Shostakovich symphony no 14 analysis plural

Mark’s notes on Shostakovich Symphony No. 14

 
Love and Death
 
Shostakovich went into hospital on 13th January 1969.

Shostakovich symphony no 14 analysis plural

Having never properly recovered from a heart attack of three years before, he had by now lost the comfortable use of his right hand and could hardly walk. In constant pain, he was suffering from the form of polio that would eventually kill him.

The city’s flu epidemic meant that no visitors were allowed, but this solitude led him to focus entirely on what was to be his Fourteenth Symphony.

Seven years earlier he had orchestrated Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death.

Mussorgsky had written this song cycle with piano accompaniment in 1875 and though it had later been orchestrated by Glazunov and Rimsky-Korsakov, Shostakovich felt that they had not done justice to the original songs of the man he considered the greatest of Russian composers.

He also thought that the work itself was too short for the subject matter, and ha