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02 11 Musorgski Szostakowicz... - 15
02 11 Musorgski Szostakowicz... - 15
In the late 1960s, Dmitri Shostakovich developed an interest in setting Anna Akhmatova's
Requiem to music. However, when his student Boris Tishchenko made his own setting of
those verses, Shostakovich declined to further pursue his as he believed that doing so would
be seen as an encroachment into his student's work.[2]
A few years later, the interests of Shostakovich and Tishchenko crossed again. In 1970,
Shostakovich became acquainted with the poetry of Marina Tsvetayeva through Tishchenko's
Three Songs to Verses by Marina Tsvetaeva, which the latter had composed earlier that year.
Both music and poetry elicited Shostakovich's approval. He wrote to Tishchenko that he had
become very fond of the work and requested a copy of the score.[3] After receiving it, he wrote
to the younger composer that he was playing and singing the work every day.[4] Shostakovich
soon acquired a collection of Tsvetayeva's poetry, which became part of his daily reading.[3]
Sofia Khentova, Shostakovich's official biographer, speculated that Tsvetayeva's character
and outlook may have attracted the composer's attention.[5]
The next year, while working on the Fifteenth Symphony and notated among its sketches,
Shostakovich composed "Yelabuga Nail", an incomplete and unpublished setting for bass and
piano of a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko about Tsvetayeva's suicide.