Dmitri Shostakovich: Composer

Dmitri Shostakovich was Russian composer and pianist. Explore interesting quotes on composer.
Dmitri Shostakovich: 64   quotes 34   likes

“If they cut off both hands, I will compose music anyway holding the pen in my teeth.”

Dmitri Shostakovich

Said to Isaac Glikman, 1936; cited from Laurel Fay Shostakovich: A Life (2000) p. 92.

Music

“The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue.”

Dmitri Shostakovich book Testimony

Page 6
Testimony (1979)

Parting , Childhood

“There can be no music without ideology. The old composers, whether they knew it or not, were upholding a political theory. Most of them, of course, were bolstering the rule of the upper classes. Only Beethoven was a forerunner of the revolutionary movement. If you read his letters, you will see how often he wrote to his friends that he wished to give new ideas to the public and rouse it to revolt against its masters.”

Dmitri Shostakovich

New York Times, December 20, 1931.

Music , Idea , Reading

“Many consider that Shostakovich is the greatest 20th-century composer. In his 15 symphonies, 15 quartets, and in other works he demonstrated mastery of the largest and most challenging forms with music of great emotional power and technical invention…All his works are marked by emotional extremes – tragic intensity, grotesque and bizarre wit, humour, parody, and savage sarcasm.”

Dmitri Shostakovich

Michael Kennedy The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music (1980) p. 593.

Music

“Not since the time of Berlioz has a symphonic composer created such a stir. In far-away America, great conductors vie with each other for the jus primae noctis of his music. The score of his Seventh Symphony, the symphony of struggle and victory, has been reduced to a roll of microfilm and flown half-way across the world…to speed the day of the American première. How the old romantics would have loved to be the center of such a fantastic adventure!”

Dmitri Shostakovich

Nicolas Slonimsky in The Musical Quarterly, 1942; reprinted in his Writings on Music (2005), p. 84.

Time , Victory , Speed , Music