Music For Silenced Voices

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Music For Silenced Voices
Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets

❖ ❖ ❖

WENDY LESSER

New Haven & London

 Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund.
Copyright © 2011 by Wendy Lesser.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any
form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright
Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from
the publishers.

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Endpapers: After the premiere of the ballet The Bolt, 1931. Reproduced by permission of
the St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music.

Set in Adobe Garamond type by Integrated Publishing Solutions,

Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lesser, Wendy.
Music for silenced voices : Shostakovich and his fifteen quartets / Wendy Lesser.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-16933-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Shostakovich, Dmitrii
Dmitrievich, 1906–1975. Quartets, strings. 2. String quartet. I. Title.
ML410.S53L47 2011
785⬘.7194092—dc22 2010038140

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992

(Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
books by wendy lesser

Room for Doubt

The Pagoda in the Garden
Nothing Remains the Same
The Amateur
A Director Calls
Pictures at an Execution
His Other Half
The Life Below the Ground

The Genius of Language (editor)

Hiding in Plain Sight (editor)
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For Martin and Barbara Bauer
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For not only is an odd man not always a particular and isolated case,
but, on the contrary, it sometimes happens that it is precisely he,
perhaps, who bears within himself the heart of the whole, while the
other people of his epoch have all for some reason been torn away for
a time by some kind of flooding wind.
—fyodor dostoyevsky,
preface to The Brothers Karamazov
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