It’s about the people, who have stopped believing because the cup of evil has run over.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICHEvery piece of music is a form of personal expression for its creator. If a work doesn’t express the composers own personal point of view, his own ideas, then it doesn’t, in my opinion, even deserve to be born.
More Dmitri Shostakovich Quotes
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I feel eternal pain for those who were killed by Hitler, but I feel no less pain for those killed on Stalin’s orders. I suffer for everyone who was tortured, shot, or starved to death.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
I live in the USSR, work actively and count naturally on the worker and peasant spectator. If I am not comprehensible to them I should be deported.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
The real geniuses know where their writing has to be good and where they can get away with some mediocrity.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
I don’t know what will become of this piece. Our brave critics will no doubt charge me with imitating Ravel’s Bolero. Too bad – this is how I hear war.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
Real music is always revolutionary, for it cements the ranks of the people; it arouses them and leads them onward.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
Football is the ballet of the masses.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
If they cut off both hands, I will compose music anyway holding the pen in my teeth.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
What you have in your head, put down on paper. The head is a fragile vessel.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
Stravinsky the composer I worship. Stravinsky the thinker I despise.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
He fell like a chicken into the soup.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
The best way to hold on to something is to pay no attention to it. The things you love too much perish. You have to treat everything with irony, especially the things you hold dear. There’s more of a chance then that they’ll survive.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
What can be considered human emotions? Surely not only lyricism, sadness, tragedy? Doesn’t laughter also have a claim to that lofty title? I want to fight for the legitimate right of laughter in “serious” music.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
I always try to make myself as widely understood as possible; and if I don’t succeed, I consider it my own fault.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH