Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets by Wendy Lesser.
This thesis explores first, why Shostakovich turned to the string quartet after some of the most fearful years of his life: his demise and rise after the scathing Pravda letter that all but threatened his life. Second, this thesis analyzes three of Shostakovich’s String Quartets: No. 1, No. 8, and No. 15. String Quartet No. 1, despite.String Quartet No. 15 provided Shostakovich an external outlet for his internal dialogue on death. Sentiments of meditation, fury, resistance, anguish, and resignation musically intertwine during Shostakovich’s longest and most painful string quartet.Dmitri Shostakovich. Shostakovich was a Russian composer who was born in 1906 and died in 1975. At the young age of 9, his mother taught him the piano which he used to help build income in his family after his father’s passing. He composed 15 symphonies, 15 string quartets, and several other works.
The 10th quartet was the last of Shostakovich's quartets to use the traditional four movement format and unusually for Shostakovich he dedicated this work to a living person - a fellow Soviet composer and close friend - Moisei Weinberg. We feel that this dedication perhaps sheds light on some of the emotions behind the 10th quartet.An introduction to, and a musical analysis of, the fifteen string quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 - 1975).
The Party Animal. Dmitri Shostakovich had a major, Communist Party-inspired crisis just about every twelve years. In 1936 it was his near-purge over the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District; in 1948 it was his censure and subsequent blacklisting for composing music deemed to be too “modern” and “self-expressive”. 1960 saw another such crisis, although this one was precipitated by.
