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Pauline Fairclough
Reaktion Books

Dmitry Shostakovich

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AuthorPauline Fairclough
PublisherReaktion Books
PublishedSep 12 2019
Book FormatPaperback
ISBN-139781789141276
Dimensions7.8 X 5 X 0.5 inches
Weight 0.7 pounds
BISAC
CategoriesBiography & Autobiography > Music
LanguageEnglish

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Book Description

Dmitry Shostakovich was one of the most successful composers of the twentieth century--a musician who adapted as no other to the unique pressures of his age. By turns vilified and feted by Stalin during the Great Purge, Shostakovich twice came close to succumbing to the whirlwind of political repression of his times and remained under political surveillance all his life, despite the many privileges and awards heaped upon him in old age. Through it all, Shostakovich showed a remarkable ability to work with, rather than against, prevailing ideological demands, and it was this quality that ensured both his survival and his musical posterity.

Pauline Fairclough's absorbing new biography offers a vivid portrait of Shostakovich. Featuring quotations from previously unpublished letters as well as rarely seen photographs, Fairclough's book provides fresh insight into the music and life of a composer whose legacy, above all, was to have written some of the greatest and most cherished music of the last century.

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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