A Soviet Credo: Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony

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AuthorPauline Fairclough
PublisherRoutledge
PublishedJul 07 2019
Book FormatPaperback
ISBN-139781138264700
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BISAC
CategoriesMusic > General
LanguageEnglish

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Book Description

Composed in 1935-36 and intended to be his artistic 'credo', Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony was not performed publicly until 1961. Here, Dr Pauline Fairclough tackles head-on one of the most significant and least understood of Shostakovich's major works. She argues that the Fourth Symphony was radically different from its Soviet contemporaries in terms of its structure, dramaturgy, tone and even language, and therefore challenged the norms of Soviet symphonism at a crucial stage of its development. With the backing of prominent musicologists such as Ivan Sollertinsky, the composer could realistically have expected the premiere to have taken place, and may even have intended the symphony to be a model for a new kind of 'democratic' Soviet symphonism. Fairclough meticulously examines the score to inform a discussion of tonal and thematic processes, allusion, paraphrase and reference to musical types, or intonations. Such analysis is set deeply in the context of Soviet musical culture during the period 1932-36, involving Shostakovich's contemporaries Shebalin, Myaskovsky, Kabalevsky and Popov. A new method of analysis is also advanced here, where a range of Soviet and Western analytical methods are informed by the theoretical work of Shostakovich's contemporaries Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Tomashevsky, Mikhail Bakhtin and Ivan Sollertinsky, together with Theodor Adorno's late study of Mahler. In this way, the book will significantly increase an understanding of the symphony and its context.

Author Bio

I am a cultural historian specialising in Soviet music and the music of Dmitri Shostakovich. My first book, A Soviet Credo: Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony (Ashgate, 2006) was an in-depth study of Shostakovich's symphonic masterpiece, which had to wait twenty five years for its premiere in the post-Stalin era.

My second monograph, funded by an AHRC Early Career Fellowship and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, was Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity Under Lenin and Stalin (Yale, 2016), which was co-winner of the BASEES Women's Forum Book Prize in 2018. I have edited four volumes: The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich (with David Fanning, Cambridge University Press, 2008), Shostakovich Studies 2 (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Twentieth Century Music and Politics: Essays in memory of Neil Edmunds (Ashgate, 2012) and 1917 and Beyond: Continuity, Rupture and Memory in Russian Music (MHRA, 2019, with Philip Bullock).

My biography of Shostakovich, written for Reaktion Books' 'Critical Lives' series, was published in 2019.

From 2021-23 I hold a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship and will be writing a monograph on Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk for Oxford University Press.

I am an elected Vice-President of the Royal Musical Association, co-editor of the CUP journal Twentieth-Century Music, General Editor of Routledge's Russian and East European Music series and I am on the editorial board of the Moscow journal Iskusstvo muzïki. Teoriya i istoriya (The Art of Music. Theory and History). Together with Olga Digonskaya of the Shostakovich Archive in Moscow,

I run the 'Shostakovich and his Epoch' study group of the International Musicological Society.

Source: University of Bristol

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