Classical Music | Music for Double Bass

Recorded on 03/01/2011, uploaded on 05/14/2012

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Dmitri Shostakovich became one the Soviet Union’s leading composers in the 1930s with the initial successes of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and the ballet The Limpid Stream. However, his moment of glory, at the young age of twenty-nine, was fleeting, and his fall from grace equally quick. Lady Macbeth became the primary target of the Soviet regime’s official newspaper’s campaign against the composer starting in 1936. Shostakovich became the target of Stalin’s vitriolic condemnations and for nearly the next two decades, lived in constant fear of the dictator’s wrath. The simultaneous denunciation of both works led to Shostakovich purportedly withdrawing his Fourth Symphony, though it is much more likely that the withdraw was a cover for an official ban, and he was forced for the time being to compose primarily film  music.

However, Shostakovich’s problems with his Soviet overlords were already building when he composed The Limpid Stream. His two previous ballets, The Golden Age and The Bolt, had already been censored for being ideologically incorrect and “un-Soviet.” These official bans appeared as black marks on the composer’s reputation and left him hesitant to take on a third ballet. Thus, he approached The Limpid Stream with the goal of approachability, both for audiences and performers alike. Its story is simple, if not mundane, involving a troupe of Soviet ballet dancers sent to provide entertainment for a new collective farm. Trite entanglements and love affairs arise, but in the end the dancers find they have more to learn from the farmers than the other way around. The music is equally commonplace, with simple tuneful melodies and harmonies. Indeed, The Limpid Stream could not be farther removed in musical language than the nearly contemporaneous Lady Macbeth.

The Limpid Stream was an initial success and ran from its premiere on June 4, 1935 until February of the following year in Leningrad. It even began playing in Moscow in November 1934. However, with Pravda’s condemnation of Shostakovich, the work was denounced as being false to the Soviet ideals of art. As a result, the ballet and its orchestral suite were withdrawn.      Joseph DuBose

courtesy of the Bradetich Foundation

Bradetich Foundation