Contemplating Shostakovich: Life, Music and Film

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Contents: Preface
Part I Music and Style: Through the looking glass: reflections on the significance of words and symbols in Shostakovich's music, Elizabeth Wilson
Shostakovich, old believers and new minimalists, Alexander Ivashkin
Five Satires (Pictures of the Past) by Dmitrii Shostakovich (op. 109): the musical unity of a vocal cycle, Gilbert C. Rappaport
Moving towards an understanding of Shostakovich's Viola Sonata, Ivan Sokolov, translated by Elizabeth Wilson. Part II Film: Madness by design: Hamlet's state as defined through music, Erik Heine
Stalin (and Lenin) at the movies, John Riley
Hamlet, King Lear and their companions: the other side of film music, Olga Dombrovskaia. Part III Life and Documents: Arrangements for Piano Four Hands in Dmitrii Shostakovich's creative work and performance, Inna Barsova
Shostakovich and Soviet Eros: forbidden fruit in the realm of communal Communism, Vladimir Orlov
A Soviet opera in America, Terry Klefstad
Shostakovich in the mid-1930s: operatic plans and implementations (regarding the attribution of an unknown autograph), Olga Digonskaia, translated by Stephen Dinkeldein
Select bibliography
Index.

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Contemplating Shostakovich marks an important new stage in the understanding of Shostakovich and his working environment. Each chapter covers aspects of the composer's output in the context of his life and cultural milieu. The contributions uncover 'outside' stimuli behind Shostakovich's works, allowing the reader to perceive the motivations behind his artistic choices; at the same time, the nature of those choices offers insights into the workings of the larger world - cultural, social, political - that he inhabited. Thus his often ostensibly quirky choices are revealed as responses - by turns sentimental, moving, sardonic and angry - to the particular conditions, with all their absurdities and contradictions, that he had to negotiate. Here we see the composer emerging from the role of tortured loner of older narratives into that of the gregarious and engaged member of his society that, for better and worse, characterized the everyday reality of his life. This invaluable collection offers remarkable new insight, in both depth and range, into the nature of Shostakovich's working circumstances and of his response to them. The collection contains the seeds for a wide range of new directions in the study of Shostakovich's works and the larger contexts of their creation and reception.

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