ID: 1759
Typed letter signed.
SHOSTAKOVICH, Dmitri

Category: Autograph Letters/Manuscripts, Music

Place/Publisher/Date:
Moscow, Union of Soviet Composers, 24 September 1942.

Description: One page, 4to. In Cyrillic with a typed translation, also signed by composers Vano Muradeli and Dmitri Kabalevsky, to the British composer Rutland Boughton, thanking him for the letter from him and the other musicians of Britain in which they offer to work together to overthrow Hitlerite Germany. "We believe that the heroic past of the Soviet and the British peoples is a guarantee of our victory," and going on to ask Boughton, as "the creator of a cycle of operas about King Arthur the conqueror of the Germans", if he could "write, in the near future, an opera about the overthrow of the Germans on the Continent"; expressing the belief that "it will be just there where the British army will deliver mortal blows to the enemy, similar to the blows which the Red Army is inflicting upon him in the East". The letter was written during the opening stages of thte Battle of Stalingrad, only days after German forces had stormed the centre of the city. This appeal was made to Boughton as he was in fact a life-long Socialist, keen that his music should be put to the service of the cause. From as early as 1907, he had had, in the words of Steuart Wilson, "vague ideas, born of Wagnerian influences, of a music drama of the Arthurian legend" (DNB). By 1908 Boughton had the first two instalments well under way. He completed the last two parts, Galahad and Avalon between 1943 and 1945. Both were to his own libretto and had an autobiographical slant: the journey from disillusion with the established church to salvation through true communism" (Michael Hurd, ODNB). Of Shostakovich's two fellow signatories, the Georgian Vano Muradeli is best-known as a composer of epic operas. He shares the distinction with Shostakovich of having fallen foul of Andrei Zhdanov, whose decree 'On the Opera The Great Friendship by Vano Muradeli' attacked not only Muradeli but those held to have influenced him, including Shostakovich and Prokofiev. His fellow signatory, Dmitri Kabalevsky, although condemned by Zhdanov in 1946, decided to make his peace with the Party and served for many years as Secretary of the Soviet Composers Union, later chairing the committee that refused to lift the ban on Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Good, some spotting, fraying and yellowing.

Price £2,750.00