Shostakovich symphony no 14 analysis of data

He often saw his music as some kind of cross that could perpetuate the memory of others. It is a brilliant aspect of this work that Shostakovich is able to use such limited orchestral colours to create such huge contrasts. It is very easy to listen to this piece without ever realising that there are only twenty-five people involved in the performance and that the vast majority are playing string instruments.

You can almost smell the alcohol. Death is a feminine word in Russian, and the legendary character of the sorceress Loreley has long been considered one of its strongest representations. This also gives the sense that the first two songs were introductions and that it is in Loreley that the symphony really begins. Yet somehow these disparate ideas seem perfectly unified.

She in turn can be seen as a combination of the death figure of the Malaguena with one of the hundred lovers from the opening movement and these textural links, as well as many musical connections, enable Shostakovich to turn four highly individual songs into what can be heard as a long opening symphonic movement. The end of this song is the first time in the work that anyone gets a chance to draw their breath.

Shostakovich was forced to denounce twelve-tone serialism as typical of Western, bourgeois decadence but as a composer he was fascinated in later life by its harmonic implications. The opening xylophone melody of On the Watch has to be one of the most pleasant twelve-note melodies ever written but it still creates a sense of harmonic instability that is cleverly able to evoke the uncertainty and nervousness of a woman waiting at home whilst knowing that her lover is being killed in the trenches.

The Loreley, who had grieved for her lover far away, has become the woman who knows her lover is being killed on the battlefield, and is obviously the same woman who in the next song laughs in despair in the knowledge that he is already dead. The vast majority of the music so far has been sung by the soprano, and the change to the male voice is telling.

In , Guillaume Apollinaire was wrongly arrested and imprisoned for stealing a few statues from the Louvre in Paris and his poem In the Sante Prison was the result of his rather less than serious five-day stay in jail. When Alexander Solzhenitsyn discovered that Shostakovich had chosen to set it, he was furious, and wrote to the composer explaining that it was outrageous that he should honour the millions who suffered in the Gulags with a poem by a man who could never have understood the true level of suffering that occurred.

Apollinaire wrote of rays of sunlight and sounds of the city drifting in, but these lines are ruthlessly cut by Shostakovich. The occasional woodblock note seems to represent the slow dripping of water in some distant, deserted, dank corridor. Share: Twitter Facebook Email.

Shostakovich symphony no 14 analysis of data

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December Learn how and when to remove this message. Some of this article's listed sources may not be reliable. Please help improve this article by looking for better, more reliable sources. Unreliable citations may be challenged and removed. Instrumentation [ edit ]. Movements [ edit ]. Guillaume Apollinaire Adagio. Overview [ edit ]. Composition [ edit ].

Premieres [ edit ]. Criticism [ edit ]. Notes [ edit ]. Tempo 92 : 20— ISSN ISBN Shostakovich: A Life. Oxford University Press. References [ edit ].