Story of a Friendship: The Letters of Dmitry Shostakovich to Isaak Glikman, 1941-1975 - Rilegato

Shostakovich, Dmitry

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0801439795 ISBN 13: 9780801439797

Casa editrice: Cornell Univ Pr, 2001

Riassunto

Dmitry Shostakovich wrote regularly to his close friend Isaak Glikman during their forty-year relationship from the early 1930s to the composer's death in 1975. The core of Story of a Friendship is a collection of 288 of these letters starting in 1941, when both correspondents became wartime evacuees from their home town of Leningrad. Earlier letters were destroyed during the siege of the city; however, the chronological gap is bridged by Glikman's detailed account, seen very much from the inside, of the main events in the composer's life during the turbulent 1930s, the height of Stalin's terror.
Story of a Friendship was first published in Russian as Letters to a Friend in 1993. This is its first appearance in English.

Su questo libro

Product Description:

After considerable hesitation and soul-searching I have decided to publish the letters Dmitry Dmitriyevich Shostakovich wrote to me. This choice by the composer's close friend Isaak Glikman brought the tormented feelings of the musical genius into public view. Now those feelings resound in the first substantial collection of Shostakovich's letters to appear in English.From the early 1930s until his death in 1975 Shostakovich wrote regularly to Glikman, a Leningrad theater critic and historian. The 288 letters included in this volume began in 1941, at the time of Operation Barbarossa and the composition of the controversial (Leningrad) Symphony no. 7, and continue until 1974, by which time Shostakovich was too frail to write. Glikman's extensive introduction explains that the earlier letters were lost-presumably left behind when both men were evacuated from besieged Leningrad. In his account of those years, Glikman relates personal details of the composer's life during the height of the Stalinist Terror, including Shostakovich's response to the public humiliation inflicted by the regime after the premiere of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.Taken together, the letters and Glikman's fascinating commentary form a portrait of a complex and acutely sensitive personality endowed with enormous moral integrity, humanity, compassion, and a sharp, often self-deprecating, sense of humor. The book recounts some of the most pivotal episodes of Shostakovich's life, including the long withdrawal of the Symphony no. 4, the regime's 1948 attacks on the composer, his subsequent trips to the United States and other Western countries, his frame of mind upon joining the Communist party in 1960, his reactions to the music of his contemporaries, and his composition of the devastating late symphonies and final string quartets.The battles over the politics of Dmitry Shostakovich and his music continue with undiminished vehemence, and Story of a Friendship is sure to occasion still more ar

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Cornell Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0801439795
• ISBN 13: 9780801439797
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 340