The Trajectory of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Vocal Music
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Abstract
Dmitri Shostakovich’s contribution to vocal music presents one of the most remarkable pages of Russian music.
Altogether he composed in this genre for over fifty years. His early oeuvres (“Two Fables by Ivan Krylov” and “Six
Songs Set to Texts of Japanese Poets”) were to a large extent of experimental character, and they are distinguished
by their use of the orchestra, which would subsequently become a largely prevailing factor in the composer’s artistic
practice. Starting from the mid-1930s he makes a turn frontally to vocal genres, now already firmly relying on the
traditions of vocal intonating and most frequently setting texts of the great Russian literary classics (“Four Songs
to Texts by Alexander Pushkin,” “Four Monologues to Texts by Alexander Pushkin” and “Two Songs to Texts by
Mikhail Lermontov.”
A genuine masterpiece of the wartime years is the “Six Songs to Texts by English Poets,” in which the narration is
carried out from the position of a person from the ordinary masses, but notwithstanding all the simplicity of utterance,
its character is endowed by profundity and dimensionality. Somewhat later the vocal cycle “From Jewish Folk Poetry”
was composed, the essence of which lies in the depiction of the image of the “small person,” so characteristic for
Russian literature. The final period of Shostakovich’s vocal oeuvres was signified by extremely contrasting aspirations:
the “high” genre of intellectual lyricism, on the one hand, expressed in such works as the “Seven Poems of Alexander
Blok” and the “Six Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva,” and the consciously debased, almost “utilitarian” satire, on the
other hand, such as the “Satires,” the “Five Songs set to Texts from ‘Krokodil’ Magazine” and “Four Poems of Captain
Lebyadkin.” The concluding masterpiece of Shostakovich’s lyrical vocal music was the “Suite set to Poems by
Michelangelo” (1974), in which the composer turns to the “eternal questions” of existence.
Keywords: Shostakovich, Schostakovich’s vocal music, songs, vocal cycles.
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