Subject Area
Music
Description
Westerners might have been accustomed to seeing war-related images on the cover of newspapers by the time they received the newest edition of Time magazine the morning of July 20, 1942. And indeed, that is what they got. But instead of the expected picture of a soldier or political leader, or even an ill-spirited caricature of the enemy, readers were graced with a representative from a different front of the war: the musical front. That day, Time venerably presented the American people with “Fireman Shostakovich,” the internationally renowned Soviet composer who famously joined the Leningrad fire department shortly before an evacuation sent him elsewhere when the Nazis sieged his city. In 1942, Dmitri Shostakovich was held in high esteem not only by Time magazine, but also by the Soviet Union government and the whole music world. However, just five years prior in 1937, Shostakovich, under fire from the Communist Party, feared a different kind of evacuation from Leningrad, one that would march him to his death by execution or in gulag. Such abrupt and substantial changes in status were commonplace for composers like Shostakovich during dictator Joseph Stalin’s rule over the Soviet Union. This paper explores such changes, along with the ambiguity, fear, and political considerations that defined the Soviet musical world throughout Stalin’s reign from the 1920s until his death in 1953.
Publisher
Providence College
Date
11-28-2023
Type
Article
.docx
Language
English
