17 quotes
Real music is always revolutionary, for it cements the ranks of the people; it arouses them and leads them onward.
The Power of Music (1964)
The real geniuses know where their writing has to be good and where they can get away with some mediocrity.
It's about the people, who have stopped believing because the cup of evil has run over.
Testimony (1979)
I always try to make myself as widely understood as possible, and if I don't succeed I consider it's my own fault.
When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.
Testimony (1979)
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.
The majority of my symphonies are tombstones.
Testimony (1979)
A creative artist works on his next composition because he is not satisfied with his previous one. When he loses a critical attitude toward his own work, he ceases to be an artist.
What you have in your head, put down on paper. The head is a fragile vessel.
Testimony (1979)
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.
Testimony (1979)
If they cut off both hands, I will compose music anyway holding the pen in my teeth.
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.
Testimony (1979)
What do you think of Puccini?
[ Britten: "I think his operas are dreadful." ]
No, Ben, you are wrong. He wrote marvellous operas, but dreadful music.
Lord Harewood The Tongs and the Bones (1981)
The Allies enjoyed my music, as though trying to say: Look how we like Shostakovich's symphonies, and you still want something more from us, a second front or something.
Testimony (1979)
People knew about Babi Yar before Yevtushenko's poem, but they were silent. And when they read the poem, the silence was broken. Art destroys silence.
Testimony (1979)
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.
Music is a means capable of expressing dark dramatism and pure rapture, suffering and ecstasy, fiery and cold fury, melancholy and wild merriment – and the subtlest nuances and interplay of these feelings which words are powerless to express and which are unattainable in painting and sculpture.
The Power of Music (1964)