Exploring a composer’s music can be a bit like visiting a foreign city.
Most tours will take you to the famous postcard sites, yet of course a different kind of visit or, better still, a rambling stroll is required before a city gives up its more intimate treasures: the secret courtyard tucked away off a bustling street, the neighborhood restaurant blissfully lost in time, that one transfixing view of the sea. It can be these more modest encounters that linger in one’s memory, if only because they disclose the essence of a place in its purest and perhaps most beautiful form.
Comments
Thanks for letting more people know about this work, and for adding more of the personal context (especially the cognac). I enjoyed the Seven Romances on first hearing (on WBUR) in the 1980's, and it's piece in which the personal and political are closely intertwined. The year in which it was composed, 1967, was also the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. Though Blok was often referred to as the prophet of the revolution, he was to be profoundly disillusioned by it--especially judging by his allusion to post-revolutionary censorship in his 1921 lecture, "The Mission of the Poet" (on the anniversary of the death of Pushkin). When Blok spoke of bureaucrats making it hard for artists to channel their "secret harmonies," the audience know this was wasn't just about what happened in 1837 (as Kornei Chukovsky, in his diary, attests). In the Shostakovich, the secret or suppressed harmonies are most evident in the last song, where the composer references his long suppressed opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. On a personal note, the music takes me back to St. Petersburg, especially to one of the first of what would be many walks around the city over twenty years.