Shostakovich Quotes

“I'll admit that writing doesn't always come, but I'm totally against walking around looking at the sky when you're experiencing a block, waiting for inspiration to strike you. Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov didn't like each other and agreed on very few things, but they were of one opinion on this: you had to write constantly. If you can't write a major work, write minor trifles. If you can't write at all, orchestrate something.”

“When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.”

“The friendship of Shostakovich cast a brilliant light over my whole life and whose spiritual qualities captured my soul once and for all time.”

“Hope, belief, and despair are not simply moods. They change our physical performance. They alter how quickly we react, how hard we fight, how quick we are to give up.- Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad”

“When asked, 'What did you want to say in this work?' he would answer, 'I've said what I've said.'This made sense in where everyone assumed music had a meaning - but where saying the wrong thing could get a person killed.-Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad”

“When we read tales of atrocity, we all want to be the one who stood firm, who would not bend, who shouted the truth in the face of the dictator.Vsevolod Meyerhold came as close as anyone to achieving this. It is important to know of the full horror of his sacrifice. It is easy for all to imagine we are heroes when we are sitting in our kitchens, dreaming of distant suffering.- Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad”

“Some love is so powerful after all, that it must always include sadness, because encrypted within it is the knowledge that someday it will come to an end.”

“Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it. Art no more belongs to the People and the Party than it once belonged to the aristocracy and the patron. Art is the whisper of history; heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art’s sake: it exists for people’s sake. But which people, and who defines them? He always thought of his own art as anti-aristocratic. Did he write, as his detractors maintained, for a bourgeois cosmopolitan elite? No. Did he write, as his detractors wanted him to, for the Donbass miner weary from his shift and in need of a soothing pick-me-up? No. He wrote music for everyone and no one. He wrote music for those who best appreciated the music he wrote, regardless of social origin. He wrote music for the ears that could hear. And he knew, therefore, that all true definitions of art are circular, and all untrue definitions of art ascribe to it a specific function.”