Music and Letters Advance Access originally published online on May 8, 2007
Music and Letters 2007 88(2):266-296; doi:10.1093/ml/gcm002
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© The Author (2007). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
The ‘Old Shostakovich’: Reception in the British Press
Correspondence: *University of Bristol. Pauline.Fairclough{at}bristol.ac.uk.
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Abstract |
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This article attempts to reconstruct the persona of the ‘Old Shostakovich’ in Britain—the pre-Testimony Shostakovich that is now a distant memory. Through examining widely disseminated sources such as newspaper reviews, radio broadcasts, articles in popular magazines, and programme notes, it traces Shostakovich's reception history in a culture that effected a shift from staunchly defending music's independence from politics to insisting upon political readings of Shostakovich's music. The reconstruction of the history of Shostakovich's British reception charts a range of changing attitudes: critical responses to the role of music in society; Britain's growing awareness of the social and cultural effects of Stalinism; and—most important—Shostakovich's developing stature as his music became more frequently played. Given the scale of this task, the article focuses on the reception of the Fifth Symphony, arguably the work that has accumulated the heaviest layer of interpretative commentary and has been the most controversial in Britain from its first performance there in 1939 until the present day.