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In 1943, as the war with Germany raged on, Joseph Stalin decided to boost the Soviet people’s morale by gifting them an anthem. “The Internationale,” a de facto anthem since October 1917, had been written by foreigners and called for world revolution, an outdated message given Stalin’s need for the Western Allies’ help to defeat Hitler, and for bolstering nationalistic sentiment at home. An anthem competition was thus decreed, and nearly 200 Soviet composers and poets were asked for submissions. Among them was thirty-six-year-old Dmitri Shostakovich.
Stalin had judged Shostakovich’s music once before, and things had not gone well for the composer. Shortly after Stalin’s appearance at Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in 1936 in the Bolshoi Theater, during which the “Father of Nations” was visibly dissatisfied, an unsigned Pravda editorial titled “Muddle Instead of Music” had accused the composer of reveling in chaos and cacophony, pandering to formalist “petit-bourgeois ‘innovations’” instead of interests of the people, and attempting “to create originality through cheap clowning.” A campaign against formalism in art had followed, causing Shostakovich to withdraw his already composed Fourth Symphony. The decision may have saved his life.
full: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/04/08/shostakovich-my-grandfather-and-the-chimes-of-novorossiysk/
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