Dmitri Shostakovich: Quotes about music

“What can be considered human emotions? Surely not only lyricism, sadness, tragedy? Doesn't laughter also have a claim to that lofty title? I want to fight for the legitimate right of laughter in "serious" music.”

Dmitri Shostakovich

From an article in Sovetskoye Iskusstvo, November 5, 1934; translation from Laurel Fay Shostakovich: A Life (2000) p. 77.

Sadness , Music , Laughter , Fight

“For some reason, people think that music must tell us only about the pinnacles of the human spirit, or at least about highly romantic villains. Most people are average, neither black nor white. They're gray. A dirty shade of gray. And it's in that vague gray middle ground that the fundamental conflicts of our age take place.”

Dmitri Shostakovich book Testimony

Page 94
Testimony (1979)

People , Age , Music , Thinking

“I write music, it's performed. It can be heard, and whoever wants to hear it will. After all, my music says it all. It doesn't need historical and hysterical commentaries. In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music.”

Dmitri Shostakovich book Testimony

Page 196
Testimony (1979)

Music

“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

“A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That's how music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it.”

Dmitri Shostakovich

Letter to Isaac Glikman, August 28, 1955; Josiah Fisk & Jeff Nichols (eds.) Composers on Music (1997) p. 364.

Beauty , Music

“Music is a means capable of expressing dark dramatism and pure rapture, suffering and ecstasy, fiery and cold fury, melancholy and wild merriment – and the subtlest nuances and interplay of these feelings which words are powerless to express and which are unattainable in painting and sculpture.”

Dmitri Shostakovich

"The Power of Music" (1964), translated in Music Journal, September 1965, p. 37.

Music , Feeling , Suffering , Painting

“Real music is always revolutionary, for it cements the ranks of the people; it arouses them and leads them onward.”

Dmitri Shostakovich

"The Power of Music" (1964), translated in Music Journal, September 1965, p. 37.

People , Music

“What do you think of Puccini?
[ Britten: "I think his operas are dreadful." ]
No, Ben, you are wrong. He wrote marvellous operas, but dreadful music.”

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quoted in Lord Harewood The Tongs and the Bones (1981) p. 133.

Music , Thinking

“The Allies enjoyed my music, as though trying to say: Look how we like Shostakovich's symphonies, and you still want something more from us, a second front or something.”

Dmitri Shostakovich book Testimony

Page 137
Testimony (1979)

Music

“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

“Jewish folk music has made a most powerful impression on me. I never tire of delighting in it, it's multifaceted, it can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It's almost always laughter through tears. This quality of Jewish folk music is close to my ideas of what music should be. There should always be two layers in music. Jews were tormented for so long that they learned to hide their despair. They express despair in dance music.”

Dmitri Shostakovich book Testimony

Page 156
Testimony (1979)

Music , Idea , Tear , Laughter

“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