano. He introduced this form not only into symphonic cycles, chamber works, but also into ballet (“Golden Age”), film music (“Golden Mountains”). The recognized pinnacle in the field of polyphonic thinking is the creation of the 24 Preludes and Fugues cycle, which continued the traditions of Bach in the 20th century.

Along with the fugue, the composer uses the old form of the passacaglia (an episode from the opera "Katerina Izmailova" - an intermission between scenes IV and V). He subordinated this ancient form, as well as the form of a fugue, to the solution of problems related to the embodiment of modern reality. Almost all of Shostakovich's passacaglia are tragic and carry a great humanist content.

Polyphony as a method manifested itself in the development of many expositional sections, the development of parts that are sonata form. The composer continued the traditions of Russian subvocal polyphony (choral poems "On the Street", "Song", the main theme of the first part of the Tenth Symphony).

6. "Autographic" chord by D. D. Shostakovich

Recently, interesting studies have appeared devoted to the analysis of the harmonic means of Shostakovich's music, as well as his "autobiographical" chord system. This phenomenon (chords with linear tones that appear under certain harmonic, linear-contrapuntal and metro-rhythmic conditions) also became one of the characteristic features of the composer's style.

In studies devoted to the musical language of Shostakovich, a special place is given to the structural refraction of previously formed material, which forms a new quality of sound. This is due to the special communicative properties of the composer's music. Orientation towards the listener, characteristic of Shostakovich, requires semantic certainty from musical means. The initial theme can change significantly in the process of presentation, but, thanks to auditory memory, it is recognized and serves as a philosophical and ethical means of conveying the idea of ​​the composition.

The quality of the "transformation of the known" is fully manifested in Shostakovich's accordion. L. Savvina’s work “Shostakovich: from montage harmony to twelve-tone rows” notes that “In numerous variations on a chord, Shostakovich emphasizes the structural mobility of consonances, which contributes to the formation of a variant plurality of chord forms: they are constantly changing, interpenetrating, hinting at each other, losing stability and sustainability". In this, one can rightly see the influence of the polyphonic complex of means of expression. The general properties of Shostakovich's harmony as polyphonic have been repeatedly noted by researchers. So, G. Kocharova notes that in the works of Shostakovich “... In the group coordination of voices in texture, the basic law of polyphonic harmony operates - the law of mismatch of points of harmonic concentration (by the degree of dissonance or by functional meaning). ... those short-term "knots", "unisons", where the functional meaning of tones and texture elements coincide, represent a kind of analogy to the old type of cadences that "accumulated" the energy of voice movement in classical polyphony. The unique author's chord by Shostakovich, which has not yet had a detailed description in the literature, is connected precisely with the “cadence” of a high order, the emphasis on a metro-rhythmically significant share. It is this chord that can be designated as autographic.

S. Nadler notes: “Shostakovich's autographic chord is a special use of linear tones. The expression that is invested in this technique generates a qualitatively different sound of non-chord sounds, makes them exist not just in a “different sound” compared to the rest of the chord sounds, but in a “different time”. This is a chord of "non-verbal-verbal" microfunctions that express the attitude to the local tonic and at the same time affect the moment of truth, the moment of insight. Many musicologists talk about a special type of perception and presentation of "time", characteristic of Shostakovich's music.

It can be concluded that Shostakovich's autographic chord comes from a polytemporal linear nature. As E. Sokolova rightly notes, “Even triads are often interpreted by the composer as two-tones, but with added tones.” The non-chord sound, which is a necessary part of such an chord, is interpreted in a dual time position.

For the first time, Shostakovich's author's chord appears in the early period of his work. It is fixed already in the opera "The Nose" in the first scene (No. 2, number 23, v. 2 - the figure of strings outlining the register perspective). The displacement of the tonal microcenter in this fragment (from the sound "a" on the "es") creates "intonation at a distance", and the appearance of the whole figure at the beginning of a new phrase sets off the significance of the harmonic event. The appearance of the author's chords here is due to the fact that this episode reveals a complex perspective of the plot with a separate semantic characteristic of each line. The "tragifarce" dramaturgical moments of the opera "The Nose" are presented by the author's chords: No. 9 ("In the newspaper expedition", number 191, v. 2), No. 11 ("Kovalev's Apartment", number 273, v. 2; number 276, v. 2; number 276, v. 2). fourteen). The proof of the significance of this chord is its concentration "around" the key polyphonic number of the opera: Intermission between the 5th and 6th scenes. Contrasting chords of a different type with polyphonic "penetration" into the secret essence of events is very characteristic of Shostakovich's individual polyphonic poetics and is included in the general system of his polyphonic "hearing" of the world.

In the early 30s of the XX century, in the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, the role of the author's chords increased significantly, which is associated with the composer's desire to be perceived in an openly tragic way, as opposed to the early period when the original tragedy of seeing the world was veiled. The border of changing the angle of view on events - from farce to tragedy - is the cycle "Six romances on poems by Japanese poets", quite "autographic" in sound. In this cycle, other features of Shostakovich's style are also beginning to be accentuated, which existed in a hidden form in the early period, and in the middle period gained dominant importance. First of all, it is an active "monologization" of musical thought and an emphasis on the free metrical development of thought. These properties are associated with a general change in the mood of the composer. At this time, not only the speech qualities of musical narration are sharpened, but the importance of tragic speech as a way of addressing the listener increases.

In the middle period, the author's chord would become the main "autograph" of Shostakovich's vertical. As an example, we can cite the chain of cadence chords in the coda of the finale of the "borderline" between the early and middle periods of the Fourth Symphony (numbers 243 - 245). The increase in the specific weight of this kind of chords is associated with the general extroversion of style in Shostakovich's music of the 30s - 50s (researchers consider the creation of the Eighth Symphony to be the pinnacle of this period).

Due to such accords, the author's accent of many works is instantly recognizable. The exceptions are, in particular, the unfinished opera The Players, where these chords do not correspond to the general dramatic line and arise in complete independence from the general narrative. The role that Shostakovich (the "tragic poet of our time", in the words of I. Sollertinsky) assumes by the time the opera was created, "did not allow" the farcical plot to be realized. It is no coincidence that the opera, composed by a third and possessing undeniable dramatic merits and fascinating musical intrigue, remained unfinished. There are also compositions of the 50s with a relatively lesser role of the author's autographic chords. For example, the first movement of the Symphony No. 11 (before the number 1). The accordion in this fragment, according to the researchers, is devoid of the special energy characteristic of Shostakovich's music and usually associated with a sharpened sound. And yet in this part (in the number 17) the author's quality of musical expression with a cathartic meaning is acquired (the "author's" chord in the number 18).

To an even greater extent, the “weakening” of the autographic chord is characteristic of Symphony No. 12. Shostakovich's music over the past 15 years has been characterized by a special autographic sounding. A significant change in the late style concerns precisely the authorized chord. In all previous periods, it was actively used. Appearing quite often, harmonic "autographs", being different in functions and acoustic sonorities, had something in common that was unmistakably distinguished by the ear as a characteristic author's accent: the activity and initiality of the chord at a point in time. This manifested itself in the texture in such a way that the author's chord acted in the "unoccupied" contrapuntal space. It seemed to permeate the entire fabric, becoming a vertical cut of the texture. In the later period, such a chord becomes an infrequent occurrence. When it appears, it becomes passive, since the place in the space-time continuum is used from the standpoint of a different dramatic meaning.

Thus, the author's accordion of Shostakovich is one of the most essential features of the style. Having manifested itself in early compositions, it undergoes changes similar to other means of expression. Despite stylistic transformations, this quality of style plays its main role throughout the entire work, individualizing Shostakovich's musical speech.

6. Some features of sonata form

Shostakovich is the author of a number of sonata cycles, symphonic and chamber (symphonies, concertos, sonatas, quartets, quintets, trios). This form has become especially important for him. It most closely corresponded to the essence of creativity, gave ample opportunities to show the "dialectics of life". A symphonist by vocation, Shostakovich resorted to the sonata cycle to embody his main creative concepts.

Sonata for Shostakovich was least of all a scheme that bound the composer with academic "rules". He interpreted the structure of the sonata cycle and its constituent parts in his own way.

Many researchers note the special role of slow tempos in the first parts of sonata cycles. The unhurried development of musical material follows along with a gradual concentration of internal dynamics, leading to emotional "explosions" in subsequent sections. Thus, due to the use of a slow tempo, the "zone" of conflict in the first part of the Fifth Symphony is transferred to development. An interesting example is the Eleventh Symphony, in which there is not a single movement written in sonata form, but the logic of its development is present in the very scheme of the four-movement cycle (the first movement, Adagio, plays the role prologue).

The special role of the introductory sections should be noted. There are introductions in the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, Tenth symphonies. In the Twelfth Symphony, the theme of the introduction is also the theme of the main part. The contrast between the themes of the exposition in Shostakovich often does not yet reveal the main conflict. The most important dialectical element is extremely exposed in the elaboration of the emotionally opposed exposition. Often the tempo accelerates, the musical language acquires b about greater intonational modal sharpness. Development becomes very dynamic, dramatically intense.

Sometimes Shostakovich uses unusual types of designs. So, in the first part of the Sixth Symphony, the development is an extended solo, as if improvisation of wind instruments. In the first part of the Seventh Symphony, the development forms an independent variational cycle (an invasion episode).

The composer usually dynamizes the reprise sections, presenting images on a higher emotional level. Often the beginning of the reprise coincides with the zone of the general climax.

Shostakovich's scherzo represents a diverse interpretation of the genre - traditional (cheerful, humorous, sometimes with a touch of irony). The other type is more specific: the genre is interpreted by the composer not in its direct, but in its conditional meaning; fun and humor give way to the grotesque, satire, dark fantasy. Artistic novelty lies not in the form, not in the compositional structure; new are the content, imagery, methods of "presenting" the material. A striking example of this kind of scherzo is the third movement of the Eighth Symphony; scherzoness of this kind "penetrates" the first parts of the cycles of the Fourth, Fifth, Seventh, Eighth symphonies.

Tragedy and scherzoness - but not sinister, but, on the contrary, life-affirming - Shostakovich boldly combines in the Thirteenth Symphony.

The combination of such different and even opposite artistic elements is one of the essential manifestations of Shostakovich's innovation.

The slow parts, located within the sonata cycles created by Shostakovich, present a variety of images. If scherzos often reflect the negative side of life, then in the slow parts, positive images of goodness, beauty, nature, and the greatness of the human spirit are revealed. This determines the ethical significance of the composer's musical reflections - sometimes sad and harsh, sometimes enlightened.

Shostakovich solved the problem of the final parts in different ways. Some of its endings reveal an unexpected interpretation (in particular, in the Thirteenth Symphony, the first and penultimate parts are tragic, and laughter sounds in the ending, and this episode is very organic in the general logic of the cycle).

Several main types of symphonic and chamber finales by Shostakovich should be noted. First of all - the finals of the heroic plan, closing some of the cycles, in which the heroic-tragedy theme is revealed. This type of final movement was already outlined in the First Symphony. His most typical examples are in the Fifth, Seventh, Eleventh symphonies. The finale of the Trio belongs entirely to the realm of the tragic. The laconic final movement in the Fourteenth Symphony is the same.

Shostakovich has cheerful festive finales, far from heroic. They lack images of struggle, overcoming obstacles; boundless joy reigns. Such is the last Allegro of the First Quartet, the finale of the Sixth Symphony; the finals of some concerts should be included in the same category, although they are decided differently. The finale of the First Piano Concerto is dominated by the grotesque and buffoonery; Burlesque from the First Violin Concerto presents a picture of a folk festival.

Of particular note are the lyrical endings. Thus, in the finale of the Quintet op. 57, of the Sixth Quartet, lyrical pastoral images are intricately combined with everyday dance elements. Unusual types of endings are based on the embodiment of opposite emotional spheres, when the composer deliberately combines the "incongruous". These are the finals of the Fifth and Seventh Quartets; the finale of the Fifteenth Symphony "captured" polarity being.

Shostakovich's favorite technique is the return in the finals to well-known themes from previous parts. Such episodes often represent climactic zones. Among such compositions are the finales of the First, Eighth, Tenth, Eleventh symphonies.

In many cases, the form of the finals is sonata or rondo sonata. As in the first parts of the cycles, he freely interprets this structure (most freely in the finales of the Fourth and Seventh symphonies).

Shostakovich builds his sonata cycles in different ways, changes the number of parts, the order of their alternation. It combines contiguous non-breaking parts, creating a loop within a loop. The inclination towards the unity of the whole prompted Shostakovich in the Eleventh and Twelfth Symphonies to completely abandon the caesuras between the movements. In the Fourteenth Symphony, the composer deviates from the general patterns of the form of the sonata-symphony cycle, replacing them with other constructive principles.

The unity of the whole is also expressed by Shostakovich in a complex, branched system of leitmotif-intonational connections.

7. Some principles of orchestration

It is important to note the mastery of Shostakovich in the field of timbre dramaturgy. Shostakovich gravitated not to timbre "painting", but to revealing the emotional and psychological essence of timbres, which he associated with human feelings and experiences. In this regard, Shostakovich's orchestral style bears similarities to the methods of orchestral writing by Tchaikovsky, Mahler, and Bartok.

Shostakovich's orchestra is, first of all, a tragic orchestra, in which the expression of timbres reaches the greatest intensity. Symphonic and operatic music provides many examples of the timbre embodiment of dramatic conflicts with the help of brass and strings. There are such examples in the work of Shostakovich. He often associated the "collective" timbre of the brass group with images of evil, aggression, and the onslaught of enemy forces. This is the main theme of the first part of the Fourth Symphony, entrusted to brass - two trumpets and two trombones in an octave. They are duplicated by violins, but the timbre of the violins is absorbed by the powerful sound of copper. The dramaturgical function of brass (as well as percussion) in development is especially clearly revealed. A dynamic fugue leads to a climax: the theme is played by eight horns in unison, then four trumpets and three trombones enter. The whole episode follows against the backdrop of a battle rhythm entrusted to four percussion instruments.

The same dramatic principle of using the brass group is revealed in the development of the first movement of the Fifth Symphony. Copper and here reflect the negative line of musical dramaturgy. Previously, the exposition was dominated by the timbre of the strings. At the beginning of development, the rethought main theme, which has now become the embodiment of evil, is entrusted to the horns, then the theme moves to the pipes in a low register. At the climax, three trumpets play the same theme, transformed into a march. The examples given show, in particular, the dramatic role of different timbres and registers: the same instrument can have a different, even opposite, dramatic meaning.

The copper wind group sometimes performs a different function, becoming a carrier of a positive beginning. A similar example is the last two movements of the Fifth Symphony. After Largo, the first bars of the finale, marking a change in the symphonic action, are marked by the introduction of brass, which embody the through action in the finale, affirming strong-willed optimistic images.

Like other major symphonists, Shostakovich turned to the strings when the music had to convey strong feelings. But it also happens that string instruments perform the opposite dramatic function for him, embodying negative images, like brass instruments. The sound becomes cold, hard. There are examples of such sonority in the Fourth, and in the Eighth, and in the Fourteenth symphonies. The technique of “alienation” is so clearly manifested: the discrepancy between the image or situation and its musical “design”.

The role of percussion instruments in Shostakovich is very responsible. They are a source of drama and bring extreme inner tension into the music. Subtly feeling the expressive possibilities of the individual instruments of this group, Shostakovich entrusted them with the most important solos. So, already in the First Symphony, he made the timpani solo the general culmination of the entire cycle. The episode of the invasion from the Seventh Symphony is associated with the rhythm of the snare drum. In the Thirteenth Symphony, the sound of the bell became the key timbre. There are also group and solo percussion episodes in the Eleventh and Twelfth Symphonies.

8. Creativity of D. Shostakovich in the context of contemporary musical art

The stylistically multidimensional art of Shostakovich presents a musical "chronicle" characterized by a deep musical and philosophical study of the external and internal worlds - in historical, social and psychological perspectives. The constant ideological pressure that provoked protest and indignation of the artist found a way out, as is known, in many of the sharpest musical parodies, subsequently accused of "formalism", "mess", etc. Shostakovich's nihilistic attitude towards the totalitarian system, which largely determined the content of the music, a special figurative structure of expression, determined the work of the author mainly in the field of symphonic and chamber-instrumental genres. It is important that for all the critical attitude and concentration of the tragic in music, Shostakovich was inextricably linked with the traditions of the "Silver Age" - first of all, the romantic faith in the transformative power of art. Inheriting the grotesque, the idea of ​​musical "duality", the psychologism of the romantic era, he never crossed the line artistic.

One of the historical merits of Shostakovich the Citizen is that he, forcibly drawn into the party, eventually became the strongest figure who managed to "bring out of the line of fire" the next generation of composers.

Shostakovich's appeal to quotation material (including baroque and classical) has not only an artistic, but a special and ethical meaning. The Creator, being in spiritual "exile", turned to the musical tradition. It was this creative task of musical "reflection" that neoromantic composers subsequently continued in the second half of the 20th century, filling in this deep flaws in the spiritual and personal spheres.

The modern musicologist L. Ptushko writes: “... The precedent of deliberately ambiguous presentation of the content of a musical work also belongs to Shostakovich. Widely using the semantic binarity of musical structures, the semantic transformation of "themes-werewolves", the composer presented the idea of ​​"doubleness" - the unspoken principle of Soviet life, the main "disease" of society - the moral ambivalence of Stalin's "theatre" of death, in which such a substitution of roles took place with diabolical virtuosity » . And this protest of the composer against dilettantism in art, the degradation of culture and the true "death of the author" was, as is known, the most important theme of Shostakovich's music.

figurative aesthetic category of death, which became a special symbol of postmodernism and connected the beginning and end of the century, occupied one of the central places in the work of Shostakovich. Symphonies No. 8, No. 11, No. 13, No. 14 are devoted to this topic; "The Execution of Stepan Razin" and many other works. In them, the author seemed to predict future tragedies for a society that trampled on its spirituality and allowed it to reach mass personal devaluation. Defending the humanistic positions of art, the composer affirmed its creative power until the end of his life, directing musical and philosophical thinking into the field of existentialism (a trend in modern philosophy and literature that studies human existence and affirms intuition as the main method of comprehending reality).

The creative path of the composer, according to a number of researchers, is directed from objective to subjective and strengthening the introverted beginning, at the end of life the artist realizes creativity as the meaning of life. As a confirmation, the composer's appeal to the eternal themes in the poetry of M. Tsvetaeva, A. Blok, Michelangelo in his later vocal cycles can serve. The symbolism of the musical elegies of the “golden” Pushkin-Glinka age, which arose in the “quiet” semantic climaxes of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Symphonies, also testifies to a lot. These fragments reveal the depth of the composer's existential being, which elevates his musical reflections above the chaos of the present into the world of beauty.

The composer preached depth of truth in art connecting epochs, times and spaces. Spiritual vigilance, truth, deliberate foolishness, rebelliousness to violence marked the life and work of many great artists of the 20th century - A. Akhmatova, M. Zoshchenko and others. Sublimating the specifics of Russian culture, its religious and moral essence, preaching truth and supreme justice through naive simplicity and ascetic expression, at the junction of the tragic and the comic, real art is revealed.

This paper presents some aspects of the creative style of the great Russian composer of the 20th century D. D. Shostakovich - his ideological and worldview positions are indicated; features of harmonic, polyphonic thinking, principles of orchestration, features of sonata form, the role of traditions. Aesthetic justifications for the use of the composer's autobiographical chords are also given. The work also includes a complete list of the author's works.

The work of Dmitry Shostakovich, the great Soviet musical and public figure, composer, pianist and teacher, is summarized in this article.

Shostakovich's work briefly

Dmitri Shostakovich's music is diverse and multifaceted in genres. It has become a classic of the Soviet and world musical culture of the 20th century. The significance of the composer as a symphonist is enormous. He created 15 symphonies with deep philosophical concepts, the most complex world of human experiences, tragic and acute conflicts. The works are permeated with the voice of a humanist artist fighting against evil and social injustice. His unique individual style imitated the best traditions of Russian and foreign music (Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Bach, Mahler). In the First Symphony of 1925, the best features of Dmitri Shostakovich's style appeared:

• texture polyphonization
• development dynamics
• piece of humor and irony
• subtle lyrics
• figurative reincarnations
• thematism
• contrast

The first symphony brought him fame. In the future, he learned to combine styles and sounds. By the way, Dmitri Shostakovich imitated the sound of artillery cannonade in his 9th symphony, dedicated to the siege of Leningrad. What instruments do you think Dmitri Shostakovich used to imitate this sound? He did this with the help of timpani.

In the 10th symphony, the composer introduced the techniques of song intonations and deployment. The next 2 works were marked by an appeal to programming.

In addition, Shostakovich contributed to the development of musical theater. True, his activities were limited to editorial articles in newspapers. Shostakovich's opera The Nose was a truly original musical embodiment of Gogol's story. It was distinguished by complex means of composing technique, ensemble and mass scenes, multifaceted and contrapuntal change of episodes. An important landmark in the work of Dmitry Shostakovich was the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. It was distinguished by satirical poignancy in the nature of negative characters, spiritualized lyrics, harsh and sublime tragedy.

Mussorgsky also had an influence on the work of Shostakovich. This is evidenced by the truthfulness and richness of musical portraits, psychological depth, generalization of song and folk intonations. All this manifested itself in the vocal-symphonic poem "The Execution of Stepan Razin", in a vocal cycle called "From Jewish Folk Poetry". Dmitri Shostakovich has an important merit in the orchestral version of Khovanshchina and Boris Godunov, orchestration of Mussorgsky's vocal cycle Songs and Dances of Death.

For the musical life of the Soviet Union, major events were the appearance of concertos for piano, violin and cello with orchestra, chamber works written by Shostakovich. These include 15 string quartets, fugues and 24 piano preludes, memory trio, piano quintet, romance cycles.

Works by Dmitri Shostakovich- "Players", "Nose", "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District", "Golden Age", "Bright Stream", "Song of the Forests", "Moscow - Cheryomushki", "Poem about the Motherland", "The Execution of Stepan Razin", "Hymn to Moscow", "Festive Overture", "October".

The name of D. D. Shostakovich is known throughout the world. He is one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. His music is heard in all countries of the world, it is listened to and loved by millions of people of different nationalities.
Dmitry Dmitrievich Shostakovich was born on September 25, 1906 in St. Petersburg. His father, a chemical engineer, worked in the Main Chamber of Weights and Measures. Mother was a gifted pianist.
From the age of nine, the boy began to play the piano. In the autumn of 1919, Shostakovich entered the Petrograd Conservatory. The diploma work of the young composer was the First Symphony. Her resounding success - first in the USSR, then in foreign countries - marked the beginning of the creative path of a young, brightly gifted musician.

Shostakovich's work is inseparable from his contemporary era, from the great events of the 20th century. With great dramatic power and captivating passion, he captured the grandiose social conflicts. Images of peace and war, light and darkness, humanity and hatred collide in his music.
Military years 1941–1942. In the "iron nights" of Leningrad, illuminated by explosions of bombs and shells, the Seventh Symphony arises - "The Symphony of All-Conquering Courage", as it was called. It was performed not only here, but also in the United States, in France, England and other countries. During the war years, this work strengthened faith in the triumph of light over fascist darkness, truth over the black lies of Hitler's fanatics.

The war is past. Shostakovich writes "The Song of the Forests". The crimson glow of fires is replaced by a new day of peaceful life - this is evidenced by the music of this oratorio. And after it appear choral poems, preludes and fugues for pianoforte, new quartets, symphonies.

The content reflected in the works of Shostakovich required new expressive means, new artistic techniques. He found these means and techniques. His style is distinguished by a deep individual originality, genuine innovation. The remarkable Soviet composer was one of those artists who follow unbeaten paths, enriching art and expanding its possibilities.
Shostakovich wrote a huge number of works. Among them are fifteen symphonies, concertos for pianoforte, violin and cello with orchestra, quartets, trios and other chamber instrumental works, the vocal cycle "From Jewish Folk Poetry", the opera "Katerina Izmailova" based on Leskov's story "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District", ballets , operetta "Moscow, Cheryomushki". He owns the music for the films "Golden Mountains", "Oncoming", "Great Citizen", "Man with a Gun", "Young Guard", "Meeting on the Elbe", "Gadfly", "Hamlet", etc. The song is widely known on verses by B. Kornilov from the film "Oncoming" - "The morning meets us with coolness."

Shostakovich also led an active social life and fruitful pedagogical work.

Dmitry Shostakovich (A. Ivashkin)

Even, it would seem, quite recently, the premieres of Shostakovich's works were part of the usual rhythm of everyday life. We did not always have time even to note their strict sequence, marked by the steady pace of opuses. Opus 141 - the Fifteenth Symphony, opus 142 - a cycle on poems by Marina Tsvetaeva, opuses 143 and 144 - the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Quartets, opus 145 - a cycle on poems by Michelangelo and, finally, opus 147 - an alto sonata, sounded for the first time after the death of the composer. The last compositions of Shostakovich left the listeners shocked: the music touched upon the deepest and most exciting problems of being. There was a feeling of joining a number of the highest values ​​of human culture, to that artistic absolute that is always present for us in the music of Bach, Beethoven, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, in the poetry of Dante, Goethe, Pushkin. Listening to Shostakovich's music, it was impossible to evaluate, compare - everyone involuntarily fell under the magical influence of sounds. Music captured, awakened an endless series of associations, evoked the thrill of a deep and soul-cleansing experience.

Meeting the composer at the last concerts, we at the same time clearly and keenly felt the "timelessness", the eternity of his music. The lively image of Shostakovich - our contemporary - has become inseparable from the genuine classicism of his creations, created today, but forever. I recall the lines written by Yevtushenko in the year of Anna Akhmatova's death: "Akhmatova was timeless, somehow it was not appropriate to cry about her. I could not believe it when she lived, I could not believe it when she was gone." Shostakovich's art was both profoundly modern and "timeless". Following the appearance of each new work of the composer, we involuntarily came into contact with the invisible course of musical history. The genius of Shostakovich made this contact inevitable. When the composer died, it was hard to immediately believe in it: it was impossible to imagine modernity without Shostakovich.

Shostakovich's music is original and at the same time traditional. "For all his originality, Shostakovich is never specific. In this he is more classical than the classics," he writes about his teacher B. Tishchenko. Shostakovich is, indeed, more classical than the classics to the degree of generality with which he approaches both tradition and innovation. In his music we will not meet any literalism, stereotype. Shostakovich's style was a brilliant expression of a trend common to the music of the 20th century (and in many respects determined this trend): the summation of the best achievements of art of all times, their free existence and interpenetration in the "organism" of the musical flow of modernity. Shostakovich's style is a synthesis of the most significant achievements of artistic culture and their refraction in the artistic psychology of a person of our time.

It is even more difficult to simply enumerate all that, in one way or another, was realized and reflected in the drawing of Shostakovich's creative handwriting, which is so characteristic of us now. At one time, this "stubborn" pattern did not fit into any of the well-known and fashionable trends. “I felt the novelty and individuality of the music,” recalls B. Britten about his first acquaintance with the works of Shostakovich in the 30s - despite the fact that she, of course, was rooted in a great past. The techniques of all times were used in it, and yet it remained vividly characteristic... Critics could not "fasten" this music to any of the schools." And this is not surprising: Shostakovich's music "absorbed" many sources in their much in the surrounding world remained close to Shostakovich throughout his life: the music of Bach, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, the prose of Gogol, Chekhov and Dostoevsky, and finally, the art of his contemporaries - Meyerhold, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Berg- this is just a short list of the composer's permanent attachments.

The extraordinary breadth of interests did not destroy the "solidity" of Shostakovich's style, but gave this solidity an amazing volume and deep historical justification. Symphonies, operas, quartets, Shostakovich's vocal cycles should have appeared in the 20th century as inevitably as the theory of relativity, information theory, the laws of atom splitting. Shostakovich's music was the same result of the development of civilization, the same conquest of human culture, as were the great scientific discoveries of our century. Shostakovich's work has become a necessary link in the chain of high-voltage transmissions of a single line of history.

Like no one else, Shostakovich determined the content of Russian musical culture of the 20th century. “In his appearance, for all of us Russians, there is something undeniably prophetic. His appearance greatly contributes to the illumination ... of our road with a new guiding light. In this sense (he) is a prophecy and “indication.” These words of Dostoevsky about Pushkin can also be attributed to the work of Shostakovich. His art was in many ways the same "clarification" (Dostoevsky) of the content of the new Russian culture, which Pushkin's work was for his time. And if Pushkin's poetry expressed and directed the psychology and mood of a person of the post-Petrine era, then Shostakovich's music - throughout all the decades of the composer's work - determined the worldview of a person of the 20th century, embodying such diverse features of him. Based on the works of Shostakovich, one could study and explore many features of the spiritual structure of modern Russian man. This is the ultimate emotional openness and at the same time a special propensity for deep reflection, analysis; this is bright, juicy humor without regard to authorities and quiet poetic contemplation; it is the simplicity of expression and the subtle warehouse of the psyche. From Russian art, Shostakovich inherited fullness, epic scope and breadth of images, unrestrained temperament of self-expression.

He sensitively perceived the refinement, psychological accuracy and authenticity of this art, the ambiguity of its subjects, the dynamic, impulsive nature of creativity. Shostakovich's music can both calmly "paint" and express the sharpest conflicts. The extraordinary visibility of the inner world of Shostakovich's works, the captivating sharpness of moods, thoughts, conflicts expressed in his music - all these are also features of Russian art. Let us recall Dostoevsky's novels, which literally involve us headlong into the world of their images. Such is the art of Shostakovich - it is impossible to listen to his music with indifference. "Shostakovich," wrote Y. Shaporin- perhaps the most truthful and honest artist of our time. Whether he reflects the world of personal experiences, whether he refers to the phenomena of the social order, this feature inherent in his work is visible everywhere. Isn't that why his music affects the listener with such force, infecting even those who internally oppose it?

Shostakovich's art is turned to the outside world, to humanity. The forms of this appeal are very different: from the poster-like brightness of theatrical productions with the music of the young Shostakovich, the Second and Third Symphonies, from the sparkling wit "The Nose" to the high tragic pathos of "Katerina Izmailova", the Eighth, Thirteenth and Fourteenth symphonies and the stunning revelations of late quartets and vocal cycles, as if developing into the dying "confession" of the artist. Speaking about different things, "depicting" or "expressing", Shostakovich remains extremely excited, sincere: "A composer must get over his work, get over his creativity." In this "self-giving" as the goal of creativity is also the purely Russian nature of Shostakovich's art.

For all its openness, Shostakovich's music is far from simplistic. The composer's works are always evidence of his strict and refined aesthetics. Even turning to mass genres - songs, operettas - Shostakovich remains true to the purity of the entire handwriting, clarity and harmony of thinking. Any genre for him is, first of all, high art, marked by impeccable craftsmanship.

In this purity of aesthetics and rare artistic significance, the fullness of creativity - the great importance of Shostakovich's art for the formation of spiritual and general artistic ideas of a man of a new type, a man of our country. Shostakovich combined in his work the living impulse of the new time with all the best traditions of Russian culture. He connected the enthusiasm of revolutionary transformations, the pathos and energy of reorganization with that in-depth, "conceptual" type of worldview that was so characteristic of Russia at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and was clearly manifested in the works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky. In this sense, Shostakovich's art bridges the gap between the 19th century and the last quarter of our century. All Russian music of the middle of the 20th century was determined in one way or another by the work of Shostakovich.

Back in the 30s V. Nemirovich-Danchenko opposed the "narrow understanding of Shostakovich." This question remains topical even now: the wide stylistic spectrum of the composer's work is sometimes unjustifiably narrowed and "straightened". Meanwhile, the art of Shostakovich is ambiguous, just as the entire artistic culture of our time is ambiguous. "In a broad sense," writes M. Sabinina in his dissertation devoted to Shostakovich, the colossal variety of constituent elements with the extraordinary intensity of their synthesis serves as an individually unique property of Shostakovich's style. The organicity and novelty of the result are due to the magic of genius, capable of turning the familiar into a stunning revelation, and at the same time obtained in the process of long-term development, differentiation and remelting. Separate stylistic elements, both independently found, introduced for the first time into the everyday life of great art, and borrowed from historical "pantries", enter into new relationships and connections with each other, acquiring a completely new quality. "In the work of Shostakovich - the diversity of life itself, its the fundamental impossibility of an unambiguous vision of reality, a striking combination of the transience of everyday events and a philosophically generalized understanding of history.The best works of Shostakovich reflect the "cosmos" that periodically - in the history of culture - manifests itself in the most significant, milestone works that become the quintessence of the features of an entire era. "Faust" by Goethe and "The Divine Comedy" by Dante: the pressing and acute issues of our time that worried their creators are skipped through the thickness of history and, as it were, attached to a series of eternal philosophical and ethical problems that always accompany the development of mankind. The same "cosmos" is palpable and in a lawsuit the essence of Shostakovich, which combines the burning sharpness of today's reality and a free dialogue with the past. Let's remember the Fourteenth, Fifteenth symphonies - their inclusiveness is amazing. But it's not even about one particular piece. All of Shostakovich's work was the tireless creation of a single composition, correlated with the "cosmos" of the universe and human culture.

Shostakovich's music is close to both classics and romanticism - the name of the composer in the West is often associated with the "new" romanticism coming from Mahler and Tchaikovsky. The language of Mozart and Mahler, Haydn and Tchaikovsky always remained consonant with his own statement. “Mozart,” wrote Shostakovich, “is the youth of music, it is an eternally young spring, bringing to mankind the joy of spring renewal and spiritual harmony. The sound of his music invariably gives rise to excitement in me, similar to that which we experience when we meet our beloved friend of youth.” Shostakovich spoke about Mahler's music to his Polish friend K. Meyer: "If someone told me that I only have an hour to live, I would like to listen to the last part of the Song of the Earth."

Mahler remained Shostakovich's favorite composer throughout his life, and over time, different aspects of Mahler's worldview became close. The young Shostakovich was attracted by Mahler's philosophical and artistic maximalism (the response was the unrestrained element of the Fourth Symphony and earlier compositions, destroying all conventional boundaries), then Mahler's emotional exacerbation, "excitement" (starting with "Lady Macbeth"). Finally, the entire late period of creativity (beginning with the Second Cello Concerto) passes under the sign of contemplation of Mahler's Adagio "Songs about Dead Children" and "Songs about the Earth".

Especially great was Shostakovich's attachment to the Russian classics - and above all to Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky. "I have not yet written a single line worthy of Mussorgsky," said the composer. He lovingly performs orchestral editions of "Boris Godunov" and "Khovanshchina", orchestrates the vocal cycle "Songs and Dances of Death", and creates his Fourteenth Symphony as a kind of continuation of this cycle. And if the principles of dramaturgy, the development of images, and the development of musical material in Shostakovich's works are in many respects close to Tchaikovsky (more on this below), then their intonational structure follows directly from Mussorgsky's music. Many parallels can be drawn; one of them is amazing: the theme of the ending of the Second Cello Concerto almost exactly coincides with the beginning of "Boris Godunov". It is difficult to say whether this is an accidental "allusion" of Mussorgsky's style, which entered the blood and flesh of Shostakovich, or an intentional "quote" - one of many that bear an "ethical" character in Shostakovich's late work. One thing is undeniable: there is no doubt "author's evidence" of Mussorgsky's deep closeness to the spirit of Shostakovich's music.

Having absorbed many different sources, Shostakovich's art remained alien to their literal use. "The inexhaustible potential of the traditional", so tangible in the works of the composer, has nothing to do with epigonism. Shostakovich never imitated anyone. Already his earliest compositions - the piano "Fantastic Dances" and "Aphorisms", Two pieces for an octet, the First Symphony struck with their extraordinary originality and maturity. Suffice it to say that the First Symphony, performed in Leningrad when its author was not even twenty years old, quickly entered the repertoire of many of the world's largest orchestras. Conducted in Berlin B. Walter(1927), in Philadelphia - L. Stokovsky, in New York - A. Rodzinsky and later - A. Toscanini. And the opera "The Nose", written in 1928, that is, almost half a century ago! This score retains its freshness and poignancy to this day, being one of the most original and striking works for the opera stage created in the 20th century. Even now, for the listener, tempted by the sounds of all kinds of avant-garde opuses, the language of "The Nose" remains extremely modern and bold. Turned out to be right I. Sollertinsky, who wrote in 1930 after the premiere of the opera: "The Nose" is a long-range weapon. In other words, this is an investment that does not immediately pay off, but then it will give excellent results." Indeed, the score of "The Nose" is now perceived as a kind of beacon illuminating the path of music development for many years to come, and can serve as an ideal "manual" for young composers wishing to learn the latest writing techniques.Recent productions of "The Nose" at the Moscow Chamber Musical Theater and in a number of foreign countries have been a triumphant success, confirming the true modernity of this opera.

Shostakovich was subject to all the mysteries of the musical technique of the 20th century. He knew and appreciated the work of the classics of our century: Prokofiev, Bartok, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Hindemith. Shostakovich wrote about his enthusiasm for his work in his early years: “With youthful passion, I began to carefully study musical innovators, then only I realized that they were brilliant, especially Stravinsky ... Only then did I feel that my hands were untied, that my talent free from routine." Interest in the new remained with Shostakovich until the last days of his life. He wants to know everything: the new works of his colleagues and students - M. Weinberg, B. Tishchenko, B. Tchaikovsky, the latest opuses of foreign composers. So, in particular, Shostakovich showed great interest in Polish music, constantly getting acquainted with the compositions V. Lutoslavsky, K. Penderetsky, G. Batsevich, K. Meyer and others.

In his work - at all its stages - Shostakovich used the newest, most daring techniques of modern composer technique (including elements of dodecaphony, sonoristics, collage). However, the aesthetics of the avant-garde remained alien to Shostakovich. The composer's creative style was extremely individual and "monolithic", not subject to the vagaries of fashion, but, on the contrary, in many respects directing the search in the music of the 20th century. “Shostakovich, right up to his very last opuses, showed inexhaustible ingenuity, was ready for experiment and creative risk ... But all the more faithful, chivalrously faithful to the foundations of his style. Or - to put it more broadly - to the foundations of such an art that never does not lose moral self-control, under no circumstances does he give himself up to the power of subjective whims, despotic whims, intellectual amusements" ( D. Zhitomirsky). The composer himself, in a recent foreign interview, speaks very clearly about the peculiarities of his thinking, about the indirect and organic combination of elements of different techniques and different styles in his work: "I am a resolute opponent of the method in which the composer applies some kind of system, limited only by its framework and standards "But if the composer feels that he needs elements of this or that technique, he has the right to take everything that is available to him and use it as he sees fit. To do so is his absolute right. But if you take any one technique - whether it's aleatoric or dodecaphony - and you don't put anything into the work except this technique - that's your mistake. You need a synthesis, an organic combination."

It is this synthesis, subordinated to the bright individuality of the composer, that distinguishes Shostakovich's style from the characteristic pluralism of the music of our century and, especially, the post-war period, when the variety of stylistic trends and their free combination in the work of one artist became the norm and even dignity. Pluralism tendencies have spread not only in music, but also in other areas of modern Western culture, being to some extent a reflection of kaleidoscopicity, the acceleration of the pace of life, the impossibility of fixing and comprehending every moment of it. Hence - and the great dynamics of the flow of all cultural processes, the shift of emphasis from the awareness of the inviolability of artistic values ​​to their replacement. According to the apt expression of the modern French historian P. Ricoeur, values ​​"are no longer true or false, but distinct." Pluralism marked a new aspect of vision and assessment of reality, when art became characterized by an interest not in the essence, but in the rapid change of phenomena, and the fixation of this rapid change was seen in itself as an expression of the essence (in this sense, some major modern works using the principles of polystylistics and montage, e.g. Symphony L. Berio). The very spirit of music is deprived, if grammatical associations are used, of "conceptual" constructions and overflows with "verbalism", and the composer's worldview no longer correlates with certain problems, but rather only with a statement of their existence. It is understandable why Shostakovich turned out to be far from pluralism, why the nature of his art remained "monolithic" for many decades, while "ebb and flow" of various currents raged around. Shostakovich's art - for all its inclusiveness - has always been essential, penetrating into the very depths of the human spirit and the universe, incompatible with vanity and "outside" observation. And in this, too, Shostakovich remained the heir of classical, and above all Russian classical, art, which always strove to "get to the very essence."

Reality is the main "subject" of Shostakovich's work, the eventful thickness of life, its inexhaustibility - the source of the composer's ideas and artistic concepts. Like Van Gogh, he could say: "I want us all to become fishermen in that sea called the ocean of reality." Shostakovich's music is far from abstractions; it is, as it were, a concentrated, compressed and condensed time of human life to the limit. The reality of Shostakovich's art is not constrained by any framework; the artist with equal persuasiveness embodied opposite principles, polar states - tragic, comic, philosophically contemplative, coloring them in tones of immediate, momentary and strong emotional experience. The whole wide and varied range of images of Shostakovich's music is conveyed to the listener at the strongest emotional intensity. Thus, the tragic, in the apt expression of G. Ordzhonikidze, is devoid of the composer's "epic distance", detachment and is perceived as directly dramatic, as extremely real, unfolding before our eyes (let's recall at least the pages of the Eighth Symphony!). The comic is so naked that sometimes it comes to the catchiness of a caricature or a parody (The Nose, The Golden Age, Four Poems of Captain Lebyadkin, romances based on words from the Crocodile magazine, Satires based on the verses of Sasha Cherny).

The amazing unity of the "high" and the "low", the rough everyday and the sublime, as if encircling the extreme manifestations of human nature, is a characteristic feature of Shostakovich's art, echoing the work of many artists of our time. Let's remember "Youth Regained" and "The Blue Book" M. Zoshchenko, "Masters and Margarita" M. Bulgakova. The contrasts of different "real" and "ideal" chapters of these works speak of contempt for the baser aspects of life, of an enduring striving for the sublime, for the truly ideal, merged with the harmony of nature, inherent in the very essence of man. The same is palpable in Shostakovich's music, and perhaps especially clear in his Thirteenth Symphony. It is written in extremely simple, almost poster-like language. Text ( E. Evtushenko) as if simply conveys events, while music "purifies" the idea of ​​the composition. This idea is clarified in the last part: the music here is enlightened, as if finding a way out, a new direction, ascending to the ideal image of beauty and harmony. After purely earthly, even everyday pictures of reality ("In the store", "Humor"), the horizon moves apart, the color becomes thinner - in the distance we see an almost unearthly landscape, akin to those distances shrouded in a light blue haze that are so significant in Leonardo's paintings. The materiality of the details disappears without a trace (how can one not recall here the last chapters of The Master and Margarita). The thirteenth symphony is perhaps the most striking, pure expression of "artistic polyphony" (an expression V. Bobrovsky) creativity of Shostakovich. To one degree or another, it is inherent in any work of the composer, all of them are images of that ocean of reality, which Shostakovich seemed unusually deep, inexhaustible, ambiguous and full of contrasts.

The inner world of Shostakovich's works is ambiguous. At the same time, the artist's view of the external world did not remain unchanged, putting emphasis on the personal and generalized philosophical aspects of perception in different ways. Tyutchev's "Everything in me and I in everything" was not alien to Shostakovich. His art can be called with equal right both a chronicle and a confession. At the same time, the chronicle does not become a formal chronicle or an external "show", the composer's thought does not dissolve in the object, but subordinates it to itself, forming it as an object of human cognition, human feeling. And then the meaning of such a chronicle becomes clear - it makes us, with a new force of direct experience, imagine what worried entire generations of people of our era. Shostakovich expressed the living pulse of his time, leaving it as a monument for future generations.

If Shostakovich's symphonies - and especially the Fifth, Seventh, Eighth, Tenth, Eleventh - are a panorama of the most important features and events of the era, given in line with living human perception, then the quartets and vocal cycles are in many ways a "portrait" of the composer himself, a chronicle of his own life; it is, in the words of Tyutchev, "I am in everything." Shostakovich's quartet - and generally chamber - work really resembles portrait painting; separate opuses here are, as it were, different stages of self-expression, different colors for conveying the same thing at different time periods of life. Shostakovich began writing quartets relatively late - already after the appearance of the Fifth Symphony, in 1938, and returned to this genre with surprising constancy and regularity, moving, as it were, along a time spiral. Shostakovich's fifteen quartets are a parallel to the best works of Russian lyric poetry of the 20th century. In their sound, far from everything external, there are subtle and sometimes barely perceptible nuances of meaning and mood, deep and accurate observations that gradually form into a chain of exciting sketches of the states of the human soul.

The objectively generalized content of Shostakovich's symphonies is clothed in an extremely bright, emotionally open sound - the "chronicle" turns out to be colored by the momentary experience. At the same time, the personal, intimate, expressed in quartets, sometimes sounds softer, more contemplative and even a little "detached". The artist's confession is never a screaming cry of the soul, does not become overly intimate. (This feature was also characteristic of the purely human features of Shostakovich, who did not like to flaunt his feelings and thoughts. In this regard, his statement about Chekhov is characteristic: "Chekhov's whole life is an example of purity, modesty, not ostentatious, but internal ... I am very sorry that the correspondence between Anton Pavlovich and O. L. Knipper-Chekhova, so intimate that I would not like to see much printed.")

Shostakovich's art in its various genres (and sometimes within the same genre) expressed both the personal aspect of the universal and the universal, colored by the individuality of emotional experience. In the latest works of the composer, these two lines seemed to come together, as the lines converge in a deep pictorial perspective, suggesting an extremely voluminous and perfect vision of the artist. Indeed, that high point, that wide angle of view from which Shostakovich observed the world in the last years of his life, made his vision universal not only in space, but also in time, embracing all aspects of being. The latest symphonies, instrumental concertos, quartets and vocal cycles, revealing a clear interpenetration and mutual influence (the Fourteenth and Fifteenth symphonies, the Twelfth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth quartets, cycles on the verses of Blok, Tsvetaeva and Michelangelo), are no longer just a "chronicle" and not just "confession". These opuses, forming a single stream of the artist's thoughts about life and death, about the past and the future, about the meaning of human existence, embody the indivisibility of the personal and the universal, their deep interconnection in the endless flow of time.

The musical language of Shostakovich is bright and characteristic. The meaning of what the artist is talking about is emphasized by the unusually convex presentation of the text, its obvious focus on the listener. The composer's statement is always sharpened and, as it were, sharpened (whether it be figurative or emotional sharpness). Perhaps that theatricality of the composer's thinking, which manifested itself already in the very early years of his work, in joint work with Meyerhold, Mayakovsky,

In collaboration with the Masters of Cinematography. This theatricality, but rather the specificity, the visibility of musical images even then, in the 1920s, was not outwardly illustrative, but deeply justified psychological. "Shostakovich's music depicts the movement of human thought, not visual images," says K. Kondrashin. "Genre and characteristic," writes V. Bogdanov-Berezovsky in their memoirs of Shostakovich, they have not so much a coloristic, pictorial, as a portrait, psychological orientation. Shostakovich draws not an ornament, not a colorful complex, but a state. "Over time, the characteristic and convexity of the statement become the most important property psychology artist, penetrating into all genres of his work and covering all the components of the figurative structure - from the caustic and sharp satire of "The Nose" to the tragic pages of the Fourteenth Symphony. Shostakovich always speaks excitedly, indifferently, brightly - his composer's speech is far from cold aestheticism and formal "bringing to the attention." Moreover, sharpness forms works of Shostakovich, their masterful finishing, perfect mastery of the orchestra - what together adds up to the clarity and visibility of the language - all this was by no means only the legacy of the St. Petersburg tradition of Rimsky-Korsakov - Glazunov, which cultivated the refinement of technique strong!* The point is, first of all, semantic and figurative the distinctness of ideas that matured for a long time in the mind of the composer, but were born almost instantly (in fact, Shostakovich "composed" in his mind and sat down to write down a completely finished composition **. The internal intensity of the images gave rise to the external perfection of their embodiment.

* (In one of the conversations, Shostakovich remarked, pointing to the volume of the musical dictionary: "If I am destined to get into this book, I want it to say: born in Leningrad, died there.")

** (This property of the composer involuntarily brings to mind Mozart's brilliant ability to "hear" the sound of the entire work in a single moment - and then quickly write it down. It is interesting that Glazunov, who accepted Shostakovich to the St. Petersburg Conservatory, emphasized in him "elements of Mozart's talent.")

With all the brightness and specificity of the statement, Shostakovich does not seek to shock the listener with something extravagant. His speech is simple and artless. Like the classical Russian prose of Chekhov or Gogol, in Shostakovich's music only the most important and essential is brought to the surface - that which has a paramount semantic and expressive meaning. For the world of Shostakovich's music, any showiness, external showiness is completely unacceptable. The images here do not appear "suddenly", like a bright flash in the dark, but gradually emerge in their development. Such procedural thinking, the predominance of unfolding over "show" - a property that Shostakovich has in common with the music of Tchaikovsky. The symphonism of both composers is based on approximately the same laws that determine the dynamics of the sound relief.

The striking stability of the intonational structure and idioms of the language is also common. It is difficult, perhaps, to find two other composers who would be to such an extent "martyrs" of intonations that pursued them, similar sound images penetrating into various compositions. Let us recall, for example, the characteristic "fatal" episodes of Tchaikovsky's music, his favorite sequenced melodic turns, or the now-familiar rhythmic structures of Shostakovich and the specific semitone conjugations of his melody.

And one more feature that is extremely characteristic of the work of both composers: this is the dispersal of statements in time. "Shostakovich, by the specifics of his talent, is not a miniaturist. He thinks, as a rule, on a wide time scale. Music by Shostakovich dispersed, and the dramaturgy of the form is created by the interaction of sections that are sufficiently large in their time scales" ( E. Denisov).

Why did we make these comparisons? They shed light on perhaps the most significant feature of Shostakovich's thinking: his dramatic a warehouse related to Tchaikovsky. All the works of Shostakovich are organized precisely dramaturgically, the composer acts as a kind of "director", unfolding, directing the formation of his images in time. Each composition of Shostakovich is a drama. He does not narrate, does not describe, does not depict, but precisely unfolds main conflicts. This is the true visibility, the specificity of the composer's statement, its brightness and excitement, appealing to the empathy of the listener. Hence the temporal length, anti-aphorism of his creations: the passage of time becomes an indispensable condition for the existence of the world of images of Shostakovich's music. The stability of the "elements" of language, of the smallest individual sound "organisms", also becomes clear. They exist as a kind of molecular world, as a material substance (like the reality of a word in a playwright) and, entering into combinations, form the most diverse "buildings" of the human spirit, erected by the directing will of their creator.

"Maybe I shouldn't compose. However, I can't live without it," Shostakovich admitted in one of his letters after finishing his Fifteenth Symphony. All later works of the composer, from the end of the 60s, acquire a special, highest ethical and almost "sacrificial" meaning:

Do not sleep, do not sleep, artist, Do not indulge in sleep - You are a hostage of eternity In captivity of time!

The last works of Shostakovich, in the words B. Tishchenko, are painted with the "glow of the most important task": the composer, as it were, is in a hurry to tell all the most essential, the most secret in the last segment of his earthly existence. The works of the 60-70s are, as it were, a huge coda, where, as in any code, the issue of time, its flow, its openness in eternity - and isolation, limitation within the limits of human life is brought to the fore. The feeling of time, its transience is present in all of Shostakovich's later compositions (almost "physical" this feeling becomes in the codes of the Second Cello Concerto, the Fifteenth Symphony, the cycle on poems by Michelangelo). The artist rises high above everyday life. From this point, accessible only to him, the meaning of human life, events, the meaning of true and false values ​​is revealed. The music of the late Shostakovich speaks of the most general and eternal, timeless problems of being, of truth, of the immortality of thought and music.

The art of Shostakovich in recent years outgrows the narrow musical framework. His compositions embody in sounds the great artist's close look at the reality that is leaving him, they become something incomparably more than just music: an expression of the very essence of artistic creativity as knowledge of the mysteries of the universe.

The sound world of Shostakovich's latest creations, and especially chamber ones, is painted in unique tones. The components of the whole are the most diverse, unexpected and sometimes extremely simple elements of the language - both those that used to exist in the works of Shostakovich, and others gleaned from the very thickness of musical history and from the living stream of modern music. The intonational appearance of Shostakovich's music is changing, but these changes are caused not by "technical", but by deep, ideological reasons - the same ones that determined the entire direction of the composer's late work as a whole.

The sound atmosphere of Shostakovich's later creations is noticeably "rarefied". We, as it were, rise after the artist to the highest and most impregnable heights of the human spirit. Separate intonations, sound figures become especially clearly distinguishable in this crystal clear environment. Their importance is increasing indefinitely. The composer "director's" builds them in the sequence he needs. He freely "rules" in a world where musical "realities" of various eras and styles coexist. These are quotations - shadows of favorite composers: Beethoven, Rossini, Wagner, and free reminiscences of the music of Mahler, Berg, and even just individual elements of speech - triads, motifs that have always existed in music, but now acquiring a new meaning from Shostakovich, becoming a multi-valued symbol. Their differentiation is no longer so significant - more important is the feeling of freedom, when thought glides along the planes of time, catching the unity of the enduring values ​​of human creativity. Here, every sound, every intonation is no longer perceived directly, but gives rise to a long, almost endless series of associations, prompting, rather, not to empathy, but to contemplation. This series, arising from simple "earthly" harmonies, leads - following the artist's thought - infinitely far. And it turns out that the sounds themselves, the "shell" they create, is only a small part, only the "outline" of the vast, limitless spiritual world that Shostakovich's music reveals to us...

The "run of time" of Shostakovich's life is over. But, following the artist’s creations, outgrowing the boundaries of their material shell, the framework of their creator’s earthly existence unfolds into eternity, opening the path to immortality, destined by Shostakovich in one of his last creations, a cycle on Michelangelo’s poems:

It's as if I'm dead, but the world's consolation I live in the hearts of all those who love with thousands of souls, and, therefore, I'm not dust, And mortal corruption will not touch me.

Shostakovich Dmitry Dmitrievich, born September 25, 1906 in St. Petersburg, died August 9, 1975 in Moscow. Hero of Socialist Labor (1966).

In 1916-1918 he studied at the Musical School of I. Glyasser in Petrograd. In 1919 he entered the Petrograd Conservatory and graduated from it in 1923 in the piano class of L. V. Nikolaev, in 1925 in the composition class of M. O. Steinberg; in 1927-1930 he improved with M. O. Steinberg in graduate school. Since the 1920s performed as a pianist. In 1927 he participated in the international Chopin competition in Warsaw, where he was awarded an honorary diploma. In 1937-1941 and in 1945-1948 he taught at the Leningrad Conservatory (professor since 1939). In 1943-1948 he taught a composition class at the Moscow Conservatory. In 1963-1966 he directed the postgraduate studies of the composition department of the Leningrad Conservatory. Doctor of Arts (1965). From 1947 he was repeatedly elected to the Supreme Soviets of the USSR and the RSFSR. Secretary of the Union of Composers of the USSR (1957), Chairman of the Board of the Union of Composers of the RSFSR (1960-1968). Member of the Soviet Peace Committee (1949), World Peace Committee (1968). President of the "USSR-Austria" Society (1958). Laureate of the Lenin Prize (1958). Laureate of the State Prizes of the USSR (1941, 1942, 1946, 1950, 1952, 1968). Laureate of the State Prize of the RSFSR (1974). Laureate of the International Peace Prize (1954). Honored Artist of the RSFSR (1942). People's Artist of the RSFSR (1948). People's Artist of the USSR (1954). Honorary Member of the UNESCO International Music Council (1963). Honorary member, professor, doctor of many scientific and artistic institutions in different countries, including the American Institute of Arts and Letters (1943), the Swedish Royal Academy of Music (1954), the Academy of Arts of the GDR (1955), the Italian Academy of Arts "Santa Cecilia" (1956), Royal Academy of Music in London (1958), Oxford University (1958), Mexican Conservatory (1959), American Academy of Sciences (1959), Serbian Academy of Arts (1965), Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (1968), Northwestern University ( USA, 1973), the French Academy of Fine Arts (1975) and others.

Op.: operas- Nose (Leningrad, 1930), Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk district (Leningrad, 1934; new ed. - Katerina Izmailova, Moscow, 1963); orchestration of M. Mussorgsky's operas - Boris Godunov (1940), Khovanshchina (1959); ballets- The Golden Age (Leningrad, 1930), Bolt (Leningrad, 1931), Light Stream (Leningrad, 1936); music comedy Moscow, Cheryomushki (Moscow, 1959); for symp. orc.- symphonies I (1925), II (October, 1927), III (Pervomaiskaya, 1929), IV (1936), V (1937), VI (1939), VII (1941), VIII (1943), IX (1945) , X (1953), XI (1905, 1957), XII (1917, in memory of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1961), XIII (1962), XIV (1969), XV (1971), Scherzo (1919), Theme with Variations (1922), Scherzo (1923), Tahiti-trot, orchestral transcription of a song by V. Youmans (1928), Two pieces (Intermission, Finale, 1929), Five fragments (1935), ballet suites I (1949), II (1961) , III (1952), IV (1953), Festive Overture (1954), Novorossiysk Chimes (Fire of Eternal Glory, 1960), Overture on Russian and Kyrgyz Folk Themes (1963), Funeral and triumphal prelude in memory of the heroes of the Battle of Stalingrad (1967), the poem October (1967); for soloists, choir and orchestra.- A poem about the Motherland (1947), the oratorio Song about the forests (on E. Dolmatovsky's tree, 1949), the poem The Execution of Stepan Razin (on E. Yevtushenko's tree, 1964); for choir and orc.- for voice and symphony. orc. Two fables of Krylov (1922), Six romances on ate. Japanese Poets (1928-1932), Eight English and American Folk Songs (instrumentation, 1944), From Jewish Folk Poetry (orchestral ed., 1963), Suite Nael. Michelangelo Buonarotti (orchestral edition, 1974), instrumentation of M. Mussorgsky's vocal cycle Song of the Dance of Death (1962); for voice and chamber orchestra.- Six romances on verses by W. Raleigh, R. Burns and W. Shakespeare (orchestral version, 1970), Six poems by Marina Tsvetaeva (orchestral version, 1974); for fp. with orc.- concerts I (1933), II (1957), for skr. with orc.- concertos I (1948), II (1967); for hlc. with orc.- Concertos I (1959), II (1966), instrumentation of R. Schumann's Concerto (1966); for wind orchestra.- Two plays by Scarlatti (transcription, 1928), March of the Soviet militia (1970); for jazz orchestra- Suite (1934); string quartets- I (1938), II (1944), III (1946), IV (1949), V (1952), VI (1956), Vlf (I960), Vllt (I960), fX (1964), X (1964) , XI (1966), XII (1968), XIII (1970), XIV (1973), XV (1974); for skr., vlch. and f-p.- trio I (1923), II (1944), for string octet - Two Pieces (1924-1925); for 2 skr., viola, vlc. and f-p.- Quintet (1940); for fp.- Five preludes (1920 - 1921), Eight preludes (1919-1920), Three fantastic dances (1922), sonatas I (1926), II (1942), Aphorisms (ten pieces, 1927), Children's notebook (six pieces, 1944 -1945), Dances of the Dolls (seven pieces, 1946), 24 preludes and fugues (1950-1951); for 2 pianos- Suite (1922), Concertino (1953); for skr. and f-p.- Sonata (1968); for hlc. and f-p.- Three Pieces (1923-1924), Sonata (1934); for viola and piano- Sonata (1975); for voice and piano- Four romances per meal. A. Pushkin (1936), Six Romances on ate. W. Raleigh, R. Burns, W. Shakespeare (1942), Two songs on el. M. Svetlova (1945), From Jewish folk poetry (cycle for soprano, contralto and tenor with piano accompaniment, 1948), Two romances on ate. M. Lermontov (1950), Four songs on el. E. Dolmatovsky (1949), Four monologues on el. A. Pushkin (1952), Five romances on el. E. Dolmatovsky (1954), Spanish Songs (1956), Satires (Pictures of the past, five romances on the Sasha Cherny tree, 1960), Five romances on the tree. from the magazine Krokodil (1965), Preface to the complete collection of my works and reflection on this preface (1966), romance Spring, spring (A. Pushkin's poetry, 1967), Six poems by Marina Tsvetaeva (1973), Suite on ate. Michelangelo Buonarotti (1974), Four Poems of Captain Lebyadkin (from F. Dostoevsky's novel "Teenager", 1975); for voice, skr., vlch. and f-p.- Seven romances for eating. A. Blok (1967); for unaccompanied choir- Ten poems on ate. revolutionary poets of the late XIX - early XX centuries (1951), Two arrangements of Russian. nar. songs (1957), Fidelity (cycle - a ballad on el. E. Dolmatovsky, 1970); music for dramas, performances, including "Bedbug" by V. Mayakovsky (Moscow, V. Meyerhold Theater, 1929), "Shot" by A. Bezymensky (Leningrad, Theater of Working Youth, 1929), "Rule, Britain !" A. Piotrovsky (Leningrad, Theater of Working Youth, 1931), "Hamlet" by W. Shakespeare (Moscow, E. Vakhtangov Theatre, 1931-1932), "The Human Comedy", after O. Balzac (Moscow, Vakhtangov Theater , 1933-1934), "Salute, Spain" by A. Afinogenov (Leningrad, Drama Theater named after A. Pushkin, 1936), "King Lear" by W. Shakespeare (Leningrad, Bolshoi Drama Theater named after M. Gorky, 1940); music for films, including "New Babylon" (1928), "One" (1930), "Golden Mountains" (9131), "Counter" (1932), "Maxim's Youth" (1934-1935), " Girlfriends "(1934-1935), "The Return of Maxim" (1936-1937), "Volochaev Days" (1936-1937), "Vyborg Side" (1938), "Great Citizen" (two series, 1938, 1939), " Man with a Gun" (1938), "Zoya" (1944), "Young Guard" (two episodes, 1947-1948), "Meeting on the Elbe" (1948), "The Fall of Berlin" (1949), "Ozod" (1955 ), "Five Days - Five Nights" (1960), "Hamlet" (1963-1964), "A Year Like Life" (1965), "King Lear" (1970).

Main Lit.: Martynov I. Dmitri Shostakovich. M.-L., 1946; Zhytomyrsky D. Dmitri Shostakovich. M., 1943; Danilevich L. D. Shostakovich. M., 1958; Sabinina M. Dmitri Shostakovich. M., 1959; Mazel L. Symphony by D. D. Shostakovich. M., 1960; Bobrovsky V. Chamber instrumental ensembles by D. Shostakovich. M., 1961; Bobrovsky V. Songs and choirs of Shostakovich. M., 1962; Features of D. Shostakovich's style. Collection of theoretical articles. M., 1962; Danilevich L. Our contemporary. M., 1965; Dolzhansky A. Chamber instrumental works by D. Shostakovich. M., 1965; Sabinina M. Symphony by Shostakovich. M., 1965; Dmitri Shostakovich (From the statements of Shostakovich. - Contemporaries about D. D. Shostakovich. - Research). Comp. G. Ordzhonikidze. M., 1967. Khentova S. The Young Years of Shostakovich, Prince. I. L.-M., 1975; Shostakovich D. (Articles and materials). Comp. G. Schneerson. M., 1976; D. D. Shostakovich. Notographic guide. Comp. E. Sadovnikov, ed. 2nd. M., 1965.