Top 45 Quotes About Shostakovich

#1. I had been playing Shostakovich on the stereo, but without conviction.

John Le Carre

Quotes About Shostakovich #327239
#2. Poor Dimitri Shostakovich: In the Soviet Union, he was condemned as being too radical; in the West, for being too conservative. He could please no one but the musical public. He revenged himself on both by writing a short piece called 'March of the Soviet Police.'

Edward Abbey

Quotes About Shostakovich #35221
#3. Torture is a good way to get people to talk but a poor method of finding out the truth; people confess whether there is any reality to the confession or not.

-Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

M T Anderson

Quotes About Shostakovich #1733358
#4. The critics say that Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony has no form. They are wrong; it has the form of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony.

Edward Abbey

Quotes About Shostakovich #1615548
#5. So here we are. The two of us. Me and this geezer I gotta kill. Sittin here in a car showroom office, lookin at each other, lettin Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony take us to places too beautiful and too fuckin sad for words.

Ian Ayris

Quotes About Shostakovich #1435139
#6. In 1948 the first severe crash occurred in my life when Stalin put out his decree on 'formalism.' There was a bulletin board in the Moscow Conservatory. They posted the decree, which said Shostakovich's compositions and Prokofiev's were no longer to be played.

Mstislav Rostropovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #1422174
#7. Shostakovich's final pieces, his quartets, are scratching the surface of another world.

Simon McBurney

Quotes About Shostakovich #1178423
#8. I was aware of Shostakovich's hidden code; the repeated, niggling act of subterfuge buried deep within the music: D - E-flat - C - B, played straight through, played backwards, flipped upside down; a tattoo on the soul of the music. (pg 329)

John Sinclair

Quotes About Shostakovich #885001
#9. Brancusi has his medium: Picasso, Faulkner, Shostakovich, theirs. Mine happens to be cloth.

Charles James

Quotes About Shostakovich #812410
#10. I know now, like drumbeats. Portentous, and a little sinister, like tympani strikes at the start of a gloomy symphony. Shostakovich, maybe.

Lee Child

Quotes About Shostakovich #799678
#11. It meant different things to different people, but somehow it meant them all intensely. Shostakovich's words just confuse the issue. His symphony itself is what remains. Listen to it. It is your symphony to write with him.

M T Anderson

Quotes About Shostakovich #776099
#12. When I was 20, Shostakovich was my favorite composer. I still find his Fifth Symphony wonderful, with its outstanding themes and rhythms. That's the piece that made me want to be a classical composer.

Dave Brubeck

Quotes About Shostakovich #707215
#13. The friendship of Shostakovich cast a brilliant light over my whole life and whose spiritual qualities captured my soul once and for all time.

Galina Vishnevskaya

Quotes About Shostakovich #545620
#14. Those who have ears to hear, will hear

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #822891
#15. I always try to make myself as widely understood as possible; and if I don't succeed, I consider it my own fault.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #1803566
#16. People knew about Babi Yar before Yevtushenko 's poem, but they were silent. And when they read the poem, the silence was broken. Art destroys silence.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #826593
#17. I write music, it's performed. After all, my music says it all. It doesn't need historical and hysterical commentaries. In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #827682
#18. Real music is always revolutionary, for it cements the ranks of the people; it arouses them and leads them onward.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #894453
#19. I don't know what will become of this piece. Our brave critics will no doubt charge me with imitating Ravel's Bolero. Too bad - this is how I hear war.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #913400
#20. A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #937056
#21. Every piece of music is a form of personal expression for its creator ... If a work doesnt express the composers own personal point of view, his own ideas, then it doesnt, in my opinion, even deserve to be born.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #1220583
#22. The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #1259312
#23. When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #1383545
#24. Badgering a colleague doesn't come from a fit of pique, it comes from an organic quality of the soul. And a mean soul will inevitably be reflected in music. Wagner is a convincing example of that, but far from the only one.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #1519687
#25. If they cut off both hands, I will compose music anyway holding the pen in my teeth.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #1546046
#26. Stravinsky is one of the greatest composers of our time and I truly love many of his works. ( ... ) The marvellous composer has invariably been at the centre of my attention, and I not only studied and listened to his music, but I played it and made my own transcriptions as well.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #1586759
#27. I live in the USSR, work actively and count naturally on the worker and peasant spectator. If I am not comprehensible to them I should be deported.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #1701744
#28. I don't think that Prokofiev ever treated me seriously as a composer; he considered only Stravinsky a rival and never missed a chance to take a shot at him. I remember once he started telling me some vile story about Stravinsky. I cut him off.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #1729550
#29. Football is the ballet of the masses.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #1772133
#30. The real geniuses know where their writing has to be good and where they can get away with some mediocrity.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #646366
#31. What you have in your head, put down on paper. The head is a fragile vessel.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #605307
#32. The majority of my symphonies are tombstones.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #584342
#33. A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That's how music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #577484
#34. Art destroys silence.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #525030
#35. It's about the people, who have stopped believing because the cup of evil has run over.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #518959
#36. I feel eternal pain for those who were killed by Hitler , but I feel no less pain for those killed on Stalin 's orders. I suffer for everyone who was tortured, shot, or starved to death.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #507383
#37. The best way to hold on to something is to pay no attention to it. The things you love too much perish. You have to treat everything with irony, especially the things you hold dear. There's more of a chance then that they'll survive.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #421478
#38. Studying Mahler changed many things in my tastes as a composer. Mahler & Berg are my favourite composers even today, as opposed to Hindemith, say, a Krenek and Milhaud whom I liked when I was young but cooled towards rapidly.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #330517
#39. Now I can't abide rudeness, even in so called great artists. Rudeness and cruelty are the qualities i hate most. Rudeness and cruelty are always connected, I feel. One example out of many is Stalin.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #325283
#40. Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #297196
#41. Music is good, not evil. Poetry is good, not evil. Primitive, but oh, so true!

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #284344
#42. Stravinsky the composer I worship. Stravinsky the thinker I despise.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #238154
#43. What can be considered human emotions? Surely not only lyricism, sadness, tragedy? Doesn't laughter also have a claim to that lofty title? I want to fight for the legitimate right of laughter in serious music.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #94163
#44. This quality of Jewish folk music [- it can appear to be happy when it's tragic-] is close to my idea of what music should be. The should always be two layers in music.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #88044
#45. Prokofiev and I never did become friends, probably because Prokofiev was not inclined towards friendly relations in general. He was a hard man and didn't seem interested in anything than himself and his music.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Quotes About Shostakovich #69012

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