Concerning the Issue of Interaction between Personality and the Environment in Shostakovich’s Late Instrumental Concertos

Abstract

An important side in the development of music in Russia starting from the mid-1950s was the artistic research
of the interrelations of the individual with the surrounding environment. The search for concrete individualized
forms of manifestation of this type of problematics attracted composers most frequently to the genre of the
instrumental concerto, where the textural principle of organization of the material provides natural possibilities
for the differentiation of the personal principle and the image of outward reality. The questions of the interaction
of personality with the surrounding environment were of greatest interest to Shostakovich during the course of
one decade (1957–1967). It was particularly at that time that in his music the genre of the instrumental concerto
received specially intensive development. The point of departure in the development of the questions of interaction
of personality and environment was fixated in Shostakovich’s late music in his Second Piano Concerto (1957),
which presents the model of a full contact of the personality with the surrounding environment, which is extremely
rare for his music. Only a few years after that the composer begins modeling the interrelation between the individual
and reality in a totally different manner. An important landmark on this path was his First Cello Concerto (1959),
which reflected the situation of the increasing contrariety of the world perception of a person living on the verge
of the 1950s–1960s in his broken connections with the surrounding world. The most important composition
pertaining to the examined subject matter is the Second Cello Concerto (1966). The general conflict passes here
along the line of confrontation between the categories of high and low, the beautiful and the ugly, the spiritual and
the primitive, the human and the anti-humanistic. During the course of the conjugacy and confrontation of these
notional-semantic strata arises one of Shostakovich’s most complex philosophical conceptions, entirely devoted
to the issue of exposure of all sorts of types of interrelations between the individual and the surrounding world.
following such a critical culmination, the contrariety started to subside quickly, the testimony to which was given
by the Second Violin Concerto (1967), which expresses an overcoming of collisions, which prior to that seemed
to be almost inextricable. This way the outstanding master brought out in his late concertos all the basic models
of possible interrelations between the personality and the environment – from harmony (Second Piano Concerto)
through increasing contrariety (First Cello Concerto) and open conflict (Second Cello Concerto) to an overcoming
of contrariety (Second Violin Concerto).

Keywords: Shostakovich, instrumental concertos by Shostakovich, personality and the surrounding environment
in Shostakovich’s music.