Dmitri Shostakovich Quotes

When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.

Football is the ballet of the masses.

Art destroys silence.

When I hear about someone else's pain, I feel pain too. i feel pain for everything - for people and animals.

I do not wish to listen to people denouncing their parents.

One must speak the truth about the past or not at all.

Love us when we are dirty, not when we are clean. Anyone will love us when we’re clean.

The majority of my symphonies are tombstones

Most people are average, neither black nor white, but grey. A dirty shade of grey. To the best of my ability I tried to write about these people, about their completely average, commonplace dreams and hopes, and about their suspicious tendency towards murder.

Now I can't abide rudeness, even in so called great artists. Rudeness and cruelty are the qualities i hate most. Rudeness and cruelty are always connected, I feel. One example out of many is Stalin.

Probably many people think that I came back to life after the Fifth Symphony. No. I came back to life after the Seventh.

Some love is so powerful after all, that it must always include sadness, because encrypted within it is the knowledge that someday it will come to an end.

[on Prokofiev] And, by the way, he never did learn how to orchestrate properly.

I can think of nothing more horrible than an orchestra that has gone out of control at rehearsal. I wouldn't wish it on an enemy.

It makes you think the best way to hold on to something is to pay no attention to it. The things you love too much must perish. You have to treat everything with irony, especially the things you hold dear. There's more of a chance then that they'll survive.

But I like listening to any music, including bad music. it's a professional disease, an addiction to notes. The brain finds sustenance in any combination of sounds. It works constantly, performing various composerly operations.

I'm training my left hand to write, in case I lose the ability in my right. That's gymnastics for the dying.

Strangely enough, doctors and nurses noted that activity actually prolonged life, when it should have shortened it. Those who lay down and tried to conserve energy often were the ones who trailed off and died first.

A fresh approach to a work of music (...) usually comes to those who have a fresh approach to aspects of life, to life in general.

I don't think that Prokofiev ever treated me seriously as a composer; he considered only Stravinsky a rival and never missed a chance to take a shot at him. I remember once he started telling me some vile story about Stravinsky. I cut him off.

Prokofiev and I never did become friends, probably because Prokofiev was not inclined towards friendly relations in general. He was a hard man and didn't seem interested in anything than himself and his music.

When we read tales of atrocity, we all want to be the ones who stood firm, who would not bend, who shouted the truth in the face of the dictator ... It is easy for us all to imagine we are heroes when we are sitting in our kitchens, dreaming of distant suffering.

Of course they understood, they understood what was happening around them and they understood what the Fifth [Symphony] was about.

I do write quickly, that'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.

What galls me is that these sadists always have fans and followers-- and sincere ones at that. The typical example of this is Toscanini.

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 team.

The truth is that the war helped. The war brought great sorrow and made life very very hard. Much sorrow, many tears. But it had been even harder before the war, because then everyone was alone in his sorrow.

Stravinsky is one of the greatest composers of our time and I truly love many of his works. (...) The marvellous composer has invariably been at the centre of my attention, and I not only studied and listened to his music, but I played it and made my own transcriptions as well.

I'll admit that writing doesn't always come, but I'm totally against walking around looking at the sky when you're experiencing a block, waiting for inspiration to strike you. Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov didn't like each other and agreed on very few things, but they were of one opinion on this: you had to write constantly. If you can't write a major work, write minor trifles. If you can't write at all, orchestrate something.

how to live away from places and people I love. Joseph Brodsky was right. So were Nabokov and Conrad. They were artists who never returned. Each had tried, in his own way, to cure himself of his country. What you have left behind has dissolved. Return and you will face the absence or the defacement of what you treasured. But Dmitri Shostakovich and Boris Pasternak and Naguib Mahfouz were also right: never leave the homeland. Leave and your connections to the source will be severed. You will be like a dead trunk, hard and hollow. What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?

Badgering a colleague doesn't come from a fit of pique, it comes from an organic quality of the soul. And a mean soul will inevitably be reflected in music. Wagner is a convincing example of that, but far from the only one.

I had to write a requiem for all those who died, who had suffered. (...) But how could I do it? I was constantly under suspicion then, and critics counted what percentage of my symphonies was in a major key and what percentage in a minor key. That oppressed me, it deprived me of the will to compose.

Studying Mahler changed many things in my tastes as a composer. Mahler & Berg are my favourite composers even today, as opposed to Hindemith, say, a Krenek and Milhaud whom I liked when I was young but cooled towards rapidly.

Tragedies in hindsight look like farces. When you describe your fear to someone else, it seems ridiculous. That's human nature.

The Seventh and Eighth symphonies are my requiem.

The Eighth [Quartet] is an autobiographical quartet, it quotes a song known to all Russians 'Exhausted by the hardships of prison'.

This quality of Jewish folk music [- it can appear to be happy when it's tragic-] is close to my idea of what music should be. The should always be two layers in music.

Really, we musicians do like to talk about Mussorgsky. In fact, I think that it's the second most favourite topic after Tchaikovsky's love life.

My impressions of contemporary France were mixed. I personally felt that it was quite provincial.

Now I can't abide rudeness, even in so-called great artists. Rudeness and cruelty are the qualities I hate most (...). No, don't expect anything good from a rude man.

Gradually, like the emigration of an insidious, phantom population, Leningrad belonged more to the dead than to the living. The dead watched over streets and sat in snow-swamped buses. Whole apartment buildings were tenanted by them, where in broken rooms, dead families sat waiting at tables. Their dominion spread room by room, like lights going out in evening.

On the artillery shells produced in Leningrad, workers stenciled messages to the Germans: “For the blood of our workers,” “For our children’s anguish,” and “For our murdered friends.

In a regime where words are watched, lies are rewarded, and silence is survival, there is no truth. - Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

I hate Toscanini. I've never heard him in a concert hall, but I've heard enough of his recordings. What he does to music is terrible in my opinion. He chops it up into a hash and then pours a disgusting sauce over it. Toscanin 'honoured' me by conducting my symphonies. I heard those recordings, too, and they're worthless.

It's so unfair. People suffered, worked, thought. So much wisdom, so much talent. And they're forgotten as soon as they die. We must do everything possible to keep their memories alive, because we will be treated in the same way ourselves.

I don't renounce my interest in gypsy songs. I don't see anything shameful in it, as opposed to, say, Prokofiev, who pretended to be enraged when he heard such music. He probably had a better musical education than I did. But at least I'm not a snob.

Glazunov was the first to convince me that a composer must make the performers submit to his will, and not the other way around (...) The composer must orchestrate in the way he conceived his work, and not simplify his orchestration to please the performers.

Even the basic facts of Dmitri Shostakovich’s life are often contested, as a glance through the end notes of this book attests. How do we reconstruct the story of someone who lived in a period in which everyone had an excuse to lie, evade, accuse, or keep silent?

So many unsaid things collect in the soul, so much exhaustion and irritation lie as a heavy burden on the psyche. And you must, you must unburden your spiritual world or risk a collapse. Sometimes you feel like screaming, but you control yourself and just babble some nonsense.

History is not simply the great tumults and tragedies but the accumulation of tiny moments and gestures.

There should always be a harmonious combination of the senses and the intellect.

In response to a plea in early 1941 from his colleague and friend, the writer Marietta Shaginyan, who was newly infatuated with the Piano Quintet and its creator, Mickhail Zoshchenko drafted for her a portrait of the Shostakovich he knew, a deeply complex individual: "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). That is the combination in which he must be seen. And then it may be possible to understand his art to some degree. 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." Quoted in Laurel Fay: Shostakovich, a Life.

I was a guest in the home of a conductor when I was in my early twenties. They turned on the gramophone and played a popular record of a foxtrot. I liked the foxtrot, but I didn't like the way it was played. I confided my opinion to the host, who suddenly said, 'Ah, so you don't like the way it's played? All right, if you want, write down the number by heart and orchestrate it and I'll play it. That is, of course, if you can do it and in a given amount of time: I'm giving you an hour. if you're really a genius, you should be able to write it in an hour.' I did it in 45 minutes.

The majority of my symphonies are tombstones. Too many of our people died and were buried in places unknown to anyone, not even their relatives. It happened to many of my friends. Where do you put the tombstones for Meyerhold or Tukhachevsky? Only music can do that for them. Looking back, I see nothing but ruins, only mountains of corpses... I'm not exaggerating, I mean mountains... I'm sad, I'm grieving all the time.

I don't see anything shameful in [gypsy songs] as opposed to, say, Prokofiev, who pretended to be enraged when he heard such music. He probably had a better musical education than I di. But at least I'm not a snob.

Our family discussed the Revolution of 1905 constantly. I was born after that, but the stories deeply affected my imagination. When I was older, I read much about how it all had happened. It think that it was a turning point -- the people stopped believing in the tsar. The Russian people are always like that -- they believe and they believe and then suddenly it comes to an end. And the ones the people no longer believe in come to a bad end.

Most symphonies, however, are wordless. They are built only of tones, nonlinguistic sounds vibrating in the air, and somehow, we take them to heart and feel that they speak to us more deeply than words ever could. Cultures make up certain rules for music that we learn without even recognizing them; for example, in the West, we have decided that music in minor keys tends to sound sad or anxious, while music in major keys conveys confidence, triumph. Other cultures have made other decisions.

Stalin was not merely trying to remove political enemies. He was not merely trying to terrorize the country into submission. He was trying to break down all social structure that did not emanate from him, and to create a new people, no longer Homo sapiens, but Homo sovieticus, the New Man of Communism.

What was the human animal in the midst of the siege? An herbivore that crawled on all fours, browsing on dirty grasses. A predator that hunted alone or in packs. A social animal that spoke of noble art and wound violin strings from the guts of dead sheep and pigs. A creature with canine teeth for tearing, but with a tongue for speaking. A mouth that could devour or sing.

its heart, it is a story about the power of music and its meanings — a story of secret messages and doublespeak, and of how music itself is a code; how music coaxes people to endure unthinkable tragedy; how it allows us to whisper between the prison bars when we cannot speak aloud; how it can still comfort the suffering, saying, “Whatever has befallen you — you are not alone.

He asked me, "Young man, do you love art? Great, lofty, immortal art?" I felt uncomfortable, and I replied that I did. That was a fatal mistake, because Volynsky put it this way: "If you love art, young man, how can you talk to me now about filthy lucre?" He gave me a beautiful speech, itself an example of high art. It was passionate, inspired, a speech about great immortal art, and its point was that I shouldn't ask Volynsky for my pay. In doing so I defiled art, he explained, bringing it down to my level of crudity, avarice, and greed. Art was endangered. It could perish if I pressed my outrageous demands. I tried to tell him that I needed the money. He replied that he couldn't imagine or understand how a man of the arts could be capable of speaking about such trivial aspects of life. He tried to shame me. But I held my own.

I hate Toscanini. I’ve never heard him in a concert hall, but I’ve heard enough of his recordings. What he does to music is terrible in my opinion. He chops it up into a hash and then pours a disgusting sauce over it. Toscanini ‘honoured’ me by conducting my symphonies. I heard those records, too, and they’re worthless. I’ve read about Toscanini’s conducting style and his manner of conducting a rehearsal. The people who describe this disgraceful behaviour are for some reason delighted by it. I simply can’t understand what they find delightful. I think it’s outrageous, not delightful. He screams and curses the musicians and makes scenes in the most shameless manner. The poor musicians have to put up with all this nonsense or be sacked. And they even begin to see ‘something in it’. (…) Toscanini sent me his recording of m Seventh Symphony and hearing it made me very angry. Everything is wrong. The spirit and the character and the tempi. It’s a sloppy, hack job. I wrote him a letter expressing my views. I don’t know if he ever got it; maybe he did and pretended not to – that would be completely in keeping with his vain and egoistic style. Why do I think that Toscanini didn’t let it be known that I wrote to him? Because much later I received a letter from America: I was elected to the Toscanini Society! They must have thought that I was a great fan of the maestro’s. I began receiving records on a regular basis: all new recordings by Toscanini. My only comfort is that at least I always have a birthday present handy. Naturally, I wouldn’t give something like that to a friend. But to an acquaintance-why not? It pleases them and it’s less trouble for me. That’s one of life’s most difficult problems- what to give for a birthday or anniversary to a person you don’t particularly like, don’t know very well, and don’t respect. Conductors are too often rude and conceited tyrants. And in my youth I often had to fight fierce battles with them, battles for my music and my dignity.

Young Shostakovich-Mitya-was nine, relatively old, when he began piano lessons. His first instructor was his mother, who, when she saw his rapid progress, took him to a piano teacher. The following conversation was a favorite family story: "I've brought you a marvelous pupil!" "All mothers have marvelous children...." Within two years he played all the preludes and fugues in Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. It was clear that he was exceptionally gifted.

There is no way to write a biography of Shostakovich without relying on hearsay and relaying the memories of people who have many private reasons to fabricate, mislead, and revise.

He said the stadium was the only place you could express yourself openly. When a player scores, you can cheer, ‘Hurray!’ because you’re happy, not because you’re forced. You can’t lie all the time!

There was one important exception, however: after Hitler secretly sent death squads to assassinate all his rivals in the Nazi Party — a bloodbath known as the Night of Long Knives — Stalin couldn’t help but admire his enemy’s ingenuity. “Did you hear what happened in Germany?” he gushed to an adviser. “Some fellow, that Hitler! Splendid! That’s a deed of some skill!

As historians have pointed out, there was some irony to this agreement. Hitler wanted to attack and subdue Russia as well as Europe. He knew that Germany could not wage war on a global scale with its small reserves of raw materials such as oil, rubber, and grain. Hitler arranged for the Russians to furnish him with everything he would need to invade Russia. Stalin essentially agreed to supply the attack on his own country.

As musicologist Richard Taruskin has said, “What made Shostakovich’s music the secret diary of a nation was not only what he put into it, but what it allowed listeners to draw out.

Halfway through the performance, she saw that one of the Musketeers had died of hunger. He lay on the floor with a shattered cup in his hand. The show, quite incredibly, went on.

Artistic flourishes like this may have seemed like a waste of energy, but they were central to the survival of the city and the pride of its inhabitants.

After having rambled through the country in the midst of the Great Depression, Ilf and Petrov wrote that for them, the United States represented “the most advanced technology in the world and a horrifyingly oppressive, stupefying social order.

As his neighbor Tatyana Litvinova described it, “Nobody who saw him taking his bows on the platform after his music had been performed could forget his crooked figure, his grimace of misery and the fingers that never stopped drumming on his cheek. It was torture just to watch him! He minced his steps and bowed like a circus pony. There was something robot-like in his movements.” He didn’t need to be nervous.

Whatever his intentions for the piece might have been originally, this was the direction people were pushing him in: to understand the growing work as a testimony of Leningrad’s struggles and strength.

The moment Shostakovich spoke over the radio, the story of the Seventh Symphony started to sparkle and to effervesce into myth. It became a public story used by others for their own ends. This does not mean that people lied — but people blurred details; they tugged; they nudged.

As the bulb of black cloud, lit by both sun and flame, hovered above the storehouses, the people of Leningrad looked on in choked awe. “It was an immense spectacle of stunning beauty,” wrote Lyubov Shaporina. The air smelled sweet as tons of sugar burned.

A few scenes have etched themselves into my memory,” wrote Skrjabina, “probably until I die: a house demolished almost to its foundations, but one wall remained, still papered in the favorite cornflower design. There is even a picture hanging on it, as straight as ever. Above a heap of bricks, cement, and beams, a whole corner of an upper apartment of another house was preserved.

The same day that the Bedayev warehouses were destroyed, Hitler’s high command called in a nutritionist, Ernst Ziegelmeyer, to discuss the food situation in Leningrad. Ziegelmeyer made a studied assessment of the rationing that would probably go into effect in the city. He calculated that the population would starve to death quite soon. His recommendation to the Führer, therefore, was that the German army should not invade the city at all but simply wait in a choking noose around it. “It is not worth risking the lives of our troops. The Leningraders will die anyway. It is essential not to let a single person through our front line. The more of them that stay there, the sooner they will die, and then we will enter the city without trouble, without losing a single German soldier.

The frontal attacks puzzled me. Why advance straight into German machine-gun fire? Why not make flank attacks?” These suicidal charges worked occasionally only because Stalin did not care how many of his own soldiers died.

In the light of recent scholarship, Shostakovich’s anti-Stalinism no longer seems surprising or controversial, and was not unusual for the intelligentsia of Moscow and (in particular) Leningrad.

As one Shostakovich biographer put it, “Testimony is a realistic picture of Dmitri Shostakovich. It just isn’t a genuine one.

While he wrote the fourth and final movement of the symphony, an artist who lived in the apartment above him started sculpting a bust of him. Shostakovich sat uneasily while he was being sculpted. He couldn’t sit still. His fingers kept tapping as he played scales and chords on his cheeks.

Shostakovich and another composer banged out trashy songs on the piano while people danced in the corridor.

This interpretation became popular many decades later, after the publication of Solomon Volkov’s supposed memoirs of Shostakovich, Testimony. In that book, Volkov has Shostakovich say, The Seventh Symphony had been planned before the war and consequently it simply cannot be seen as a reaction to Hitler’s attack.

There are several problems with this passage in the Volkov memoir, though. For one thing, only one page earlier, Volkov has Shostakovich say the opposite: “I wrote my Seventh Symphony, the ‘Leningrad,’ very quickly. I couldn’t not write it. War was all around. . . .

A symphony is built not just by the composer, the conductor, and the musicians, but by the audience. The wartime audience heard the approach of the German Wehrmacht. A more recent post-Soviet audience wants to hear the cruel antics of Stalin and believe that Shostakovich was speaking in code.

It is as if there is no syntax, no grammar, that can contain their suffering. Only a list of things perceived.

Just within the limits of besieged Leningrad, there where days when more than ten thousand people died. Over the course of January and February alone, there were roughly two hundred thousand deaths. We cannot know the numbers exactly. All authority in the city had broken down. No one recorded deaths anymore. No one removed the bodies from the streets.

Beyond fatigue, there was another good reason to delay taking the dead out of an apartment: until the death was declared, the family could still collect rations in the name of the deceased.

These ghastly decisions were made in a welter of starvation, which sharpened the senses but confused thought. “The brain is devoured by the stomach,” said one sufferer.

The Nazis asked carefully about when precisely people stopped helping one another in the streets, about how many people were being arrested for cannibalism.

The symphony, a biographer wrote in 1942, tells the man who hears it, not the story of a stranger, but his own story. It makes him the hero of it; it cries out his own sorrows and celebrates his own victories. . . . Shostakovich states that at the beginning of the Seventh he depicts the peaceful life before the war in the quiet homes of Leningrad. But to a listener in Iowa it could mean the meadows and the rolling hills around his home. After the fantastic theme of war, Shostakovich has put into his music a lament for the dead — and the tears of a Russian mother and of an American mother are the same.

As historian Max Hastings wrote, “Both Hitler and Stalin displayed obsessive stubbornness about Leningrad. That of Stalin was finally rewarded, amid a mountain of corpses. A people who could endure such things displayed qualities the Western Allies lacked, which were indispensable to the destruction of Nazism. In the auction of cruelty and sacrifice, the Soviet dictator proved the higher bidder.

It is one of the sick ironies of the war that they probably would not have been able to if they had not learned to absorb loss in the nightmare of Stalin’s purges.

Now western movies, western novels, and western music were all forbidden again. Russian nationalism was on the rise. French bread was renamed “city bread.

On June 26, a thousand Jews were beaten to death in a garage. The SS arranged for locals to perform the massacre. They thought it might look distasteful if they carried it out themselves.

By noon on the first day of Operation Barbarossa, the Germans had destroyed more planes than they did in a whole year of their air assault on Britain. The Russian air force had been neutralized almost without firing a shot. The Western Front’s air force commander, staggered at the overwhelming futility of the loss, took out his gun and killed himself.

And everyone understood that Stalin was one thing and the country was another.

Zhukov was stunned. Unlikely as it might seem, most of the Leningrad tank force was made up of motionless decoys, nailed together by Shostakovich’s colleagues in the set-design team at the Mariinsky Theater.

It was still dangerous to disagree with Stalin. This fact was disastrous for the war effort. His generals were terrified of telling him bad news; it was safer to lie. For the first several months of the Great Patriotic War, therefore, he often didn’t know the real strategic situation. Even worse, military experts couldn’t question his amateur civilian judgment without fear of death.

Collapsed roofs “hung at an angle and looked as if they were still sliding down, perpetually falling, like a waterfall.” Leningrad now literally resembled one of the fractured Cubist landscapes of the 1920s avant-garde — or, as Ginzburg remarked, one of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s stage sets.