Fun fact: Shostakovich was not a fun composer
Album Of The WeekFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
I was almost put off listening to this album by a sleeve note announcing that ‘Shostakovich was known for his fun-loving attitude during his early years as a composer’.
A fun guy, right? In his first decade as a composer he was too busy to have much fun and any time later he was oppressed. Any humour he showed was of the gallows variety.
What we have here…
Read on here.
And in The Critic.
Mmmm…… indeed ‘fun’ is not what one would expect from Shostakovich. At the most, it is the sarcasm of his symphonic finales where he seems to depict something like a soviet policeman whipping a victim with the instruction of: ‘Rejoice! Rejoice!’
(As related in Volkov’s contested ‘Testimony’ – a story I find very convincing.)
Shostakovich was well known for his wicked sense of humour. How about The Nose? Or The Bolt? Like all Russians, he used humour to deal with darkness in life. While the Nazis were advancing towards Leningrad, he was staging parody cabaret shows with the Theatre of the People’s Militia making fun of Hitler and Ribbentrop. You clearly hear this humour at the beginning of the 7th symphony. Then his 9th was criticised precisely because it was too lighthearted a take on the Soviet victory, and deemed “childish” and inappropriate.
My advice to Westerners scratching their heads over this most enigmatic of composers – talk less, listen more, and stop trying to read “Stalinist oppression” into everything. Shostakovich has way more to offer outside that narrow interpretation.
Shostakovich spoke clearly about “Humour” in his 13th symphony. It is no “fun”.
And how about the wicked humor in his Lady Macbeth of Mtensk?
If there’s someone who doesn’t yet know this gem: here is “Tea for Two” arranged by Shostakovich for a bet in 1927. BBC PO, Vassily Sinaisky, 1997 Proms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYJUJ_qzVWY
His music is full of humor, and that’s what matters. His music is all that matters.
No fun?
How about Opera North’s Paradise Moscow?
The fun would come much later in life, e.g., Москва, Черёмушки.