5/16/2023 0 Comments Philip sprite space funeral 4![]() ![]() Others, however, believed that it merely created “two Shostakovichs,” and that to find the composer’s true feelings one must look for hidden messages that lie beneath the seemingly compliant surface. Some regarded the composer’s move as a thoughtful, fruitful effort toward compliance with the official agenda for soviet music. Now it was generally believed he had found a “new path.” The triumph of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony of 1937, which was awarded a since-persistent subtitle, “a soviet artist’s creative response to just criticism,” brought to an end Shostakovich’s state of troubled insecurity. Commentators have shown that Shostakovich was deeply unsettled in his work for a time after this and that he withdrew his Fourth Symphony from all public venues. In Shostakovich’s case this revolved around a famous incident in 1936, when in the midst of anti-formalist campaigns that merged ominously with deadly purges of Stalin’s Great Terror a Stalinist critic writing in the official party newspaper Pravda castigated the composer’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and some of his other work. Yet there is a larger body of music by Byrd, featuring many settings of sacred texts in Latin, which seems poignantly to betray his ties of allegiance to some of the more militant forces of Catholicism, among them the Jesuit missionary movement that was antithetical to the Elizabethan Settlement.įinally, and most importantly for our purposes, Byrd and Shostakovich were both to endure dangerous and defining falls from grace. Not surprisingly, Byrd wrote works for the English state and its religion and in these he often evoked Elizabeth herself, as in his “Queenes Alman” for keyboard, his anthem “O Lord, make thy servant Elizabeth our queen,” and two madrigalian settings of “This Sweet and Merry Month of May,” which celebrated “Eliza” as “the queen of second Troy.” No one has detected any irony in these works. Along with his mentor Thomas Tallis, he also held a royal patent for twenty-one years (1575-96) that put him in charge of a monopoly for printed music, printed music paper and music importation. Notably, he was a leading member of Elizabeth’s prestigious Chapel Royal. Overall, many feel that at the core of his work, where he could bring to bear a highly developed musical language fraught with “colossal emotional power,” Shostakovich expressed a consistent and profound disaffection for the Stalinist reign, if not for the Soviet system as a whole.īyrd enjoyed a position of cultural and economic power in his musical world too, thanks to official ties. Yet he also composed bitterly satirical works, such as his Antiformalisticheskii Rayok, attacking Soviet positions on the arts that he found objectionable. He held various positions of leadership in the Soviet system and eventually joined the Communist Party in 1963. He wrote sincerely patriotic music during wartime, praised Stalin's leadership enthusiastically, and offered a musical tribute to the dictator's grandiose but ill-conceived project to halt the desiccating winds from eastern deserts by planting a vast forest belt. Shostakovich won the remunerative Stalin Prize twice (19). Thanks to a seminal essay Joseph Kerman had placed in those same pages some time ago-that has now been complemented and furthered by Kerman himself, Philip Brett, David Mateer, Craig Monson, and others-the NYRB audience at least has been alerted to the circumstance that if there were indeed a dissident platform on which Shakespeare stood, Byrd stood alongside him, and on a much surer footing. But readers of the widely distributed New York Review of Books have lately been exposed to claims that Byrd’s great contemporary William Shakespeare had strong ties to the Catholic cause during a time when England was under statutory Protestant rule. Evidence of a similar political relationship between Byrd and England’s long-reigning ruler Elizabeth I (r.1558-1603) is mainly confined to discussions in the traditional musicological literature. Few matters in musicology were more widely discussed not too long ago than the premise that Dmitry Shostakovich had a close if, as some fervently argued, essentially dissident relationship with Josef Stalin, the de facto leader of the Soviet Union for nearly a quarter century ( c.1929-53). Was Byrd the Shostakovich of his time? Surely the aptness of this analogy has occurred to others. ![]()
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