Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich by Solomon Volkov

Author:Solomon Volkov [Volkov, Solomon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, music, Genres & Styles, Classical
ISBN: 9780062987853
Google: l1I1EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2021-05-04T00:33:10.703550+00:00

IS a musical concept born consciously or unconsciously? It’s difficult to explain. The process of writing a new work is long and complicated. Sometimes you start writing and then change your mind. It doesn’t always work the way you thought it would. If it’s not working, leave the composition the way it is—and try to avoid your earlier mistakes in the next one. That’s my personal point of view, my manner of working. Perhaps it stems from a desire to do as much as possible. When I hear that a composer has eleven versions of one symphony, I think involuntarily, How many new works could he have composed in that time?

No, naturally I sometimes return to an old work; for instance, I made many changes in the score of my opera Katerina Izmailova.

I wrote my Seventh Symphony, the “Leningrad,” very quickly. I couldn’t not write it. War was all around. I had to be with the people, I wanted to create the image of our country at war, capture it in music. From the first days of the war, I sat down at the piano and started work. I worked intensely. I wanted to write about our time, about my contemporaries who spared neither strength nor life in the name of Victory Over the Enemy.

I’ve heard so much nonsense about the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies. It’s amazing how long-lived these stupidities are. I’m astounded sometimes by how lazy people are when it comes to thinking. Everything that was written about those symphonies in the first few days is repeated without any changes to this very day, even though there has been time to do some thinking. After all, the war ended a long time ago, almost thirty years.

Thirty years ago you could say that they were military symphonies, but symphonies are rarely written to order, that is, if they are worthy to be called symphonies.

I do write quickly, it’s true, but I think about my music for a comparatively long time, and until it’s complete in my head I don’t begin setting it down. Of course, I do make mistakes. Say, I imagine that the composition will have one movement, and then I see that it must be continued. That happened with the Seventh, as a matter of fact, and with the Thirteenth. And sometimes it’s the reverse. I think that I’ve started a new symphony, when actually things come to a halt after one movement. That happened with The Execution of Stepan Razin, which is now performed as a symphonic poem.

The Seventh Symphony had been planned before the war and consequently it simply cannot be seen as a reaction to Hitler’s attack. The “invasion theme” has nothing to do with the attack. I was thinking of other enemies of humanity when I composed the theme.

Naturally, fascism is repugnant to me, but not only German fascism, any form of it is repugnant. Nowadays people like to recall the prewar period as an idyllic time, saying that everything was fine until Hitler bothered us.

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