num_pages: 368
description: Most previous books about Dmitri Shostakovich have focused on either his symphonies and operas or his relationship to the regime under which he lived or both since these large-scale works were the ones that attracted the interest and sometimes the condemnation of the Soviet authorities. Music for Silenced Voices looks at Shostakovich through the back door as it were of his fifteen quartets the works which his widow characterized as a diary the story of his soul. The silences and the voices were of many kinds including the political silencing of adventurous writers artists and musicians during the Stalin era; the lost voices of Shostakovich's operas (a form he abandoned just before turning to string quartets); and the death-silenced voices of his close friends to whom he dedicated many of these chamber works. Wendy Lesser has constructed a fascinating narrative in which the fifteen quartets considered one at a time in chronological order lead the reader through the personal political and professional events that shaped Shostakovich's singular emblematic twentieth-century life. Weaving together interviews with the composer's friends family and colleagues as well as conversations with present-day musicians who have played the quartets Lesser sheds new light on the man and the musician. One of the very few books about Shostakovich that is aimed at a general rather than an academic audience Music for Silenced Voices is a pleasure to read; at the same time it is rigorously faithful to the known facts in this notoriously complicated life. It will fill readers with the desire to hear the quartets which are among the most compelling and emotionally powerful monuments of the past century's music.
language: English
title: Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets
publisher: Yale University Press