Shostakovich in Context

This volume presents recent research into Dmitri Shostakovich's life (1906-1975) and work by leading British, American, Russian, and Israeli scholars. It is occasioned by the ever-growing interest in a composer whose significance in and for the history of twentieth-century music is, as Richard Taruskin has commented, immense, possibly unparalleled and above all, continuing. The authors of the thirteen articles are musicologists, Russian literature specialists, biographers, and cultural historians, whose diverse fields of expertise are reflected in the interdisciplinary nature of the materials collected here.

The collection presents Shostakovich and his legacy in a variety of different contexts and its interdisciplinary nature will also serve to open up discussion. In this way, it breaks from previous tendencies to focus on the purely extrinsic qualities of the composers musical oeuvre, which has so often been interpreted in terms of autobiography. The chapters span the composer's entire career and contain substantial amounts of new information about Shostakovich and his musical legacy.