The Rest Is Noise Series: The Art of Fear: Music in Stalin’s Russia

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Alex Ross. The Rest Is Noise Series: The Art of Fear: Music in Stalin’s Russia

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This is a chapter from Alex Ross's groundbreaking history of 20th century classical music, The Rest is Noise.

It is released as a special stand-alone ebook to celebrate a year-long festival at the Southbank Centre, inspired by the book. The festival consists of a series of themed concerts. Read this chapter if you're attending concerts in the episode The Art of Fear: The music of oppression and war.

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Laurel Fay, in her authoritative Shostakovich biography, quotes a verbal portrait that Zoshchenko made of the composer in the early 1940s: “It seemed to you that he is ‘frail, fragile, withdrawn, an infinitely direct, pure child.’ That is so. But if it were only so, then great art (as with him) would never be obtained. He is exactly what you say he is, plus something else—he is hard, acid, extremely intelligent, strong perhaps, despotic, and not altogether good-natured (although cerebrally good-natured) … In him, there are great contradictions. In him, one quality obliterates the other. It is conflict in the highest degree. It is almost a catastrophe.”

Shostakovich was born on September 25, 1906. From an early age he showed an astounding aptitude for music, grasping basic theory and notation almost without formal instruction. In 1919, at the age of thirteen, he enrolled in what was then called the Petrograd Conservatory, where his abilities mesmerized Alexander Glazunov, the alcoholically dilapidated but still formidable head of the institution. Glazunov made sure that the young man stayed well fed during the lean years of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. In exchange, Shostakovich’s father supplied Glazunov with beverages illegally obtained from the Bureau of Weights and Measures.

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